> There’s no shortage of meaningfully free and open software to use that will do what you need, but as soon as you have to sacrifice any sort of convenience, non techies stops listening.

It's often beyond just sacrificing "any sort of convenience" - but rather "it's effectively impossible for someone who's not at least a compentent IT hobbyist to install this software".

> I really don’t know how you’re going to change that.

You need to change the culture in free/open software. The current goal seems to be something like "as long as it works, and I can install it --no matter how convoluted or unreliable that process is-- then that's good enough". Mainstream users don't want to use the shell, or have to search internet forums for solutions, or use Docker, or whatever.

If you genuinely want FOSS to win, the goal should be to be better than the commercial alternatives: easier to install, more reliable, better more intuitive UIs, smaller, faster, more features, whatever.

It should be easy to make FOSS Web apps especially ones that favour front end (and hence web standards) for most of what they do. Someone does need to be the server though so you end up with a bit of cloud.

I think another problem is marketing. The SaaS can afford to advertise. The free libre app has to be discovered.