Buying McDonald's food does not make it legal for them to poison you. Buying Microsoft's OS does not make it legal for them to break antitrust law. Again.
But while you can just switch to another fast food chain of your choice, doing so with an operating system and losing years worth of experience + potentially paid software (games) is not something most people will choose to do on their own.
I'm using Mobian trixie (basically Debian testing) on a Librem 5. The overall experience is very much “not there yet”, but I reckon most of this is down to relatively few high-impact issues, mostly around touch input.
Editing text is very frustrating (but it sounds like the 1st iPhone was on-par). The keyboard doesn't always appear or disappear when you'd expect (but you can manually open or close it in Phosh). The biggest frustration here is that the text editing context menu (Copy, Paste etc) doesn't appear at all consistently.
Phosh as a shell is mostly fine. The spatial model doesn't really make sense, so it's not as nice to use as the mobile version of Gnome, but that's still pre-alpha for now. Phosh hides the window's close button for some reason, and overrides that setting on every restart, so until apps switch to the new dialogs (which landed yesterday), even closing a dialog is awkward.
Overall it feels very cobbled-together for now. Files and Camera don't work properly yet, so Mobian has replaced them with Portfolio and “Camera (Dev Preview)” (which is actually a completely separate project called Millipixels that looks like a tech demo). Firefox has been heavily modified, including the bizarre decision to put the headerbar at the bottom of the window(?!) unlike any other app, and hide a load of menu options.
And then there's the general fit-and-finish I'd expect from Debian (compared with Fedora). There's a useless “Advanced Network Configuration” app that appears in the app grid, but apparently isn't a real app, because when you try to view its details Software says “Sorry! There are no details for that application”, so you can't get rid of it, whatever it is. Also, Evolution Alarm Notify; but at least I know how to prevent that from starting. (There's less of this sort of thing than with Ubuntu, though — there aren't 3 separate apps for installing software, updating software, and everyone's favourite pastime, configuring software repositories.)
It is possible to use it for basic tasks, and for me personally, I'd rather put up with good-faith bugginess than have to deal with something that assumes I want a Google account.
10 years ago I would've agreed that Ubuntu is the most reliable option.
For me now it comes across as a bit clunky, unpolished and less coherent compared to Fedora Silverblue — Ubuntu has more visible seams where it's been built from separate projects.
A major upgrade of Silverblue is literally 3 clicks plus the time it takes to do a normal restart. It doesn't ask questions a non-techy doesn't care about, and they can't break it.
(I'm not saying your choice of Ubuntu is “wrong” or anything, but if you haven't yet done so, it's worth installing a previous version of Silverblue and role-playing how it would work for a non-techy audience long-term.)
My experience is that Ubuntu is past its prime for the elderly.
My mum was on various versions of Ubuntu for about 15 years. Updates started to be a problem and the network manager caused a lot of trouble for her, and by extension me and her neighbours who would "help" from time to time.
I gave up and went to win 11 and haven't had trouble other than the ads and non consistent popups. If it gets worse I'll have to try something else but I'm not looking forward to it.
This sounds like they're trying to make a proprietary GitLab-only alternative to Forgefed. I don't understand who would want this.
Edit:
Ah, this sounds like the opposite: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247#note_1529...
Good!