> They matter a lot because they're the ones that push your design language, develop new ideas, influence the general community, build new programs, find your bugs, and all of that

they used to care, but they don't now, because these corps have sufficient monopolistic control to not require "outsiders" to push their design language, develop new ideas, influence or programs.

In fact, it seems to me that these big corps want power users out, as they disrupt the agenda, find workarounds for "features" being pushed out that should have been mandatory for pleb users!

> [Linux is] still not right for the average joe but it's on its way and a few more specialty distros are already there (e.g. steamos).

i hope that is the future, because it's the only road to freedom for general computation. Unfortunately, the hard part is not the end user's acceptance of it, but the hardware manufacturers, who are being gripped by the balls one way or another. Unless they're willing to sacrifice any microsoft certification etc, they will be somehow beholden to them (may be not now, but certainly in the future when linux truly threatens window's dominance).