That could be a false dichotomy.

Singapore has a much lower crime rate though.

What do you do when people tell you to smile for the camera?

Is it a regional thing? I've never seen that happen.

Not literal.

> Is there something lost, when it's not the adult telling the child a bedtime improv story? (IME, kids love this.)

Kids use their imagination because they're encouraged to do so. It's somewhat of a challenge to find the cusp between what is plain and what is incomprehensible (think of the ZPD but for creativity).

Yep, sell your ICE and buy a jet plane instead.

Short answer: Climate (even without climate change) and war.

Long answer: Western colonialism.

> Long answer: Western colonialism.

How do you explain lack of farming / infrastructure prior to colonialism? More or less all environments populated by sub saharans struggle with infrastructure. This is true before, during, and after colonialism.

If they take out options, then you might have to maintain a fork or write a plugin to keep them.

And the time and effort it takes to maintian a project.

The vast majority of people can just benefit from the time and effort that someone felt was worth spending to scratch their own itch.

You're drifting from your original argument. Taking away features usually does make it harder for power users.

I don't think I am. Free Software does not suffer from the same authoritative restrictions imposed by proprietary software. If people don't like features being removed, someone will package the software without the feature removed, and everyone who cares about the missing features can just use that.

For example, people in this thread have been mentioning GNOME as software that has been removing features to the detriment of technically inclined people who want those features. But MATE exists, and I don't have to maintain it. Because someone else felt was worth spending to scratch their own itch.

Gnome has sacrificed a lot of control.

i3wm and sway haven't :-).

My point being that it's okay for some projects to sacrifice control, as long as others don't. I can't tell Ubuntu how they should make their distro; what I can do is choose Gentoo (or anything in between).

Gnome can do whatever they like with their own project, but fragmentation is the biggest problem with Linux.