Readit NewsFeudalism in North America, in the 1900s? Your geography and timelines are way off.
Those are far closer to medieval feudal peasantry than 20th century industrial labor, regardless of the lack of an official hereditary aristocracy in the US.
Integration, testing, and support are all expensive. Right or wrong, that's a reason why if a laptop "just works" (like a Mac, Windows Thinkpad, or a Chromebook), it probably has proprietary binaries.
Also, if you aren't paying for the OS (via the hardware it's coupled with), you can't expect the OS to have the benefits of tight hardware integration.
Even Framework laptops use proprietary boot firmware, and they've been pretty clear that they only provide support for Ubuntu and Fedora, not the alphabet soup of other Linux desktop distros.
There are no plantations around here. This was cattle and grain country in that time. Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines. The story is quite similar to those who used software to multiply their output in our time, and similarly many tech fortunes have built mansions just the same.
> Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.
Well, they weren't palaces. You're absolutely right that they don't look like mansions by today's standards, but they were considered as such at the time. Many were coming from tiny, one room log cabins (stuffed to the brim with their eight children). They were gigantic, luxurious upgrades at the time. But progress marches forward, as always.
This sounds like a semantic disagreement.
I think you are using the word "farmer" to mean "large agricultural landlord". Today, those terms may have a lot of overlap, because most of us don't work in agriculture like we did then, but in the past, it wasn't so much the case.
Back then, the landlord who had the "big house" wasn't called a farmer, but often a "Lord" or "Master".
"Farmers" were mostly people who worked as tenants on their land. The confusion in US history started early as the local feudal lords of the time (the founding fathers) rebranded themselves as farmers in opposition to their British rulers, but the economic structure of the societies was scarcely different.
It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.
Remember, subsistence farming first had to end before people could start working off the farm. Someone has to feed them too. For 50% of the workforce to be working a job off the farm, the other 50% being subsistence farmers would be impossible.
Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm.
If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.
Do you run ChromeOS Flex on some thinkpads or do you work on a Chromebook?
What are the pros/cons vs running a debian if you can elaborate?
Chromebook.
> What are the pros/cons vs running a debian if you can elaborate?
I like minimalist desktop environments. I like full screen window tiling using keyboard shortcuts, power management, fingerprint readers, accelerated displays, phone tethering, touch screen, passkey support for auth, and verified boot, and preferences synced across devices.
And I like all that to work out of the box with no fiddling,
Take any other praxis that's reached the 'appliance' stage that you use in your daily life from washing machines, ovens, coffee makers, cars, smartphones, flip-phones, televisions, toilets, vacuums, microwaves, refrigerators, ranges, etc.
It takes ~30 years to optimize the UX to make it "appliance-worthy" and then everything afterwards consists of edge-case features, personalization, or regulatory compliance.
Desktop Computers are no exception.
I wish the same could be said of car UX these days but clearly that has regressed away from optimal.