You don't even need a test computer, all you need is another laptop hard drive. Laptop HDs are usually brain-dead-easy to replace, usually just with one or two screws. On my Dell Latitude, there's two little screws holding it in, plus a plastic bezel part that screws to one side (and replacements are available for a few dollars on Ebay). It's simple: just pop out the regular HD, and put in your testing HD, and use that for your experiments while your critical data sits safely in a drawer.
Of course, not having any kind of backups is still pretty stupid. At the least, just get a portable USB hard drive and back up to it periodically using rsync.
Why you'd want to be Fedora-based when you could be CentOS-based I have no idea,
Um, I don't think this is hard to understand. CentOS is just a rebranded version of RHEL. RHEL is basically like Debian Stable: it's slower and more conservative. Fedora, as you just said, is where Red Hat tests new stuff before putting it into RHEL (much like Debian Testing or Debian Unstable). So if you want your distro to be a little more cutting-edge, you'd base it on Fedora, not on CentOS. If you want your distro to be more conservative, you'd base it on CentOS, not Fedora.
Actually, I do realize that, which is why MikeRT's suggestion is even more ridiculous. Why would the KDE team want to restrict themselves to making their own OS when they already are used on multiple different OSes? The whole thing makes no sense.
Oh, ONLY 15 years.. and they STILL don't have even a quarter of Apple's desktop marketshare.
Wrong, there's more Linux users than Mac users. Your numbers are faulty because they're based on purchased computers. No one buys a computer running Linux, they repurpose other computers.
Also the idea of a "mature market" for PC's is exactly why Linux on the desktop has no hope! The market is mature! It's settled in with Windows and OS X and there is no room to disrupt that with a Linux desktop no matter how damn amazing it is.
People can't keep running Windows XP forever; the hardware will fail and the OS is already out of support. The same will happen with 7 before long, and probably already has happened to Vista. So people need to either upgrade to a new PC, or install an alternative OS, or become part of a botnet. OSX costs a fortune because Macbooks are expensive as hell. There's already more people running Linux on the desktop than OSX, the number will only increase.
MacOSX doesn't offer much more than Linux either, yet enough people have moved to that (partly out of annoyance with MS, partly out of Apple's marketing and image) to make it a viable platform, even though its marketshare is likely single-digits. Apple seems to be doing just fine with single-digit marketshare.
Windows is going to enjoy inertia for a long time thanks to the Win32 API and all the software built on that, as well as MS Office. There is almost nothing Linux can do to change that, except perhaps to keep chugging away at WINE so people can run Windows applications on Linux. WINE actually works pretty well for a lot of things these days, but of course it's not 100% and likely never will be. Apple, for all their money, hasn't figured out how to unseat MS's dominance, so acting like Linux has "failed" because they haven't done the same is ridiculous. Linux doesn't need to completely take over the desktop market, it only needs to gain enough of a following to be a viable alternative. Macbooks are a viable alternative and they only have single-digit marketshare, so why is Linux somehow a "failure" even though, by many accounts, it has just as much marketshare as MacOSX?
Serious work software, like image editing, audio editing, professional NLE, post production effects, CAD, CAM, process engineering, manufacturing process simulation, BIM tools, architectural and product design/visualization software, simulation pre and post processing tools, etc, etc.
Last I checked, Hollywood effects companies were all running their serious FX software on Linux desktops. Engineering software has been much more recalcitrant.
Anyhow, home users don't use any of that stuff, they just need a web browser mostly. Office users are largely the same: they need a browser and an office suite (which as you point out has been moving to web browsers).
The more imaginative can easily see there is no technological reason you can't hook a keyboard, mouse and monitor to a smartphone or tablet and do everything a desktop can do.
Except for two problems: 1) you can't fit PC hardware into a phone. Phones are still nowhere near as powerful as PCs or laptops, and as long as CPUs make as much heat as they do, that's not likely to change for a while. You can't get the heat out of a phone efficiently. And 2) even when that does change, no one wants to use Android or iOS as a desktop environment. Perhaps KDE et al will run on phones later; they're already working on running Linux (not Android) on phones, so there's no reason you won't be able to run Linux/KDE on your phone soon, and give you the full desktop experience when you plug that phone into a docking station with a full-size monitor and keyboard (though, as I noted, with lesser performance than laptops/desktops). The move to smaller computing devices isn't going to remove the need for a desktop environment that enables you to do real work instead of texting people and playing Angry Birds.
it's been decades and Linux is still no closer to that goal.
First, it's only been about 15 years at the most, and second, yes it is. Back in the late 90s, installing Linux was not really an easy process and took some expertise and a lot of screwing around. Now, you just put a Linux Mint.iso on a thumb drive, pop it into your PC, reboot, and follow some prompts, and after a half-hour, viola! you have Linux installed. It's easy as pie. It's quite easy to use these days too, as long as you don't use stupid Gnome3. KDE works wonderfully for both advanced users and users coming from Windows.
Instead focus on the servicing the niche and/or looking to the future of computing
What future of computing? Are you one of those morons who thinks we're all going to abandon desktops (/laptops) and do all our programming, graphics design, word processing, spreadsheets, etc. on our cellphones and tablets?
The future of computing is desktop PCs. They aren't going anywhere, for doing serious work. For some tasks, like watching videos or reading e-books, other devices are taking those roles over to some extent. People are doing more things with computing devices, so the market is expanding, and mobile devices are enabling usage that was either impractical or impossible before. This doesn't mean that desktops are dying, it just means they're a mature market.
Keep pushing shit uphill if you want, the desktop is becoming less and less relevant.
So you are one of those morons. Did you type this post on a phone?
the fact remains that most end-user software doesn't run on it
What software? Steam runs fine on it, and lots of other software has moved to running in web browsers. People are using less and less proprietary software, and desktops are becoming more confined to being used for specific apps: web browsers mainly, plus office apps.
As far as standardization goes, sure, there's only one PC-BSD, but at least with Linux there's various commercial and open-source software available for it. For instance, if I want to run the official Google Chrome (so I can watch Netflix videos without a lot of trouble), on my Linux computer I can just go to Google's Chrome web page and download the Linux version, conveniently packaged in a Debian.deb file, and install it. Can I do that with PC-BSD? Of course not; I'm stuck with whatever PC-BSD has available in its repos. Linux may not be completely standardized, but there are only a few really popular distros, and it's usually possible to get things in either.rpm or.deb.
And as for device support, Linux has pretty good support; it lacks a bit for a few select things (winprinters namely, WiFi is still sometimes problematic but not much, high-end video has been a bit problematic though proprietary drivers are available), but overall you can usually install Ubuntu or similar with no trouble and everything "just works" on reasonable hardware. PC-BSD isn't going to top this any time soon.
No, he's most likely using Mint. And he miscounted: there's 4 far superior alternatives with Mint: KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, and XCFE. Mint isn't yet using systemd, but is planning to move to it in a future release; hopefully by that time the furor will have died down and it'll have been proven stable and reliable.
That's utterly ridiculous. There's a lot more to an OS than just the desktop environment (DE): there's the kernel, the init system and other low-level daemons, the display subsystem, the package manager, and of course lots of apps (beyond just what KDE (or Gnome) include in their software collections). The KDE team has enough work to do, they certainly don't want to become their own distro, when there's already several distros that feature KDE as a prominent DE (Mint, Debian, OpenSUSE for starters).
Linux on the desktop isn't sufficiently popular yet with mainstream users, so Linux users should just give it up and go out and buy brand-new Apple or MS computers running half-assed desktop OSes, as you put it.
Huh?
I've been using KDE for over 15 years now, and it works just fine, quite well in fact. Why would I want to give that up and switched to a "half-assed" (you said it, not me) desktop OS like MacOSX or Windows? KDE isn't half-assed at all, and has only been getting better and better, while staying quite stable and not removing any useful features the way those two proprietary OSes have. So why exactly should I switch?
If you're just saying we should stop trying to convince everyone else to change (it's a little vague), why? Sure, most people are dumb and are going to continue to buy into the big corps' crap, but Linux on the desktop has only been getting better and easier to use, so why not? Lots of people have switched their family members over to great effect (my wife gets along just fine with KDE on Linux Mint). Who cares if Linux never gets to 95% marketshare? As long as it's popular enough to not be as completely unknown as, say, PC-BSD (my wife and my elderly mother both know what Linux is, though to different degrees,, but if I ask either of them about BSD I'm just going to get a blank stare), and users are able to use it without a lot of roadblocks throw in the way like back around 2000, that's good enough. It doesn't need to become a monopoly-of-sorts, it only needs to be strong enough to be a viable alternative, not just for techies but for anyone who has enough technical ability to plug a USB drive in and follow some simple on-screen instructions. And as far as I'm concerned, it already is.
This has really demonstrated the lack of value of free software over open source for example.
What are you talking about? Free software is a subset of open-source, sorta: FS is a philosophy, while OS is a development process. FS has provided us with lots of great software, including Linux (the kernel), X, Open/LibreOffice, Firefox, and countless more packages. How does "open source" top that, when it includes it (though it technically also includes stuff like MS's "shared source")?
All the while youve got RMS doing stupid shit that runs counter to the whole "freedom" idea like trying to prevent GCC users from sending the frontend output to proprietary backends,
I don't remember anything about that, I remember him wanting to put up a restriction to keep gcc from working with a non-GPL (but still Free) backend. It's just another licensing argument, which is very common in the Free Software community. You can criticize it if you like, but the idea that we should all just give up on Free Software because of occasional things like this and run back to Microsoft and Apple is ridiculous.
The only point you have here which is valid is the NSA one, because you can't choose your government (not by yourself). No one is forcing you to use NVidia or Steam. Just like no one is forcing you to use systemd or any particular feature.
Battleship cannons aren't for leveling cities. They're basically sea-based artillery; artillery these days are actually quite accurate. Maybe not quite as accurate as a cruise missile, but pretty close. Even back in the "old days", they were used for shooting at ships from miles away, and ships aren't exactly city-sized targets, and this was back in the days before computers and other accuracy-improving technologies we have today.
Also, the US Navy is going back to this, with their new rail guns.
Not a really great analogy, but there might be something to it.
Basically, people are lazy. For the 2A vs. government abuses thing, the answer there is fairly simple: undertaking violent revolution against the US government is a good way to get killed, and at this point probably isn't going to change anything anyway. You're not going to get enough people to rise up at once to effect real change, not right now anyway. Maybe if we get to the point where lots of people have friends in concentration camps or something. So, you have ridiculously high risk and almost no chance of success and survival, so no one does anything.
For systemd, there's no such risk. You can do whatever you want. The cost, however, is time and effort, plus there's the problem where a lot of the complainers probably aren't as technically capable as they think they are, and not enough to actually make their own distro. So while your 2A thing carries a big risk, systemd can be chalked up entirely to pure laziness. These people bitch and bitch and bitch, but most don't actually do anything productive such as make a new distro (well, it looks like there might be some effort into making a Debian fork, but we'll see how far that one gets). If these people spent as much time on making on productive things instead of bitching about systemd...
I never said that it "never happens" that you can't run newer Android on older phones with the situation the way it is now, I said that it "never happens" that you can't run newer Android on older phones for any valid technical reason.
Do you always get into utterly pointless pedantic arguments when you know full well what the person meant?
It's only useful to people running virtualized Linux on a MS host. That isn't a normal Linux user by any means, and it doesn't do anything for anyone running Linux natively or in any kind of non-MS environment.
It's nice I guess that they weren't completely allergic to working with the Linux community (though as I recall, it didn't go smoothly and Linus bitched them out a lot because they just dumped a bunch a code and then didn't go through the steps necessary to get it properly integrated), but as you said, it was entirely self-serving, and didn't do anything at all for anyone who isn't running an MS environment (Azure, Hyper-V). This is quite different from, say, Red Hat who contributes a lot of stuff that's used by many other distros, or Intel who contributes a lot of low-level stuff, much of which isn't specific to Intel hardware. MS hasn't contributed anything at all which is useful for someone not using MS's server products.
WTF are you talking about? KDE, X, file managers, FireFox, and LibroOffice all work just fine without systemd. I'm running all those things on my Mint laptop right now (Mint hasn't yet moved to systemd).
They can't run it because the drivers are closed-source and incompatible with newer kernels. It's not a technical limitation, it's a consequence of Android's largely closed-source nature. If Android were all open-source like Linux, this wouldn't be a problem.
If open-source drivers were developed or made available for one of these older phones, there's no reason Android couldn't be made to run on it.
Are you really putting such a stain on your credibility just to win an internet argument? That's on you, pal. Use a less critical machine or a virtual one if you want to experiment, don't use your damn work machine. That's incredibly unprofessional.
And has this fool never heard of "backups"? Doesn't everyone know they should do a full backup before doing anything risky on their primary business computer, such as a system update? Or that they should do backups regularly anyway, just in case of hardware failure?
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You don't even need a test computer, all you need is another laptop hard drive. Laptop HDs are usually brain-dead-easy to replace, usually just with one or two screws. On my Dell Latitude, there's two little screws holding it in, plus a plastic bezel part that screws to one side (and replacements are available for a few dollars on Ebay). It's simple: just pop out the regular HD, and put in your testing HD, and use that for your experiments while your critical data sits safely in a drawer.
Of course, not having any kind of backups is still pretty stupid. At the least, just get a portable USB hard drive and back up to it periodically using rsync.
Why you'd want to be Fedora-based when you could be CentOS-based I have no idea,
Um, I don't think this is hard to understand. CentOS is just a rebranded version of RHEL. RHEL is basically like Debian Stable: it's slower and more conservative. Fedora, as you just said, is where Red Hat tests new stuff before putting it into RHEL (much like Debian Testing or Debian Unstable). So if you want your distro to be a little more cutting-edge, you'd base it on Fedora, not on CentOS. If you want your distro to be more conservative, you'd base it on CentOS, not Fedora.
Actually, I do realize that, which is why MikeRT's suggestion is even more ridiculous. Why would the KDE team want to restrict themselves to making their own OS when they already are used on multiple different OSes? The whole thing makes no sense.
Oh, ONLY 15 years.. and they STILL don't have even a quarter of Apple's desktop marketshare.
Wrong, there's more Linux users than Mac users. Your numbers are faulty because they're based on purchased computers. No one buys a computer running Linux, they repurpose other computers.
Also the idea of a "mature market" for PC's is exactly why Linux on the desktop has no hope! The market is mature! It's settled in with Windows and OS X and there is no room to disrupt that with a Linux desktop no matter how damn amazing it is.
People can't keep running Windows XP forever; the hardware will fail and the OS is already out of support. The same will happen with 7 before long, and probably already has happened to Vista. So people need to either upgrade to a new PC, or install an alternative OS, or become part of a botnet. OSX costs a fortune because Macbooks are expensive as hell. There's already more people running Linux on the desktop than OSX, the number will only increase.
MacOSX doesn't offer much more than Linux either, yet enough people have moved to that (partly out of annoyance with MS, partly out of Apple's marketing and image) to make it a viable platform, even though its marketshare is likely single-digits. Apple seems to be doing just fine with single-digit marketshare.
Windows is going to enjoy inertia for a long time thanks to the Win32 API and all the software built on that, as well as MS Office. There is almost nothing Linux can do to change that, except perhaps to keep chugging away at WINE so people can run Windows applications on Linux. WINE actually works pretty well for a lot of things these days, but of course it's not 100% and likely never will be. Apple, for all their money, hasn't figured out how to unseat MS's dominance, so acting like Linux has "failed" because they haven't done the same is ridiculous. Linux doesn't need to completely take over the desktop market, it only needs to gain enough of a following to be a viable alternative. Macbooks are a viable alternative and they only have single-digit marketshare, so why is Linux somehow a "failure" even though, by many accounts, it has just as much marketshare as MacOSX?
Serious work software, like image editing, audio editing, professional NLE, post production effects, CAD, CAM, process engineering, manufacturing process simulation, BIM tools, architectural and product design/visualization software, simulation pre and post processing tools, etc, etc.
Last I checked, Hollywood effects companies were all running their serious FX software on Linux desktops. Engineering software has been much more recalcitrant.
Anyhow, home users don't use any of that stuff, they just need a web browser mostly. Office users are largely the same: they need a browser and an office suite (which as you point out has been moving to web browsers).
The more imaginative can easily see there is no technological reason you can't hook a keyboard, mouse and monitor to a smartphone or tablet and do everything a desktop can do.
Except for two problems: 1) you can't fit PC hardware into a phone. Phones are still nowhere near as powerful as PCs or laptops, and as long as CPUs make as much heat as they do, that's not likely to change for a while. You can't get the heat out of a phone efficiently. And 2) even when that does change, no one wants to use Android or iOS as a desktop environment. Perhaps KDE et al will run on phones later; they're already working on running Linux (not Android) on phones, so there's no reason you won't be able to run Linux/KDE on your phone soon, and give you the full desktop experience when you plug that phone into a docking station with a full-size monitor and keyboard (though, as I noted, with lesser performance than laptops/desktops). The move to smaller computing devices isn't going to remove the need for a desktop environment that enables you to do real work instead of texting people and playing Angry Birds.
it's been decades and Linux is still no closer to that goal.
First, it's only been about 15 years at the most, and second, yes it is. Back in the late 90s, installing Linux was not really an easy process and took some expertise and a lot of screwing around. Now, you just put a Linux Mint .iso on a thumb drive, pop it into your PC, reboot, and follow some prompts, and after a half-hour, viola! you have Linux installed. It's easy as pie. It's quite easy to use these days too, as long as you don't use stupid Gnome3. KDE works wonderfully for both advanced users and users coming from Windows.
Instead focus on the servicing the niche and/or looking to the future of computing
What future of computing? Are you one of those morons who thinks we're all going to abandon desktops (/laptops) and do all our programming, graphics design, word processing, spreadsheets, etc. on our cellphones and tablets?
The future of computing is desktop PCs. They aren't going anywhere, for doing serious work. For some tasks, like watching videos or reading e-books, other devices are taking those roles over to some extent. People are doing more things with computing devices, so the market is expanding, and mobile devices are enabling usage that was either impractical or impossible before. This doesn't mean that desktops are dying, it just means they're a mature market.
Keep pushing shit uphill if you want, the desktop is becoming less and less relevant.
So you are one of those morons. Did you type this post on a phone?
the fact remains that most end-user software doesn't run on it
What software? Steam runs fine on it, and lots of other software has moved to running in web browsers. People are using less and less proprietary software, and desktops are becoming more confined to being used for specific apps: web browsers mainly, plus office apps.
It won't.
As far as standardization goes, sure, there's only one PC-BSD, but at least with Linux there's various commercial and open-source software available for it. For instance, if I want to run the official Google Chrome (so I can watch Netflix videos without a lot of trouble), on my Linux computer I can just go to Google's Chrome web page and download the Linux version, conveniently packaged in a Debian .deb file, and install it. Can I do that with PC-BSD? Of course not; I'm stuck with whatever PC-BSD has available in its repos. Linux may not be completely standardized, but there are only a few really popular distros, and it's usually possible to get things in either .rpm or .deb.
And as for device support, Linux has pretty good support; it lacks a bit for a few select things (winprinters namely, WiFi is still sometimes problematic but not much, high-end video has been a bit problematic though proprietary drivers are available), but overall you can usually install Ubuntu or similar with no trouble and everything "just works" on reasonable hardware. PC-BSD isn't going to top this any time soon.
No, he's most likely using Mint. And he miscounted: there's 4 far superior alternatives with Mint: KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, and XCFE. Mint isn't yet using systemd, but is planning to move to it in a future release; hopefully by that time the furor will have died down and it'll have been proven stable and reliable.
That's utterly ridiculous. There's a lot more to an OS than just the desktop environment (DE): there's the kernel, the init system and other low-level daemons, the display subsystem, the package manager, and of course lots of apps (beyond just what KDE (or Gnome) include in their software collections). The KDE team has enough work to do, they certainly don't want to become their own distro, when there's already several distros that feature KDE as a prominent DE (Mint, Debian, OpenSUSE for starters).
Lemme see if I understand your logic here:
Linux on the desktop isn't sufficiently popular yet with mainstream users, so Linux users should just give it up and go out and buy brand-new Apple or MS computers running half-assed desktop OSes, as you put it.
Huh?
I've been using KDE for over 15 years now, and it works just fine, quite well in fact. Why would I want to give that up and switched to a "half-assed" (you said it, not me) desktop OS like MacOSX or Windows? KDE isn't half-assed at all, and has only been getting better and better, while staying quite stable and not removing any useful features the way those two proprietary OSes have. So why exactly should I switch?
If you're just saying we should stop trying to convince everyone else to change (it's a little vague), why? Sure, most people are dumb and are going to continue to buy into the big corps' crap, but Linux on the desktop has only been getting better and easier to use, so why not? Lots of people have switched their family members over to great effect (my wife gets along just fine with KDE on Linux Mint). Who cares if Linux never gets to 95% marketshare? As long as it's popular enough to not be as completely unknown as, say, PC-BSD (my wife and my elderly mother both know what Linux is, though to different degrees,, but if I ask either of them about BSD I'm just going to get a blank stare), and users are able to use it without a lot of roadblocks throw in the way like back around 2000, that's good enough. It doesn't need to become a monopoly-of-sorts, it only needs to be strong enough to be a viable alternative, not just for techies but for anyone who has enough technical ability to plug a USB drive in and follow some simple on-screen instructions. And as far as I'm concerned, it already is.
This has really demonstrated the lack of value of free software over open source for example.
What are you talking about? Free software is a subset of open-source, sorta: FS is a philosophy, while OS is a development process. FS has provided us with lots of great software, including Linux (the kernel), X, Open/LibreOffice, Firefox, and countless more packages. How does "open source" top that, when it includes it (though it technically also includes stuff like MS's "shared source")?
All the while youve got RMS doing stupid shit that runs counter to the whole "freedom" idea like trying to prevent GCC users from sending the frontend output to proprietary backends,
I don't remember anything about that, I remember him wanting to put up a restriction to keep gcc from working with a non-GPL (but still Free) backend. It's just another licensing argument, which is very common in the Free Software community. You can criticize it if you like, but the idea that we should all just give up on Free Software because of occasional things like this and run back to Microsoft and Apple is ridiculous.
The only point you have here which is valid is the NSA one, because you can't choose your government (not by yourself). No one is forcing you to use NVidia or Steam. Just like no one is forcing you to use systemd or any particular feature.
No one is forcing distros to adopt it.
Battleship cannons aren't for leveling cities. They're basically sea-based artillery; artillery these days are actually quite accurate. Maybe not quite as accurate as a cruise missile, but pretty close. Even back in the "old days", they were used for shooting at ships from miles away, and ships aren't exactly city-sized targets, and this was back in the days before computers and other accuracy-improving technologies we have today.
Also, the US Navy is going back to this, with their new rail guns.
When I said "system update", I meant something like updating from Linux Mint 16 to Linux Mint 17, not just a routine weekly security fix.
Not a really great analogy, but there might be something to it.
Basically, people are lazy. For the 2A vs. government abuses thing, the answer there is fairly simple: undertaking violent revolution against the US government is a good way to get killed, and at this point probably isn't going to change anything anyway. You're not going to get enough people to rise up at once to effect real change, not right now anyway. Maybe if we get to the point where lots of people have friends in concentration camps or something. So, you have ridiculously high risk and almost no chance of success and survival, so no one does anything.
For systemd, there's no such risk. You can do whatever you want. The cost, however, is time and effort, plus there's the problem where a lot of the complainers probably aren't as technically capable as they think they are, and not enough to actually make their own distro. So while your 2A thing carries a big risk, systemd can be chalked up entirely to pure laziness. These people bitch and bitch and bitch, but most don't actually do anything productive such as make a new distro (well, it looks like there might be some effort into making a Debian fork, but we'll see how far that one gets). If these people spent as much time on making on productive things instead of bitching about systemd...
If you don't like it, make your own distro. Or use Slackware. No one is obligated to do things the way you want.
I never said that it "never happens" that you can't run newer Android on older phones with the situation the way it is now, I said that it "never happens" that you can't run newer Android on older phones for any valid technical reason.
Do you always get into utterly pointless pedantic arguments when you know full well what the person meant?
It's only useful to people running virtualized Linux on a MS host. That isn't a normal Linux user by any means, and it doesn't do anything for anyone running Linux natively or in any kind of non-MS environment.
It's nice I guess that they weren't completely allergic to working with the Linux community (though as I recall, it didn't go smoothly and Linus bitched them out a lot because they just dumped a bunch a code and then didn't go through the steps necessary to get it properly integrated), but as you said, it was entirely self-serving, and didn't do anything at all for anyone who isn't running an MS environment (Azure, Hyper-V). This is quite different from, say, Red Hat who contributes a lot of stuff that's used by many other distros, or Intel who contributes a lot of low-level stuff, much of which isn't specific to Intel hardware. MS hasn't contributed anything at all which is useful for someone not using MS's server products.
It's possible, but it seems a bit conspiracy-theorist to me.
WTF are you talking about? KDE, X, file managers, FireFox, and LibroOffice all work just fine without systemd. I'm running all those things on my Mint laptop right now (Mint hasn't yet moved to systemd).
They can't run it because the drivers are closed-source and incompatible with newer kernels. It's not a technical limitation, it's a consequence of Android's largely closed-source nature. If Android were all open-source like Linux, this wouldn't be a problem.
If open-source drivers were developed or made available for one of these older phones, there's no reason Android couldn't be made to run on it.
Are you really putting such a stain on your credibility just to win an internet argument? That's on you, pal. Use a less critical machine or a virtual one if you want to experiment, don't use your damn work machine. That's incredibly unprofessional.
And has this fool never heard of "backups"? Doesn't everyone know they should do a full backup before doing anything risky on their primary business computer, such as a system update? Or that they should do backups regularly anyway, just in case of hardware failure?
That's irrelevant. Try installing it on non-Apple hardware. Apple can't prohibit it; they do not have the ability to write laws.
The point is, MacOSX isn't going to work on some random hardware. It doesn't have driver support for it.