> A normal end user cannot do anything about this without significant effort.
This succinctly captures an important truth about computers (and especially mobile phones) over the past thirty years or so. Free software communities just don't, ironically, seem to have really had user empowerment as a core value since around the mid-90s or so.
> Free software communities just don't, ironically, seem to have really had user empowerment as a core value since around the mid-90s or so.
Of course they have. Empowerment is not simply teaching people how to code, it's first and foremost giving control to users. Allowing them to understand how things work, why it changed, participate in the community to ask questions, surface bugs, and discuss on features. Change tools because formats are standardized and documented. Just like farmers using open hardware tools are not expected to be able to repair everything, but to have the right to repair the way they want.
Why would I install the beta? The current version works fine. They don't need to change anything in the first place. And if they hadn't changed anything they wouldn't have had to "listen to the people" because there would've been nothing to listen about.
Seriously, begging developers to change or fix things doesn't count as "user empowerment", and neither does spending the 10,000 hours necessary to figure out the maze of interlocking horrible technologies required to try to fix it oneself. It's a developer full-employment theorem for sure: people's jobs depend on users not being able to address their own problems when it comes to getting computers to do what they need.
This succinctly captures an important truth about computers (and especially mobile phones) over the past thirty years or so. Free software communities just don't, ironically, seem to have really had user empowerment as a core value since around the mid-90s or so.