to me this is a feature rather than an issue, whenever a package is updated in the package repository it’s super convenient to just update them from the same place instead of having auto-updaters built into all applications on the system. i guess that’s a preference thing though.
The US leans very heavily into capitalism, so passing laws that make companies less money probably isn’t what the government has as a priority unfortunately. Companies can make a lot more money selling you a new device than selling you a battery, even if the battery has crazy markups like most manufacturers that have replacement batteries available do.
I think Lemmy seems like a good idea and generally like it so far, but i do think that users that aren’t that tech savvy may have issues. It’s also nice that the servers are customizable in a way, but at the same time if you pick certain servers you can’t see down votes, or creating communities might be disabled which will seem inconsistent to newcomers that think of Lemmy as a more traditional platform like Reddit that only has one instance. The community search is also pretty clunky, a lot of users will probably have trouble understanding why they can’t just find all available communities instead of writing an obscure email-like string that still says “no results”, but then magically after searching again it will be there. I would say some areas are unpolished and even a bit buggy at times too. I figured these things out pretty fast, but being a software dev myself, i know that an end-user may struggle a lot more with these things, to the point where they may just abandon the platform out of frustration. I hope some of the rough edges can be smoothed out because the idea of this platform is definitely interesting, but if average people can’t use it it’s less likely to really succeed. I must admit that even i am a bit skeptical, and i may have to return to Reddit if not enough users/content migrate to this platform, even though i don’t really like many of the decisions Reddit make. I’m giving it a fair shot though and i definitely like it so far.
I think the experience depends a lot on what ditros you’re using and your hardware configuration. I started out on Manjaro and that ran terribly for me, then i went on to Linux Mint which i liked a lot and that was solid, but since i got a new GPU i needed a distro with a newer kernel which made me switch to Pop!_os and that is also running great. But i won’t deny that audio was a bit flakey on Mint for me until i messed with it, seems solid on Pop though.