... and as a result, I end up with reliable, light, somewhat costly machines(1) that come from one or two vendors and provide a consistent if inflexible experience.
This is not the lose-lose that some people seem to think it is. One of the reasons closed-source few-vendor is a dominant ideology is that it actually satisfies the use-case for an awful lot of users. Meanwhile, in 2015, I still can't get a reliable basic audio(!) experience on my Linux distributions because the open-source community can't seem to decide on the right way to do something as fundamental as "pipe bytes to the digital-analog-conversion hardware."
(1) Costly in general. With the Gluglug running at around US $500, it's not winning the cost game.
If the default audio setups of several different distributions fail to work, that's unfortunate. In my case, Dell's preinstalled Ubuntu had working audio, and when I replaced that with a custom NixOS installation, all I had to do was enable PulseAudio with a oneliner. Is your audio hardware supported by the Linux kernel?
Hardware companies keep specs secret and sabotage the development of free software drivers. That's feasible because they only need to collaborate with Microsoft and Apple to support a big market share. If consumers don't care, then apparently this is what happens. But it's not just a question of the competence of free software developers.
My hardware is ostensibly supported, but I often have to killall pulseaudio or restart the machine to get audio playing on Flash in Chrome.
Part of my point, though, is it's not a question of the competence of free software developers.
It's a question of the capacity of free software developers in the long-standing market / legal ecosystem to deliver a reliable solution at all. The roadblock may be entirely structural and completely unfair; doesn't matter. As the end-user (speaking with the Queen's "end-user"), we don't care why it doesn't work; we care that if we buy this computer / OS it works, and if we install that OS on that computer it doesn't. So of course we buy this computer / OS; we have work to do, and "Make the ecosystem fair for hackers to implement a working and reliable pulseaudio" isn't that work.
Knuth, when faced with a world where he didn't have a typesetting solution to print his book, wrote TeX. Most people just put up with the crappy existing solution, because their goal is to write a book.
Well, Flash is a proprietary bundle, right? Who knows what it's doing? It may not be PulseAudio's fault.
Of course there's some causal reason why many are stuck using proprietary software. That doesn't invalidate the free software cause, and is not a reason to snark about how "they don't care about software, only ideology." That distinction is itself ideological.
This is not the lose-lose that some people seem to think it is. One of the reasons closed-source few-vendor is a dominant ideology is that it actually satisfies the use-case for an awful lot of users. Meanwhile, in 2015, I still can't get a reliable basic audio(!) experience on my Linux distributions because the open-source community can't seem to decide on the right way to do something as fundamental as "pipe bytes to the digital-analog-conversion hardware."
(1) Costly in general. With the Gluglug running at around US $500, it's not winning the cost game.