I think you’re forgetting where Linux was the most successful by far: Servers and Android. Server guys do what they want, if you tell them they can only use software you allow them to, they will laugh at you and buy their data center elsewhere. Android has had locked bootloaders forever (I actually think even my very first phone had one).

So maybe development would have been harder? I mean, we don’t have looked bootloaders on desktop even today, not really locked at least, so it’s hard to tell. Linux’s main audience would not have cared I think.

Things just weren’t like that then. Otherwise all PC peripherals would be locked down too, so no device drivers. That was already a problem with cheap windows crap. But the better stuff was documented.

Maybe there would be no Linux but that isn’t as bad as it sounds, since BSD Unix was being pried loose at the time, plus there were other kernels that had potential. And the consumer PCs we use now weren’t really foreseen. We expected to run on workstation class hardware that was more serious (though more expensive) than PCs were at the time. They would have stayed less locked down.

Asded: PCs were an interesting target because there was a de facto open hardware standard, making the “PC compatible” industry possible. So again, without that, we would have used different hardware.