Whatever was said at the time, I’m convinced Google Reader was collateral damage from the Bay of Pigs Google Plus effort. It had social features (which I honestly never used) and anything social had to be G+.

Still, I honestly don’t understand why this is the hill people want to die on, what they feel most betrayed about. Like I haven’t seen some people this upset since Firefly was canceled.

In retrospect Reader's death marked a turning point in how Google was perceived. There were grumblings before that but Google was still the darling of the web.

As you say, Google+ was consuming Google at that time. So when they killed Reader it was not just killing a beloved service. It also acted like a lightning rod for the discontent that had started to swell. A lot of people would never again view Google through a rose tinted lens.

It's that, but it's also a symbol for how the Web has changed. Google bulldozing Reader in order to clear ground for a (intended) social media behemoth reflects how all sorts of smaller online communities and spaces have been razed or faded away as everything continues to consolidate onto the social media giants.

And it's not just the web. It's everything. Every company in our capitalist utopia just keeps growing and growing.

Microsoft is the perfect example. They've bought companies from the start, and never stopped. I still hate that they were allowed to buy GitHub. They will eventually make it supplant their stupid MSDN "devops" thing in their offerings.

But if not Microsoft, it just would have been Oracle or Amazon or someone else, and the problem is all the same. Now it's just another -- vital -- service, where I'm not the customer, and I can't ever fully trust it.

And, yes, you can argue that this didn't materially change with the Microsoft buyout, but I trusted former management's objectives for the site to run more closely to my interests than Microsoft's.

Not that many people who use Linux are clamoring for it, but it's interesting that GitHub does not provide an official desktop app for Linux -- even though it's a frickin Electron all. And that's totally GitHub's doing.

Meanwhile, at the parent company, Microsoft offets VS Code for Linux. And it's nice.

What I dislike about Linux in general is how often the mentality for an app is “you’re using Linux, just find the repository and figure out how to get the release to your system or build it yourself”.