No they don't. There are viable, open source alternatives for 99% of the software/services we use. The fact that people are not aware of it is already like half of the real problem.
I am only speaking for myself and I am most definitely not a pro, but I think preoccupation with efficiency and usefulness is the main obstacle to actually liking programming, which is itself a must if you want to get good at it. Some years ago I read an article with the title 'why I spend my time writing useless software'. I can't remember what it actually said since I only needed the title to really internalise the fact that programming is an art. Imagine telling Monet, Picasso, Michelangelo or John Lennon that their line of work is 'imperfect' or 'inefficient'. If that sounds like a ridiculous thing to do, that's because it would be. I've written at least 15,000 lines of code (I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer), most of it for production in banking systems. And yet, the piece of software I'm most proud of is...a library for encoding and decoding morse.
I wasn't a big fan of GNU initiatives, and even less of 'viral licenses', until I encountered Public Money, Public Code. The more you think about it, the more fucked up it appears to you that governments pay for Windows/365/AWS licenses, using your tax money, because decision makers haven't got the slightest clue about FLOSS, and if they do, they mostly don't have the nutsack to implement the sweeping changes that would be necessary to migrate.
Hospitals are dangerous for children, the elderly and immuno-compromised patients not because of risk of contagion, but because the bacteria that have survived the aggressive chemicals hospital surfaces are cleaned with are the strongest ones (shamelessly plagiarised from my 8th-grade chemistry teacher).
I used to have a mid-2012 MBP and its broadcom WiFi card was either not working at all (all BSDs and some Linuces) or working, but at ridiculous speeds and providing a very flaky connection (Red Hat derivatives). I settled for a USB wi-fi adapter. I found the Netgear ones to be more reliable. If you live in Europe, Technoethical (no relationship) has one adapter that uses the pretty generic Atheros driver.
This, coupled with the fact that firewalls are protocol-agnostic. You can, for instance, use 'port https' in your Packet Filter config instead of 'port 443', but that simply means that PF will block/pass traffic to whatever service is bound to that particular port, and NOT https connections in general.
No matter how old I get, I still find it weird thinking, even for a nanosecond, that for me to exist my parents and grandparents had to do THAT kind of thing.
It seems to me like you didn't do your homework before posting, since what you write is patently untrue. Guix is actually, primarily, a (very much functional/declarative) package manager which you can also install on top of other Linuces, even RHEL. Then there's the Guix operating system, which is very much useful for many tasks other than developing free software.
Never tried! But I'm assuming it's a pain indeed. Not even Signal Desktop works out-of-the-box (or maybe at all, haven't tried either) because of Electron.
I was once in the plane and I asked the flight attendant to please bring me some water. I wanted to swallow an Omega 3 gel cap. Thinking she wouldn't be long (I didn't fly often back then), I put it in my mouth. It was only a couple of seconds, but the flavour of that thing dissolving is still on my top 5 of the most disgusting things I've ever tasted.
'There was no such thing as Palestinians' - Golda Meir.
/s (or, rather, dare I say, /ss)