What’s missing in this article (or at least as much of it as I could read) is that much of the software listed has alternatives. For instance, bash can be replaced by a combination of some other shell (fish, zsh, dash . . .) and some other scripting language (python, perl . . .). There are other compression algorithms than xz, even if they’re less efficient. And so on.
Others are nice-to-haves, but their absence wouldn’t cause much actual technical dysfunction. If Harfbuzz vanished tomorrow, it would result in some ugly text displays. This is not the end of the world.
What’s missing in this article (or at least as much of it as I could read) is that much of the software listed has alternatives. For instance, bash can be replaced by a combination of some other shell (fish, zsh, dash . . .) and some other scripting language (python, perl . . .). There are other compression algorithms than xz, even if they’re less efficient. And so on.
Others are nice-to-haves, but their absence wouldn’t cause much actual technical dysfunction. If Harfbuzz vanished tomorrow, it would result in some ugly text displays. This is not the end of the world.