Yes, this is the alternative. And it’s a PITA as you say. And might not even be possible in the future, given the trend towards locking down Android and OSs in general.

Obsessing about this increasingly irrelevant figure is pointless. Most people do not even have desktop computers outside work, and the number is going to keep dropping and dropping. The world has moved to mobile.

As Linux nerds who care about the future of free personal computing, we need to reboot our minds and focus on how to get free software onto mobile devices and into mobile applications.

The FOSS Linux stack is going nowhere on mobile (I have speaking rights here: I once bought an Ubuntu phone). Our last best hope is web apps that use web standards. I say we transfer our obsession to that project instead, rather than worry about this distraction of a statistic.