The line between helpful tech and quiet surveillance is blurring — and our devices no longer feel fully under our control.
I’ve been on Linux since 2016, and I’m honestly useless at Windows Administration now.
It’s not just that, but a lot of software feels awful to use. It feels like when Cable stations would just start airing Infomercials (maybe they still do) late at night, trying to sell you things you don’t need. Using modern software unfiltered is an onslaught of advertising, and pressure. It’s not fun.
All monopolies should be split into different smaller companies which would then be given to the workers who would collectivize them.
I agree, big tech should be trust busted to oblivion
It is not user experience, it is user manipulation. We are so so far beyond Stallman’s warnings about enslavement through corporate software design.
I think that’s the reason why I always change the operating systems of my devices – Fedora Linux for my PCs and custom ROMs for my phone. The stock ones don’t feel “personal enough” to me anymore.
Laughs in every computer I own is Linux and my mobile is GrapheneOS
Cries a little for everyone else
I’m just starting that journey … Graphene is dope once you learn your way around
My favorite feature is honestly so simple. Denying network permissions during install.
I’m literally building my set-up…I love having apps but a profile without Google play!
I switched to gOS and had to go back for NFC payments and auto.
It is great to see though, those are just necessities for me. Having gone back, I can say I hate pixel launcher and can’t even change keyboard
I’m genuinely curious, what makes NFC a necessity? And what do you mean by auto?
I don’t carry a wallet, and card contactless is limited to like 50. Can’t even do the weekly shop.
Android Auto for driving is difficult to get working, I see gOS can do it but I couldn’t get it to work.
It’s been a while since I got mine set up and working, but IIRC all I had to do was install Android Auto from the preinstalled GrapheneOS App Store app
Its trains when I travel for me. I am not giving up my tap to pay.
I might just be old, but I can do that with my debit and credit cards without involving my phone, so I couldn’t care less.
Limited in terms of value so it is less useful.
Lifestyle creep is real. I was like you before. Keep fighting the good fight and I will join you once Linux figures out NFC.
Brother/Sister if that is the good fight, I seem to be missing my cape. Happy new year :)
They aren’t building things for our benefit, they’re building things for their benefit. All the idiots who gleefully bought devices with surveillance and tracking and data collection, normalized it. Now everyone has to use some of this shit or their life suffers. The masses showed them they can take from our private lives whatever they want and the masses of fucking morons will happily pay them to do it. Why the hell would they stop taking when the consumer market has lost any sense of caution?
Sure, I might own the hardware
Not for long. The goal seems to be to make RAM, flash memory, and GPU’s so expensive that most consumers will need to purchase low-powered client devices and subscribe to cloud computing business models. It’s a handful of companies who are cornering the markets, controlling the supply, and seeking rents.
I don’t really see that happen. It would mean developers (or crappy AI code generators) would have to write efficient code for the low-powered client devices. The web is basically already other people’s computers and look how memory hungry browsers are, or maybe more specifically the websites/apps that run in the browsers.
I bet it’ll be more like a subscription for an LLM upgrade, since they’re shoving “AI” into the OS, it’ll need a bit of local processing power but then you pay to connect it to a beefier server
We well make some new companies
Big Tech keeps building smarter devices
Smarter or just louder?
The more Windows tries to manage my files for me the less I’m able to find where anything is.
I wish Windows 2000 still ran modern games.
Linux does. Not all, but a lot, and more every day.
It’s been years now, and it still hits me sometimes how insanely nice it is that my computers now work the way I want them to.
Interestingly, Linux also runs old Windows games better than modern Windows.
Yeah, that was an unexpected nice thing about switching to Linux, though also the whole point. Like I knew that I wanted to take control back over my computer and OS, but I was surprised at just how much nicer it is when defaults are set without any profit incentive. There just wasn’t “spend time disabling MS attempts to get me to use their other software” or “dig deep for how to change a setting MS would really rather you don’t change” periods and it made me realize that that was where I’d spend a majority of the “computer maintenance” time on windows.
I’ve hated and avoided 11 since I first experienced it. After Xmas I had to help setup my parents new PC. It of course is win 11. I spent so much fucking time getting that shit just to a usable state. I’m more convinced than ever to fuck off from MS for good.
remind me about the odds on whether a specific distro will work with my gpu or cpu
Older stuff, nearly 100%. New stuff, still really high to nearly 100%. The only place you’ll run into trouble is with devices made with only windows drivers etc. So things like a USB label printer or glucose monitor or something like that.
Computer hardware though, very unlikely to see an issue. Servers use both the CPU and GPU. And most servers run some flavor of Linux.
Gamer’s nexus did a great testing breakdown with Bazzite in a lot of different hardware configs.
Nvidia GPUs are all over the place in expected performance, AMD and Intel just worked from what I remember.
odds are pretty good these days, and if you’re worried dont switch now, but next time you buy hardware buy it with the intention that you may switch and opt for some Linux friendly hardware, which is pretty simple - avoid nvidia and realtek (avoid realtek on windows too if I’m being honest), make sure things are compatible with standards.
What’s Realtek done? I haven’t kept up on them.
Odds?
Just look it up, or tell me what you have.
Regardless of what you have, the “odds” are good.
If you have something unusual that causes problems, that’s too bad, but it doesn’t stop the rest of us from having a good time. And now that I’m on linux, I can make sure something will work before I buy it, and if it doesn’t, I can return it.
It’s only at the time of when you switch you need to think about whether your existing hardware will work.
it says created for windows vista on the front if that helps
It’ll work.
I just installed plain old boring Debian on three (3) random decommissioned office PCs the other day and every single piece of hardware in them worked out of the box including the Wi-Fi cards.
What’s so hard about C:\users\skisnow, it’s pretty intuitive. Also I don’t think that has changed for almost 2 decades now. (XP was last I remember it being different).
Unless your talking about OneDrive or some shit.
What’s so hard about C:\users\skisnow, it’s pretty intuitive
Except it only plays out like that if you follow their entire plan for how you want to structure your files and do it exactly how they want. Yessir, I put my pictures in Pictures and my documents in Documents and my music in Music and my videos in Videos like a good boy and everything is taken care of, until the moment I have to do something very very slightly different to Microsoft’s plan for my life, like get a second SDD or install one of the many many many applications out there that prefer to put themselves in the top level directory and store their own data in there.
Unless your talking about OneDrive or some shit.
You mean the OneDrive that gets bundled with every Windows along with an account that you have to really fight the computer to not give you? Why wouldn’t I be including that?
You can move your home folder anywhere you want, like the second SSD you mentioned. This can be done with both a GUI and the command prompt. I’m forced to use a Mac OS for work, and use linux for my devices. But file systems on Windows are easy. Complaining about forced injections of ads or ai makes sense, but their file system is fine.
Our devices are no longer fully under our control, it’s not a “feeling”.
people are experiencing innovation fatigue
What innovation? The user experience hasn’t undergone significant innovation (improvement) in the last decade
It’s enshittification fatigue, not innovation.
Innovative data collection for the shareholders so the line goes up!
Don’t forget all the innovative ways they’ve found to make it harder to repair “your” device.
Exactly. I almost feel like many are hungry for something new and different. So much so, that you give them something completely useless like an Ai widget, and they are willing to accept it to scratch an innovation itch.
My dream phone would basically be a phone jammed into a small handheld console with a big battery. Like stuff a pixel into a gameboy advance and that’d be perfect.
The user experience hasn’t undergone significant innovation (improvement) in the last decade
B-b-b-but thinner bezels!!! Slimmer phones!!!
There’s kind of been an increase in things being more accessible and usable by the standard user where previously they would need to be quite savvy or know a language.
But, yeah, I can’t think of much else. Not user-based tech anyway. Just the usual insignificant increases and a bunch of bullshit no one asked for and actually ends up using, but has to pay for.
I think smartphones are an excellent example. Most people wouldn’t notice the differences between a second-hand $150 Samsung Galaxy from five years ago, and the latest flagship for 10× the price. The innovation is almost entirely unnoticeable.
In many cases that accessibility is a full-on neutered replacement for a previous system that offered more user control and customizability, removing options from power users, so one man’s progress is another man’s step backwards.
As someone with a second hand Galaxy from seven years ago, yeah there’s not really much difference. Newer phones are slightly more annoying to use, actually.
Only difference is lack of updates for security and latest android, turns phones into ewaste long before the end of the hardware useful life.
Forced ‘innovation’ see-
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Windows 8/10/11
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Gnome 3
There’s no forced Gnome 3 (and it’s not been called that for a long time either), because you choose to install it, have the freedom to install anything else you want, and can customise it infinitely if you so choose.
Besides, Gnome is great. Maybe you don’t like it, but it seems odd to say that the way Linus Torvalds uses Linux is the “wrong” way to use Linux.
If you want to keep using Gnome 2 there are a million forks that are actively maintained, or idk you could just use another desktop. Nobody is forcing you to use gnome but you aren’t entitled to having a project do things the way you specifically want.
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I watched something on Netflix the other day.
It immediately then showed an ad for that same movie I’d just watched, telling me the last day to watch is in a few days.
The other day my spouse was trying to watch a movie on prime I think it was, it started by playing an advertisement for the movie she chose to watch. I told her a copy was on the jellyfin server. She said I pay for this so I want to use it. It hit a 2 min 40 second ad break a little later and I saw her glare at me out of the corner of my eye, I chose to pretend to watch the commercial and not look at her, didn’t want that conversation.
I saw her glare at me out of the corner of my eye
As if you were the one putting the Ads into Prime lol
I installed Lubuntu on my Microsoft Surface 2 and my custom PC from 2014 that couldn’t get upgraded to windows 11 due to lack of a tpm chip. We don’t need better hardware, we need better operating systems. We need more Linux.
We need more real Linux – GNU/Linux, with compliant copyleft licensing – not Tivoized crap like they put on TVs.
Roku OS, Amazon Fire OS, Tizen (Samsung TV OS), etc. – all technically Linux, but you wouldn’t know it because they’ve systematically butchered them to destroy everything that made Linux good (the users’ freedom).
What’s the point of being so pedantic?, they were obviously not advocating for more Roku installs.
Because the distinction matters. The corporate raping of Linux has to stop being tolerated or else nothing is solved. The technical details of the kernel don’t actually matter; the licensing and openness is what matters. Hell, if the Windows NT kernel got magically relicensed to AGPLv3 tomorrow it would instantly become the superior option just because of that.
Linux doesn’t fucking matter. Copyleft matters.
Sigh. This kind of nonsense is why so many people get scared away from even trying linux. Who cares which distro you use, as long as it is linux it is a step in the right direction, and a whole lot of people (including myself) have taken that step very recently, despite some arrogant linux bros doing their best to gatekeep us away from even trying.
do you seriously think roku, tizen, amazon fire are a step in the right direction?
Yes. Kinda.
How do you think Linux devs get paid? The devices are locked down, sure, but there are strong incentives to upstream code and fund further development upstream. Linux ”won” because of this. You can’t build and develop Linux for such a wide audience and hardware flora with a bunch of hobbyists.
As Linus himself said plenty of times - GPL2 was the correct choice. Roku, Tizen, Chromebooks and Amazon garbage are absolutely within what the developers intended, and the devs are doing the work after all.
From a consumer standpoint, I absolutely agree with you, open everything is wonderful. However - commercial interests currently fund most OSS development. Without those funds, development stops and developers must take other paying jobs (probably closed source). Would be nice to change this, but then we need to completely pivot our funding model. You need to pay devs, either directly or indirectly (taxes, foundations, etc).
So far, the open source community hasn’t been very good at figuring out funding models for consumer products. It usually ends with the development team needing to put food on the table, so they add a subscription and close down parts of the project. About two seconds later, the project has ten forks and the original author can’t buy groceries.
”Buy me a beer” simply isn’t s viable mechanism to fund open source. How should we do it?
Personal preference: Slowly move the public sector towards open source, and require them to provide financial aid to products they use. Not perfect, but something that could happen gradually, without shocking the system.
tl;dr: yes, but also no.
The devices are locked down, sure, but there are strong incentives to upstream code and fund further development upstream. Linux ”won” because of this. You can’t build and develop Linux for such a wide audience and hardware flora with a bunch of hobbyists.
if these companies were upstreaming code, it would not be a problem to replace the factory operating system on their products with something else. however just like phone makers, they don’t upstream the driver code needed for the onboard devices to work.
so far the only good I found to have come of it, is that after we find a vulnerability in their code, we can open a shell in the system and use ready made familiar tools to try to tame the devices from inside. until they force an update that patches the vuln because it got too popular, and you are locked out again.
Do you think anyone, anywhere think of roku and amazon fire when they hear “you should try linux”?
read this thread again, please, because you completely missed the point. but you know what, I’ll help:
grue said:
We need more real Linux – GNU/Linux, with compliant copyleft licensing – not Tivoized crap like they put on TVs.
Roku OS, Amazon Fire OS, Tizen (Samsung TV OS), etc. – all technically Linux, but you wouldn’t know it because they’ve systematically butchered them to destroy everything that made Linux good (the users’ freedom).
Rothe said:
… Who cares which distro you use, as long as it is linux it is a step in the right direction, …
roku, amazon fire, tizen and co are all “linux based” operating systems. the topic was not about people recommending linux to each other, but about corporations misusing the foundations of it to further their greed. point being, something runs linux does not make it good. and that’s where grue’s call for real linux on these devices gets relevant.
No they arnt, but also using terminology like rape is a huge problem. He’s entirely right, the avg vocal Linux user is fucking insane. And a big reason there’s still much misinformation and fud around Linux for your avg user.
The worse thing for Linux is unironically it’s fucking vocal users.
Sure, because caring about users’ rights is “insane.” Because caring about societal effects of (lack of) antitrust and consumer protection law is “insane.” Because having an ounce of goddamn self-respect and not wanting to be abused is “insane.”
No, I don’t think I’m insane at all, actually. I think the people incomprehensibly arguing against me in this thread can fuck all the way off with their corporatist simping!
What the fuck? I said I don’t even actually care if the kernel is Linux or NT (or anything else) as long as it’s genuinely open so the user can modify it, and you somehow try to twist that as quibbling over distros?! Way to miss the point by a goddamn mile!
Tizen is actually pretty fun to hack tbh
Can you actually install your hacked version on your TV, or is it DRM’d to prevent it? That’s the only thing that matters.
People just need to install lubuntu or some Linux distribution on their pc. Tech companies for years have forced consumer upgrades for average pc users when it wasn’t necessary.
I have a photo company in my town that still ruins dos off of windows 95 and has internet for email on windows 2000s for their point of sale machines is all dos. Even dot matrix printers. I was born in 1984 and remember this. Shows you don’t need the latest tech
That’s great for the folks who have access to decades-old pre-enshittification technology and the means to maintain it, but what about everybody else?
Continuing my smart TV OS analogy, your answer is like saying just to use a dumb TV instead. There aren’t any dumb TVs anymore! The TV manufacturer cartel colluded to quit making them!
“Just go live in the fucking woods like the goddamn Unabomber, eschewing modern technology” is not a valid solution for normal people! The law must be changed to protect them from predatory abusive corporations.
A modern tv without internet connection is a dump tv.
It really isn’t, though. It will still have a shitty UI that tries to shove the “smart” features in your face, it’ll probably shove some bullshit EULA in your face on first startup, and engage in other dark patterns.
i use my tv as secondary display on my desktop and run anything i want to watch from it.
You aren’t wrong but you sound unhinged. That’s coming from someone who lives in the woods and runs Mint.
Continuing my smart TV OS analogy, your answer is like saying just to use a dumb TV instead. There aren’t any dumb TVs anymore! The TV manufacturer cartel colluded to quit making them!
Yes there are, every smart tv becomes dumb as soon as you disconnect it from the internet. Just use it the same way you would use a monitor for your computer.
The CNC machines I run at work run from windows xp. IT disconnected them from the network, so I have to get.dxf files from my engineer on a thumb drive to program machining paths from. Ain’t that progress? No it’s lazy.
Eh, the printers should be swapped for laserjet to save money and ears. I don’t even know where one could buy paper for dot matrix printers either.
Repost: The power and influence of billionaire tech companies over the government is enormous. Ofcourse workers/users don’t get any (privacy) rights in america, none is lobbying for them lol, nobody in Washington is fighting for us
- A measure you would normally impose on convicted criminals or terrorist leaders is now being used by the U.S. against these three people:
- former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was responsible for European legislation including on social media;
- Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, who researches online hate, A US judge has temporarily blocked the detention of this British social media campaigner Imran Ahmed, who took legal action against the US government over having his visa removed. Mr Ahmed, a US permanent resident, had warned that being detained and possibly deported would tear him away from his American wife and child. 😳;
- and Clare Melford, who maps disinformation with her organization.
- Trumps inauguration lmao
their power and influence wont stop 100 million people breaking down their gates, grabbing them out of their beds, and throwing them into woodchippers.
I’m holding my breath, do it quickly.
- A measure you would normally impose on convicted criminals or terrorist leaders is now being used by the U.S. against these three people:
We need to stop supporting them. We’re just helping them build their empire to leave us behind sooner than later.
