That’s the biggest mindfuck for me.
In the 90s and 2000s, people made fun of me for constantly being on the computer whenever possible. Now those same people are completely hooked on their pocket computers and now I’m the one making fun of them.
I don’t know how we got to this point, but all I know is that Steve Jobs is mostly to blame. The iPhone changed everything and now nobody knows how to interact with each other anymore, which is especially frustrating when trying to get assistance from anyone for anything. Even the simple process of returning a product to a store is now a lot more frustrating than it used to be, because the person running customer service absolutely refuses to interact with the customer.
The other day a mail informed me, that my battlenet account was locked due to suspicious activity. I went to the website to get support. Unlocking my account via the “support” did not do anything. I tried creating a ticket or talking to someone. You need to log into your account to do that.
Corporates perfected the Marketing department, also known as the Department of Lies and Half Truths so well, that even they believe their own spiel these days.
Mass Psychosis, I think it’s called, when everyone gets swept in a single line of thought and herd mentality sets in.
Even the simple process of returning a product to a store is now a lot more frustrating than it used to be, because the person running customer service absolutely refuses to interact with the customer.
i kinda assume that businesses give out the guideline to hesitate when taking back objects, as they lose money that way (lower net revenue).
Technology has stopped becoming a tool and a utility and has instead become a form of control. Where we once felt freedom to explore the internet and learn about new things we now have. This technology turned against us to track our every second and control our every thought. Plus the endless crap updates that just make things worse over time instead of better, yeah I could see why people just gave up on this bullshit.
Almost every refuge in internet is for profit data hungry giants. Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
All over the place, they just don’t get indexed high in search…
I still blog. Nobody reads it because search sucks, but I keep blogging. Others do too. There are dozens of us.
Me too. With no telemetry or interaction I don’t even know if even a single person has read my dump of thoughts.
WordPress has the ActivityPub plugin, which is the only way I’ve managed to disseminate my articles and have people interact with them.
Who’s your webhost? The data is almost certainly there.
It’s just a static jekyll server I host on my own.
Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
they’re right here actually
I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging
I don’t know though
Maybe this is it
Neocities exists
YouTube?
Just seeing all those thumbnails with the shocked face and stupid arrows makes me want to scratch my eyes out.
But without the red circle and arrows how will you know you’re supposed to be looking at the exploding police car?
Just seeing all those thumbnails with the shocked face and stupid arrows makes me want to scratch
mytheir eyes out.
But also open source, self hosting, and diy tech is booming
But also open source, self hosting, and diy tech is booming
how can I use it to feed my family? I’m genuinely asking, I lost my enterprise job I hated.
Honestly, here’s the thing. My PC is still running Win10. It just works. My life is stressful and chaotic and my escape is gaming. I love modded Skyrim and I love gaming and when I get a chance to sit down at my computer I just want to fucking escape. I don’t want to troubleshoot, I don’t want to fiddle, I just want to load my game and have fun.
That is what has been keeping me from switching to Linux these past few years. I have Win10 tweaked in the registry so it can’t run copilot or AI, the start menu can’t connect to the Internet so it can’t show me ads, it’s still Microsoft and I don’t love it but I don’t have to think about it.
If someone came along and said hey, for $100 I’ll install Linux on your computer, make sure all your drivers are installed, make sure all your hardware works, and get your games and files moved over, tested and working, and be around to troubleshoot in the future and teach you basic troubleshooting if you need me (for an additional reasonable fee), I’d pay it. I’m not made of money, but I don’t want to spend my time or limited brain power doing that stuff and I’d be more than happy to offload it to someone else.
modded Skyrim
Probably a good thing you haven’t switched then. In my experience setting up mod manager and any external tools (like Nemesis) was not easy, but it’s doable. Mods themselves may not work though, especially if they are more external to Skyrim. So, for example, you can forget about ENB shaders. I mean, when I tried them they worked, but basically no other mods and in an empty area with 7fps is not exactly playable (on Windows it was unstable ~30fps with mods).
After using https://github.com/Anon00b/MO2 to install MO2 for Linux I just used MO2 the same way I used it in Windows and all my mods played nice.
I had heard it was an issue in Linux. I’m running Lost Legacy and Yggdrasil (Skyrim VR) which are both 100+ gb mod packs (and highly recommend them both, Lost Legacy is breathtakingly beautiful). Lost Legacy is also very stable and runs very smoothly, especially compared to some of the other pre built mod packs I’ve tried.
If I did get brave and make the switch, is this something that theoretically could be run in a Windows VM or would it be better to dual boot and keep Windows hanging around for Skyrim?
As someone who does Linux tech support for 2 people as a hobby/because I love them, it would cost you more than $100 for all that.
But $300 for the setup and then $100 per year for support would be reasonable as long as you don’t expect me to drop everything and rush over when something changes/breaks.
I’d happily pay that if it allowed me to not have to deal with it.
I’m not a technological idiot, it’s just not my thing and I find it very stressful to deal with. It would be worth it to me to not have to.
I hear you. It’s a pain even when you have the skills to do it. I am looking for a secondary income stream and want more people using Linux, so maybe I should offer that for people. But ugh, the ways a computer can break can be so stupid.
I understand that you do not want to fiddle with a computer, I was once like that and that is what kept me from switching to any OS on my computer. I want to let you know as an experienced Linux user though that once you setup linux, you do not need to do any more fiddling. For the files and personal stuff, just back it up to an external hard drive. That is pretty much it. I could help you for free, but I do not really have somewhere to message anyone.
This is completely false ime. Updates can break your setup, though on stable distros they usually don’t. Also anytime I installed a game I’d have to invest time to set it up. For older games this could take an hour or more to get everything working. For newer games some features might not even work.
I ditched Linux for a reason. It was useable but I need my gaming machine to be stress free, not another work project.
I was referring to stable distros. But once you got all your games set up, aren’t you kinda good to go? But I get your point still, though.
Not sure unless you find people that want to switch over to non Microsoft etc products and you help them. I had a decent side gig getting people out of marketing companies by building them basic static websites and an email. Mainly plumbers, machine shops etc. They went from paying over a grand a month to like 20 bucks. It got out of hand from word of mouth and my lack of knowleges pretty quickly though
This might not be your issue but replace the subscriptions you use with FOSS ones.
Windows for Linux. MS365 Office for LibreOffice (although I guess you could say Google docs too). DropBox for Filen (or other services). … Gameing for retro Roms? Etc.
Theres also lots of foss support for pirating streamed media.
I couldn’t belive how many my live at home 18yr old cousin was paying for.
- hotspot WiFi
- playataton online
- game pass to play whatever game
- Netflix
- Spotify
- YT premium
- … let alone the mobile plan itself
Got a kickstarter for a cool idea, and a friend with a podcast with like 12 million subscribers? This is about the barrier to entry. But you’re going to be OK, maybe you go take a boring, stable job like a state university, and make up the difference in pay by consulting during work hours. Maybe it’s not so bad.
I’ve spent the past couple of years moving away from Apple devices and commercial software, into self-hosting as much as possible. While at this stage I wouldn’t go back to my previous set up, there’s no denying that it’s nowhere near as stable and easy to maintain.
Home Assistant, for example, is an incredible tool; that fails to turn some lights on and off far more often than Alexa ever did. It’s frustrating. Not so much that I’m going to bin it off and go back to relying on Amazon, but enough that I mostly just end up feeling kinda pissed off that the big companies have pushed me into a place where I’ve had to learn how to be a part time sysadmin, alongside my 9-5.
that fails to turn some lights on and off
This is the biggest issue I have with smart gadgets and home automation - they fuck up. Not even getting into the additional pains of fixing the automation when it fails, I’ve literally never gone wrong with pressing a light switch, or possibly pulling a cord. Full 100% success rate without rounding, even when the wifi’s down. I have to walk past the switches (and cords) to enter and exit rooms, so not pressing them on the way past doesn’t even save me any actual time.
Most of the automation I see seems to be the same - it introduces a chance of failure to something that already works, and/or imagines itself a solution to something that isn’t actually a problem. Boilers, fridges, toasters, beds - these were basically solved technologies until someone came along and decided to reinvent the wheel.
There’s a handful that do provide quality of life improvements to disabled people, but the overwhelming majority just seem to be parlour tricks that don’t reduce the human workload.For me, the utility is in being able to turn a bunch of lights on and off at the same time. We have a number of lamps, or light strings or what have you, rather than one or two big lights. Put them all in Home Assistant and I can set all the ones I want to turn on half an hour before sunset without having to touch a button. And 99% of the time it’s fine.
Equally, I can have a few lights turn on in the bedroom shortly before I go up to bed, then turn off half so there’s enough light to read by, then turn off every light in the house with the press of a button. And it is a button, because I don’t have a voice assistant set up.
Also, I have a bunch of temperature sensors around the house.
None of it is essential, but it’s a nice quality of life upgrade for my wife and me.
I am curious as to how out-of-touch your single downvoter is. Because you hit that nail right on the head.
Like, for my current place I’m still designing a CCTV system. But it will be using dumb PoE cameras, hardwired into a traditional NVR. But everything will be shielded, airgapped, and using dumb(ish) components that do not “phone home” to their manufacturer in any fashion.
I’m even looking into solid state and mechanical components for other home automation functionality. Like, nothing computerized to any degree, and therefore, incapable of being a threat or a data leak.
the scythe was peak technology, actually
Technology nowadays is basically a cult, a coercitive cult. They often take technology as an end in itself rather than as a means to other ends, they reify it and even deify it, and they treat any moderate stance as an enemy and as a brake on their shitty eschatology.
Theyre still tools, still utilities. Just because douchebags are using them in power games more often doesn’t make them any less so.
Just came back from a 4 day camping trip in the mountains where I turned my phone off and forgot it existed and just sat back down in my seat in my cubicle at my IT job.
I’m fucking over this.
Hear me out… anti-WiFi trees.
They grow towards any RF signals and their leaves are specially shaped to attenuate anything over 900MHz. They use the extra energy to increase their density to better resist harvesting and increase their height.
I read about a fungus found near the reactor in Chernobyl that seemed to be using the radiation as an energy source, so it seems plausible for a plant to evolve to absorb RF energy.
The actual energy in the RF is basically nothing. The sun has been outputing RF since the beginning of existence I’m pretty sure something would have evolved to make use of it if it had any sufficient energy density.
But if you think about it your phone is generating an RF field off the back of a tiny lithium ion battery, almost all of that power is going to power the screen anyway, the dribble of power that so left over is transmitted and then spread out over 50 kilometers of area. Anyone location is receiving less power than it would if it just absorbed power from sound waves
20 years ago, technically competent people had an integral role in the development and use of tech. That position is now infested with people who think economics is a science and money is real.
Technically economics is a subset of sociology and thusly is a science. But the people your probably referring to probably wouldn’t consider a backyard blacksmith to be under goods manufacturing either so ditto. This is just a reminder that economics isn’t just dumbasses who think that the only thing that matters is line go up, but the actual science side of it are generally in secondary fields or quietly working for the government or certain consultants.
As an intellectual discipline, economics is closer to theology than physics, with finance an entirely arbitrary, cherry picked subset of rules to justify a particular economic model.
Economics is the control mechanism that filled the void in society, vacated by religion, after the Enlightenment. Every economic model is functionally equivalent to any flavour of religion, just with a little extra accounting blended in.
We did away with one unhinged narrative construct, things can’t get better until the current dominant fantastical conjuring is dispelled.
As an intellectual discipline, economics is closer to theology than physics
Absolutely. Ask any economist where clean air sits in any economic model, and they would call it an “externality”. Or a healthy forest. Or clean water. Or any of the other hundreds of millions of things that make life on this planet - or even a vibrant civilization - possible.
It’s also why capitalism is the most cancerous economic system possible, and leads only to ugly fascism-adjacent authoritarian feudalism and (eventual) systemic civilizational collapse and the early death of billions just so a few obscenely wealthy people can accumulate even more wealth before the end.
Economy is a social construct. It is a liberal arts, not STEM.
So is history, but a whole lot of it is still scientifically based. The term soft science has existed exactly for this purposes for decades.
Ecunomics is a science. It is not hard science, and like all science, what you derive from it depends on the hypotheses you made.
True economist can work with unreal hypotheses and get wrong conclusions. The fact that it’s not hard science allows a bench of idiots to decide they know better an come up with flat-earth level theories like trickle down economics.
Economy is a social construct.
That’s the history of enshitification in a nutshell (sorry to people who hate the term, it’s just apt).
Engineers had some social power in these institutions for a brief moment. Sadly, we weren’t able to get to any kind of class consciousness before the space was enclosed by capital, not even basic trade unionism.
All they had to do was make some of us millionaires and the rest basically comfortable until our skills were devalued enough that we’d lost our bargaining power as workers.
Anyway, best time to plant a tree 20 years ago and all that…
20 years ago, I remember phones were cool and never had a crazy price-tag before the iPhone showed up. Tech in general was affordable and made sense. I mean look at the market now, you see companies forcing new tech upon us by skipping the rule of “need vs want” while making a purchase.
On a side note, I miss those fancy slider phones from the 2000s.
I miss the phones that slid open sideways and had a mini keyboard :/
a modern sidekick would go so hard, discord kids would absolutely love it.
i’m really tempted to get a clicks communicator if it doesn’t suck.
At least the phones from the 2000 had character, not like today’s simple cuboid phones.
In 2000 the whole data hording apparatus hadn’t been fully implemented yet, and AI surveillance was something more so seen as science fiction, nothing to worry about until possibly 2100. Sure there was some data collection but it wasn’t like billions of people were walking around with surveillance tech in their pocket 24/7. Things have changed and drastically. Methods to monitor, model, predict, and control human behavior are now a thing and quite robust. If only people were aware of what’s happening there would be a mass migration to secure hardware, OS’s, comms, and of course not a single cloud based always on assistant in sight. IOT devices are cool when they are secure but they often get the least attention, few if any security updates. If you can get rid of robot vacuumes, smart home assistants, smart TVs, smart thermostats, switch to secure FOSS OS’s on your computer and phone.
You can point a laser at someone’s window and accurately record their keystrokes from the sound vibrations. Things go deep in the surveillance and intelligence world. Nothing is truly and absolutely secure, just more difficult to crack.
10 years ago, I privately refused a gifted Alexa after Christmas, explaining “Hey I work in the industry, I know people who work for FAANG, Amazon spending billions on very smart engineers building systems to harvest data is a bet that they will be able to extract even more money from me, is it still within the return window.” My aunt told me to go live in a cave.
Has she seen the price of caves lately?
“Alexa, list local cave prices.”
“If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
duh… you don’t buy a nice cave, you buy a starter cave and install grey click flooring and a pot faucet over the stove.
Then paint the whole thing flat white, really splurge on a granite counter top for the kitchen, and a deep single basin sink. (Single basin sinks were made by the devil to torment me)
I was gifted an Alexa by a (previous) girlfriend. I haven’t even opened it because I have very little use for an AI companion. And I too know people working in FAANG and how invasive those smart devices are.
Something tells me that aunt calls for help when they have tech issues.
Maybe just personal experience…
For help, you know what you talk about. But if it is about privacy or safety, I am hyperbolic… apparently
My brother has/had a Google nest router, and that absolutely floored me.
Things like this is why I don’t even bother.
“Thanks Aunt!” then just chuck it into the trash at home.
Or try replacing the brains with a Raspberry Pi, idk.
I still like technology. It’s still possible to find technology that doesn’t spy on you and that you can control yourself. I use Mint, by the way.
It’s not the technology that’s the problem (mostly), it’s the corporations that control 99% of it.
Foss got me back into computing and seeing how fun it is. And turning my back on corpos as much as possible.
Installing Linux and bucking the yoke of Microsoft from my private life has reminded me that using a computer used to be fun and rewarding. Not even kidding.
My brother wanted to play Project Zomboid on a private server, and I’ve had more fun setting up and managing the server than I’ve had playing a lot of games that came out in the last few years. I need to get the time to setup CRON to jobs backup and update the server and mods. I’m trying to figure out if I can do it all from my Proxmox OS, or if I need to build separate cron jobs both inside and outside the VM and schedule them with enough buffer that they won’t run at the same time… Trying to get a nice and quiet hour to myself to really dig into it.
Dude exactly the same here. I didnt realize computing had become depressing to me. Linux made me feel young again!
side note one of my co workers said it got so bad and he hates windows so much he just pretends he doesn’t have a laptop and uses his phone for everything. I’m like…bro go mint. Its so much better.
I have to use a Windows 11 machine for work, and I feel better every week about my decision to switch my personal computer from Win 10 to Mint. I’m trying to get my wife to switch over, but she swears up and down that she needs Microsoft Office to do basic document functions… I’d love nothing more than to get her away from that, and stop the $160 or so that I spend every year on Microsoft office.
seems like we have the same life. I also am forced onto 11 for work, and i DESPISE IT. every second i’m on win11 makes me so thankful i got rid of that garbage in my personal life. My SO actually did switch to Mint with me and we’ve worked through issues together, now we joke that she’s “Defeated Lynux” xD. So far, not a single thing has needed windows, except one time i tried to do a firmware update on a mouse through a linux vm with windows and bricked the mouse, and needed actual windows to reflash it. But thats a very small use case. and we can’t play spyware trash games like pubg or fortnite (which are brainrot anyways). I do miss pubg a little bit tbh, just driving around and causing havoc ha.
ah, unfortunate that they need office. Libreoffice won’t work at all?
NGL. I kinda miss League of Legends. I’ve been looking for ways to run it from a VM, no dice. I may end up making a portable installation of Windows 11 and keep it on a removable SSD, and then only boot it when I really get a hankering for playing Ivern.
Libreoffice would work fine, but it looks different, and for the layman, that can be completely unacceptable.
I use mint too! Only switched last year and i have never looked back.
I want to start farming and growing vegetables. My dream is to have a pantry filled with wall to wall canned and pickled stuff I grew myself… to live for an entire winter on good I grew and preserved…
Same with chickens. Fresh eggs and meat…
Just make sure to check your dirt first. So many properties use(d) nasty chemicals to make “pretty” lawns.
Do you have a garden?
I moved into a townhouse too late to plant anything but next year! Definitely not nearly enough to support myself but I’m saving to buy an acreage in the next few years.
You can have a garden on a small patio. Get wire shelves and put planters on them. Kinda like this:
They sell a “greenhouse” at Home Depot that’s basically a wire shelf with plastic thrown over it.
Or you can get a planter like this that sits on the patio or one that hangs on your fence
Nosy apt complex would complain about “excessive plants”.
I guess it depends on the apartments? I’ve got a friend who grows lots of veggies on their small patio
Dude, we just gotta restart civilisation by this point.
The first generation of the post-apocalypse be filled with enthusiasts and nihilists alike.
Nihilists embracing absurdity can be positively enthusiastic.
I have been told I am complaining too much about my company moving to windows 11 and that I need to grow up.
I will then watch those same people slowly but surely start to complain about changes and things not working. I got laughed at today for fighting the updates and windows 11 by a few people who are probably going to be made redundant by this change. (I’m not angry, making people laugh and being a loudmouth idiot is my favourite thing)
I have been in IT support since 2007 and I know that all the change is bad.
My personal computer is on Win10 LTSC IoT and I’m moving to Linux Mint (Thankyou to the people on this forum that recommended it).
Change in tech can be good but not when it’s Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and HP making the changes.
I moved to Linux Mint 2+ years ago. Zero regrets. 10/10, would recommend. Win 11 getting bloated is what finally drove me there. FWIW, Claude is amazing support for Mint and Linux in general.
It’s not just you, though. There’s a post on Hacker News right now about the 170k non-profit orgs just had their data deleted my MS recently. There’s a whole comment thread about how MS is no longer a serious company. Silicon valley professionals have lost faith in the company. It’s not just you (and me).
Oh no, you’ve triggered my occasional whine about Linux Mint. I was so happy to finally have a Linux distro to play with, twenty years after first wanting to try it after my dad brought home a copy of Linux Format someone left on the bus.
Linux just doesn’t like me. It was okay at first, though I couldn’t get my art programs to work (sorry, I love my SAI and psp 7, I don’t like krita and always hated gimp). But I could use it for intrewebz and storing my mp3s. I was so proud of my first sudo apt update. But after a while it wouldn’t connect to the internet so I can’t update it and now it’s just gathering dust taking up an entire SSD. I wish I was brave enough to reinstall it or replace it with a different distro, but I’m too scared I’ll brick my entire PC.
That is the end of my occasional whine about Linux.
I just had a little chuckle that you are having a whine and that to get those apps running in linux you need WINE.
WINE no like me either :(
Edit: sorry that’s not actually true. I got mp3tag to work on wine or playonlinux which I think uses wine?I found that bottles is quite good. It creates all the WINE prefixes etc and can run exe installers from there. I needed to use it to get ableton live to work and that was the method that worked.
As a side note: If you ever try again, I got SAI2 working on Zorin OS out of the box, while I just could not make any version of it work properly on Mint. As far as I know psp is out of the question, though. (And I am still stuck on Windows, since I have not yet found a way, to get the Surface Pro pen work well enough, on any distro.)
Sounds good. What I need is a bunch of local nerds starting a computer club with some old PCs we can practice installing Linux on. I would actually be willing to talk to people for that. And then once I knew what I was doing, I’d have so much fun making other people learn it too.
Psp7 is my staple, been using it since around 2001 ish, still does most things better than XI. Although I can’t save presets on Win10.
That sounds like you ran into a few hardware issues, which may just be bad luck with your machine. Sure, Mint isn’t for everyone or every machine. But the vast majority of people gave good luck with it.
Not sure what your opinions are on AI, but I would guess that a day or so using paid tier Claude would have you safely running some Linux distro on nearly any laptop. I used it to guide me through a home server setup that took a couple hours total. If you’re worried about bricking the machine or want the SSD back, it’s an easy way to get that, one way or another.
LLMs are really good at resolving all of these issues for you
i wouldn’t say “all” but some. i’ve gotten the compose key and some edits to my xkbmap working with it.
Llms are perfect for linux and I think it might be what takes linux desktop to mass consumer appeal. I know lemmy is full of luddites but this is revolutionary tech for linux desktop and the next 10 years will be incredible!
you’re gonna make a lot of people very upset with your attitude. you’re supposed to be against LLMs because (checks notes) idk something about electricity consumption (which is not actually that big) and water consumption (which is not actually that big). and of course making artists unemployed (which btw they largely already were, and you can still donate to them via patreon, just as you could before, just that now there’s more competition in the field, which is somehow bad, because for some reason art is only good if some human suffered through the process of making it. suffering builds character or sth after all, amiright? /s)
Yeah I actually really hate this defeatist take. We should use that energy to liberate LLMs not to destroy them because the latter is never happening so it’s just wasted effort.
Change in tech can be good but not when it’s Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and HP making the changes.
Now, yeah.
I remember when a new microsoft OS was a great thing that brought wonder and excitement instead of bullshit.
3.11 to 95 was revolutionary
Upgrading from 98 to XP was amazing.
XP to 7 was like being blessed by a digital god.
7 was truly the pinnacle of OSes. Everything after 7 started to take the crap and fall apart though. 8 with its stupid tablet design for desktop, 10 for its spyware and bullshit, 11 because you’ve become the product instead of the OS, and also laying the foundations for a restricted, walled garden like apple has.
I’ve been on linux for several years now, but god damn do I miss windows 7. It was the peak of operating systems. sleek, stable, usable, and the first OS from microsoft that didnt need regular reformating to maintain stability. It didnt need babying. Things almost never went wrong, and when something did go wrong it was easy to figure out and fix… I went years between reformats, and those only typically happened because of hardware changes (which often werent necessary, but used as an excuse for digital spring cleaning, basically)
I never had 95, my family couldn’t afford a PC back then. But getting out families first PC running Windows ME and spending so many afternoons trying to fix it is that got me into IT support.
Moving to Windows XP was a huge step up and moving to Windows 7 was another step up.
Microsoft has never ever made an OS as good as Windows 7.
7 and XP are equal until in XP you try to drag a full screen window and cannot.
I’m on 10 LTSC IoT and I think (Thanks to people on the Linux sub) I’ll be moving to Linux mint Cinnamon.
I agree, windows 7 was the best OS microsoft ever made… maybe the best OS ever.
It was the peak, and microsoft could do nothing to improve on it…which is why every OS afterwards has relied on slop and creepware.
Best OS ever? Nahhh. I don’t think it’s controversial to say modern linux distros have eclipsed 7.
No they havent.
Linux has made astonishing progress, and it is in a state where it is every day usable by alot of people, but its not at the polish and usability of windows 7.
I remember when a new microsoft OS was a great thing that brought wonder and excitement instead of bullshit.
Trouble is, what can the OS makers offer these days?
Apple brought it on themselves by insisting that their platforms had to be updated annually, presumably because it made it easier for them to blacklist older devices more frequently. An unsupported device is basically landfill, right? So you’ll have to toss it and buy a new one. Because…reasons.
But really, what are the functional differences and benefits to the end user of moving from Win10 to Win11? Of moving from macOS Sequoia to Tahoe to Golden Gate? I’m not massively au fait with Windows, but from my experience, the only real difference that could be sold as an upgrade is “Moar Copilot!”.
We’re at a point where hardware from five years ago is every bit as functional as hardware released today. So all of the companies have latched onto AI. But users don’t really care about AI. And that leaves Microsoft and Apple and Google with… nothing. This is particularly obvious in the mobile space, where they’ve run out of hardware features to hang a new device off of. Even the cheapest new smartphone has a still/video camera with surprisingly high quality sensors. They can all connect to high speed wifi and cellular networks. They can all do all of the things people need of them. What else can they add?
But the shareholder value must increase.
It’s exhausting.
Trouble is, what can the OS makers offer these days?
Corporate OS makers like Apple and Microsoft?
Nothing.
The sad reality is we have hit the point where every OS for the last 15 years have been able to do everything necessary, and would still be able to do everything today if driver and security updates had continued.
Theres always the need to release a new product, from a corporate profiteering perspective, but there is no longer significant progress in the product itself. There is no revolutionary improvement like you saw from,(using windows as an example) say 3.11 to 95. or 98 to XP, or XP to 7.
Beyond that we’ve just kinda gotten minor iterative improvements(to be fair, we used to get iterative improvements as well bad then, with ME and Vista, as examples), along with a lot of creep and spyware because even the big OS makers realize that the OS as a viable, continuing product is coming to an end, and now they are shifting their attentions towards harvesting your data, tracking you, spying on you, and profiling you, so they can sell/lease/etc that data to others.
The only alternative to this corporate hellscape that exerts ownership over our OS and Computers is to use something like Linux.
and I know some people might cringe at hearing linux, because there are rabid proselytizers for linux, but as of this moment Linux is the only OS that for the most part lets you use modern computing without the creepware thats invaded modern paid-for OS’s.
The ease of changing over to linux depends a lot on what you do, and may not be viable for everyone of course.
Until a couple of years ago I was hard in the Apple ecosystem. I saw things like Universal Control come along and how cool it was that I could control my iPad from my Mac; but only if both were new enough to support it.
Then I began to dabble in Linux, before immersing myself in it. And then I realised that Universal Control was just Deskflow, (or one of the numerous forks of the same project). Which led me to realise just how many of those incredible Apple innovations over the past 10/20 years were mostly just polished versions of things people could do with far cheaper hardware.
Take iPhone mirroring. That’s been available to Android users as SCRCPY for god knows how long. But if you use Linux or Windows and an iPhone, it’s not for you. For a long time, my iPad got very little use because I can’t integrate it with Linux very easily at all. And that’s by design. That’s how Apple sells more stuff.
I think you are misremembering how bad XP was on launch. It took a year or two for it to be stable. Windows Vista was an even worse nightmare before we got to 7.
I didnt have many big headaches with XP. In fact, the only headache I recall having was getting some very old games working, but there were workarounds and eventually they ran fine.
Vista was only a nightmare because vista changed how drivers worked from all previous windows editions, which meant every old legacy device had to have new drivers made and signed for it, which caused major headaches for a lot of people not on the absolute latest and greatest, but that storm did eventually pass… it should have passed in testing instead in public, which is partly why I didnt mention it, the other part being i never used it on a personal system, but Vista was ultimately a stopgap release due to delays with 7. basically a windows 6.5 if you will.
The company I work for has, until now, not really given much of a shit about cybersecurity. Sure, we had some basic stuff in place, and had managed to avoid any issues, but it’s fair to say that the boss’ focus isn’t on the computing side of things. But we recently took on a big contract from a BIIIG customer, and that customer has a contractual requirement that we achieve the UK government’s Cyber Essentials rating at the very least.
So out with the old Win10 PCs and in with some new Win11 units. They’re still shitty, but at least they’re compliant.
Trouble is, because the company broadly didn’t care, I was able to put Kubuntu on mine. You could argue that my PC was the most secure because I ran timely updates, where my colleagues were still using unsupported Win10.
Well, I’ve lost my Linux privileges because now the IT guy needs everyone to be in line, and on the same hardware.
So I’ve spent the past few weeks poking and prodding at Windows 11 to figure out how to bend it to my will without admin access. It’s been quite good fun actually. Aside from the whole using WIndows thing.
Yah even “disruption” in tech has been captured by the rich. Nothing shakes up the established order unless it’s taking from someone who has less to give to someone who already has too much.
“Electric Vehicles? I don’t know, we need to go very slowly, and then consider how disruptive this technology is to the economy. A lot of big companies might not be able to divest quickly enough… (etc)”
then cut to LLMs and it’s like
“AI is here to stay. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle (or stop spending billions and billions of dollars desperately pushing the technology into every crevasse). We’re literally incapable of acting ethically if it contradicts with short term profits. Business = nature, we’re just following an evolutionary maxim — our hands are actually tied! Look, fascism and endless war are just good for business, I don’t make the rules (bribes government to make rules for them)…”
It’s actually deplorable, and it’s lead to a more impoverished future for everyone.
Your confirmation bias will not prove anything.
Users have been complaining about every piece of software forever. They do not do it more on Windows 11 than they did on Windows 7 or XP.
I also work in IT support for more than a decade.
And switching to Linux just is not an option. They just do not have a decent answer to Active Directory. And retraining users to use a completely different operating system will have bankrupted plenty of businesses.
Users have been complaining about every piece of software forever.
Not really. People stood in lines for Windows 95. I don’t think I ever heard a complaint specifically about that OS. 2000 brought the 95 interface to the NT kernel. XP got mild criticism for looking childish, but people liked it as a stability improvement from 95 and 98.
Vista was the first Microsoft OS that saw a lot of backlash. It was more secure, but ran slowly on anything that wasn’t very new hardware. 7 was widely enjoyed, 8 was mixed (very tolerable with something like ClassicShell), 10 was beloved, and 11 is widely hated for a huge variety of reasons.
Can you find someone with a complaint about any of these OSes? Sure, but that’s meaningless. The fact is that MS has released both beloved and hated OSes, and Vista is the only one to receive as much hate as 11.
Techies stopped jumping on the newest gadgets when the newest gadgets became plastic slop that did nothing but track what you said, did, where you went, etc, and reported it back to the company so they could build a profile of you and sell that data.
normies buy the shit now because its affordable (Because of the afformentioned creepware) and because they cant be bothered to do a modicum of research to realize theres a 98.6% chance that the device will be non-functional in a year because the company collapsed (having harvest all the information it needed before rebranding as a new company to do it all over again) and took the online servers with it, because of course your fucking toaster totally needs online servers to operate.
But while going bankrupt, it will sell all information about you to the biggest bidder. Terms and services for you fryer included sharing data with “partners”, so now your health insurance can jack up your premium because you used the fryer “too much for your own good”.
It took extra effort to find a damn washer and dryer that did not want internet access.
As a tech person, I try to do have a lot of smart devices that I can self host, try to use home assisntat, bridges to my own NAS, have some rpi for my own DNS filter (with pi-hole)
My TV is offline while I am using a Apple TV box for streaming
And yeah some stuff is unnecessary. I don’t have a smart fridge, but I have an old iPad with a custom home assistant dashboard in my kitchen
Home assistant is so fucking good.
Yeah, just setup a zigbee or z-wave network for your smart home, and just block the MAC address of the controller on your router.
None of the IoT devices will be able to contact anything on the internet, and you can still access them while you are connected to your own wifi.
I haven’t connected any appliances to my network, but I may try Zigbee.
I’m not optimistic about the future of home appliances. Without stronger privacy protections, there’s little stopping manufacturers from adding cellular modems to avoid the need for wi-fi to collect and transmit user data, with features/usability locked behind accepting ToS.
I am one of the few people in my office that still has a normal (digital) wristwatch.
My G-Shock is my everyday watch. Solar powered and multiband 6, nothing is more accurate.
G-Shocker user here. Mind is still going strong too, but I’m hoping to get a AE-1200 Casio one of these days
I love my 13-ish(?) year old citizen eco-drive solar analog watch.
A lot of tech today is over priced subscription/data farming crap that is locked and dumbed down so the average consumer can use it without overloading their limited brain capacity.
I’m not going to sign up or use an app on my phone to activate a piece of tech.
Luckily there are still DIY projects I can tinker with. And it’s much more satisfying making it yourself, although more time consuming. But that’s part of every hobby, right.
