Your Windows 10 PC will soon be ‘junk’ - users told to resist Microsoft deadline::If you’re still using Windows 10 and don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11 any time soon you might want to sign a new online petition
Yeah, I hear you. I still run an old MacbookPro with MacOS for personal computing stuff. I just don’t always want to tinker. It’s been a living meme: “the year of the Linux desktop” for years on years now and yet we still comprise like 0.3% of the desktop market.
But I really do see a tide shift now. Microsoft is doubling down on the enshittification of Windows. Apple’s hardware is still—as always—prohibitively priced. Steam OS on the Steam deck. The Indian government officially adopting it—and its FOSS office application offerings. Companies like Pop!_OS and Framework are making real headway for popular adoption. HP, Dell, Lenovo all offer Linux-default laptops now, that aren’t just “Pro-Dev” offerings.
Linux is not as polished as the for-profit offerings. Perhaps it never will be. Perhaps that’s also its appeal.
I don’t think not being polished is an appeal for anyone. For me it’s just being able to control it. Like Apple wants to control your hardware (and also your software on mobile) and Windows wants to cram whatever bullshit on your computer that they can and load it down with all sorts of bloatware and spyware. What’s my other option? I’d rather deal with an unpolished system than that bullshit any day.
There are a few distributions out there that are genuinely trying to abstract the nitty-gritty away and bring a polished Linux to the masses. ElementaryOS, for one. Yet, it is still Linux at its core and all the poweruser functionality isn’t far away.
But to face a bit of harsh reality, the average computer user doesn’t want that. They resist change and learning something new, they want it to “just work” and “work for me the way [company] says it should” even if that means gross (often implicit) violations of privacy, control, agency. They just don’t care. Or maybe they don’t know. It’s amazing how hard it is to “degoogle” oneself, let alone “demicrosoft” or “deapple”. As I type this on an iPhone…
There will always be bleeding edge computation environments. I just hope that we users can force Big Tech’s hands to respect data privacy and agency. We had a big win with Google conceding web-DRM, but it won’t be the first nor last attempt and their patience is immense.
Tron: “I fight for the users.
