Personally I use Linux unless forced to use something else by my employer.
Why is that in any way exonerating? Most people do most of their actual computing on their phones now, it is not an irrelevant toy platform. We should be more, not less, hard on Apple than Microsoft for pulling this shit on their mobile platform.
Its a psychology trick that took decades of marketing to pull off, but they are deeply entrenched as someone's identity. These users have a religious devotion and will defend them, because an attack on Apple is an attack on them and their group.
If you don't care about a corporate in-group, you are most likely wanting a quality computing platform. Which is why people are so hard on Google an Microsoft when they restrict computing.
That is just the bare minimum. Its 2023, every phone is like this.
Anyway, any teenager can tell you what its like to have the wrong kind of bubbles. They are extremely susceptible to in-group bias. Heck I wore Abercrombie and American Eagle, it wasn't because the clothes fit.
I even had a single buddy, age 30, recently get peer pressured into getting an iphone because his sister said "I don't date green bubbles". He took it to heart.
At some point, its denialism to think in-group bias doesnt exist. Not that someone exploited can easily admit to it, its far too difficult to imagine your brain being incorrect about something. Much easier to say things like "they are reliable and consistent" than to accept that marketers have exploited us.
All the people she didn't date thank her.
Shallow people are shallow, and it’s hardly like Apple made them that way. People do the same thing about cars, shoes, clothing, alcohol, zip codes, etc. The only upside is that it lets you very quickly identify and avoid them.
In the messaging case, it’s important to remember that Google is currently funding a huge lobbying campaign trying to get governments to restore the market position they gave up a decade ago. SMS messages have been green on iOS since the first iPhone – and shortly after the App Store launched most people were using Google Chat since everyone using Gmail was on it and it even federated with other XMPP services. Google spent the next decade pushing users away with a bunch of poorly conceived and executed attempts to lock users into their proprietary system. Only after those failed did they start picking up RCS, but most of their catch up with iMessage work has been proprietary extensions which help sell carriers on Google’s Jibe cloud service.
I like the idea of open protocols but Google is acting out of self interest and I have no doubt that they’d try to lock things up in a heartbeat if they think they could get away with it.
Let them park for their own PR, and we can talk about more open alternatives.
RCS is controlled by Google just like iMessage.
Google doesnt control RCS. Its a general format. Apple could implement RCS. At most, they are a loud voice. Any phone can adopt it.
This is completely different from a closed imessage that cannot be adopted by others. Not to mention, imessage has been pretty anti-consumer with all their security problems, inability to accept high quality video, etc... None of this is good for the consumer.
What is good for the consumer is that the color of the bubble are different, this is important for status seeking individuals who want to be part of the in-group.
Back to the parent comments, RCS is better if you want a computing device. iMessage is the best if you want to buy your way into an in-group.
Oof gross. Do you have any further reading? I couldn't find anything on it.
Oh yeah its not a Apple thing, its a human thing.
Apple takes advantage of that weakness in humans and reinforces it with their marketing. I personally don't have the ethics to take advantage of people who are class insecure, but Apple stepped up in the tech space.
Anyway, the original point was that Apple gives less freedom and its fine because they sell a social club, not necessarily the ability to compute. If they aren't selling a social club, they are doing a poor job at letting people compute.
Yes, that’s the claim but it’s glaring how it’s an emotional position presented as a given but completely unsupported by any evidence and bears a striking resemblance to a competitor’s PR campaign. If this was true, it’d be easy to point to things like ads or marketing material disparaging SMS users – not to mention some effort to extend this outside of the United States where apps like WhatsApp are far more popular.
> If they aren't selling a social club, they are doing a poor job at letting people compute.
Here’s the thing: most people don’t buy phones (or computers) to “compute”. If you look at an Apple ad, it’s full of people doing things like creating photos or videos, sharing moments with their friends, traveling, etc. – that’s what they’re selling and the repeat purchase rate suggests most people feel like they are getting what they were promised.
I get it may help you feel more confident about your Android preferences to concoct these weird theories about iOS buyers being brainwashed or part of some weird social club but you might want to consider why you need to justify your preference this way. Most iOS users are buying something which they find useful and you’d be far more successful in your advocacy if you focused on what tangible benefits normal people are missing out on. What you’re doing sounds insecure, not persuasive.
Popular doesnt mean 'in-group'.
>I get it may help you feel more confident about your Android preferences to concoct these weird theories about iOS buyers being brainwashed
No, we learned this during my MBA. Apple is basically 50% of your marketing classes. I'm not sure you want to call academics incorrect here. They were spot on, they knew you'd come to apologize. Your identity is wrapped in Apple. An attack on Apple, is an attack on you.
Meanwhile I hate google and microsoft. I'm agonistic and trying to find anything better. Heck, I even think Linux isnt great for consumers given all the USB issues I've had.
Do Apple fans complain about butterfly keyboards, international high stakes security breaches, and holding your phone wrong? Or do they rush to Apple's defense. Weird you don't see people doing that in Google and Microsoft threads.
I don't really care particularly about the icloud/imessage ecosystem but all close people around me have iphones (the network effect was not the primary reason for the switch).
This is such a funny take I see so often parroted by the self proclaimed ‘out-crowd’. Your need to feel different and therefore superior clouds your judgment. Likes this post.
Yeah, there isn't anything going on beside out-group cope. Really glad most plans have unlimited text these days. Having spam texts where the person I'm communicating with just parrots what I'd just typed with the words "Liked this" would have driven me insane back in the days when you only got a thousand texts for the month.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who wants an unreliable and inconsistent laptop
All you have to do is search HN for "linux laptop", look:
"newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn't update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it's a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can't connect more than one device at a time" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32964872
Reply: "With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed. In 2022."
"I have a slimbook pro (the model before the silver keyboard) and sadly I am very unhappy with it, I got a fairly maxed out version and it's fans are always on full blast and I have found no way to keep the power management under control except throttling the CPU - so it is constantly overheated, suspend is not working properly and the chassis is not strong enough so the fans stall unless you have it on a flat surface. [...] Still I will keep buying these things.. eventually someone will figure out how to make reliable laptops that align with the ethos of free software. I've researched system76, puri.sm and also lately the way too expensive MNT reform, but really the only laptop people seem to be happy with is thinkpad x220 / x230 which came out 12 years ago.... This makes me sad. I would pay a lot for a super sturdy laptop which works (and aligns with the free software ethos)." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23925729
NB that they say what they want is 'super sturdy which works' but their actual behaviour, and the market signal they send, is they pay a lot for an unreliable and inconsistent piece of junk, knowing and expecting it will be that way, and that they will keep doing so indefinitely as long as companies keep making them, and as soon as companies make a good thing they will stop buying. Hmm.
My local dollar store has a couple of prepaid android 5.5" phones. Not much size diff from my iphone 12 mini.
Point still taken though - 'regular' sized phones from 6 years ago are mostly gone from the mainstream market. I really hope there's another mini or a bumped up iphone se. I would like them to keep the physical home button with touch id as well. Or maybe a touch id sensor someplace else...?
I also dislike many things apple does but all too often, their hardware quality is good and lasts a long time. I'm still using a 2014 macbook. it is on its last legs but eight years out of a piece of tech is borderline amazing.
I think that is pretty normal. I'm still using my 2014 $700 Asus 'gaming laptop' for CAD, emulators, gaming, etc.... Only reason I even upgraded was so I could have 6gb VRAM for various AI purposes.
Time for my kid to use it for a few years... Then I'll turn it into a server.
This reads like the whining of a 14-year-old standing in a dark corner during the school dance. Translation:
"Look at me! I'm different! I'm so very counter-culture. People like Apple products, so I'm going to pretend it's a problem with the people and not other products. That way I can cosplay like I'm better/smarter/cooler than all those 'lemmings.' Now I'm going to smoke cigarettes, wear jeans, pop a leather jacket because nobody's been doing that since the 1940's. I'm special!"
I don't think I ever used iMessage in my life and have an iPhone. Most people I know also don't, in the 3 countries I lived in. We use WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram.
Since you're projecting onto people, I'll provide a counter point in that I dislike Android enough, the hardware is often of poor quality, support for updates don't last very long, OEMs install unremovable software (unless you root).
All in all, an awful ecosystem, in my personal experience.
I don't buy Apple for fashion reasons, some mythical "in group" or any of the reasons you say.
I was just talking to my 80 year old mom yesterday and she was telling me how much she loves being part of the “in group”
I think you're reading into the parent too much. They were simply stating a fact.
on a new install of MacOS, when you have installed Chrome and explicitly set it as the default browser, MacOS will still ask you, albeit once, whether you really want to open that resource in Chrome, or Safari. And Chrome isn't the default option.
It is not about "performing slowly" but about getting your app rejected from the App store because it violates an Apple policy of scripting languages/interpreters not being allowed. And also another one that forbids you from competing/replacing the Apple applications, i.e. Safari. So if you want to display a web page you have to use webview (i.e. Safari behind the scenes).
We need a comeback of antitrust enforcement with teeth to get both Microsoft and Google to do honest competition, instead of backhanded methods.
These have dark patterns, but freedom still. (Not M$ anymore, they restore defaults with each update)
We're discussing desktop operating systems, Windows is the only one that deliberately messes with the default browser.
On Firefox I can stand the suggestion to use Chrome when I use google, I can even block it with uBlock, but haven't really bothered to.
Now, when they keep tweaking my OS settings, and use every upgrade as the excuse to reset my browser settings over and over, then I get mad. When I get ads on my start menu too. That's why I don't use windows anymore.
> I can even block it with uBlock
You can also block such things in your OS. It requires more expertise to modify machine code rather than obfuscated HTML, but in the end, it's cosmetically altering software to make it look the way you want it to.
Equal levels of 'evil' either way, to me
If they had gone out of their way to add DRM specifically to the pop-up (detecting div deletion for the web version, for example), that would be more evil, but such things aren't being done for showing browser advertisements (might come as a side effect for Windows licensing, but one who chooses to employ licensed software naturally invites that)
The both the browser and OS actively advise against it.
What doesn't negate anything you said, it's just a detail worth adding.
It worked first try.
I don't think they explicitly broke it in ff, just that they don't test on anything that isn't chrome, which results in these nice side effects.
You make it out as if this is only done by Google. The same company that tries everything it can to make you use Edge on Windows also tries to make you switch to Edge on their site. Google is perfectly entitled to do what they want on their site, Microsoft however takes it to a whole new level - which is par for the course with Microsoft.
"Experience AI-powered browsing with the new Bing built-in. Get comprehensive answers and summarized information side-by-side in Microsoft Edge"
> In 2020, Bill Gates left the board of directors of Microsoft, the tech giant he cofounded in 1975. But he still spends about 10% of his time at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, meeting with product teams, he says.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/02/06/bill-gate... (article is from early February of this year)
Still, agreed, that doesn't really make him responsible for MS's current decisions.
Gates owns 100x more shares than Nadella - about 1% of all shares - and thus has 100x the responsibility.
They are both guilty of greed and disrespecting their customers through their actions, or their willful or negligent ignorance and inaction.
I don't know how they can live with this, they are already rich, why not try to be better even if you earn less money in the short term?
Disrespecting your customers will get you nowhere in the long term.
Shareholder returns.
It has nothing to do with CEOs "already being rich", their job is literally to run the company properly so that the shareholders make more money.
Like it or not, that's how it is. Now, if this "crap" actually hurts the brand and the bottom line, they shouldn't implement it. If they are seeing more profits, and not many complaints, it's likely it will stay.
Moral faiure does not come into play.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
(arguably)
The one thing you will need to do occasionally is experiment with different Wine distributions. This means you will need to right click on your game and select the distribution from a drop-down box. Exhausting, I know.
Red Hat is working on getting it integrated, and Valve have it in their display manager.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
But for general users, out of the box, no.
None of the games I've played recently even are on Steam, so no, your answer is misleading at best.
And no, I've not tried it recently on my main machine but I've tried it often enough that my summary is still: Feel free to try it, but many (or most) of us still have to stick with Windows even if we don't like it.
They are not necessarily applicable to everyone, but most of the time they are accurate. Makes it easy to see whether setting it all up under Linux is worth it for your library.
Only problem with Linux gaming is that you don't get stuff like fan, voltage, frequency control for newer AMD hardware. This hasn't been an issue for me until I got a 6800XT. I thought about RMA until I remembered their Adrenaline software exists. I wish I could save my settings to the card's BIOS.
I no longer use this machine for anything but gaming. Going back to windows sucks
This application lets you adjust everything and the settings are saved on reboot
All games I want to play these days work under Linux without effort. Older titles work even better where under Windows you could run into compatibility issues not so under Linux because of the great effort put on backward compatibility by Wine.
Also, a bit susprising and unfortunate, the Windows version of a game that has native Linux support often runs better.
I run Manjaro Linux and have an Nvidia GPU for if it matters. My Steam games I run with Steam and for the games I bought on GOG I use Lutris.
I would really suggest people to check out how far it has come.
It’s really mind blowing that winapi is the binary cross-OS API of choice.
Alternatively, a Windows box locked down to LTSC.
How about enforcing direct control about Microsoft business? Not just another “low” fine in the ten to twenty billion range. Just stopping Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Enforcing AT&T to not enter any new business worked well. In consequence we got UNIX, C, open-source and documentation and finally the TCP/IP-stack of BSD, GNU and Linux. This had a positive effect for the complete computing industry and society. Reagan relaxed all rules, split up AT&T and no IT company had to fear regulation afterwards “no laws, no rules”.
We don’t need this companies with too much power through incompatibility, vendor lock-in and storing away our data (the newest approach).
I don’t ask for America here because since Reagan actually nothing was done.
EU cannot tell Microsoft in general what to do.
Which is why Bill Gates personally intervened, when Munich switched to Linux a couple of years ago.
Regarding Munich: Three competing IT-Departments! Repeat, three. An own special distribution. They didn’t migrated all applications (either do it or not) and a lot of stuff was always done on Windows. Finally Microsoft moved a headquarter to Munich and solved it with “tax money”.
Rumors say that the reverse migration to Microsoft itself was also “bumpy”. Let me guess, three IT-Departments?
The former major of Munich also gave an interesting interview about the “experience”.
And after some (hard) years of actual competition benefits of compatibility will lead to lower prices and more choices.
Indeed, the AT&T case at the US is the textbook example, it's worth looking at it.
Enforce the kernel team must be separate from the application layer - let other people build operating system UIs on top of the kernel.
For the operating system team to be separated from the product teams.
Even go further and unbundle the product teams - make office separate from bing which is separate from edge, etc.
Just make sure you also do it to Apple, Google, etc.
This is what the US almost did in the 90s.
A mere split up will lead to “baby bells” and the bigger one will just buy others - and centralize again.
PS: We should remember that Microsoft was able to destroy Nokia with an installed CEO (Stephen Elop) of their own. Killed the already shipping Linux smartphone. Installed Windows Mobile and Nokia was finally dead. Nokia itself did mistakes before but from outside this was questionable?
Microsoft already lost this case twenty years ago? Repeat offenders do not get the mercy of the courts.
We have standards wars, a stale browser that just woke-up and became a bit less stale (but no promises for the future), anticompetitive practices all around. We are right inside a browser war.
About the Windows gaming machine, you can surely build one just for gaming; just never put any personal data on it, never use it for surfing or doing anything that is not gaming, never give it any unfiltered access to your LAN, assume it contains malicious software then put it on dedicated Ethernet port on the firewall, setting up rules that allow only very restricted storage sharing so that it can't read or write anywhere but directories set up to contain exclusively what one would want to be readable/writeable by that machine.
Yes, it's a nightmare, but I don't see alternatives, save for giving Windows the middle finger for good also wrt gaming, which might end up easier than expected given the recent development with Proton and DXVK.
I wonder since the initial "free" W10 upgrade, where the hell are the regulators? The browser selection window happen these years ago and seems they call job well done both for themselves and MS.
And yes there are also ways to stop data collection if you're concerned about giving that to them.
Bill Gates said so himself in 2007: "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not,"[1]
I'm not pretending that the intervening 16 years hasn't changed things; I am happily gaming exclusively on Linux after all, something most people didn't truly expect back then. But that statement remains true regardless.
[1]https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007...
The problem is the games coming in the next years started development five years ago.
What makes you think the crack you apply to your official ISO isn't compromising your OS?
> even if it were questionable on the security front it's not like you're doing anything that really needs that sort of security
If you're going to install steam on your PC, then you'd be giving an attacker access to your steam account and if you ever install or use a platform that doesn't already have your credit card info stored then the attacker gets your credit card data.
> And yes there are also ways to stop data collection if you're concerned about giving that to them.
This isn't true. There is no way to stop windows from collecting data. No version of windows is capable of disabling all data collection, and there's no setting you can configure that can't be undone by MS at any time, and without any notice at all to you.
At best, you can install a copy of windows on a machine that is left offline 100% of the time, but i think most gamers would find that unacceptable since even if you don't care about MMOs or multiplayer, steam is still pretty popular.
I don't object to the idea of pirating software you don't like, don't want, but feel "forced" to use, but the idea that there are no real risks to your security or your privacy by doing it is just plain wrong.
Just use linux. It can play plenty of games.
I guess the crack being FOSS with readable source code helps. It's a 9000 line cmd file with insane Windows-y things everywhere that make it hard to read, but being open at all and with that many users gives me quite a bit of confidence in it.
Shouldn't it all, good or bad, be attributed to Satya Nadella at this point?
Or does the great CEO lack agency?
Even weirder, for some reason people have no issues blaming Google's sorry state directly on Sundar Pichai.
shrug
Enjoy!