I'll criticize Apple when it's due, but I'm glad the OS isn't filled with absolute trash all over the place on a fresh install. I can't even bring myself to build a new PC for gaming, because whenever I turn on a Windows box I get disgusted by what it's become.

You guys seem to ignore that apple is an ads broker itself so no idea what are you on about https://www.wired.com/story/apple-is-an-ad-company-now/

I think they're probably talking about junkware like Candy Crush and Tiktok being pre-installed (or at least preexisting in the start menu)...

Owned iPhone for more than two years now. Haven’t seen a single ad pushed onto me via home, settings or browser.

Owned iPhone for 13 years and I have never seen any ad, except on the web. And even that is partially blocked with some Safari extension.

They definitely put ads for Apple products like iCloud in Settings. They’re just much more restrained and tasteful than MS. And that’s good.

I just noticed “Apple Fitness+ Free for 3 months” in Settings. It’s definitely an ad but less annoying than candy crush.

Well, Windows still has that trick where you can launch some other program as the shell instead of explorer.exe. Perhaps your newly built system should just launch to Steam as the primary OS shell directly ;)

In fact, I'm surprised I didn't do this earlier.

What do you mean? I have a Linux PC and all of my games work very well on it. I’m not an avid gamer though.

not visible, but there's a lot of invisible stuff going on in the background.

Fuck the poor

Ubuntu is free. (As in beer)

I can’t use Thunderbird with my university email, because the Owl plug-in developer cornered the market on an Outlook plug-in with a subscription model.

Subscription software is my hill to die on.

*won’t

You’re right, in the same way that I won’t use a rent-to-own furniture company because it’s a bad deal for me.

EWS works with Evolution pretty well. Other than that, there is OWA.

I sorta feel similar about BIG subscription software. Little subscription software (from small companies/developers) I see almost benign. If i needed this i would pay for it.

Same.

Open Office, Linux and various other Open tools are becoming a big .

Have you tried davmail?

I wasn't an Android user for 13 years because I couldn't afford an iPhone. I was an Android user for 13 years because I despised Apple's vision of mobile computing, specifically more paternalistic tendencies like "not allowed to side-load apps", "no filesystem access for you", "lol what are standards, let's use Lightning for everything".

Don't pretend that Apple and quality of computing go hand in hand. They only do if you buy into their mindset wholesale, warts and all.

And now just about every single android phone does the same thing. Even pixels are carrier locked. I have a 6A that I can’t root for 6 months.

I too have a 6A, and it's not carrier locked because I didn't get it from a carrier. Easy as that, really. Your carrier isn't Google's fault

The point being that even the “Google version” is subject to carrier enshitification, which casts a bad light on android as a whole compared to Apple, who has never compromised on their “take it or leave it” stance with regards to their vision and product in discussions with carriers.

Lol. We're all at the same clown show. You just paid more for your seats.

The bloatware isn't even a blip on the radar for these companies. Everything is about gaining as much control as possible over everything. MS wants to make everything Office related web based so we have no control over our own documents and communication. Apple wants us to use iCloud for our photos and the app store for apps we need so we become dependent. Google dominates with Chromium because they don't want you to access the internet unless you're doing it the way they want.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft would be split into 20 companies each if regulations were working properly.

But apple is just a different set of problems. They do things in their own interest just as much.

When you get a iphone, their privacy policy is right there at the beginning, thousands of pages long. "Privacy is a right!" But they still snoop on every little thing you do in their own way. And they have no buttons. Definitely do not have a "Reject All" button. sigh.