My trust in software, an all time low | Hacker News Reader

My trust in software, an all time low

underjord.io

246 pointslawik174 comments

Just putting this out there, since the post mentions he basically can't switch to Linux because of gaming: gaming on Linux is pretty great right now. 6mo ago, I could play maybe 80% of games. Today, all single player* games work flawlessly (through steam+proton, I can't comment much on others). So if gaming is what's stopping you from going to Linux full time... it's not a bad time to really consider switching.

*That said, there are some games do extremely invasive windows kernel level anti-cheat stuff.. so, some games' multiplayer won't work. Apex legends and doom eternal's multiplayer are two I've tried and failed to play in the past 3mo. Though doom eternal single player works swimmingly.

I don't understand why anti-cheat requires invasive software. Encryption can be used to communicate with the server, and the server can then authenticate the client's state. The application itself can use tokens to prevent the user from prying in its address space via a rigged kernel.

How do you "use tokens" to prevent prying in its address space?

> server can then authenticate the client's state

I'm sorry, but how exactly would it work? Do you mean that the server would authenticate the whole memory of the client's process, a few hundred megabytes at least, in order to make sure that there's no code that switches alpha of the wall textures to 0 every 5th frame, for example?

That has always be the promise behind Trusted Computing, yes. Maybe in another 20 years Intel will actually deliver a reliable implementation of it.

Anti cheat is the excuse used to collect saleable or exploitable private data, and as a mechanism to perpetuate walled gardens. Centralizing accounts and identities to enforce ban lists, associate payment methods, target advertising, enable microtransactions, and so on are the reason for the security theater.

Rent seekers will extract as much cash and time from players as can be gotten away with.

Server level ban lists and competent game referees and volunteers could be a powerful answer to the problem, but there's not a lot of incentive to innovate away from rent seeking, as the big studios and stores crush any threats to their success.

Server level ban lists and competent game referees could perhaps solve this for high level play, but there’s no way you could scale that out so that the average player of a first person shooter doesn’t have to deal with cheating. That said, I’m not really a fan of things like Vanguard if for no other reason than it’s not clear that they have helped much beyond making cheats somewhat more expensive but not enough to be much rarer.

It’s also worth noting that multiplayer games without anti-cheat have had centralized accounts and microtransactions for a long time, so I’m not sure I understand how the anti-cheat measures are furthering those.

I wonder if more low tech solutions could work. What if you added random short screen blackouts or unexpected lags and see if perfect input still comes through. Anything that a human would react to but a bot won’t.

If your shooter intentionally drops frames or adds network or input lag, nobody is going to want to play it. This is the genre that generates most of the consumer demand for > 60 Hz refresh rate monitors.

Ideal solution is to make "cheating" impossible by design rather than by trying to ensure trust.

Don't send the data player is not supposed to know. Don't trust clients to just tell the server what happened. And - I realize this is extremely controversial - ideally don't design games on pure reaction speed, visual acuity and mechanical dexterity where a sophisticated enough machine would consistently and unpreventably beat any human.

I believe we should be able to compete with bots just like we're able to compete with humans - and not because bots are handicapped and constantly toss coins deciding if they want to let the puny meatbag win.

I'm curious if there are any special tournaments where "cheats" are encouraged and even required, not prohibited. Would love to see a FPS where you have all the software aid you can think of. Texture hacks become enhanced vision aids (server may toss a coin and enforce camouflaging by not sending any information, though), auto-aim is smart munitions (so we don't compete on whoever has the faster hands or a better mouse -- see, it's already a competition of machinery!), last-seen markers and sound source visualization are tactical HUDs, and if you want some other feature you're free - as your competitors - to implement it. Naturally, if that's based on an existing game that would require heavy re-balancing of its rules (e.g. nerf of one-shot-kill weapons or buff for supports so in a teamplay they can save their teammates from such weapons). That would be a whole next level e-sports, true to the name.

> And - I realize this is extremely controversial - ideally don't design games on pure reaction speed, visual acuity and mechanical dexterity where a sophisticated enough machine would consistently and unpreventably beat any human.

What games, other than turn based strategy games or puzzle games, don't have the property you list here? And even then, you can absolutely cheat at chess. Like it or not, people want to play shooters online.

> What games [...] don't have the property you list there.

A game of almost any genre doesn't have to be designed purely on those neural and mechanical skills.

(And puzzles are actually a bad example, as many can be unimaginatively played by a machine, and machine typically wins in terms of the computing speed. Unlike a complex strategy game where bots don't necessarily dominate human players.)

My previous comment had even hinted at how a FPS could be designed to not depend on one's eyesight difference, sleight of hand or gaming chair performance. If everyone has a perfect aimbot by design, tactics and teamplay (if that's a team game) becomes a deciding factor in a shooter. If everyone has a helper AI that alleviates mundane clicking you don't have to put your mouse on fire doing that 9000 APM micro - the actual strategic thinking and planning ("macro" rather than "micro") makes more important in winning a tower defense or RTS game.

I'd wish I could just write a whole implementation idea, but I'm no game designer. I just believe that things could be designed and balanced in such a way. I can be wrong, but I don't think it's proven yet (given the modern status quo of "don't you dare think of any aids or tools but those game designers have very very explicitly allowed").

It's just that most games out there were never designed for this so their gameplay becomes extremely unrewarding, as there would be a huge imbalance if everyone is mechanically perfect. Which is probably why there is no cheaters' competitions.

Maybe I'm thinking about a different genre, something like first-person-shooter-but-not-FPS?

Maybe they take advantage of it but no it's not just an excuse. 10+ years ago hacking in games was very common and annoying.

This is so incredibly wrong, I'm not sure why you come to a forum and lie openly like this. Anyone who has reversed modern anti-cheats will disagree with this statement.

This is incredibly wrong. One of the main USPs of the service that I'm working on right now, fastcup.net, is a third-party anticheat. People use our service exactly because they trust our anti-cheat to provide a better value than what CS:GO has by default.

This is true also for other SW. Now everybody has telemetry and services running with elevated rights. I think the future is to treat these programs as malware.

The client can just lie about its state.

The only solution that is deterministic would be to move all rendering server-side. You could guarantee a fair match as long as participants are within some reasonable distance to the server.

Note that this has other massive benefits if you can build for it natively...

Not sure why you are being downvoted for not understanding and asking a question to fix that, as the matter is relevant to the post you replied to...

Essentially anti-cheat code needs that level of access to detect/circumvent cheat enabling code that has that level of access - it is a protracted arms race. There is money and kudos to be made through gaming, so people will cheat by any means necessary.

You can't remotely prove the entire state of the client unless you entirely control the client, and no current OS can offer the level of sandboxing required to offer that assurance. If you can't 100% trust the state of the client then no transport level encryption and such will fix that - you are just guaranteeing the faked data is transported safely at that point.

Of course that level of control being required for single player games is much more dubious, so there is a grain of truth in the more tin-foil-hat sounding theories about identity tracking & such on the part of the publishers.

"Thanks" to competitive gaming involving real money incentives these days, cheats have reached the level of custom PCIe cards directly accessing kernel memory via DMA.

So a kernel rootkit is the bare minimum to try and detect these attacks, preventing them isn't even on the table any more.

In the distant future, you might be able to bypass it with hardware-authenticated homomorphic encryption, but that's still way off.

Doesn't require it. Anticheat for multilayer could all be done server-side, by peers (started by vote), on demand or by peers on demand; all by just checking the player could do what their client claimed to do.

It's just event logging and replay.

But checking drivers and secure connections is easier.

How does checking if the client claimed to do something possible answer questions about if the player had the skill to actually do what they could have possibly done?

Because many cheaters do things which are impossible. This is low hanging fruit that we're told we need a ring0 driver to have access to EVERYTHING. Stupid things like tracking other players through walls. Still common because it's so damned easy. You play back their events and you see the cheater always knows where to go, where to hide. There are also exploits. These can all be unit tested away.

But there are cheats like kickback compensation, hitbox tracking. You can apply statistical models and find unlikely consistency but it's hard to say for certain.

Event logging is irrelevant if you have incorporated certain optimizations into your game.

For instance, many forms of netcode necessitate revealing slightly more information to players than you otherwise would want to. The world coordinates of player footstep sounds is almost certainly some information flowing across the network.

All you would need to do is intercept this information on the network and view it on an entirely decoupled system in a 3d coordinate space - potentially one synchronized to your player character using similar snooping tactics. Valve has done a pretty good job at making this harder with asymmetric encryption, but its still something the client can ultimately decode or otherwise you wouldn't hear shit during a multiplayer match.

Trying to lock down/validate the actual gamer's PC is a fool's errand. Just go back to first principles in information theory to see what a joke this is. If a certain fact made its way to a player's computer (or simply their home network), you should assume that they know it in the most adversarial way possible and model for that outcome. Obfuscation is just playing yourself in the long run.

Interesting - is performance comparable to Windows or is there a significant hit?

It depends on the game, but of the ones I've tried so far, most are fairly comparable!

Separately; GOG.com has a large selection of games that run Linux native; though not necessarily the most popular ones.

It also depends on your kernel, the FUTEX_WAIT_MULTIPLE patch solves a specific Wine/Proton bottleneck that native software doesn't care about¹, but delivers a significant performance improvement if compiled in.

¹: https://lwn.net/Articles/811696/

Even for single player games it's never certain everything will work and with multi-player there's too many that don't. At any rate, I barely game and it's still super disappointing when the random thing I want to play turns out to not quite work.

> Even for single player games it's never certain everything will work

100% compatibility isn't guaranteed for Windows either, you can always get screwed by random driver bugs.

For that, you need a console.

Is there any collector site that states what titles are Linux compatible and what are not? I'd like switching and gaming is keeping me from it.

Browsing to all developer studios websites for my favourite 50 steam titles is a bit tedious... in other words... I'm lazy.

Perhaps protondb fits your needs?

https://www.protondb.com/

With steam+proton you can almost just buy whatever; but it does help to check the db before you pay.

For those who are not (always) on steam there's also the original wine:

https://appdb.winehq.org/

> With steam+proton you can almost just buy whatever

Unless you don't have a magically compatible hardware setup. On my laptop like half my Steam library won't start, only shows a black screen or crashes instantly. Not even all official Linux releases reliably work. The last time I tried Ubuntu I couldn't even install Steam out of the box. Yes, Steam+Proton has improved the situation immensely. It's still a different kind of experience than on Windows, though.

I just went the console route. Not perfect, but I like that it basically guarantees the hardware will be compatible with new games for 5+ years. The slightly better visuals aren't worth it to me, most games look good enough nowadays (or rather, the best-looking games tend to not be the most enjoyable ones on average).

Hilariously, NixOS actually gets steam set up perfectly every time, all the time.

Of course this presupposes you got NixOS set up at all in the first place. And I'm not ENTIRELY sure I'd recommend it for your daily driver. But a friend of mine talked me into it all; and despite the warts at times it just seems like it's the least worst distro (to praise it with faint damns)

There are some massive, incredibly fiddly consequences of using NixOS to run Steam games via Proton. A lot of stuff works, a lot of other stuff is a royal pain the ass.

I moved to flatpak for Steam on NixOS and couldn't be happier, except now the latest proton uses flatpak under the hood and flatpak doesn't support nested containers.

I hear the flatpak-based Proton works much better (and that makes sense) but I still have some titles that are broken with it but work with older versions.

Tracking "Linux" compatibility is difficult because there's no standard "Linux", just a bunch of separate hodgepodges that become incompatible with themselves after 2 years. It's been a problem with distributing software on Linux since the beginning.

Yep. ProtonDB and WINEHQ mentioned in other replies here are both excellent sites for that sort of information. For native Linux games, sites like Steam, and Itch.io both have little icons (often a little "Tux" the penguin, tho on Steam it's the SteamOS icon) you can look for which labels those games as bein' natively Linux. Obviously any game or program you install directly from your Linux distribution's package manager (app store, basically) will be native to Linux.

For non-game software (and even some games), https://alternativeto.net/ can help you easily find Linux-native alternatives to software that you know the name of from other platforms. Also great for finding interesting software alternatives for your other platforms (iOS, Androin, Win, Mac, etc) too.

I did say I use Windows for gaming, I don't think I said I couldn't switch but you have the right idea. I haven't tried Linux gaming in some time (ages). At a base level I don't mind having Windows for certain things, such as gaming and using Win or Mac for some media workloads.

If they could just stop with the egregious overstepping I'd be pretty okay with using Win for gaming, accounting and a few other things. I'll likely have Win around for the foreseeable future, not just me in the household :)

I appreciate the update on Linux gaming though, haven't really looked in a long time.

As someone who stuck with Windows begrudingly for game support (but was comfortable with Linux), Valve's Proton is basically black magic. I ended up running pop_OS! (Ubuntu) as my main OS for a solid year or so before selling my desktop. The fact you can play GTA V at 60 FPS like it's nothing is pretty mind blowing. Even more surprising was the ability to play Final Fantasy 14. Primarily because I expect anything with a custom launcher to be dead on arrival with Linux. If you find Windows frustrating, I highly recommend trying out pop_OS! just since everything Just Worked out of the box, even VR

It's still a bit rough around the edges, as the best compatibility is found in community Proton forks you need to install manually, plus the need for out-of-tree drivers and non-standard bluetooth module config flags to get game controllers to work reliably.

(OTOH, you're stuck with a similar driver mess if you want a DualShock or JoyCon on Windows, so w/e)

But it's gotten a lot better than it used to be.

> (OTOH, you're stuck with a similar driver mess if you want a DualShock or JoyCon on Windows, so w/e)

Recently bought a PS5 controller and while not supported natively on either Linux/Windows, Steam does pick it up without any configuration (on both OS:es).

It's really leveled up my PC gaming experience: I get the same feeling as playing on console with the freedom of PC.

The last PlayStation I owned was a PS3, so my experience is admittedly a bit rusty.

The need to manually install proton seems to mostly be out of the way these days. Their release schedule (within steam) has gotten a bit better. Though, I can imagine for bleeding-edge games you'd still need to do this for a month or two before steam includes that new version of proton.

Persona 4 e.g. (which prompted me to go down the GloriousEggroll rabbit hole) is hardly what I'd call Bleeding Edge, it's a dusty port of a Playstation 2 game.

I no longer evangelize for Linux.

The hardware support is good enough that it just works, and has been for a decade. In that period I've seen the desktop become worse and worse in the name of 'accessibility'. Since I can't get the people in RedHat to stop making the desktop worse my next best alternative is to make Linux toxic enough that there is no financial incentive for them to continue and simply leave.

Anyone non-technical who ask about windows alternatives I merely tell them that Linux is too hard and they should stick to Windows. Gate keeping is a virtue that we need to practice more of.

What accessibility? It has never had much support. Linux is terrible at that.

Is it possible to play SteamVR games on Linux?

With a Vive or Valve's Index, yes. The Occulus pricks dropped Linux support as soon as they delivered a consumer product.

I'm not much of a gamer these days, but aren't consoles pretty good these days? I guess it depends on what kind of games you like, but afaik the difference in available content for PC vs console is a lot smaller than it used to be.

Smaller, yes, relatively speaking. But in absolute terms, the gap is still vast, and not exactly closing. (If anything, widening, as we keep getting more and more reliable emulators on PC that give access to hundreds of older console exclusive titles.)

Plus, individual consoles are still randomly cockblocked by exclusive contracts, so you'd need 3 consoles to get all possible content, vs. a multiple accounts on one machine for all the various PC game shops.

> all possible content

The path to happiness for me has been realizing that I don't have time to consume all possible content anyway, especially right now (cf. "Peak Content"). So I just pick one platform every few years and choose from the games available on the platform.

Over the years, I've gone from PC to PS2 to Wii to PC and right now, I'm gaming on a Switch (plus Minecraft on the PC that I already have). And if there were ever a PS5 or XSX exclusive that I'm interested in, I can always watch a let's-play first and see if I'm still interested later. (Which has not even happened to me so far because I don't actively seek out news for games that are not on the platform I own.)

You won't get all content on PC though because not every game gets ported there.

I think a lot of people are pretty happy with a PC + Switch combo, since there's straight up no hope of Nintendo porting their games to PC in any time soon. And a Switch is relatively inexpensive (especially if you go for the Lite model)

Sony also has a lot of exclusives on their systems (Bloodborne, Spider-Man, Uncharted, Last of Us, God of War, etc)

Consoles aren't any better than Windows in terms of control.

They are fully controlled by the respective manufacturer, and if you're not getting permission dialogues, it's because you agreed to them when you first started the console. (Disclosure: I don't actually know if modern consoles spam permission dialogues or ads.)

Sure, but you don't need to trust a dedicated gaming machine as much because you only use it for entertainment.

Windows is literally just uber for malware at this point.

Gaming is great as long as GNU/Linux keeps pretending to be Windows.

I rather have the original deal without additional layers.

As you apparently already know WINE/Proton is just for games that are not available in native Linux versions.

My own Steam library is packed with games (thousands of them with many thousands more available for purchase at any given time), and very few of those require the use of Proton, but it sure is nice to have available, since it adds the ability to play games which would otherwise bit-rot there in my library.

Windows and game consoles raise a couple of thousands more and pay to see the cards, if we are playing quantities game.

If on the other hand we are playing the quality card, or what everyone else is actually paying for, then down Proton it goes.

Isn't ironic that while most Android games are NDK based, so basically ISO C, ISO C++, OpenGL, OpenSL, Vulkan, they don't get ported to GNU/Linux?

Or Stadia ones for that matter (regardless of its possible future).

All fair points, but honestly? I fully expect comparability layers to be at least somewhat flawed and I adjust the way I do things accordingly. Game doesn't work 100%? Whatever, I have other games to play.

At the end of the day, I don't want to reboot just to play a game. I personally don't see the need to be a comparability purist here.

Also many developers are creating native Linux versions - Paradox Games Studio comes to mind where their Grand Strategy games are available native on Linux. Rimworld and Factorio as well.

Nowadays I'm very unlikely to buy a game that doesn't have a native Linux version.

It's also worth noting that Steam brings in some of the tactics of the untrustworthy world of commercial software. By requiring the installation of Steam to install games purchased through Steam, they are forcing the installation of a marketing tool. While Steam may be mostly benevolent at present and they have made enormous contributions to Linux for gamers, it doesn't change the fact that they are using their position to sell people more games when they go to launch a game. It also doesn't diminish the possibility that Steam could integrate user-hostile features at any time. (Remember, there was a time when Google was considered benevolent.)

Unfortunately steam also limits library usage to one person at a time. For those with hundreds of games, this is very limiting nowdays if you have a family. I switched to GoG whenever possible.

Steam actually has a family share feature, and while you "can't" play games if your library is being used by someone else, you can just go into offline mode to bypass that. So if you want to play single-player games, that works pretty well.

I'm aware and that's a bug, not a feature. If you are online and go Offline with the explicit button (instead of unplug the cable) and actually keep the cable connected (not sure if LAN or internet at this point) and start a second Steam client and use the library (not sure if online or offline for the second one), the offline one will not be able to use the library because already in use.

The workaround is, indeed, pull the cable or firewall steam, go offline, plug the cable.

So the concern becomes "what if the protection becomes stronger".

I used to live somewhere with terrible internet. Offline mode seems to work about 10% of the time and your better off pretending it doesn't exist.

This is my #1 complaint with Steam. I have 3 kids in the house on the family share thing, and if any one of them plays a game it locks everybody else out the entire library. I don't think Valve understands what a family is.

I think Valve's definition of a family is one guy who owns a whole bunch of different computers that he wants to flit between. Maybe this is what family is to a Valve employee? I don't know.

Most streaming services allow a small but reasonable number of concurrent connections. Usually around 5. Why does Valve insist on locking out my library of games that I paid for when one person has a game open? It makes no sense.

I wouldn't complain if the rule was you couldn't have more than one copy of a particular game open (maybe have an option to buy multiple copies for the library?), but if someone is playing L4D2 they shouldn't lock someone else out of playing HalfLife 2.

I think you can also use steamcmd to download games? Not sure about launching.

I tried looking into this a couple of years back, and it looks like Steam has to run in the background for games that link to a library that offers Steam integration. I concluded that continuing to research a path that offered an uncertain conclusion was too much trouble, then switched to purchasing games from DRM-free vendors. The end result is saving a lot of money. Alas, that didn't correspond to a diminished amount of time spent gaming.

Linux gaming is fantastic. I couldn't play dragon age origins on my windows 10 PC. Was a nightmare just to get it to launch and then it would just crash all the time. Tried it on my Linux machine and bam it worked no sweat. I should add the hardware was different so I can't rule out the game not working on rtx20 series or 9-10 gen i7. Couldn't believe it. (I also got it running on windows 7 before I decided to try my mint is).

I've flagged the post because I found the headline misleading. The headline is, "Trust in Software At an All Time Low", which implies that it's some kind of survey of software users or something. Instead, the post is just about how the author's own trust in software is at an all time low. Headline should read, "My Trust In Software Is At An All Time Low", or maybe "I Trust Software Less Than Ever".

I can see that interpretation, did not have it in mind while writing it and I tend to post what I write here with the title I gave it as HN asks.

I apologize if it felt misleading. That was unintentional. I don't believe I can edit it.

I've added "My" to the title to make clear that it's the author's (your!) perspective. I hope that's ok.

Absolutely fine by me :)

The trust of the author, in a survey of one software user, is obviously at an all-time low, the trust of seemingly a large number of people reading it, judging by the comments, is similarly low, eg. Apple seems keen on marketing privacy, so maybe Apple at least feels that a certain segment of their customer base’s trust in software is at an all-time low (or should be)? That’s at least some ‘my’s and ‘their’s… How would you quantify feelings of trust quanticle? What would be sufficient proof to make a general claim about a nebulous emotional quality like ‘trust’? Perhaps it is poorly phrased as a headline/not the most accurate title ever, but how do you feel about what the article says? Do you agree? Should people not be allowed to write/post articles based on qualia?

Congratulations on catching up with the old joke.

Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.

Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.

Similarly:

Non-magic users: collect crystals, call their pet a familiar, draw pentagrams

Magic users: the most magical things I keep in my house are rocks, and I keep a hammer next to them in case they act up

You are not a expert in something until you know when not to use it.

Is that a reference to a book I don't know?

It's frustrating. I gave up Windows after Windows 7, because Windows 10 had ads. I've switched entirely to Ubuntu Linux. I still have one Windows 7 desktop, and one subnotebook. I suppose I should turn them on to see if they still work.

Even there, Firefox wants me to "log in with my Firefox account" so I can use Pocket or give them my passwords or something. They also made the local bookmarks feature worse some time back, to force the use of Pocket. And Ubuntu keeps updating "snaps" of dubious value.

My phone uses F-Droid and Fennec, and when I got the unlocked phone, I said no to Google and deleted most of their stuff, without ever agreeing to any Google terms. I haven't logged into a "Google account" in years, and the only reason I have one is to update an add-on.

This is a pain. I'm not fanatical about this. I just don't like being pushed around.

Used to be with vanilla Ubuntu but switched in Mint a few years ago and haven't looked back.

Firefox is not a problem for me, I find the account useful for sending links and syncing the few extensions and settings I use between devices. Pocket is annoying but they do not push it very hard, I changed my default homepage to be clean of pocket articles and that was about it. I use bitwarden for passwords and FF gives me no problems.

I think the fatigue of being pressed for new settings/accounts can be wise than the thing itself. You see your device pushing some new bloat, and even if disabling it is three clicks away, the exhaustion of remembering all those frustrating settings you COULDN'T disable makes you too tired to find out. But maybe that's just me.

I agree with the author about windows through - I have a dual boot and only use the windows part for gaming. Even as featured as it is, the bloat and ads and Cortana you can never quite turn off are too exhausting for me to use it for anything else.

Firefox offering to login vs. Windows showing Ads are completely different levels of invasive crappiness.

One is optional, the other is forced on you.

For instance, when you search for an app in the Start Menu in Windows 10 and the menu doesn't find the app despite briefly showing it to you and instead opens Edge to do a Bing Search for the term you were searching for instead of just opening the dang app that is already installed on your computer.

So incredibly frustrating and a deep, deep antipattern.

> Firefox wants me to "log in with my Firefox account"

Firefox sync is absolutely wonderful, and would recommend anyone to try it out. You get automatic sharing of passwords and bookmarks between devices. I don't understand how I ever managed without it.

And they don't show ads, if that's what you're worried about.

Yes that’s what they keep telling me.

Ubuntu Snaps made me switch to CentOS (and now RockyLinux).

CentOS has been amazing for me for the last decade on the server side of things. I've rolled out 5, 6 and 7 on a large scale and it has been nothing short of miraculously stable. I hope RockyLinux continues this trend.

Mint doesn't have them either.

I really want to switch to Linux for ideological and control reasons but I'm pulled in two other directions.

Firstly there is the comfy prison of Apple I currently reside in which is fairly friction free if you stay within the rails but costs a kidney to keep going.

Secondly there is the vastly flexible and compatible with weird stuff I use Windows which punches you in the face once a day and treats you badly.

I am at a loss because I am getting older and lazier. I tried to switch to Linux several times over the last 20 years from Windows but it never stuck at the end of the day due to the missing difficult to define "quality" on the desktop which I think (shoot me) that even Microsoft manages to surpass.

The killer though is that I'm using Windows at work on a daily basis due to corporate troll enforcement. Switching back and forth from that to Apple ecosystem is killing me, especially considering the UK keyboard layouts are rather different between both platforms. I'm not even sure I'm happy with Apple because I'm on ARM everything and I can't even fire up an ad-hoc VirtualBox VM like I could on windows and SSH into it to do Linux stuff. And the games are shit. Also getting stuff out of the Apple ecosystem is painful (Numbers / iPhoto / icloud email for example).

Some days I wake up, load a whole custom PC worth of parts into a shopping basket and dream of running windows or linux. But I don't know which one. I'm not even sure I want to leave the comfy prison.

Ugh not sure what the point of that rant was but I'm stuck and don't know which way to go but I'm not happy where I am. Help!

Edit: fine example. So I am editing openstreetmap while writing this infernal rant and the default editor doesn't work properly with safari, nor does it block youtube ads with any adblocker I've used. So I've had to install Chrome just to handle that, which is a PITA because that doesn't work properly with keychain. Then I figure if I use Edge on windows it'll just work, which it will. Even firefox will do that.

The solution that worked pretty well for me at a Windows shop was two monitors, a Linux workstation, and a Windows VM in kvm. The VM stayed up on one of the screens most of the time. This was ~10 years ago and I don't use a windows VM anymore but I was pleasantly surprised within the last year or two to find that Windows 8/10 will happily boot from its own media under kvm (for troubleshooting/restore purposes in my case), so you probably don't even have to reinstall Windows. Just qemu-img convert the disk to qcow or similar to save space.

Desktop quality is highly flexible and entirely what you make of it. I'm happy enough with default Ubuntu unity or whatever they ship this year. Xfce if you want incredibly snappy response, better than any other common modern desktop. Most workflows are browser-based or terminal-based at this point anyway; I use very little desktop software (games are by far the majority of non-browser use and I am pretty happy with Steam's selection) any more. Your mileage may vary.

The way to handle YouTube ads is to pay the $10 or so monthly subscription. It seems like a fair price. I haven’t seen an ad in months.

> nor does it block youtube ads with any adblocker I've used.

I'm superhappy with https://adguard.com/ (https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardForSafari) and haven't seen a YouTube ad in quite some time...

> So I am editing openstreetmap while writing this infernal rant and the default editor doesn't work properly with safari

I suggest to use JOSM [1] for editing OSM. It has a bit of a learning curve, but then you're not depending on your OS, since it looks and behaves identically on a Mac, Linux and on Windows :)

[1]: http://josm.openstreetmap.de/

Thanks for this one. Makes perfect sense.

I've found my Firefox account to be very useful for syncing my history and bookmarks between my 6 devices.

Even so, Mozilla, of all large technology organizations, should be the least likely to persistently nag you to get an account. That's user-hostile of them and they should know better.

As for snaps - the idea, at least, is to set up a sandboxed Linux userspace that can help alleviate the absolutely terrible security model that we currently have. The implementation is awful, but at least the idea is noble.

But, as to your overarching point - yes, even in the open source world, software is bad.

The sad part is that it's totally possible to run Windows without any of the snooping and annoying extras: our corporate Windows PCs run great, no distracting anything.

It's just the consumer that gets screwed and, let's be honest, who is willing to pay the actual price of a SW license anymore? I remember paying hundreds of dollars for SW in the pre-internet era. So instead of paying in dollars you now pay with your data. The fact that Linux is still underrepresented on the desktop just shows that we're willing to put up with it to get the shiny thing.

I'm happy that I pay for my macOS software license each time I buy a computer. I was happy paying for Windows in the past too. I was happy to accept free software from Canonical for my little Ubuntu Eee PC and I think I once donated $10 or something like that.

I don't mind paying software developers for great software. But if they start pumping it full of antipatterns and trackers I'm out.

FWIW, it's rarely developers who establish the incentives for "antipatterns and trackers".

There's a very, very strong sentiment out there about what does and doesn't qualify as a "fundable business" with respect to both business models and shapes of products. This backdrop creates very strong incentives to make one's business and associated products conform to those archetypes. Right now "antipatterns and trackers" one of the allowable archetypes. For better or worse, depending on the perspective.

I don't disagree, but I don't fully agree either.

Developers can usually choose whom they work for. If the boss brings in trackers and such they can usually leave for another job. I know there are employment visas that complicate things, but broad strokes it is true.

I have empathy for the developers of Windows at Microsoft. They really do have high stakes, real impact work and it is hard to differentiate "gal who stopped the whole global economy from grinding to a halt" from "guy who wrote the tracker tech" but at the end of the day I'm not paying for an OS that tracks me. I won't pirate it either, but I won't pay. I am sick and tired of this model and for some things it's just a bridge too far for me to accept.

I accept that I'm a bit of a hypocrite here. I use Google Chrome and I use Google Search and I know they're not perfect, but at least I know that it is confined to "web stuff" and not buried in the OS. Call it old fashioned but if Canonical didn't let me uninstall Amazon bloatware I would not have used Ubuntu, and thankfully that dark chapter in their history is over.

> The fact that Linux is still underrepresented on the desktop just shows that we're willing to put up with it to get the shiny thing.

I don't know if I would call Windows a "shiny thing." It's cemented as the standard because of years of backwards compatibility.

Yeah, in this case the compatible applications are the shiny thing.

A computer is nothing to most people without compatible applications

As someone who uses both Kubuntu and Windows 10 daily, between the two I'd definitly crown Linux with KDE to be the shiny thing.

It is amazing how usable KDE has become, including settings, calender, presentation tools etc. Windows feels like a cluttered shed in comparison.

> The fact that Linux is still underrepresented on the desktop just shows that we're willing to put up with it to get the shiny thing.

Alternatively, it just shows that the Linux Desktop experience is still so terrible that people put up with Windows's bullshit. I know I'm in that camp. In theory I'd love to be running an open source OS, but in practice Linux Desktop just annoys me with its completely backwards way of doing just about everything I want to do with a computer.

And before you start: no, this isn't a hold over opinion from 2008. I have used Linux Desktops on and off since 2000, have contributed to FOSS software, put together my own distro once, and was once president of a LUG. I speak from experience: The problems I have with Linux Desktop are deeply rooted and systemic and show no signs whatsoever of improving.

That's why you focus on command line. Much more productive anyway. Only need X for browser and maybe 1 or 2 other apps.

The command line is much more productive for programmers. The entire issue with open source OS adoption is that these systems are not being designed with non-technical users in mind, and their GUIs are lackluster to say the least.

I really don't understand this attitude. It's like a woodworker talking about how much better handcrafted furniture is than the mass-produced stuff you'd buy online. Of course it's better! But does that really mean the answer is for everyone to spend years learning furniture-making? Same goes for computer systems: most people are not, don't want to be, and never will be technical users.

If we want open-source systems to beat closed-source, consent-engineered spyware from dominating people's online lives then we need to meet them where they are.

I don't even think it caters particularly well to technical users, since I am one. I think it caters mostly to C programmers who don't use GUIs and web developers. Anyone else is encouraged to change their use case to match if they want to use a Linux Desktop.

Most modern GUI IDEs are well integrated with the command line.

My opinion is that until the Linux Desktop Experience is redone from the ground up to cater to the "It Just Works" crowd, the people who don't want to search the internet for 45 minutes to get the one line of code they need to type into the terminal to get the app they want to use to work correctly before realizing that the app doesn't fit their use case and they now need to search for another one, that Linux will always remain the OS equivalent of a tank when people want to drive cars.

Sure, it will get you there, and practically nothing can stop it, but it's never going to reach the "climb in, sit down and go" ease of a sedan.

> but it's never going to reach the "climb in, sit down and go" ease of a sedan.

For someone fluent in command line usage, this is very wrong. I'm 10000x more productive in a terminal and X Browser session than on windows, and almost never need to look things up (and when I rarely do, it's on man pages, not web).

But otherwise, I don't disagree. I'm not trying to convince windows users to switch to Linux (unless they're devs, in which case they will suffer professionally if they don't).

For most regular users, I recommend Chromebooks these days.

I was taking about devs above, since we're on hn.

And good command lines, like propeller configured bash or zsh, have better discoverability than most GUIs.

But sure, I point non devs to Chromebooks, Macs, (or windows if absolutely necessary).

That assumes my use case for a PC is the same as yours, which it isn't since I need more than just a terminal and a browser.

Since we're on hn, I'm talking devs. But anyone can benefit from command line. I've taught some data science people who are very happy now.

The fact that you don't get what I'm saying at all is part of the problem.

I believe you, but you also have to understand this is largely a preference thing. Which is okay: It's all just whatever gets the job done in the end!

I'd say I have the opposite experience: I've had to use the Windows Desktop for extended periods before, and found it, as you put it, "completely backwards way of doing just about everything I want to do with a computer". I even went through all sorts of lengths to "fix" it with alternative WMs, launchers, etc, but as no matter how much I tinkered with it, I couldn't even get fairly "vanilla" features (eg multidesktop support) sufficiently working without constant papercuts and limitations. Of course, things may have improved since I last used it, so I'm sure Windows Desktop circa 2020 has much improved, but a few years back it seemed very broken.

Ultimately, it's just preference, and what workflows you grow used to.

Sure, if you like the way it works then that's great for you, but I think it is worth noting that despite the stated desire of many in the Linux Desktop community to see the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop", it still languishes in a distant 3rd place. I personally think that's because it has deeply rooted systemic problems that it has refused to address in any meaningful way for the past 20 years, which is incredibly frustrating for those of us who'd like a real alternative to Windows for what we do.

True, but if the goal is to no longer languish in a distant 3rd place, then the power-user features that we find lacking on Lin/Win are a red-herring, since we constitute a tiny fraction of computer users. From my experience, I don't think Lin/Win DEs are actually so bad so as to affect mass adaption. I've introduced dozens of new students to Linux, and have had largely positive results, and also generally found the Windows -> Ubuntu switch easier than Windows -> macOS (assuming all are pre-installed)

And that last assumption is truly the hard part. There is no software meritocracy. There is no "if you build it, they will come". It's sales all the way down. Until this changes, whatever is outputted from FAANG/MS market research firms will be what's popular, end of story.

To be frank, I think this line of reasoning is something Linux Desktop evangelists tell themselves so they can feel better about their abject failure to gain any significant desktop market share.

For starters, the separation of the world into "power users" and "normal users" is, to me, a sign of flawed thinking. The goal of a personal computing system should be to allow a complete novice to onramp into a "power user" as their understanding of the system grows. Discoverability and consistency are absolutely key to this and Linux DEs have always been terrible at both (and other Desktops are getting worse too). There are many more problems I could go on about, like walled gardens like Apple's App store or Linux's package repos creating another boundary between users and creators that need not exist, for example.

Point being, separating the audience into "people who get shit, like me" and "people who just want X" is an excuse for having a bad system. Instead of admitting and attempting to address the issue, you instead get to say "well, normal users don't need that and power users should be able to deal with the bullshit".

My point is that I'm not sure even how I would "address" these issues that you are insisting Linux Desktop evangelist "stop excusing". That is, 1) I'm not getting paid to work on Linux DEs or have the time (right now) to volunteer, and 2) I don't think you could get 10 people in a room to agree how a DE should behave. Like, what would I change to what? I've consumed plenty of blog posts complaining about UI inconsistencies on Windows, macOS, or Linux, but these all still seem like preferences with no single "correct" answer as to how a GUI should be.

Even taking the one concrete example you provided in this thread, Apple's App Store is incredibly popular -- in fact in the US it has a 56% marketshare [1] -- so why would a Linux OS moving toward what you prefer would increase adaption? I really see no actual evidence of this; as in the example you give is literally the most popular way to do it. That said, I don't even think it matters either way. I've grown cynical enough by now to realize that humans are a lot more complicated, markets more monopolistic, and purchasing habits are better explained by market researchers than developers (or even HCI researchers!)

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...

> My point is that I'm not sure even how I would "address" these issues that you are insisting Linux Desktop evangelist "stop excusing".

If any one person could do it, it'd have been Linus but he doesn't seem interested. It isn't anything a single individual can deal with because it's part of the community culture.

> Even taking the one concrete example you provided in this thread, Apple's App Store is incredibly popular -- in fact in the US it has a 56% marketshare [1] -- so why would a Linux OS moving toward what you prefer would increase adaption?

It's just one aspect of the problem. Apple's App Store has one thing going for it that Linux doesn't: there is one App Store. You get your application onto the App Store and everyone can use it. This is not true of Linux Repos. Besides which, the number you quoted is for mobile, not a desktop operating system.

Linux Desktop culture has this rhetoric of freedom and control, while simultaneously pushing an application distribution model that wants to manage everything in a very limited way. You can't install applications onto other disks, you can't have two versions of the same application (unless the maintainers have deemed it a worthy use case), and you can't keep old versions of applications around unless you want to keep your whole system back too.

>it's totally possible to run Windows without any of the snooping

Researchers found that even Enterprise with special "baselines" installed was still sending data. Is this not the case anymore?

> who is willing to pay the actual price of a SW license anymore?

Windows 10 Pro is $200. Pro for Workstation (mandatory for some computers) $309 -- and it includes the same shit as Home and Pro, I think.

Granted OEM costs less than retail, but that always has been the case, and OEMs do not necessarily pass the savings to the consumers, sometimes on the contrary (esp on pro hardware)... Would be interesting to know the typical OEM pricing of Windows 7 and Windows 8+, though.

Anyway, Retail price actually is somehow less than the price during the Windows XP/Vista/7 era (it went down to the current levels with Windows 8). However there has been for example uninterrupted growth for Windows revenues since 2015 including historical records since 2017 (edit: source: https://dazeinfo.com/2019/11/12/microsoft-windows-revenue-by... ). And I think that does not count the ancillary revenues of MS selling our asses to random other companies.

So could they do without that crap? Probably. Will they? Probably not. On the contrary they will require an online account for Windows 11 Home, for example :/ (and given the ridiculous hardware requirements, I'm sure they expect at the same time pretty neat licensing revenues)

Good software behavior decreased staunchly in closed environments and especially on mobile. People aren't asked about telemetry, data hording is hidden in some lengthy TOS that you have to accept in most cases anyway.

Work at any company and want to decline the TOS of MS Word? Good luck...

Collecting data might be sensible, but it isn't too hard to ask.

They're all terrified that if they do ask, they'll be declined, or held accountable for misuse, abuse, or leaks. It's much better to hide "telemetry" in the fog of tos or eula walls of text. Maintain your customer's blissful ignorance at all costs.

Privacy and liberty are inseparable at the highest levels of interacting with society. Compromising private personal information can only weaken individuals against abuse by society at large, whether by mega corporations, governments, Twitter hordes, or spam callers.

It's become overwhelmingly apparent that there's no benefit to the consumer by allowing telemetry in almost any form. The purported advantages are paltry straw men compared to the nightmare of identity and surveillance infrastructure.

…staggering that unchangeable/indelible personal, political, financial and even biometric/medical data which could potentially be leveraged against users, eg. in an aggregate profile by various forms of AI, is often seemingly slapdashedly stored/shunted around various shady ‘cloud’ services/data brokers. After all, seemingly ‘solid’ companies may go bust/become desperate, governments may change radically/may have radically different values if you plan/are forced by circumstances to move around the world, or what’s to stop eg. insurance policies/mortgages/rental contracts etc. etc. unfavourable to various dubiously-defined ‘categories’ of people in future being based on inferences made from these profiles/dystopian ‘social credit’-like schemes being introduced that could be calibrated based on all manners of unforeseen criteria…

> Collecting data might be sensible, but it isn't too hard to ask.

Collecting data might be sensible ... for corporations. But, it is rarely for the consumer. That is why it is so hard to ask.

"Can I do this thing that you do not understand but probably have the feeling that is only going to be bad for you?". That is a hard question to ask, that is why the question is hidden behind weird concepts, lists of consent checkbox, or other dark-pattern mechanisms.

Collecting data might be sensible.. but only for one side of the deal. Data collection is a clear WIN-LOSE situation, a situation that is only accepted because there is an unsymmetrical amount of power in the relationship.

I mean, charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers, created by an asymmetrical power balance. There are good arguments for regulating data collection, but “customers should be able to pick and choose any aspect about using a product they’d rather not have and jettison it” is not one of them.

> charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers

That is not true. I pay money, I get a product I want. That is a win-win situation.

I see TV and the TV channel shows ads is a win-win situation.

I see YouTube and YouTube records who I am, where I live, my age, my relationship status, my political views.... to watch TV for free seems a very bad exchange.

I am not against the advertisement industry, but in its current form in conjunction with tech companies it is damaging society in very real, very harmful ways.

> > charging for products are a clear win-lose situation for customers

> That is not true. I pay money, I get a product I want. That is a win-win situation.

I get a product which spies on me and I cannot turn it off (android, win 10). Win for them, loose for me.

> I see TV and the TV channel shows ads is a win-win situation.

I paid for this channel - so win for them , loose for me.

> I see YouTube and YouTube records who I am, where I live, my age, my relationship status, my political views.... to watch TV for free seems a very bad exchange.

> I am not against the advertisement industry, but in its current form in conjunction with tech companies it is damaging society in very real, very harmful ways.

Yes. And they also pay politicians and lobbyists.

I'd pay for things if they included the source code.

No, as the customer does not have to fork over cash for the product. That is the benefit.

This isn't particularly strange. Give one group of people power over another group of people and they will find a way to abuse it. The solution is that it should always be possible to install a new OS on any computing device that you buy and that there should be a way to install software in that OS that does need approval of the makers of the OS. Anything less is basically an invite to power abuse.

This article describes my feelings exactly. I trust almost none of the tools I use on a daily basis very far. Every piece of software I use is liable fall prey at some point or another (and sometimes constantly) to some combination of the following:

* Continuous mandatory updates which make various things worse or introduce new "features" I don't want

* Continuous mandatory updates which break things without warning that I was reliant on

* Integrated advertising or dark-pattern behavior I have to frequently circumvent

* Unreasonable levels of lack of security or security theatre

* Getting retired or crippled because the company which makes it goes out of business or gets acquired with no transition plan

The fundamental issue, it seems to me, is that nobody cares about users except in abstract anymore. They care about funding, brands, growth, the Hustle, not making something that is in any way good or usable long-term. And anything that is good can be summarily ruined in the pursuit of the above goals, with no warning.

It's exhausting.

I'd exclude certain software from this tho. Something like Blender becomes usually just faster and better with every update, there is other software where this applies as well.

The software where this doesn't apply is usually everything "consumer".

Mostly riffing on the title more than the content (which is about Win 11),

I've noticed a massive degradation in how software is managed (as in bug fixes, quality designs etc) over the years and it straight frightens me that cars, planes, financial apps etc are all being "disrupted" by this new software. It seems to me the future is going to be so full of edge bugs that if one is an outlier you're going to basically be smashed back into the mean by the bureaucracy.

I say i again and again, Microsoft your Windows is one of the best Application run-times on the Planet, why try to platform it? You are not good at this, you will once again loose against apple and google, focus on a clean and lean OS, make Windows the number one Dev/Office/Game Machine, and stop that OneDrive/Cortana/Marketplace/Different Windows-Edition BS...that's not what your Customers want and that's NOT what your good at.

BTW: The presentation of Win11 was a big second hand embarrassment.

Unfortunately Microsoft is unlikely to listen to this. Their moves this past decade have signaled quite clearly that they hate personal computing and want the Desktop OS to die so they can sell you their version of a walled garden and/or some cloud-based-dumb-terminal bullshit.

Maybe not what you want, but it seems to me that people are still using Windows as much as ever.

That was NOT the point...read again.

I'm saying customers (but perhaps not the average HN poster) may actually want cortana/onedrive/win11/etc. shrug

At least MS makes it pretty obvious when they are being predatory. Of course they dont need to know your email , yet they even have a huge telemetry control panel. Meanwhile author is being hush about apple that you could never use without them having your email and credit card. Trust is not just low, it has been hacked and become a marketing term.

> Meanwhile author is being hush about apple

I take it he just doesn't use any Apple stuff.

> you could never use without them having your [...] credit card

This is provably wrong. I have an iPhone and iPad. I never entered any credit card information. If I were to purchase apps, I would do so by buying a gift card at a retail store.

I've mostly transitioned off of Apple stuff. So I didn't dwell on them. My thoughts on them have also been on here a good while back.

https://underjord.io/the-mac-is-losing-me.html

In the end I use them all. The point is mostly that they are all disappointing. I haven't recently suffered additional annoyances from Apple, so this post speaks to recent frustrations.

edit: In addition, I don't feel like I need to address every actor in my rants. I would never get past LinkedIn.

Windows 10 is incredibly nosey and endlessly demanding. I would be happier to stick with Window 7, but it makes more sense to use the same OS most of my customers are on.

Accept/Ask Me Later is particularly irritating, because it shows such disrespect. It's not the popup, it's the blatant, shameless annoyingness.

Even before that, installing additional software increases instability on your system. That’s why, despite being a power user, I refuse to install mouse drivers and buy only basic mice like the Logitech B100 that don’t require them to function.

It's ironic reading this and then seeing the page track your progress reading it. Here's a screenshot of my browser dev tools: https://i.ibb.co/8Yt7FY0/trust-in-software-an-all-time-low-t.... It's a websocket connection to wss://wisps.underjord.io:8601/socket/websocket?vsn=2.0.0.

This resonated with me a lot. Windows 10 is a bit of a mess but mostly still tolerable. Once it's EOL I'll replace my current PC (from '09) but I'll try to avoid Windows 11. The MS account requirement really annoys me. I'm currently playing with Pop!_os in a VM and like it so far. I also like that I can pay for it, which I plan to. Developing a quality desktop needs resources, paying directly is far preferable to me than paying indirectly through ads or data collection.

This is a topic close to my heart and I am trying my best to create a serverside platform that can only run open source software. My hope is making digital services transparent half the shenanigans will go away. For two reasons

  1. bad actors can't hide B.S.
  2. good actors have something they can point to that has 3rd party validation.

So for digital services where the source code is always available, my runtime dynamically loads the source code indicated in the URL each request. So you are free to go to the URL directly, and you can figure all the routing out in advance of data leaving your device (in theory).

For the sake of moving fast, the 1st supported code repository the runtime can run serverside code from is Observablehq, which has the additional property of being a code IDE which simplifies greatly how you actually upload code to a public location.

The core building block: https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/serverless-cells

Some blogspam: https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/towards-a-better-serverless...

I built the IndiaAuth provider using this transparent technique, so you can see exactly how it works.

https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/auth

There is a solution* to this: open source

*not a solution for everyone (lots of proprietary things have no open equivalent), nor for all open source software (Audacity etc have telemetry)

You can disable telemetry in Audacity on build time AFAIK. Having source code is empowering even if you don't agree with all developers' choices.

Audacity's telemetry is (for now) just:

- OS/IP/Audacity version when checking for updates (opt out) - should be opt-in if you ask me

- Crash reports if you choose to send the individual one which can include personal data

It's not even a solution for software that isn't Audacity :)

I run a good chunk of OSS software, and I pray to the gods every day that somebody somewhere actually read all the three bazillion packages I need to install as dependencies. (Why does ffmpeg require a DNS resolver again?)

Yes, theoretically all that is out in the open and would be found by somebody. Practically, nobody has time to verify all software they run, and the smaller/less interesting packages are basically completely taken on trust.

There is no solution outside of trust. You are running things that vastly exceed the complexity you could fully understand in several lifetimes. You have to trust somebody it does what it says on the tin. I'm fairly certain that OSS has survived so far because exploits there would mostly target small groups of people. (In the end-user scenario. The server/commercial user scenario is different, and often gets attention from several companies for each package)

I certainly trust all that open software much more than any proprietary software, since the incentives are often very different.

There is however a solution to this complexity; distributed code review, for eg:

https://github.com/crev-dev/

Disappointing article. The title suggested it might have some data rather than being just a non-technical rant.

How about "the data" really being how many independent voices you see conclude that "Windows is an Adversary of the User" and other things?

How many "independent" voices you see depends on your bubble. How many users are there of these platforms? What fraction wrote a rant? Not saying those opinions are wrong, but it's not particularly insightful.

See, a company that is user orientated would be appalled by such resonance regardless of numbers and would try to alleviate concerns. Microsoft doesn't do any of that. Their escalating behavior cannot really be explained away.

Sure, maybe there is a happy island somewhere with enthusiastic users, but working in the industry, I doubt that very much. Also, many of their forums about their frameworks have developed into ghost towns. So if you now that happy isle, I would gladly like to see it.

Unfortunate that you found it disappointing and it wasn't my intent for the title to imply data. It was intended to describe my experience. I can see how you were primed to think otherwise.

This is very much a rant. Hope you find your numbers elsewhere :)

I too visited the article expecting to find the results of some survey, but I was not disappointed. It was a magnificent rant.

Aww, thank you.

I visited the article after the title was edited, so I knew what to expect. And it far exceeded my expectations. I hate the palpable feeling that as a software engineer I’m part of an industry that is becoming harmful to society. And we are the ones doing or at least putting up with the excellent examples in the article.

Anything that is eating the world shouldn’t be trusted.

Like humans?

This only matters if people are otherwise willing to fork over cash for what is currently ad supported. So what if Windows is not trusted? Are you willing to spend any meaningful amount of money/time on an alternatives? Most are not.

But windows is paid software? In fact most microsoft software is. If not paid for by you, it's paid for by your OEM or organization.

At this point keeping Windows working costs more time and money than just installing something like Pop!_OS.

I would pay good money for an alternative that was at least close to Windows for my needs, if one existed. Sadly making a new operating system today is a gigantic undertaking thanks to the proliferation of hardware and the non-universality of drivers. Rump kernels seem to be (very slowly) making this a little better.

> This only matters if people are otherwise willing to fork over cash for what is currently ad supported.

People were paying for Windows when it wasn't ad supported. People are still paying for Windows now that it is ad supported. Its completely clear that the only thing that matters is whether software businesses want to betray user trust or not - users don't really have much of a say in the matter. They do everything right, but user growth slows down, business growth needs to continue, so they try to extract extra value from each user instead of trying to add extra value that users happily pay more for.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. My trust in commercial software bottomed out years ago, to the point where I largely just stopped using it entirely. I also stopped adopting new Android apps about 5 years ago, because mobile apps are the second-least trustworthy segment of an untrustworthy industry (in my opinion, the least trustworthy is anything that is running in the cloud)

I truly despair for the state of the software industry.

I feel your pain. I don't have adds on my Windows 10 version but I still can't stand that It needs an email account and that it harasses me about dumb irrelevant sh*t and that It was incredible hard to disable those notifications and unsolicited apps like the "xbox bar" because of the mess they did with the control panels.

But lets face it, the alternatives are not much better. Yesterday I spend half an hour trying to update a free opensource software called Amass on my Debian based distro, a dependency was corrupted and I had to uninstall that dependency with apt, re-install it with snap and then I was able to finally update the app with apt. And, of course, the config file wasn't updated and it didn't even warned me that it needed to. I had to go to github and check by hand. I can't ask my grandma to do that.

This article uses the word "psychotic" to describe Facebook's user tracking, but they probably meant "psychopathic".

Probably. I wrote it and I can't decide which would be more appropriate.

'Depraved', 'deviant', 'perverted', 'unhinged', 'sociopathic', 'criminal'... the list of adjectives that apply to Facebook is very long indeed.

Except in smart contracts on blockchains

Billions in total value locked

There is no value locked, the money (the real one) is where you got your coins.

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