Big Tech Roadblocks
Ever feel like the big tech companies don't really care about your user experience, or even try to make themselves useful to you anymore?
The irony is that every one of the big tech companies exactly **became** big tech companies by **being extremely useful** to *everyone*. Seriously. Your old aunt probably has Facebook. She probably has a Google account, and uses it daily for e-mails and cloud storage, probably without knowing much about how it works or what it is exactly. She probably has a Microsoft account and uses it daily on her Windows PC. But that's the beauty of these companies: they take something useful but otherwise complicated, and make it accessible to millions of people. This is what made them so big. It's also really what drives anybody to become a billionaire: can I scale this service up to service millions of customers, instead of doing it one by one? Think Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Now, sadly, these companies seem to have reached a point where, instead of focusing on being useful and helpful to their customers, they have started throwing up roadblocks whenever you want to download an app, navigate a website or share something with your friends.
You try to navigate a site, and they throw up ads or pop-ups about how you need to accept their new terms of service. Okay? Leave it at the bottom, instead of blocking my whole view with something that **nobody reads anyway**. Other sites do it the right way, when they say "by continuing to use, you agree to X". Simple, fine, now get out of the way.
Google even does this when you're not logged in, such as if you dare do a Google search in an incognito window. Who are they asking to accept terms, if there's not even anyone logged in?
Microsoft are the worst. You can barely get to use your old Skype username to log in, without converting it to a full-on Microsoft account, with all the horrors that that involves. And forget about making a local login account for your laptop. You can actually risk being locked out of your PC if you don't have Wi-Fi while trying to unlock your laptop using your Microsoft account. What the hell is that about? Let me into my freaking PC. Having a local user password for logging in used to be the norm, but now we all need to be part of the awful Microsoft tangled web of services and logins.
I think the truth of the matter is that the big tech companies have to make money off of us now. We are not customers to be serviced. We are products. Always remember: "If it's free, **you** are the product." You've probably never spent money on Google or Facebook, so their business model is really to serve you up to advertisers and to collect and sell data on you and your habits. I'm sure Microsoft is in exactly the same boat, but at least most of us have probably paid for a Windows license key when we got a new PC. A purchase which doesn't seem to give any pause to the data collection and targeted advertisement: Candy Crush is literally part of the fresh start menu on Windows 10, until you remove it. And remember all the things you have to opt out of during the first setup? Location services, personalized ads, privacy settings, Microsoft account.
As a last frustrating example, I recently wanted to help my mom try the Sleep Cycle app to track how well she sleeps. I remembered it's free and relatively to use the basic features, at least on Android. Oh, how wrong I was. My mom uses an iPhone, and not only did we need to relog into her Apple ID to even get the download started, we also had to start a free trial and make a user to even try using it. This included adding her credit card as a payment option, and then immediately cancelling the free trial to avoid being charged after the first week. Sheesh. Okay. How do they even expect older people will be able to figure this out? There are things like this that ***I*** can't even figure out, and have had to give up on. https://www.sleepcycle.com/
A recent one of these was a friend who wanted an activation crack program for his wife's Windows 10 PC, whose activation had run out. I had the zip file, and wanted to send it by creating a Dropbox link my freind could download it from. Nope, not happening. Immediately, Dropbox let me know I had "reached my daily limit of creating share links" - what? Why lie and give me a reason that has nothing to do with it? Even after trying to reset the warning to be able to create more, it just gave me another excuse. Same thing when I tried sending the file using Gmail, it was blocked as being virus and would not send. **Even when I encrypted the zip file with a password**, the transfer was not allowed. How does that work exactly...?
I ended up finding the link for the download from a torrent site, but that is **also** impossible to send over an app like Facebook's Messenger. I was literally down to the idea of him physically having to visit me, and get the file on a USB pin. Like we lived in the stone age, you know?
I ended up being able to send him the torrent link in an email, but this was after about an hour of frustration over how to get a maybe 8 MB zip file sent to a friend. You would think that shoud be easy nowadays. I think I will need to get into using things like Nextcloud, and just make my own cloud hosting server instead of relying on services like Dropbox. DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Linux instead of Windows. Android instead of iPhone. Open source instead of just "free". Freedom over all! https://read.cash/@green_claymore/moving-to-open-source-software-as-a-step-into-freedom-from-windows-to-linux-63b347a1
Moving to open source software as a step into freedom (from Windows to Linux)
In november of 2020 I finally made the switch, for the first time in my life, away from Windows as my personal computer's operating system. In 2015 I had excitedly upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 on my old desktop computer, as I saw it as a neat ugprade on my otherwise outdated PC. First of all, the upgrade itself went wrong so my harddisk had to be reset. Okay, took some tinkering, but I got it running with some help from a friend.
Finally, using Windows 10. Delicious. It seemed to boot faster than Windows 7, had a refreshed look, and all the software I was using was getting upgrades to follow along the new OS as well. However, some things were a little odd. For some reason simple menus such as Settings now seemed to have to load when entering them, as if it was an online service on a browser. That seems odd, as surely the settings are offline / on the computer itself, and in no way connected to the internet. Second problem is the endless pushing of using your Microsoft account. Signing in, syncing, suggesting it as a login on all kinds of services. I've even experienced having to enter my Microsoft login on my laptop at times, requiring an internet connection to simply log onto my laptop! In those cases where I couldn't remember the password, I was literally locked out of my laptop and had to reset my Microsoft account password until I could get back on.
Of course, simply changing the setting in Windows to not require a password to log into Windows on startup requires you to enter "netplwiz" in the command prompt (cmd window). It's not easy to find through common menus, and is something you just learn and accept over time, even if it makes no sense. Unfortunately, many things in Windows are like this. We all know them. When you want to force-quit a program which says "Program X is not responding..." and you then click "cancel" to actually force-quit it.
Taking all this aside, probably the biggest issue for most is are the endless bulky and apparently poorly-optimized Windows Updates. It's not uncommon for people to experience their computer suddenly deciding to update in the middle of their work, giving us the feeling that we are not really in control of our own computer at all.
Even having updated, some people will get the infamous *blue screen of death* (BSOD) after updating, as some things are suddenly too hard for the OS to handle which worked fine before. This is also the place where you will suddenly discover new context menu items, such as "Send with Skype" when right-clicking on anything.
You didn't ask for this addition, but there it is, taking up space. And god help you, should you want to remove it. This process usually involves some heavy google-fu, finding fellow poor suckers who've grown frustrated and decide to venture into the *RegEdit* nightmare of adding weird little commands deep in the system's settings to perform basic customization.
So, what's the alternative?
Well, a project and community which long has lived free on the sidelines of all this corporate madness, is the Linux project. You've probably heard of it before. Maybe your friend has a media server which runs some kind of Linux. Turns out, Google's Android is built on Linux, and most servers in the world running our favorite websites and cloud storage services **are running on some form of Linux******.**** Well, how come? Because it's stable, uncluttered and free to use. It also doesn't have a lot of hardware requirements to run, which is what makes it possible to run on the Raspberry Pi (running the Raspian OS, which is a form of Linux) to supercomputers. For this reason Linux is also famous for being able to bring old and slow computers back to life. Maybe it has to do with freeing the computer from all the gigabytes of Windows Update over time, adding more and more background processes that you don't need?
I'm not an expert on Linux by any means, but over time of having had to use a lot of different software for my education and in my personal life, I've come to love the concept of open-source software. Think of the apps you like to use on your computer. Which ones have stood with you the longest? For me it is VLC media player, the one media player which could play any type of video file without needing all kinds of codecs installed. Mozilla Firefox, the open-source browser which has stayed with the times and remained lightweight and useful all along. And finally qBittorrent, an open-source torrenting program that I switched to after getting tired of the endless ads in µTorrent. The great thing about open-source programs in general is that it's not only free, but will remain ad-free, since it's built by volunteers and not people who aim to feed you advertisements. And any malicious part of the software will be spotted by anyone who bothers to take a look into the source code.
Now, what if this concept of open-source was applied to your whole operating system instead of just the apps you use? Well, that's exactly what Linux is. There's hundreds of different versions (distributions, or just distro's) to choose from, depending on what you like. And even having installed one, you can customize them to your liking. They're all free to use, and require no license keys at all. They can be downloaded, put onto a USB which you can then boot from, and there you go. https://distrowatch.com/
Pop!_OS
For me, the OS that caught my attention as a possible candidate for switching to, was Pop!_OS developed by System76. It has along with Linux in general been featured multiple times on Linus Tech Tips on YouTube, mainly due to its focus on gaming, which admittedly is the one area where Linux has struggled. But not really anymore. Steam works fine on Linux, and uses it's own "Proton" software to allow the games to function on a Linux system. Other than that, you have the open-source platform Lutris, which has succeeded in getting a whole range of games to run on Linux. So far I've been able to game Team Fortress 2, CSGO, Factorio and World of Warcraft just fine. https://pop.system76.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/LinusTechTips/search?query=linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software) https://lutris.net/
However, coming from a whole life of having used Windows, I needed some customization to feel right at home. Thankfully, the "gnome"-extensions ArcMenu and Dash to Panel allowed me to get just the same type of desktop environment that I'm used to!
Using Pop!_OS, my PC is now back to the same fast boot speed using my SSD, which otherwise seemed to have gotten slow on Windows 10 despite originally being fast. I also make use of the built-in cryptdata option for encrypting my disk, which lets me type in my encryption password before my system boots into the desktop. I can choose to install software updates from the built-in "Pop!_Shop" app store which updates all of the installed software, instead of having to go around and update individual software one-by-one with their own installers.
There's a lot to say about Linux, open source, and the switch from Windows, but I hope this post has enlightened the topic for you. I enjoy being in control of my computer now, and being able to rely on it functioning and appearing the same tomorrow as it did today. I no longer feel like just a *product* for Microsoft to use, advertise to, and sell the data of. *My* computer.
If there's interest (please comment below!) I'd be happy to write a more detailed guide of the steps + setup process to get ready to use the desktop in the image above, from your current Windows desktop. All you'll need is a USB pin :-)
@green_claymore
