The shift to SaaS and Windows 11 updates means you no longer own your software. Here is how free software tools can help you reclaim control.
I think I’m basically done after my current rig dies. Even though I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford these ridiculous prices, I have no interest in being a peasant in some techno feudalist dystopia. I’ve been dedicating more time to reading books, writing, traveling, some retro gaming, and working around the house.
It’s enough for me.
These days, as a tech worker, I immediately log out at the end of my workday and shut everything down. I have no further interest. It’s not fun anymore. Frankly, I don’t think I can last until retirement in this space even if my job isn’t automated. Again, fortunately, I could retire today if I wanted to. But most people aren’t in that situation and I have no idea what I would do if I didn’t have the financial autonomy that I enjoy. And I got here–in part–by building parts of the platforms that harm us (social media). So that feels great.
We live in a dystopia. Everything fucking sucks.
I have felt the same for awhile honestly sans the could reitre today. I may have been spoiled though because I used to workin a research lab and then corpo jobs were fine but man the meetings and sudden change in technology for no other reason than its the current fad. I think though its just hard to do something full time for decades and still find it fun at home. One of the things though is as an IT guy I stopped configuring my systems because it was kinda tiresome and so often I had to know how the default was because that is what I would have to help people with. So I limited it to things I just could not live without but did not get to minutia about it. Then I got sorta sick up spinning things up and started going with what was easiest. mac’s when their warranty would just cover anything and then back to windows and even with linux I use easy to setup stuff. I just want it to work and not spend a whole lot on making it work anymore.
It’s not fun for me either, also in IT. My joy comes from watching my kid play, we just finished split Fiction and reanimal, now starting the last of us.
The most I get is jumping into random L4D2 pub games and rushing the maps while blasting music.
Same boat here, minus the “still in tech” that I left over 10 yrs ago. Picked up my last pc end of last year and packed up my previous rig for future use. With the old tech around my apt: Laptops, old pc’s, and raspberry pi’s, I should be able to last til I die. I will never use cloud gaming, only use for that I see is linux users that want to play certain “competitive” games, next phone will most likely be dumb as well. I started my journey on a Commodore Vic 20, never thought this would manifest
How do you get out?
I got burnt out and took a job that is not tech.
It used to be fun to trouble shoot issues, help people understand, on their terms, what the pc was doing and why. Then it got old cause everything started turning to crap, starting with vista (spent a week regressing ~30 laptops from vista to XP cause I didn’t want the headache of dealing with that brand new operating system). I used to build and wire, by hand, networks. I could whip out a cable in about 2 mins, from cut to crimp, and then set the Dell and/or Cisco routers/switches. I just couldn’t keep doing it and keep my sanity
The death of the PC market will greatly affect the next 50 years of computing worldwide. Corporations have successfully been pushing for a computer market where we rent computing power online and never own anything.
The selfishness will definitely have negative impacts going forward.
That’s terrible, I honestly want those corporate cloud data centers to explode and we don’t have to rent computing power
I don’t think the personal market will completely die out, but it will definitely shrink by a significant percentage over the next ten years or so.
We’ll see a considerable volume of gamers move to thin clients, ditto for businesses, casual use (email, browsing, consuming media etc.) will continue to switch to mobile devices.
PCs will still exist as a hobby for enthusiasts, but we’ve definitely seen peak-component sales.
You’re making me sad.
The PC market has shrunk 80-90% in one year.
Even before that the GPU market was overvalued thanks to unusually high demand from COVID and unusually high demand from crypto mining the decade before.
Even consoles are reaching the $1000 mark soon.
This thread is calling out a legitimate problem, but things aren’t that bad.
Last year the market grew by 9%. This year it is projected to shrink by 11%. That’s huge, but not 80-90%.
The PC market has shrunk 80-90% in one year.
The cost of GPU’s and memory increased 5-10x in 1 year. What did you expect?
Also the old stuff still works great if you aren’t running AI. Hell I have a FX-8350 and a 1060 which is just fine for most things…and I think that CPU is from 2015.
Not just GPUs. This time is RAM and storage are also massively inflated because they’re allocated for a product that nobody really wants and nobody wants to pay for.
I’d wager that in 10 years, it will be illegal to own your own hardware.
Edit: pay attention to what’s currently happening in the tech and political sphere. Big tech corporations are a new branch of government and the end goal that most of these CEO’s want is a change to how the world is run. Read Curtis Yarvin’s slop diatribes for an insight into the ideology behind the global right.
Fearmongering garbage.
A visceral reaction but aimed at the wrong person. It’s just an observation of the trends. The fact that tech companies no longer need to sell to consumers, the intermingling of tech companies with the US government, the trending authoritarianism of world governments, and the moral panic being manufactured to implement age verification, the erosion of encryption, and the now-illegality of VPNs by first world governments.
Go read some slop by Curtis Yarvin. He’s the mind behind the ideology of the new right. That is where it’s headed.
Or free money. Take the wager! Why don’t you fine folk both put your money where your sermingly-confidently-omniscient mouths are?
because I don’t eat my momey sir
It won’t be illegal, it will be unavailable. We just won’t have access to anything cause they won’t make it. Why make something they can only charge once for when they can rent the same equipment and earn multiples of what it would have sold for
You and I have come to the same conclusion. Compute as a service. I foresee it one step further - anyone with unlicensed personal compute that isn’t tied to a corporate subscription will not be legal.
Then I will be a criminal, again. If “they” implement the on OS ID, even if we are exempt from the identifying info on our systems (linux), there won’t be anywhere to really visit online anymore and as I said (here? another thread?) once my pixel 6 is dead I will be going the dumb phone route. No google play, no QR scanning, so I guess no more browsing except for the few non compliant sites. Will IRC networks need to comply? That would be my last stop (00s) before going back to the 80s where I read books, went outside, and didn’t worry about anything outside my little child world though it is hard not knowing what is going on in the world, tried it a few times. Hell, after my kinda “smart” tv dies (it doesn’t require an internet connection, has not been connected since I got it) I don’t know that I will find one of them that doesn’t require internet connection just to play a video off my pc. I saw shit going south 3 decades ago, never thought it would get so bad in my life
The world is not America, there is no chance this would ever possibly happen.
I admire your viewpoint and wish it was the case. America will use its military and economic force to bend the world to do what it wishes. It already does that now and they’ve shown intent to further this behaviour.
C’mon, microsoft. What are you DOING with your life???
I’m no linux apologist. I BARELY understand what I’m doing. If ANY task needs terminal, then that task just isn’t going to happen for me.
All that said, it’s time to switch to linux. And for anyone asking where they should start with all these distros…Mint. If you’ve never used linux before, start with Mint.
Now I’m a bit of a hypocrite for saying that, because I’m on Zorin. There’s nothing wrong with Zorin. It is perfectly fine as a starter distro if you’re coming from Windows. It’s almost equal to Zorin in usability. Mint has one edge that cannot be overlooked for newbies.
Userbase.
EVERYONE uses Mint, which means there’s going to be a broader range of support. There are times I wish I had started with Mint. But I chose Zorin when I was new, and now my heels are dug in.
That being said, YOU should use Mint.
Ugh…I can’t believe this is where we are in this world. Where I have to reccomend linux, while still not knowing what the hell I’m doing.
Anyways…use linux. Fuck microsoft. It’s the only way to take back OUR hardware. They want to go full greed mode? I’m now using software which they don’t make a dime on, and never can. As much as I hate the structure, I can’t say anything negative involving bloat, or spyware, or anything else that I classify as “modern day bullshit”.
sigh Just use linux.
What’s the difference between Zorin and mint? I’m on zorin right now to get my feet wet on linux. I am not a terminal user as I’m not technical.
There is also cachyos, they are sooooooo smooth on kde plasma desktop environment.
I’ve been recommending Endeavour because its “Arch with a nice installer” and it seems to go down well with modestly technical people.
Especially since they can then pick their DE.
Please do not recommend Arch-based distros to newcomers. At some point, something minor or major is going to break, and they’re not going to be able to fix it. Give them something Debian-based to learn the ropes (or not). It’s not going to break down on them as easily.
EndeavourOS was my first distro, and I had a great experience. Learned a ton (sometimes by completely breaking everything. Time Shift saved my ass many times).
I’m sure not everyone learns things the same way, but breaking shit and having to learn how to fix it was the best way I could have learned about how Linux works
I’m happy that things did work out for you, and indeed, “breaking shit and fixing it” is part of the rites of passage on Linux.
That said, I guess you’re part of the “tech-savvy tinkerer” crowd. This demographic will handle these things gracefully and take every breakdown as a learning opportunity.
Coming from this demographic, it’s easy to forget that there are people out there that deem computers mere tools, not a hobby. These people expect things to “just work”, and any breakage is an annoyance, a road block, a “this Linux thing sucks”. Set them up with a tinkerer’s distro, and you will make them thoroughly unhappy. Not because they’re wrong. Not because we’re wrong. Just because of a mismatch of expectations.
So, dear penguins: let’s not blindly advertise our pet distro to whoever asks (or doesn’t). Let’s look at who is before us, and provide them with the best experience possible. In a lot of cases, due to the influx of “just works” users, this may mean something stable in order not to put them off.
As a new user I tried all the “easy” distro and they all just fucked me over really hard, they favor ease of use by restricting the user so anytime I went to do anything I just kept running into repeated minor problems. When I tried endeavor it #just works and with snapshot software you can always rollback most distros as far as I know so there is no reason to not reccomend a Linux distro that doesn’t hold your hand unless there is something suepr specific the person needs that for some reason is the only thing capable of doing it reasonably well.
they favor ease of use by restricting the user
Never ran into anything like that. I’m hungry for more details.
with snapshot software you can always rollback most distros as far as I know
It sounds you’ve never done that yourself. It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing, but it’s not trivial either and may require use of a boot stick, dealing with disk encryption through the terminal, chrooting… and that is not the kinds of hoops I’d expect a newcomer to have to jump through just to fix their system.
I dunno man, less shits broken here than on Ubuntu.
Debían based except Ubuntu, Even Ubuntu flavours like kubuntu are fine just not Ubuntu.
Wait, why did you use “í?” It’s just “Debian.”
Autocorrect does weird things.
I’m out of the loop, Ubuntu has been broken/unstable?
No but they have been steering towards practices that makes people uncomfortable.
They are slowly replacing part of their ecosystem with proprietary modules or modules with permissive license and people have seen this behaviour enough to know what the end goal is
*yet
How old is your system?
I’ve put endeavour on a bunch of desktops and various thinkpads of a variety of vintages, including very modern.
I dunno man, it just works. I buy conservative technology choices and vendors and shit just works.
The hardest thing in my life is getting WWAN to work reliably OOTB on thinkpads with cellular.
Edit: No, the hardest thing in my life is asking people “Is wayland in the room with us right now?” because I’ve yet to have a machine running wayland.
You misunderstood my question. How old are those installs? Chances are they’re not very old.
Arch-based systems like EndeavourOS are rolling releases with minimal testing. They’ll work fine at the start, but errors will accumulate over time. Breakage is not a question of if, but when, and when that happens, Arch assumes you’re a savvy user who knows what youre doing and able to fix your stuff. If you aren’t (and newcomers to Linux normally fall into that category), you’re going to have a bad time.
Whatever the hype around Endeavour or CachyOS is: I wouldn’t recommend any of them to Linux newcomers for this very reason. Instead, it’s wise to give them a stable Debian-based OS to make themselves comfortable with Linux. Once they have arrived, they may or may not experiment with other flavours of Linux.
It feels like you’re just gate-keeping Linux because you apparently had a bad experience. It doesn’t sound like you’ve used an Arch-based distro in a while (or if you have, it was Manjaro - there has been a host of problems over there that will take a lot of time and effort to rebuild community trust, imo).
We’ve got 2 desktops and 2 laptops in our house all running Arch-based distros, the oldest being a little over 4 years old without any “breakage”. Two of the users had not even seen Linux prior to this, and one of them is not at all what I would consider “computer savvy”.
I can’t speak for vanilla Arch, but all of the “Arch with helpers” distros I’ve ran had pretty simple buttons to deal with system maintenance. Additionally, I’ve seen firsthand the difference a rolling-release distro can make over a “stable” release for game and hardware compatibility. It’s generally much easier to get (and keep) all the hardware working correctly on a gaming laptop in one of those arch-based distros than Debian or Mint, especially if it has an nvidia gpu. I couldn’t in good conscience recommend anything debian based to someone in that boat personally.
The use of the system matters A LOT when recommending a new distro. For some grandparents that just browse facebook and send e-mails - yea I’d probably just put Debian or LMDE on their system. I’m not sure I would make the same recommendation to anyone else though.
I mean with every day passing there’s less and less desktop users anyway. Most teenagers know significantly less about windows than you know about Linux. They’re on iOS and android.
As an admin i see it as an opportunity to switch to Linux but the boomers are refusing to let go of microslop office so it’s a bit of a fight still.
And while at that, I recomend regular Mint (which is based on Ubuntu).
There is Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), but I have found it harder to use (while I can manage, I’m not that experienced with Linux to bother to troubleshoot and solve it [at least at the time], but I think it was dependency, incompatibility, or driver issues).
Plus, the main Mint version is still the Ubuntu based one, LMDE is kinda a side project and usually isn’t as up-to-date, as far as I know.
LMDE would indeed be a bad recommendation for a newbie. Regular Mint benefits from Ubuntus better hardware support, GUIs for drivers/updates, PPA support and if you have AMD graphics it’s not a newbie nightmare to get the most up to date Mesa.
Do more people use Mint than Ubuntu these days? I’ve been on Arch for a decade now so I don’t know the popularity of distros as well as I used to.
I don’t know but it seems that Mint is pretty popular: https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
Anyway, Mint is the closest to Windows 3.1/98/2000 by its simplicity. It shows windows, you can move your files and run applications, it’s all I need.
Arch at around #15 btw. I would have expected it to be a little bit more popular than some of the other ones on this list but I guess I don’t know what the metric is based on here. Downloads?
Page hits. Good ‘ol clicks baby.
Arch, 150 million page visits, 0 installs.
Debian, 1 page visit, 1 install.
Arch more popular than Debian. 😎
Could you imagine?
Sounds good enough for average people. 👌
I switched from popos to manjaro and later mainline arch about a year ago for the AUR. It’s a lot more streamlined then all the terminal stuff needed to install third party software on Ubuntu
I remember mucking about with all these custom PPAs when on Ubuntu. The AUR is a dream compared to that. I even made my own packages because it’s so simple and well-documented.
Eh, I’m a sufficiently advanced Linux user (been using it on and off since the mid to late 90s) and I use zorin. It just works and it also looks pretty good too
Mullvadvpn is my vpn of choice. Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora are the recommended distros if using Mullvad.
Mint isn’t for everyone. A lot of picking a distro, at least for me, is will it work with the services I want to use.
To use mullvad on mint, download the .deb file. Double click on it. Click ok to installing it.
Done.
Edit (Download it off mullvad website if not clear)
It’s just wire guard. You can download the config file and import into the native vpn settings
True. But the app makes it easier for noobs to configure. Anyone with basic CLI skills wouldnt be trying to infer Mullvad doesnt work on Mint anyway.
You don’t actually need the official Mullvad program either, although there’s nothing wrong with it.
I prefer to just load the wireguard config directly with network manager (or whatever your distro uses).
You, maybe.
Subscribe to a privacy community and let the good times roll blocking all tracking of you online.
Degoogle your life. Leave meta platforms wherever possible.
Starve them of the data they want.
Just get rid of as much American software as you can. The US is a mess and the cloud act will always be abused.
Edit: or open source software
This is the way. I’m actually going to do my next YT video on options for repatriating your tech consumption and data, because other regions of the world have such better digital regulation.
For now though, I’m 99% on Linux and that helps a ton.
I guess the remaining 1% is YouTube?
Yes, that and the very few things I need a dual-boot to do.
Unfortunately there really isn’t a viable Fediverse alternative to YouTube. (Though I did include Peertube in my recent Fediverse video anyway.)
