alt Hacker NewsThe only way this get better is if the user gets to choose between an OS with ads, lock-in, telemetry etc. and then one with none of that.
As it is now, buying a laptop in a store is a "pick your poison" situation.
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What bugged me for years is that I ended up paying the microsoft or apple tax that way. In the end I figured out a more efficient way around that than any of the rebates/refunds: just buy second hand hardware. Someone else paid for and used the windows license, I just need the box.
I mean, this goes way beyond OSes.
Look at the mobile YouTube client. The bottom navigation bar has the "+" create button stuffed right in the middle of it, larger than any other button. What % of users creates YouTube content? Probably <1%. What pp of those do it in the mobile YouTube client? Probably 0.1%. Yet the button is there, with no way to disable it.
In general, why don't apps have a "creator" toggle, off-by-default, that optimized the entire UI for viewing / consuming? Just how apps like Uber have either an entire separate app for 'partners', or toggle.
I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders. And YouTube has no competitor, so they can go buckwild with anything that synthetically increases KPIs.
I think the only app in recent memory that I have seen right the ship is Spotify. The past year they have introduced a lot of toggles for things like the shuffle algorithm, the dumb looping album art videos, audio loudness normalization being split out into normalization and compression ('volume'), etc; About the only thing that's missing is a toggle to disable podcasts, just like YouTube needs a toggle to completely disable shorts.
Any PMs reading this, be our hero. Fight the good fight.
On the Linux subreddits recent, I have seen a great increase in two kinds of posts: 1) That’s it, I’ve had it, windows is dead to me, I have moved/will move to Linux. Help me pick a distro. 2) I’d love to get off window and move to Linux but I can’t because it doesn’t have an app that works identically to word/excel/photoshop/whatever.
This.. give me the - option - to not be an ad infested hellhole of an OS and sell me a product.
Better yet: don't pick any poison at all -- both System76 and Tuxedo Computers (as examples, sometimes you can buy a latop without an OS and save the money, same goes for PCs) offer laptops with Linux installed: no Microslop tax, and hardware that's guaranteed to work with OSS.