Your Computer Isn't Yours

Most of the components inside my PC are over 10 years old. I do video editing. I do music production with many VSTs open and running. And of course web browsing with a million tabs opened at once. For any of those tasks I can't see what would be the point of having a faster machine. Everything happens at once.

Also, having a modular machine lets you replace individual parts when they fail (which they almost never do anyway).

What are people doing with their computers that need so much computing power? Is it gaming?

I have a ThinkPad T470s running Arch Linux (I also tried Fedora and Ubuntu and saw these there too):

- Desktop performance is too poor to run at 4K, even though it works fine in Windows. I'm not talking playing games (they actually work well), just having a desktop with a browser and editor running at 4K. Ive tried Gnome, XFCE and Plasma on Wayland and X11 and they are all the same. The desktop feels slower, but strangely running tests (backend TypeScript and Scala) is noticeably much slower.

- Multiple monitors mostly works, but it's not always plug and play. Sometimes when I plug in an external monitor it doesn't always switch to it, so I have to set it up manually. Other times it just doesn't detect the monitor so I need to reboot. See note above about testing different DEs.

- Bluetooth audio mostly works (including LDAC) but the sound system often gets confused about which output device should be used. Sometimes Bluetooth audio connects, but it still defaults to the speakers. Sometimes the volume control turns down the Bluetooth audio, but turns up the speakers. See note above about testing different DEs.

- Suspend/resume mostly works, but sometimes it has the same issues as when connecting monitors. Sometimes when I resume I get a black screen, but if I go to a virtual terminal I can restart X11 and everything works. Other times it doesn't without a reboot.

Now of course these aren't the end of the world. I've been using this system and dealing with these issues for a couple of years now. The tradeoffs vs Apple privacy and better developer tooling (native Docker is so much nicer) on Linux make it worth it for me. I also have a desktop system which works perfectly, so it seems to mainly be issues with laptops (or this laptop?). But yeah compared to macOS or Windows, Linux really lacks a lot of polish.

A key fact about extortion is that the person being coerced is often not the person surveilled. It may be, instead, a judge, or a prosecutor, a purchasing agent, an admissions director, a night watchman. Each has parents, children, spouses, bosses, friends they would not want to suffer. The person surveilled need not even know they were used; the coercion is often more effective when they don't.

For each time you have heard of a defendant who pled guilty to a false charge, a judge who ruled in obvious contradiction to settled law, a legislator who voted against contituents' interests or resigned for "personal reasons", a manager who embezzled, or a contract awarded to the weaker proposal, consider whether it really was just on a whim.

This is the world of pervasive surveillance we are plunging into. This is the world that only consistent encryption and anonymity can have any chance of protecting against. But it is your family and friends who need the encryption and anonymity, not just you.

It's not going to happen. Apple talks up privacy and security but the truth is they don't care about those things. What they care about is having a locked-down platform because locked-down platforms make Apple $hitloads more money than open general-purpose computers.

Let's take another example: Remember back before 9/11 and you didn't have to show an ID when you boarded a plane? The airlines hated that because it meant people could resell tickets when they changed their plans, and there was no way for the airlines to get a cut of that money. After 9/11, the Feds made the airlines ask for ID, which the airlines absolutely loved because it destroyed the secondary market for unused tickets. Of course they didn't frame it this way--the airlines said "they were happy to help enforce additional security measures"--even though you and I both know that asking for ID before boarding a plane is just another aspect of security theater.

Apple is doing the same thing. Locked-down platforms they justify with security theater are making Apple a lot of money. They have absolutely no incentive to change anything.