My transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

And by "out-of-the box support for flatpaks and appimages" I mean: run it inside a sandbox! If I didn't care about stability and security, I'd use windows.

You could mostly call me a "Unix Greybeard" at this point - I grew up with Windows, learned the joys of Unix on IRIX in the early 2000s, and never really went back. Linux is for servers and dev work desktops, but for about 18 years I'd been using OS X as a daily driver desktop. It really does "just work" for an awful lot of values of work, and it interfaces very nicely with Linux systems and has done so for a long while. With Microsoft's WSL and actually shipping a bloody SSH client now, Windows interfaces better, but it's a bit too little, too late.

I never really objected to Windows, just never had much of a use case for it - but, despite that, I typically had a Windows desktop of some variety or another laying around for various purposes, and a Windows VM or three for [whatever] - currently I've got a Win10 VM that mostly runs UPS WorldShip (I used to ship a lot of hazmat, and I actually like the program for my shipping needs).

Windows 10 has gotten "progressively more annoying" about online accounts. You used to be able to just say "No, thank you, I want a local account only." Then the options got more hidden, and then the option disappeared unless you literally don't have a network connection when you're installing it, and if you have a local account it starts nagging you more and more to "sign in with Microsoft!" Yes, you can turn it off, but the default is to badger the user. I don't want an online account for my local operating systems, thank you very much. Never have, never will.

Windows 11, though, has turned into a "Nope, never..." option for me. Maybe in a VM if I really need to. The two major things that really upset me are the transition to a "You can't have a local account only on Win11 Home," and the bug in the beta in which a bad advertising JSON blob (from Microsoft!) absolutely hosed Explorer, rendering the OS unusable. There is no computing world I'm OK with in which basic OS operation and functionality should be rendered unusable by bad data from the internet, and that tells me where the priorities for Microsoft are: Tightly integrated advertising. With the "We must know your email address to use our OS," there's almost certainly some variety of behavioral analysis going on that they can use to profit on the backend from the "free" OS. You're the source of raw materials, and all... so Windows 11 is out.

Apple was going well, and I really appreciated their privacy stance... and then they seem to have badly miscalculated and blown most of that trust, in my book, with the on-device, anti-user CSAM scanning that was a beautiful, ivory tower, academic exercise in novel crypto, that seems to have fallen apart literally as soon as people got their hands on the concept to play with. The photo hashing they're using couldn't withstand any basic adversarial attacks (either in terms of mutating images to avoid being detected, or in terms of deliberate image collisions), and they seem to have been caught dazed and confused in how their responses to concerns about it were almost "Oh, yeah, uh... yeah, we're definitely defending against that concern with this thing we just thought of at 3AM." The later documents and FAQs read like the output of someone operating on no sleep for a couple weeks, and some of their internal email quotes regarding the "screeching minority" didn't exactly go over very well either.

Yes, I know they've "delayed" it, but they've not said "We're sorry, that was a terrible idea, and we're not going to do that or anything like it" either, so... Apple's out. Sad, really, the M1 Mac Mini I bought when it was announced is, by far, the best computer I've used across a huge variety of metrics, and the M1 Mac Pros are quite literally exactly what I want in a laptop. Oh well. I'll find alternatives.

If I'm going to continue using modern computing (which, unfortunately, isn't quite as optional as I'd really prefer in the modern world), that leaves me staring down the Linux path, and so I've gone that way. Linux on the desktop isn't perfect, but neither is it nearly as painful as it used to be. It does most of the stuff I care about - and my attitude has changed around to, "If I can't do it on Linux, then I suppose it's not something I should particularly care about doing." I'm at a point in my life where that's entirely viable for me, so it's the route I've gone.

... and then for added pain, because I'm apparently allergic to working computers at this point, I've gotten pretty well upset with Intel over the last few years with "Yet Another Microarchitectural Vulnerability" (and then the endless variations on a theme that they didn't patch against when they fixed the first set - come on, if the academics understand your processors better than the people in charge of fixing them, that's a problem too). AMD is an option, but as ARM has been coming up the ladder quickly in performance, I've set out to try and use as much ARM as I can. So, my primary laptop, for when I use it, is a PineBook Pro, I've got an ODroid N2+ and RasPi4 running as office desktops (and am uncomfortably excited about the upcoming Rock5 with NVMe and 16GB RAM), etc. I still have some x86 in my life for certain things, but I'm trying very hard to reduce that over time.

While I'm at it, I've gone back to a flip phone, and I don't even bother bringing that with me half the time I go out anymore.

I won't say I always like the corners I've painted myself into, but I'm at least comfortable with where I am. I'm not having to say, "This thing Company X is doing is horrible... but, I mean, what am I gonna do?" and then use Company X's software/hardware. I'm able to do most of the things I want to do, even if they're a bit more roundabout than they used to be, and I'm OK with that.

But, as I get older, even working in the low weeds of tech, I do look forward to, at some point, being able to just put down a computer for the last time. The future they promised and the future we got have diverged so badly, and just continue to diverge.

Suddenly saw that Windows was rebooting the computer. I had about 1 minute of warning and I lost a lot of work.