PPS: Please at least TRY to read the following - and if possible, not just the title - with an open mind and in a spirit of tolerance. It was written in good faith by a Linux user who will be staying on Linux.
I’m frustrated. Once again, I have had to buy a computer I didn’t want in order to stay on Linux.
Some background. Compared to most people in this forum, I am a somewhat normal computer user. That is, I have not touched a mouse in decades, I use a small lightweight low-end laptop (which is not slow on Linux), and I do not take anything to pieces. To be clear, I’m a programmer and a massive FOSS idealist. But I’ve never been interested in hardware, and in this respect I’m a complete normie. Let’s not forget that for most ordinary people, a “computer” these days is the tethered corporate toy in their pocket.
For me this slide away from free personal computing is now getting impossible to ignore.
- 20 years ago I could buy a laptop (a Fujitsu) from a major European electronics retailer which came with a Linux CD - a Linux CD! (Kanotix, a Debian variant).
- In the late 2010s, I had a nice choice of cheap Taiwanese Wintel netbooks. So there was a Windows tax to pay but at least the hardware worked fine.
- 4 years ago, the options were getting thin on the ground. For 400€ I could find only one Linux-compatible X86 laptop, made by Acer. And since I didn’t have a Linux live USB, I had to (fake-) register the thing with Microsoft in order to get access to the damn web.
- Today, there’s almost nothing left. Intel laptops have all but disappeared from the budget aisle, replaced by ARM-powered Chromebooks and, increasingly, big Android tablets with keyboards. Putting non-spyware Linux on these things is often possible, sort of, but it’s a nightmare. You’re back to the 2010 era of ROM-flashing on Android, using repos from random developers and wading through impenetrable forum discussions. It’s a massive PITA. This is not the way computing should be done, and normal users will never do it even if they were capable. It’s hardly secure either.
The geeky suggestion which I can hear coming, “buy a secondhand Thinkpad”, is not a proper solution. It’s a band-aid fix with a timeout (PS: meaning it’s on the way to EOL). Hardware from the likes of Tuxedo and Framework is nice but too heavy (PS: correction, Framework is not heavy) and way too expensive for me. The Pinebook Pro is always out of stock.
And anyway, for years I have wanted to move from a laptop to a convertible tablet (like the Surface or Lenovo’s Yoga and Duet lines). It makes so much sense ergonomically and even in terms of maintenance. (Keyboards have moving parts. I have to change my Acer because it has a faulty keyboard which cannot be fixed except professionally at prohibitive cost. Crazy.) But none of these computers are easily compatible with Linux. It’s possible, yes, but hardly simple.
I considered, for a fleeting moment, throwing in the towel. After 20 years.
And then bought yet another laptop, basically the same model as last time except a Chromebook. I know I’ll get an OS I control onto it without too much stress. That’s a relief. But I’m more worried than ever about how this story is going to end.
PS: I should have predicted the bitterness and negativity and cynicism I would provoke simply by sharing my thoughts and feelings in good faith. Social media is absolutely incorrigible. In the meantime I will of course be staying on Linux, as I thought I described.
It’s the subtext to my whole post. I completely share your take.
In your previous post you mentioned this:
I was in a similar boat, a few years ago. Then I started I realizing the constant trade-offs I was accepting to do in order to use an always newer and better tech… So, I did what I was trained to do: consider the problem in its entirety, not just as “computers are getting more expensive or they come with too many trade-offs” position (which it is, btw) but as something more global: what do I want to achieve with those high-tech tools and do I really need them to achieve that?
In my case, this is not a universal truth but it’s 100% working for me, I realized that most if not all what I had been trying to achieve with high-tech was to recreate something comparable to what I had been using all my live, since I was a little boy: analog tools. Like, you know, reading actual books, writing and sketching using actual pen and paper, and so on.
So my very personal solution was simply to move away from digital-tech and to rekindle my usage of analog low-tech. It took me some effort to re-educate myself but it was worth it. That was also a true revolution in the preservation of my privacy and… sanity (I quit all social media at the same time, now a few years ago, and it was so liberating).
It’s also cheaper ;)
Interesting take, and maybe you are a kind of pioneer.
Actually, I’ve done something a bit similar in that I use my mobile device (“smartphone”) a lot less than a decade ago. It had got to point where I was doing everything on Android (i.e. like most people today). I said STOP to that and moved gradually back to the laptop. Now I have a tiny smartphone (4-in Cubot) which I use for the same things as 15 years ago: mapping, photos, podcasts and that’s about it, certainly nothing social (nothing at all, including messaging, if you can believe it). Pretty radical but it’s been a liberation, similar to your experience.
I see myself as being a lot more stubborn than a ‘pioneer’ in anything ;)
The day I realized I could not agree with the intense push toward always more invasive tech (with less privacy, less user control and more outside control, be it private-corporation or official/public), I acted accordingly… to the best of my limited abilities.
Indeed.
As for my own phone (I have one: I’m no Luddite, I just wish to stay in control). I use as a mere phone (and barely) and for any app/services I have no reasonable alternative to. Which means I use it for work/business/government/financial things (which is already too much, but like I said there is no real reasonable alternative left for those). So on that phone, there is no social, obviously I quit using all of them beside the Fediverse (that I only access on my computer), no games, no movies, no apps (beside Uber), no music or podcast (for the rare occasions when I want to listen to something on the go, I will use an old iPod one with the wheel). I’ve even stopped taking pictures almost entirely and completely stop taking personal pictures.
We are very similar, it seems.
With the exception that I’m totally addicted to podcasts. Literally thousands of hours per year, and I jack up the speed on them, too (productivity hacking is a mirage, I know, I know).
And photos. I take a ton. But only a few survive my ruthless culling.
I used too. Started as a little boy in the 70s… I quit approx a decade ago when people started becoming hostile towards my kind of pictures (street). It always was my hobby, not worth the hassle. Instead, I switched to sketching street scenes ;)
I feel this. Days are well and truly gone when we could play at Henri Cartier-Bresson. Yet another baleful by-product of social media.
Your sketching solution is a fine hack. Good luck with it.
Forgot to say that: your title was probably not the best pick if you really did not want to trigger emotional (and, obviously, mostly unhappy) reactions. Just saying.
Yeah, you’re right, but just allow me to say that it’s really irritating to have to write as if for children rather than for adults. I actually toned down the title in anticipation of exactly that. I love Linux and personally I am not “triggered” by this title, it remains a mystery to me why people are so sensitive to such things. Especially geeks.
I know. Even just the fact that we should worry about discussing that mere remark publicly, knowing we may expose ourselves to some angry crowd, is a worrying sign.
I don’t know if we’re the same age (I’m nearing my 60s) but do keep in mind a vast majority of those younger people (younger than I, at least) have never been properly educated to behave like adults. School failed them. They also never have been taught how to properly read/listen to an argument, even less so to an argument they don’t agree with, and how to properly respond to it. Nowadays, barely caricaturing, any disagreement of opinion will instantly morph into a personal attack.
They’re not responsible for that tragic situation, though. School is. We are, their elders, their parents. We who allowed school to fail teaching kids anything useful.
The first time I read this article, I wanted to cry. I had been noticing for many years already things were not going that well with the public educative system (not just in the USA, here in France too: it’s unbelievable) but I naively imagined ‘elite’ kids were sort of immune to the leveling down that was happening everywhere else… But no, even College-level kids nowadays can’t read books anymore. They also can barely write or do simple math.
It’s no wonder all the ideological non-sense that is thriving on so many campuses could spread so easily among them: they had no been prepared to notice it for what it is (almost complete garbage and non-sense), nor how to resist it. Here again, all they seem able to do is to make it a personal affair with an ‘us’ camp facing a ‘them’ camp… while the people behind all that non-sense, tranquilly benefit from it.
Or maybe it’s me being too old (and grumpy), unable to notice the amazing critical thinking that is going on among them? I would love that it was just me.
With you on all counts. I read that article when it was published (on college kids) and was similarly shocked and dismayed. Didn’t know it was quite that bad.
Actually it’s worse still: not just semi-illiterate and incapable of taking criticism but also inclined towards authoritarian politics. Definitely parenting is a factor, as you say. Effectively children have become consumer objects, when people are having them at all. The result was predictable. Other factors must be at work too, I think. It’s been 3 generations since a major war, and most people are barely aware of how lucky they are and not interested enough in history to find out. And there’s the environmental context, too. Things are going to get harder for our species. I think that deep down the youngsters know this, and they’re scared, as we should all be. I’m a child of the 80s and I’m feeling like I drew a pretty good lot.
So we should maybe give them a break with all these judgements. But it’s so hard!
those are linked. Edit: Without any education to critical thinking (and self-doubt, too) there is little preventing anyone from falling for ‘authoritarian’.
It’s not hard for me. I remember being young myself (thinking I knew it all…), plus I would rather spend my energy blaming the ones that do deserve to be blamed: