Never ask a company to pick between the right thing and profit.

It’s fundamentally impossible for a publicly traded company not to choose profit over ‘The Right Thing’, fullstop. Shareholders feel that have a fundamental right to growth, and if Google’s CEO were to choose ‘The Right Thing’ over profit, the shareholders can oust them in favor of a CEO willing to choose profits.

Enshittification is where every public company ends up, because the line MUST go up, no other alternative is acceptable.

Even if law enforcement can get a warrant, unless there’s a backdoor in the encryption then the data stays private. That’s the whole point of encryption.

The fundamental problem is law enforcement feeling entitled to snoop on private communications with a warrant vs the inherent security flaw with making a backdoor in encrypted communications. The backdoor will eventually get exploited, either by reverse engineering/tinkering or someone leaking keys, and then encryption becomes useless. The only way encryption works is if the data can only be decrypted by one key.

Anyone else remember when TSA published a picture of the master key set for TSA approved luggage locks and people had modeled and printed replicas within hours?

I think my favorite part of swapping has been forgetting how Windows does things. I’m so embedded in Linux and how it works every day that I don’t remember where to go for certain things in Windows without having to search.

I remember some power user shortcuts like run prompt shortcuts (appwiz.cpl or control userpasswords2) but I used to be able to walk people through how to get certain pages in the Windows UI, and I couldn’t do it today.

I made the swap after they forced Windows 7 update behavior to change. You used to be able to download updates but you got to choose when to install them. Then they changed it to either they’re on and fully automatic, or fully off.

At the time, I was running a computer repair company, and my work computer running Win7 was running a data recovery on an accidentally formatted drive for almost two days. After I had left and the program finished, Windows was all “Oh, the computer is idle now. Let me give you a 15 minute warning that I’m going to install updates and reboot if you don’t cancel”.

After the second time, I formatted my work computer. Shortly after, I did the same to my gaming PC. Haven’t looked back once.

Some of us manage to break the cycle, but despite how much I love Linux (ups and downs) I understand that it isn’t for everyone currently.

What most people want is a stable system they can just use without understanding much if anything about how the underlying systems work. They don’t care that wifi drivers can be fixed through a few terminal commands, they rail against the fact they have to do much of anything at all besides click [Next >]. And I can’t blame them; that’s what Microsoft has trained them for.

So many people with random toolbars and junk extensions in their browsers because the [Next >] button is how they get past whatever problem they have. The average user isn’t very tech savvy, and it takes someone with a desire to learn to truly thrive in a Linux environment.

I’ve converted my mom to Kubuntu, and she does well, but she’s also an outlier (she has an expired CCNA certification).

Linux suffers from a catch 22: there’s not enough users because there’s not a lot of commercial support because there’s not enough users because… And the people who are donating their time to make it better are saints as far as I’m concerned, but there’s only so much people can do for free. Things truly have gotten better, but until more typical user types can adopt Linux with little to no fuss, not much will change.

And that fact hurts my soul.

AFAIK, the unilateral nature of TOS/EULA agreements in the day of Software as a Service hasn’t been litigated. Which means there isn’t a court’s opinion on the scope or limits of a TOS/EULA and what changes can be made.

Currently, Adobe has the full force of contract law to initiate this change without any input from consumers because a case about this has never made it to the courts.

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes, but Adobe will likely backpedal on their language in the TOS before any case gets to a Judge because the last thing any company wants is for a TOS/EULA agreement to be fundamentally undermined by a court.