The most important part of this is:
the vast majority of people never cared
We make our happy little bubble here to be outraged in. The world at large carries on without caring. Just in the past few years, there’s been the Reddit API change, the WhatsApp ToS change, the YouTube dislike button removal, etc etc. A small minority (like us) complains endlessly. The rest of the world shrugs and accepts enshitification.
Every eventuality can’t be covered by regulation. Sometimes you realise something can go disastrously wrong after someone is hurt. I wouldn’t be surprised if this never happened to other mechanical cars to never need regulation. Sometimes you need to wait for a stupid product to exist for someone to make a rule saying “stupid products shouldn’t exist”.
I’m 6 months into fulltime OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and love it. KDE is amazing. The Steam Deck converted me. Linux users rise.
It works better the way you said it, if you really want to drive the point that this will be a dead duck for sure.
The motto google lives by.
Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.
No one will make money from that, so they’re not going to do it.
Tumbleweed…and Kubuntu before that…and EndeavourOS before that…and ZorinOS before that…and Linux Mint before that…and Ubuntu before that.
But I’ve finally found Tumbleweed to be the OS to stick with. Although I do sometimes feel tempted to go back and try EndeavourOS now that I know more about Linux.
Depends on what you want to do. I sold my 2 year old gaming laptop and managed to spend 2 months getting amazing bargains on secondhand parts to make an amazing gaming PC. The Steam Deck and that does a great job of streaming the more demanding games from the PC.
The 9 year old laptop might be surprisingly functional if you use something like ZorinOS on it.
I’ll be honest, troubleshooting is still a gigantic pain in the ass sometimes. But if you can get over the hill of setting up the OS, then you’re good to go. The thing that’s made Linux bearable for me is AI. If I have a problem then I write it out in Copilot or ChatGPT, and it usually gives me the solution on the first try with a command o can just paste into terminal.
I keep checking videos on YouTube from time to time about whether it is worth upgrading to Win 11 now (which people keep releasing regularly). Keep deciding it’s not worth changing.
Then I sold my laptop and had to use my Steam Deck for a couple of months. At that point I thought if I’m going to learn a different OS, then I might as well go all the way and jump over to Linux. Been very happy with OpenSUSE ever since.
Their whole service is built to collect everything you type.
People don’t know and don’t care. Privacy isn’t an issue on anyone’s mind (just like climate wasn’t 20 years ago). People don’t know or care about digital media ownership issues.