This stuff is increasingly normalized across platforms.
I'd say "vote with your wallet", but when all the tech platforms are doing it, there's not much choice. PCs / laptops are probably the last hold out: Just switch to Linux (but be careful which distro you pick) or MacOS (for now).
The political pendulum is going to swing far left in the US given the disasters that are playing out in DC. Hopefully this sort of crap will be banned when that happens.
IMHO Linux Mint keeps being the strongest option to recommend when the intention is a clean transition with the least amount of fiddling. It just works, it is reliable, and it doesn't play games with changes of basic technologies that can only cause confusion (e.g. none of the Ubuntu shenanigans like their confusing desktop or their non-Debian packaging)
I can't agree about the "it just works" part. About a year ago I build a new PC, and I tried installing Mint on it. I ran into two issues that I was never able to resolve:
1. The WiFi just would not work; I couldn't see any networks.
2. I have 2 monitors, and one monitor would display 80% of one screen, and 20% of the other. I suspect that it was because the monitors had different refresh rates and resolutions.
I then tried installing Windows, and everything did just work.
I wouldn't recommend Mint. Better use something with recent KDE Plasma and recent kernel and Mesa for best Wayland experience.
Especially speaking of playing games, I periodically see newcomer Linux gamers hitting problems due to Mint being outdated and not having good Wayland support. Especially for any kind of recent hardware.
Fedora makes major upgrades pretty easy - you can even do it via the GUI Software Center, then reboot.
Personally I'm using Kinoite[1], an "immutable" version of Fedora that has an immutable base image, which makes it nearly impossible to break things during updates (even major upgrades).
You probably used Nvidia and some outdated distro with a bad DE on top. Not something you should be using. Using X11 is DOA anyway, so you can figure out what was wrong in your case and use better options.
No, AMD. I had issues on the latest Debian, released this summer, with KDE. X11 works perfectly fine. I would be happy with wayland too, if it worked. And in fact I use it on my other device.
The Steam main window did not open, although Steam itself did load in the background. I could work around this by disabling smooth scrolling on web view and some other GPU-related option (I forgot exactly).
But then there was a strange glitch on every single game (both native and Proton-based). Periodically (e.g. every ~10 seconds on some 3D games, on every screen reload on some other) the screen turned black for about 2 seconds.
Then I remembered that I had some issue when I first installed Debian 12 two years, though I forgot which issues exactly, and that I solved them by switching from Wayland to X11.
What DE? And that's with all the latest components as above? I wouldn't use Debian stable for gaming purposes, since it falls behind very quickly. Debian testing / unstable is a better idea, and even then you'd want to install latest amdgpu firmware manually potentially.
Linux Mint is terrible. Horribly outdated software, how are they still on X11? Both their DEs are forks which introduces problems...
Like, in regular Gnome/KDE land, you have Wayland which is a huge improvement over X11, HDR works, fractional scaling works... None of that works on Mint.
Not sure why you are downvoted, what you said is true. Mint has some WIP to support Wayland in Cinnamon, but it's way behind other DEs and I wouldn't recommend using it.
Wong wording may be, but the point of the post is correct. Mint just lags behind with Wayland support and in being up to date for handling recent hardware especially.
The former is Mint's specific problem, while the latter is a general problem of all long period release distros that don't take care of updating Linux kernel, Mesa and etc. to actual recent releases.
It's almost like monopolies aren't good for the consumer. We need some real power for enforcing the Sherman act. Too many companies have been able to buy all their competitors
Unfortunately, anti-trust doctrine in the US has gone from "too little competition in a market is inherently bad" to "any % of market share is OK as long as it doesn't result in consumer prices getting too high too fast." We've really lost the plot of why anti-trust regulation was passed in the first place.
> We've really lost the plot of why anti-trust regulation was passed in the first place.
I don't personally have any knowledge of the answer to this question but, hundreds of people had to vote for it and they rarely all have the same things in mind when they do.
It's better to focus on what legislation does and says rather than what it was meant to do.
Yeah but that sweet sweet ABI, we just gotta have that stable ABI, bum ba dum.
Remember that ABI when you're pulling out your hair over whatever MS's latest snafu is. The PC isn't about personal computing, no ,no, its about desperation. Its about using the fulcrum of ABI stability to see how much someone can accept wedged down their throat, because yeah, well, don't wanna loose that ABI.
Remember that ABI, 'next time 'Error: Something Happened.'
When Apple forces users to use an online account to access their local Mac, and disables their OS unless they turn on iCloud on their Mac -- then you can claim equivalence between them.
I literally just got my first Mac computer a few months ago. I tried to set it up as a local account with no online account. I could not.
Maybe it is possible and I just missed it. But either they don't allow it, or they have enough dark pattern bullshit to trick me, either way, it's the same as windows to me.
Unless the way VMs install a distro is somehow fundamentally different from a new computer, then it's literally two clicks when installing Sonoma to use a local account when prompted (Setup Later and then click Skip). I just tested this.
I'm pretty sure there was some keyboard shortcut to skip apple id login/creation during initial setup - not sure if that's still possible nowadays but I did used it once on my mbp few years ago
I tried installing the latest 25H2 (stable iso) and nothing has changed so far. You can still use "bypassNRO" to set it up with a local account, offline. The planned changes will likely only affect the Home edition (Pro/Ent/Edu have more options). Even with Home edition there's a good chance you'll be able to make a local account with an answer file[1][2] or an unofficial tweak.
I think Windows will always be able to work without a MS account, because there are many critical (offline) deployments out there. But they'll probably make it difficult if you're using a "consumer" edition.
the fact that you have to have an apple account to do all kinds of basic developer tasks (installing Xcode / Xcode command line tools, which are needed for lots of stuff last time I checked (a few years ago?)) is evidence that they suck also. But not nearly as bad as Microsoft who are actively scum from the moment you first turn the computer on.
"I need a free developer account to download Xcode" is certainly more user friendly than "I have to pay a subscription fee or pay up front to use Visual Studio".
it still sucks, though, since there's no conceivable reason why it would be technically necessary to have an account. It's purely out of self-serving disrespect.
I can claim equivalence between them whenever I want. If both OSes adopt and enforce my biggest pet peeves, then no amount of eye candy or freebie features will fix my workflow.
Gatekeeping and second opinions don't really move the needle on where I stand with either company.
Showing up in a thread you haven’t even participated in and saying “I’ve already made my choice, quit giving me second opinions” is comically self-centered.
I’ll concur with Apple being way more aggressive about this as well. icloud and if you try to use music on you iPhone with your collection of music Apple Music is always being pitched. Though the windows default start menu is something to behold these days (or widget panel..). I deleted Apple Maps from my phone because I never used it, but nothing would free up the 10 gigs of data it was storing…. Sigh.
Linux is good enough to be a daily driver for most things these days.
New phone came with no standalone music player only YouTube Music. But fair play to them you can click "local files only" at first launch and it keeps out of your way.
Agreed about switching to Linux. I don't agree on macOS though. Apple is nasty in its own way and has a ton of anti-user patterns no one should be dealing with. If you want to decide for yourself and not things being decided for you because "we know better than you what you really need", just use Linux.
My Android tablet keeps bugging me about updates and what not. Wish I could install my preferred flavor of Linux on it, but it seems infeasible at this moment.
macOS is absolutely awful about iCloud nag. If you try and use a Mac without an iCloud account, you'll get neverending popups and notifications begging you to go online. It's nearly as bad as Windows.
Neither GNOME nor KDE get anywhere near as bad. It's really only these commercial "holier than thou" operating systems that think they know best.
I haven't experienced this but I see you're the second comment pointing that out. I've been using macbooks for work for a long time and never once used iCloud nor do I remember seeing a confusing prompt. But I also rarely upgrade my machine.
With Windows, a regular seemingly normal update appeared almost as if I was upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and it prompted me to do the backup to OneDrive. I accepted it because I was worried the update to Windows 11 would get screwed up. After the update completed it was just a normal update after all and there was no need for me to accept that onedrive backup!
iCloud nags appear in the Settings app and Notifications menu. When you are signed out, Apple will assault you with notifications (that you must disabled with a script) until you log in: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250786208?sortBy=rank
I've got my fair share of horror-stories with both OSes, I switched between dailying Mojave and Windows 10 for a big portion of my life. Nothing will ever top updating to Catalina, booting up Ableton Live and seeing all my paid plugins go from "working fine" to "completely unsupported" in the span of an update.
I see. I think part of the reason why I don't see this (or don't remember it?) is I treat my work computer differently than my home computer. For my work computer, I honestly only restart my Mac maybe once every few months and never install updates. By the time I'm 1-2 OS releases out (usually when the battery starts to fail), my company gives me the latest macbook.
For the people in the office who use Windows they start dropping off randomly during the day as their computer decides to start installing updates during critical times.
During pandemic I started playing with smart home stuff and since I'm already within apple playgrounds I've got homepod mini since they stripped ipads from hub feature. After configuring the speaker I had apple music ad for about 3 months at the top of settings where ios software update notifications appears.
Its everywhere. You get nagged constantly for Apple music on your iphone too. My dystopian prediction is that in the near future, corporations will just garnish your wages so they don't have to do this.
Apple had a go at doing this with iCloud, but clearly there was enough consumer pushback (a friend lost all their files after cancelling iCloud, thinking it was a backup service, not realising it deleted the original copies on their machine) that they stopped the enshittification there.
Reminder that Apple's revenue from ads is in the billions and climbing at an accelerating pace. The enshittification comes for all. They don't need to be good, they just need to be better than Microsoft.
I'd say "vote with your wallet", but when all the tech platforms are doing it, there's not much choice. PCs / laptops are probably the last hold out: Just switch to Linux (but be careful which distro you pick) or MacOS (for now).
The political pendulum is going to swing far left in the US given the disasters that are playing out in DC. Hopefully this sort of crap will be banned when that happens.