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Yet despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth - both in the article and in the comments here in the various threads - people are still making excuses for co

Yet despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth - both in the article and in the comments here in the various threads - people are still making excuses for continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft/et al products because the alternatives are a bit rough round the edges. These companies have repeatedly shown that they don't respect people's privacy and people have resoundingly responded that neither do they. I would suggest that the users here are probably some of the best suited in the world to help smooth those rough edges and even surpass the features and usability in the privacy respecting alternatives I just hope we collectively notice this before it's too late.

damnencryption 6y ago
I was looking into various differences among demographics which use and prefer apple products. Nobody rated any of the problems often thrown in here as a priority. Majority of iPhone users are women and HN/reddit are primarily men dominated. It should be no surprise that apple caters to aesthetics over thermals and you see people complaining about that on these platforms. Apple customers put status and prestige when deciding to purchase something above cost. They are rich. They care about environment that's why apple "care" about environment. They care about privacy which is why apple "care" about privacy. So for them, it's reasonable to change the device than allow it to be repaired at some shady shop. It's consistent with their image. They can't compromise on privacy or safety because that's why they bought into apple ecosystem. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/26/apple-does-not-let-bad-guys-use-iphones-on-screen https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/26/apple-doe...
- JimTheMan 6y ago
  >Majority of iPhone users are women I sold iPhones for years and never noticed this trend. I highly doubt it is true in any significant way. I would also challenge the assumption that women want aesthetics over some other factor. In this day and age, that's an incredibly 'old fashioned' statement to make. From what I could tell. People bought iPhones because they were: a)Cool and of good quality. (Your everyman can just go buy an iPhone and KNOW it won't be junk. They don't know the other brands and researching stuff is a pain in the ass) b)They were used to using them and didn't want to use android/didn't like using android phones c)They had shit experiences with other platforms and just wanted something 'that would just work' d)The iPhone really was the first good smartphone on the scene. They have inertia associated with points a->c above.
  - damnencryption 6y ago
    > that's an incredibly 'old fashioned' statement to make If spending in cosmetics industry is any indicator, women definitely cares about how something looks over men. There are hard number even if you don't believe in the various evolution theories and biological differences which makes women more prone to noticing subtle visual and design cues. From 2010: https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/01/women_want_apples_iphone_men_prefer_google_android_nielsen_finds https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/01/women_want_apples... From 2013: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271204/android-vs-iphone-mobile-owners-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/271204/android-vs-iphone... From 2015: https://www.statista.com/statistics/513995/smartphone-user-gender-distribution-by-os/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/513995/smartphone-user-g... I am not aware of any large scale recent surveys focused entirely on that but there are many dating surveys which reports women having preference for men with iPhones. Likely dubious at the numbers most of them report (70%?) and could be influenced by other factors but still it seems women do prefer iPhones more. I don't think this should be odd. iPhones have the best overall cameras every year and are huge on Instagram and Pinterest (platforms dominated by women) so I can only extrapolate the difference would be bigger now with social media booming.
    - JAlexoid 6y ago
      If you wanted to compare purely biological imperatives, then you'd only take data from cultures that treat women and men wearing makeup equally. As such - men spend a lot on fashion and grooming, while the same can be said about women and cosmetics... but that's mostly about cultural customs. PS: Only the latest iPhone has best camera. They traded places with Pixel, Samsung, etc... over the last few years. PPS: Your stats are a little bit out of date... Let alone - the 2013 data contradicts your claim. Women are distributed between Android and iPhone equally in 2013. There would be a shift towards iPhone, if women wanted iPhone more.
      - damnencryption 6y ago
        For cultural customs, I am not sure which country to take. For US and UK (which dominate the statistics on stuff like this due to language and other factors), women spend significantly more. > The 2013 data contradicts your claim. It doesn't. Men want iPhone less than women. My initial point was simply that people here and on reddit (men dominated sites) are not reflective of apple's focus. 31% of men wanted Android while only 24% of women wanted the same. > PS: Only the latest iPhone has best camera. They traded places with Pixel, Samsung, etc... over the last few years. This is misleading. While iPhones fared worse than pixel in photo department for 3 years, they make up to it in other aspects especially video. As for Samsung, it depends on what you consider better camera. iPhone arguably has the best color profile and accuracy while Samsung phones does beautification and increase contrast which does make them look nicer but overall, not accurate.
mistermann 6y ago
To be fair, if this was truly a big deal, it would be a political issue with bipartisan support and taken care of short order. In times of strife, at least there's one thing you can always count on: Democracy. It never fails. If you can just remember that one thing, you should be able to sleep soundly at night. (It works for me at least, I used to be a constant worrywart until I learned this trick from my therapist, and I've been golden ever since.)
- Ygg2 6y ago
  Yeah. This is solved in America. Like affordable health care. And endless wars. Wait. No. It isn't.
- shawxe 6y ago
  > To be fair, if this was truly a big deal, it would be a political issue with bipartisan support and taken care of short order. Are you serious? Since you're using the term bipartisan, I'm going to assume you're also from the US. Have you been following the news/current events recently (and by recently, really I mean any time at all over the course of the past forty or fifty years)? Almost nothing actually gets "bipartisan" support these days. Our government is in a constant state of gridlock and it is next to impossible to get anything done. > In times of strife, at least there's one thing you can always count on: Democracy. It never fails. If you can just remember that one thing, you should be able to sleep soundly at night. (It works for me at least, I used to be a constant worrywart until I learned this trick from my therapist, and I've been golden ever since.) I'm really having a hard time telling if this comment is sarcastic. I'm not trying to cause you to lose sleep or anything, and honestly, I commend your optimism if you're serious, but the fact is that democracy is an abstract concept that is almost never put into practice perfectly. Even if democracy's promise of "most people being happy" meaning 51 people are happy while 49 people are not is actually sufficient, even that idealized version is very far from our actually political system in the United States. I think one thing most Americans actually would agree with is that the way we do things here, right now, in terms of government, doesn't work so well. I think there is a lot of disagreement about what should change, and how, but it seems like very few people are satisfied with the current state of affairs. The more I think about it, the more I think this comment just has to be sarcastic, so this reply is probably a waste of everyone's time, but in any case, wow. I wish what you were saying here were actually true. That would be a nicer world to live in than this one (although, frustrating as it might be at times, this one is also not so bad).
arvinsim 6y ago
Don't hold your breath. Majority of people would trade security and openness for convenience and profit. I think we are handing over the future of tech to these few tech giant megacorps.
- mosselman 6y ago
  Unless I missed something, we can still build custom computers right?
zepto 6y ago
The alternatives are still completely unusable by most people.
- lern_too_spel 6y ago
  Android handles this reasonably well. I can use F-Droid reproducible builds where possible and fall back to Play Store (or Amazon App Store) apps for apps I don't care that Google (or Amazon) knows I'm running. I get to choose where I want to make the trade-off between privacy and convenience. If I want convenience, it lets me go further than any Apple product, and if I want privacy, it also lets me go further than any Apple product in that direction also.
  - nemosaltat 6y ago
    I’ve considered making the switch back to Androids to play with F-Droid, do you have a device recommendation?
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      For phones, anything that gets updates directly from Google (Pixel and Android One) will update quickly and will have community support for LineageOS for many years after official support ends. Unfortunately, Google makes absolutely terrible hardware decisions, but nothing comes close in terms of software value, which is far more important in my experience.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  Well the alternative can't rely on unpaid workforce while Apple/Microsoft and co spend billions on their software, GUI and user experience. It is simple economics. Open source needs financing, not just free Github repositories that MS/Apple and co can then exploit for free because the code is licensed as MIT.
- Haga 6y ago
  Every time you open the shell a windows user talked into switching to Linux, quits forever and talks about the experience to all his friends. For a osos to suck seed the power users would have to give up- their privacy and share their work flows and set up as macros.
rsanheim 6y ago
You pointed out a core problem here, and a common blindspot with the HN crowd: > continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft That is probably 98%+ of devices that most typical people use for everyday computing, across phone, laptop, and desktop. Whether it is an android device, an iPhone, a Dell laptop or a new M1 macbook you are beholden to a corporation that doesn't care about privacy. I would argue that Apple cares a bit more, and I really hope they respond to the most recent shit show with some changes, but I'm not holding my breath. And before "have you tried this *nix distro??" comments appear, they are still too hard to setup and nowhere near as user-friendly for most people on an everyday basis. And hell, if you setup Chrome and Gsuite as your default tools of choice, as many do (or are forced to because their job) how much are you really breaking free anyways? I don't know the solution, but its clear that in the war between privacy and convenience and usability that privacy is on the ropes and its the last round of the fight.
- qz2 6y ago
  I’ve worked out that breaking free from this is just not for the average person. If you have the power then stand outside and look in but there’s absolutely nothing you can do about the churn other than watch it burn. I’ll carry on educating people but even suggesting this might be an issue is drowned out by the marketing machines of the large vendors and downvoted into oblivion even here. That is unless there is some large story that something fishy is going on. But a big story is made of a thousand small ones which people don’t care about. Look where fighting Facebook and political influence got us. Nowhere.
- est31 6y ago
  You are totally right that Linux is only a single digit percentage in user share if you look at all computers deployed world-wide. However, in the developer sphere, GNU/Linux is way more represented. In the Stack Overflow 2020 survey, 26% of people said they were using a Linux based OS [0]. This number has been gradually increasing over the years so further growth is expectable. It's less than one percent less than the Mac OS share of 27%, but I'm not sure how much noise there is. So Linux is usable enough for a growing community of developers, and many laptop/computer vendors targeting the developer market offer GNU/Linux as a preinstalled option. As a result, at least for software people, Linux is a real privacy preserving alternative on the Desktop. HN is a software forum, and the blog post was also made with people educated about software as the recipients. So I think the post you are replying to should be understood not in a global context but in a context of the IT crowd. Of course, it's not beautiful that Linux is less of an alternative to people who need to use complicated niche ISV software, but generally any industry can make the move if there is a subset of users pushing towards GNU/Linux. [0]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-developers-primary-operating-systems https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-de...
jodrellblank 6y ago
> "I would suggest that the users here are probably some of the best suited in the world to help smooth those rough edges" How would you get around the problem that many vocal Linux users think easy-to-use software is for weak losers, and consider difficult software a sign of manliness and an identity, even a religion? This is like saying Buddhists would be the best suited people to disarm gun-lovers, without considering that said gun-lovers don't want to be disarmed, and see pacifists as weak and unmanly.
supermatt 6y ago
A number of user stopping using these products wont change the slightest thing. We all encouraged our friends and family to ditch IE for chrome, and look where that got us. Legislation and regulation are the only fixes for these practices. The EC have a lot of kettles in the fire here - on multiple fronts. I trust that, although it will take time, "fairness" will prevail.
- stkdump 6y ago
  > We all encouraged our friends and family to ditch IE for chrome, and look where that got us. I didn't. I encouraged friends and family to ditch IE for Firefox and nowadays I encourage them to ditch Chrome for Firefox. I never cared that Chrome was a little faster for some time. One person that only uses the (very old and underpowered computer) for mail and printing documents I helped install Linux (not Ubuntu ;)) and since then they are much happier, because it doesn't get slower with each security update and needs less maintenance help than with Windows.
  - danuker 6y ago
    > encourage them to ditch Chrome for Firefox You should probably start advising that they ditch Firefox for IceCat. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - stkdump 6y ago
      The last IceCat update is over a year ago. Might as well leave my front door open.
- ernst_klim 6y ago
  > We all encouraged our friends and family to ditch IE for chrome, and look where that got us. Antitrust entities bashed microsoft for shipping IE and look where that got us. If anything, it's worth keeping in mind that volumes of regulations written for big corps may indeed force them to behave, but are an impediment for tiny companies to enter. Corps like microsoft do call for regulations and copyright laws all the time, the have an army of lobbyists, they know that even without regulatory capture these extinguish competition.
deepstack 6y ago
Apple has NOT being the same after steve is gone. It is MS 2.0 now! With better design and products of course, none the less the business practices are the same. Much this is enforced by the current economic and political system.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Not MS. MS today is much less into the anti-user, anti-privacy, rentseeking game, compared to Apple or Google. Apple today is M$ 2.0, as much as people here hate that trope.
  - e_proxus 6y ago
    The privacy-invasive tracking in Windows 10 is much more obnoxious and tricky to workaround (since it is spread out and hard/impossible to disable). This tracking in macOS is at least under the guise of security whereas the Windows tracking is pure telemetry.
    - fakedang 6y ago
      And you can disable that tracking on setup /installation.
      - e_proxus 6y ago
        Not all in one place, and not everything. See for example https://superuser.com/a/1512224 https://superuser.com/a/1512224
  - deepstack 6y ago
    MS is still the same, they just matured a bit. They just have to behave better in the open source community to attract the developers. I don't believe for a second that they are doing it for the benefit of information sovereignty or the development of tech and software. Their backdoor put a really bad taste in my mouth. Will try to avoid them if I can.
kebman 6y ago
I'm not. Since the last few iterations of Apple hardware and OS software, I've decided to switch to something else. I'm also advicing all friends and collegues to do the same. There is simply no reason to stay with Apple anymore as a professional. It used to be stability and ease of use, but Windows has since closed that gap, and Linux is a close second (and a must for programming). Most likely that means I'll run a Linux laptop for programming, and have a partition for Windows on a gaming computer, cuz I love me some games. I know Steam is gradually approaching Linux, but most AAA games still run best under Win. Plus it's an easy platform (outside OS X) to run multimedia production tools. Sorry, I just don't think Gimp or other Linux tools for multimedia production are good enough yet, but the hope remains that they will someday compete with giants like Adobe. For real. And not just as free but woefully inadequate alternatives. Please correct me if I'm wrong here, though. I'd love to be surprised, if you are able!
- jm547ster 6y ago
  Gravit designer, Blender and Bitwig studio would come to mind as tools for multimedia production that are as good as anything on the other platforms.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Also Krita is improving pretty much constantly to become the "Blender of drawing".
  - kebman 6y ago
    Great tips! Thank you! I'm more into 2D compositing for video, but I've had my eye on Blender for some time. Not sure how it stacks up against stuff like After Effects. For audio production I already use Reaper FM, but I might give Bitwig a go too. ^^
    - blcArmadillo 6y ago
      Not open source; however, supposedly DaVinci Resolve is supported for Linux: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/ https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/. For most people the free variant should be more than enough.
user-the-name 6y ago
> These companies have repeatedly shown that they don't respect people's privacy I mean, this is just plainly not true. Apple has done many things, things they did not at all need to do, in order to protect user's privacy. They have shown, repeatedly, that they do in fact care.
ForHackernews 6y ago
It's super infuriating reading posts from developers who are like "Well I would love to use Linux, but I can't because the touchpad drivers don't behave exactly the way they do under MacOS..."
- gonzo41 6y ago
  I kinda pity them, I have a track-point.
- npteljes 6y ago
  It was super frustrating until I got used to the Linux way of handling, and then the other system was the weird one. Companies don't mind this effect at all I think, it increases their retention.
intricatedetail 6y ago
My main workstation is Linux for a couple of years now. I have dedicated PC for Ableton and I disabled all known telemetry calls. I got rid of all Apple products except iPad 2.
eznzt 6y ago
The alternatives are not "a bit rough round the edges". They are much, much worse.
- jason0597 6y ago
  How much worse are they? Can you explain your experience?
coldtea 6y ago
>Yet despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth - both in the article and in the comments here in the various threads - people are still making excuses for continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft/et al products because the alternatives are a bit rough round the edges. Or we like what Apple/Google/Microsoft are putting out, including the "walled" nature of the iOS/macOS. People's homes are also "walled" for a reason. Your concerns are not everybody's concerns. That said, I don't like the telemetry and information leak as described in the article, and would want Apple to stop it and allow disabling it. But I also don't care for using another OS just because "it's actually yours and you can do anything you want with it". That's also true for TempleOS, but I would't want to use it (to use an extreme example of an alternative), and simililarly, I prefer macOS and the app ecosystem to any Linux distribution I've seen (and I've used UNIX when there were still UNIX wars and SunOS workstations with black and white monitors, and Linux for close to 25 years).
morganvachon 6y ago
> "...people are still making excuses for continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft/et al products because the alternatives are a bit rough round the edges." I found myself being one of those people, so I made a commitment to no more Microsoft or Apple for my personal devices[1]. I'm eagerly awaiting PostmarketOS to reach full functionality on the PinePhone and I'll give up my Android phone at that point, taking Google out of the equation as well. I'm even considering trying to learn C so I can contribute to OpenBSD for my hardware that is "rough around the edges". [1] My wife's PC with Windows 10 is exempt for now; she's not a techie person at all and I don't want to force her into something alien. She tends to borrow my Thinkpad with Linux every now and then and is getting more used to it, so we'll see how that goes.
ttiurani 6y ago
I need XCode to build software for iOS and OSX, and there isn't to my knowledge any other feasible, performant and off-line capable way to do that beside running OSX on a Mac. This is the only reason I had to move away from (arch) linux and it saddens me every day.
frEdmbx 6y ago
Reminds me of Eben Moglen's "Freedom in the Cloud" talk.

damnencryption 6y ago

I was looking into various differences among demographics which use and prefer apple products. Nobody rated any of the problems often thrown in here as a priority. Majority of iPhone users are women and HN/reddit are primarily men dominated. It should be no surprise that apple caters to aesthetics over thermals and you see people complaining about that on these platforms. Apple customers put status and prestige when deciding to purchase something above cost. They are rich. They care about environment that's why apple "care" about environment. They care about privacy which is why apple "care" about privacy. So for them, it's reasonable to change the device than allow it to be repaired at some shady shop. It's consistent with their image. They can't compromise on privacy or safety because that's why they bought into apple ecosystem. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/26/apple-does-not-let-bad-guys-use-iphones-on-screen https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/26/apple-doe...

JimTheMan 6y ago
>Majority of iPhone users are women I sold iPhones for years and never noticed this trend. I highly doubt it is true in any significant way. I would also challenge the assumption that women want aesthetics over some other factor. In this day and age, that's an incredibly 'old fashioned' statement to make. From what I could tell. People bought iPhones because they were: a)Cool and of good quality. (Your everyman can just go buy an iPhone and KNOW it won't be junk. They don't know the other brands and researching stuff is a pain in the ass) b)They were used to using them and didn't want to use android/didn't like using android phones c)They had shit experiences with other platforms and just wanted something 'that would just work' d)The iPhone really was the first good smartphone on the scene. They have inertia associated with points a->c above.
- damnencryption 6y ago
  > that's an incredibly 'old fashioned' statement to make If spending in cosmetics industry is any indicator, women definitely cares about how something looks over men. There are hard number even if you don't believe in the various evolution theories and biological differences which makes women more prone to noticing subtle visual and design cues. From 2010: https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/01/women_want_apples_iphone_men_prefer_google_android_nielsen_finds https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/01/women_want_apples... From 2013: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271204/android-vs-iphone-mobile-owners-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/271204/android-vs-iphone... From 2015: https://www.statista.com/statistics/513995/smartphone-user-gender-distribution-by-os/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/513995/smartphone-user-g... I am not aware of any large scale recent surveys focused entirely on that but there are many dating surveys which reports women having preference for men with iPhones. Likely dubious at the numbers most of them report (70%?) and could be influenced by other factors but still it seems women do prefer iPhones more. I don't think this should be odd. iPhones have the best overall cameras every year and are huge on Instagram and Pinterest (platforms dominated by women) so I can only extrapolate the difference would be bigger now with social media booming.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    If you wanted to compare purely biological imperatives, then you'd only take data from cultures that treat women and men wearing makeup equally. As such - men spend a lot on fashion and grooming, while the same can be said about women and cosmetics... but that's mostly about cultural customs. PS: Only the latest iPhone has best camera. They traded places with Pixel, Samsung, etc... over the last few years. PPS: Your stats are a little bit out of date... Let alone - the 2013 data contradicts your claim. Women are distributed between Android and iPhone equally in 2013. There would be a shift towards iPhone, if women wanted iPhone more.
    - damnencryption 6y ago
      For cultural customs, I am not sure which country to take. For US and UK (which dominate the statistics on stuff like this due to language and other factors), women spend significantly more. > The 2013 data contradicts your claim. It doesn't. Men want iPhone less than women. My initial point was simply that people here and on reddit (men dominated sites) are not reflective of apple's focus. 31% of men wanted Android while only 24% of women wanted the same. > PS: Only the latest iPhone has best camera. They traded places with Pixel, Samsung, etc... over the last few years. This is misleading. While iPhones fared worse than pixel in photo department for 3 years, they make up to it in other aspects especially video. As for Samsung, it depends on what you consider better camera. iPhone arguably has the best color profile and accuracy while Samsung phones does beautification and increase contrast which does make them look nicer but overall, not accurate.

mistermann 6y ago

To be fair, if this was truly a big deal, it would be a political issue with bipartisan support and taken care of short order. In times of strife, at least there's one thing you can always count on: Democracy. It never fails. If you can just remember that one thing, you should be able to sleep soundly at night. (It works for me at least, I used to be a constant worrywart until I learned this trick from my therapist, and I've been golden ever since.)

Ygg2 6y ago
Yeah. This is solved in America. Like affordable health care. And endless wars. Wait. No. It isn't.
shawxe 6y ago
> To be fair, if this was truly a big deal, it would be a political issue with bipartisan support and taken care of short order. Are you serious? Since you're using the term bipartisan, I'm going to assume you're also from the US. Have you been following the news/current events recently (and by recently, really I mean any time at all over the course of the past forty or fifty years)? Almost nothing actually gets "bipartisan" support these days. Our government is in a constant state of gridlock and it is next to impossible to get anything done. > In times of strife, at least there's one thing you can always count on: Democracy. It never fails. If you can just remember that one thing, you should be able to sleep soundly at night. (It works for me at least, I used to be a constant worrywart until I learned this trick from my therapist, and I've been golden ever since.) I'm really having a hard time telling if this comment is sarcastic. I'm not trying to cause you to lose sleep or anything, and honestly, I commend your optimism if you're serious, but the fact is that democracy is an abstract concept that is almost never put into practice perfectly. Even if democracy's promise of "most people being happy" meaning 51 people are happy while 49 people are not is actually sufficient, even that idealized version is very far from our actually political system in the United States. I think one thing most Americans actually would agree with is that the way we do things here, right now, in terms of government, doesn't work so well. I think there is a lot of disagreement about what should change, and how, but it seems like very few people are satisfied with the current state of affairs. The more I think about it, the more I think this comment just has to be sarcastic, so this reply is probably a waste of everyone's time, but in any case, wow. I wish what you were saying here were actually true. That would be a nicer world to live in than this one (although, frustrating as it might be at times, this one is also not so bad).

arvinsim 6y ago

Don't hold your breath. Majority of people would trade security and openness for convenience and profit. I think we are handing over the future of tech to these few tech giant megacorps.

mosselman 6y ago
Unless I missed something, we can still build custom computers right?

zepto 6y ago

The alternatives are still completely unusable by most people.

lern_too_spel 6y ago
Android handles this reasonably well. I can use F-Droid reproducible builds where possible and fall back to Play Store (or Amazon App Store) apps for apps I don't care that Google (or Amazon) knows I'm running. I get to choose where I want to make the trade-off between privacy and convenience. If I want convenience, it lets me go further than any Apple product, and if I want privacy, it also lets me go further than any Apple product in that direction also.
- nemosaltat 6y ago
  I’ve considered making the switch back to Androids to play with F-Droid, do you have a device recommendation?
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    For phones, anything that gets updates directly from Google (Pixel and Android One) will update quickly and will have community support for LineageOS for many years after official support ends. Unfortunately, Google makes absolutely terrible hardware decisions, but nothing comes close in terms of software value, which is far more important in my experience.
throw_m239339 6y ago
Well the alternative can't rely on unpaid workforce while Apple/Microsoft and co spend billions on their software, GUI and user experience. It is simple economics. Open source needs financing, not just free Github repositories that MS/Apple and co can then exploit for free because the code is licensed as MIT.
Haga 6y ago
Every time you open the shell a windows user talked into switching to Linux, quits forever and talks about the experience to all his friends. For a osos to suck seed the power users would have to give up- their privacy and share their work flows and set up as macros.

rsanheim 6y ago

You pointed out a core problem here, and a common blindspot with the HN crowd: > continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft That is probably 98%+ of devices that most typical people use for everyday computing, across phone, laptop, and desktop. Whether it is an android device, an iPhone, a Dell laptop or a new M1 macbook you are beholden to a corporation that doesn't care about privacy. I would argue that Apple cares a bit more, and I really hope they respond to the most recent shit show with some changes, but I'm not holding my breath. And before "have you tried this *nix distro??" comments appear, they are still too hard to setup and nowhere near as user-friendly for most people on an everyday basis. And hell, if you setup Chrome and Gsuite as your default tools of choice, as many do (or are forced to because their job) how much are you really breaking free anyways? I don't know the solution, but its clear that in the war between privacy and convenience and usability that privacy is on the ropes and its the last round of the fight.

qz2 6y ago
I’ve worked out that breaking free from this is just not for the average person. If you have the power then stand outside and look in but there’s absolutely nothing you can do about the churn other than watch it burn. I’ll carry on educating people but even suggesting this might be an issue is drowned out by the marketing machines of the large vendors and downvoted into oblivion even here. That is unless there is some large story that something fishy is going on. But a big story is made of a thousand small ones which people don’t care about. Look where fighting Facebook and political influence got us. Nowhere.
est31 6y ago
You are totally right that Linux is only a single digit percentage in user share if you look at all computers deployed world-wide. However, in the developer sphere, GNU/Linux is way more represented. In the Stack Overflow 2020 survey, 26% of people said they were using a Linux based OS [0]. This number has been gradually increasing over the years so further growth is expectable. It's less than one percent less than the Mac OS share of 27%, but I'm not sure how much noise there is. So Linux is usable enough for a growing community of developers, and many laptop/computer vendors targeting the developer market offer GNU/Linux as a preinstalled option. As a result, at least for software people, Linux is a real privacy preserving alternative on the Desktop. HN is a software forum, and the blog post was also made with people educated about software as the recipients. So I think the post you are replying to should be understood not in a global context but in a context of the IT crowd. Of course, it's not beautiful that Linux is less of an alternative to people who need to use complicated niche ISV software, but generally any industry can make the move if there is a subset of users pushing towards GNU/Linux. [0]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-developers-primary-operating-systems https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-de...

jodrellblank 6y ago

> "I would suggest that the users here are probably some of the best suited in the world to help smooth those rough edges" How would you get around the problem that many vocal Linux users think easy-to-use software is for weak losers, and consider difficult software a sign of manliness and an identity, even a religion? This is like saying Buddhists would be the best suited people to disarm gun-lovers, without considering that said gun-lovers don't want to be disarmed, and see pacifists as weak and unmanly.

supermatt 6y ago

A number of user stopping using these products wont change the slightest thing. We all encouraged our friends and family to ditch IE for chrome, and look where that got us. Legislation and regulation are the only fixes for these practices. The EC have a lot of kettles in the fire here - on multiple fronts. I trust that, although it will take time, "fairness" will prevail.

stkdump 6y ago
> We all encouraged our friends and family to ditch IE for chrome, and look where that got us. I didn't. I encouraged friends and family to ditch IE for Firefox and nowadays I encourage them to ditch Chrome for Firefox. I never cared that Chrome was a little faster for some time. One person that only uses the (very old and underpowered computer) for mail and printing documents I helped install Linux (not Ubuntu ;)) and since then they are much happier, because it doesn't get slower with each security update and needs less maintenance help than with Windows.
- danuker 6y ago
  > encourage them to ditch Chrome for Firefox You should probably start advising that they ditch Firefox for IceCat. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - stkdump 6y ago
    The last IceCat update is over a year ago. Might as well leave my front door open.
ernst_klim 6y ago
> We all encouraged our friends and family to ditch IE for chrome, and look where that got us. Antitrust entities bashed microsoft for shipping IE and look where that got us. If anything, it's worth keeping in mind that volumes of regulations written for big corps may indeed force them to behave, but are an impediment for tiny companies to enter. Corps like microsoft do call for regulations and copyright laws all the time, the have an army of lobbyists, they know that even without regulatory capture these extinguish competition.

deepstack 6y ago

Apple has NOT being the same after steve is gone. It is MS 2.0 now! With better design and products of course, none the less the business practices are the same. Much this is enforced by the current economic and political system.

fakedang 6y ago
Not MS. MS today is much less into the anti-user, anti-privacy, rentseeking game, compared to Apple or Google. Apple today is M$ 2.0, as much as people here hate that trope.
- e_proxus 6y ago
  The privacy-invasive tracking in Windows 10 is much more obnoxious and tricky to workaround (since it is spread out and hard/impossible to disable). This tracking in macOS is at least under the guise of security whereas the Windows tracking is pure telemetry.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    And you can disable that tracking on setup /installation.
    - e_proxus 6y ago
      Not all in one place, and not everything. See for example https://superuser.com/a/1512224 https://superuser.com/a/1512224
- deepstack 6y ago
  MS is still the same, they just matured a bit. They just have to behave better in the open source community to attract the developers. I don't believe for a second that they are doing it for the benefit of information sovereignty or the development of tech and software. Their backdoor put a really bad taste in my mouth. Will try to avoid them if I can.

kebman 6y ago

I'm not. Since the last few iterations of Apple hardware and OS software, I've decided to switch to something else. I'm also advicing all friends and collegues to do the same. There is simply no reason to stay with Apple anymore as a professional. It used to be stability and ease of use, but Windows has since closed that gap, and Linux is a close second (and a must for programming). Most likely that means I'll run a Linux laptop for programming, and have a partition for Windows on a gaming computer, cuz I love me some games. I know Steam is gradually approaching Linux, but most AAA games still run best under Win. Plus it's an easy platform (outside OS X) to run multimedia production tools. Sorry, I just don't think Gimp or other Linux tools for multimedia production are good enough yet, but the hope remains that they will someday compete with giants like Adobe. For real. And not just as free but woefully inadequate alternatives. Please correct me if I'm wrong here, though. I'd love to be surprised, if you are able!

jm547ster 6y ago
Gravit designer, Blender and Bitwig studio would come to mind as tools for multimedia production that are as good as anything on the other platforms.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Also Krita is improving pretty much constantly to become the "Blender of drawing".
- kebman 6y ago
  Great tips! Thank you! I'm more into 2D compositing for video, but I've had my eye on Blender for some time. Not sure how it stacks up against stuff like After Effects. For audio production I already use Reaper FM, but I might give Bitwig a go too. ^^
  - blcArmadillo 6y ago
    Not open source; however, supposedly DaVinci Resolve is supported for Linux: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/ https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/. For most people the free variant should be more than enough.

user-the-name 6y ago

> These companies have repeatedly shown that they don't respect people's privacy I mean, this is just plainly not true. Apple has done many things, things they did not at all need to do, in order to protect user's privacy. They have shown, repeatedly, that they do in fact care.

ForHackernews 6y ago

It's super infuriating reading posts from developers who are like "Well I would love to use Linux, but I can't because the touchpad drivers don't behave exactly the way they do under MacOS..."

gonzo41 6y ago
I kinda pity them, I have a track-point.
npteljes 6y ago
It was super frustrating until I got used to the Linux way of handling, and then the other system was the weird one. Companies don't mind this effect at all I think, it increases their retention.

intricatedetail 6y ago

My main workstation is Linux for a couple of years now. I have dedicated PC for Ableton and I disabled all known telemetry calls. I got rid of all Apple products except iPad 2.

eznzt 6y ago

The alternatives are not "a bit rough round the edges". They are much, much worse.

jason0597 6y ago
How much worse are they? Can you explain your experience?

coldtea 6y ago

>Yet despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth - both in the article and in the comments here in the various threads - people are still making excuses for continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft/et al products because the alternatives are a bit rough round the edges. Or we like what Apple/Google/Microsoft are putting out, including the "walled" nature of the iOS/macOS. People's homes are also "walled" for a reason. Your concerns are not everybody's concerns. That said, I don't like the telemetry and information leak as described in the article, and would want Apple to stop it and allow disabling it. But I also don't care for using another OS just because "it's actually yours and you can do anything you want with it". That's also true for TempleOS, but I would't want to use it (to use an extreme example of an alternative), and simililarly, I prefer macOS and the app ecosystem to any Linux distribution I've seen (and I've used UNIX when there were still UNIX wars and SunOS workstations with black and white monitors, and Linux for close to 25 years).

morganvachon 6y ago

> "...people are still making excuses for continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft/et al products because the alternatives are a bit rough round the edges." I found myself being one of those people, so I made a commitment to no more Microsoft or Apple for my personal devices[1]. I'm eagerly awaiting PostmarketOS to reach full functionality on the PinePhone and I'll give up my Android phone at that point, taking Google out of the equation as well. I'm even considering trying to learn C so I can contribute to OpenBSD for my hardware that is "rough around the edges". [1] My wife's PC with Windows 10 is exempt for now; she's not a techie person at all and I don't want to force her into something alien. She tends to borrow my Thinkpad with Linux every now and then and is getting more used to it, so we'll see how that goes.

ttiurani 6y ago

I need XCode to build software for iOS and OSX, and there isn't to my knowledge any other feasible, performant and off-line capable way to do that beside running OSX on a Mac. This is the only reason I had to move away from (arch) linux and it saddens me every day.

frEdmbx 6y ago

Reminds me of Eben Moglen's "Freedom in the Cloud" talk.