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This is despicable, and it's indicative of a trend I've been noticing over the years. Personal computing used to be about user empowerment. Today it seems to

This is despicable, and it's indicative of a trend I've been noticing over the years. Personal computing used to be about user empowerment. Today it seems to me that many tech companies treat their users as nothing more than either "eyeballs" to show ads to or as cows to be milked through vendor lock-in and subscription services. Either way, I feel the user experience has degraded in recent years, and I feel we increasingly have less control over our computers. Thankfully alternatives exist. Linux and the BSDs keep evolving, Haiku and ReactOS continue to develop and may one day reach daily-driver status, there's still a thriving market for building your own x86-64 PCs (I'll be building a Ryzen 9 machine this weekend), and products like the Framework laptop, the PineBook, and the Librem laptop have me excited. Hopefully these alternatives will continue to evolve and take root so that way there's a formidable challenger to Big Tech.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago
People put up with it, and we all suffer. Google recently shat out a similarly offensive update to Android TV, so now the only UI on people's $4000 Sony TVs is 1/3 advertisements for stuff the user often doesn't even have access to. Disgraceful.
ladyanita22 5y ago
> Thankfully alternatives exist. Linux and the BSDs keep evolving, Haiku and ReactOS continue to develop and may one day reach daily-driver status, there's still a thriving market for building your own x86-64 PCs (I'll be building a Ryzen 9 machine this weekend), and products like the Framework laptop, the PineBook, and the Librem laptop have me excited. Hopefully these alternatives will continue to evolve and take root so that way there's a formidable challenger to Big Tech. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahaha
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rchaud 5y ago
My first laptop was a Toshiba Satellite in 2003 and it was crawling with bloatware, e.g Norton/Mcafee Antivirus popups. If you want to go bloat-free, buy from the business product lines, not the consumer ones. Although with the always-online Windows 11, it might be time to dump Windows altogether.
- beamatronic 5y ago
  There are so many great Linux versions now which are end-user friendly. I've been impressed by Linux Mint and of course Ubuntu. The hardest part is just picking one and sticking to it.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  That's very easily resolved with a fresh install though. And it's always been. The problem with the more locked down nature of devices these days, especially mobile, is that that isn't an option anymore like with this Lenovo update.
Syonyk 5y ago
Alternatives certainly exist - I've been moving myself rapidly in that direction after my nearly 20 years of Apple use has come to an end (at a remarkably low sysadmin-hours-per-year level, that's going to go up substantially). Unfortunately, most of them aren't quite ready for standard daily driver use. I've been daily driving a PineBook Pro, and despite some custom kernel hacking I've done, I still don't have reliably sound after sleep... unless I don't have sleep enabled properly, at which point it won't last the night on battery. Pick your poison. Or do more kernel hacking. It's something related to device sleep/resume on the audio chip, which I eventually found some NDA'd datasheets for. Fortunately, I can use 2.4GHz wifi out where I live, because 5GHz is also weirdly broken unless you perform the right incantations after power cycle. At this point, I think "those who can" move away from the core ecosystems have an obligation to do so, and try to pave the road in front of us. Right now, it's cobblestones at best (if you ignore the potholes), and a lot of people simply won't go that way. As long as the alternatives start with "Well, as long as you don't mind..." and then a list of features people consider important... they're going to remain alternatives. But, at the same time, I find myself considering how much hassle is worth it to "remain in the ecosystems." Yes. I can do a lot of work to smooth out rough edges, write my own kernel modules to work around hardware quirks (I really should upstream the sleep changes), figure out alternatives to things that don't work, do Matrix bridges, and... At what point is it simply not worth it? At what point is trying to keep up with modern consumer tech, to de-fang it, and make it work for me instead against of me just more hassle than it's worth? If anything mainstream is eventually going to get updates that turn it against me (which I consider updates like this to be), then... why bother? The benefits are great, but if the downsides and workarounds and time cost are too much, then I should consider if I actually want to be part of that. I've already done this with cell phones. Apple pissed me off with on-device CSAM scanning enough (well, that was the final straw) that I've gone back to a flip phone. I could go Pixel, Graphene, etc, but I've decided to experiment with what I actually miss out on, going back to a flip phone. I've de-fanged my previous phone a lot, so it's less of a change than for a lot of people, but... a few weeks in, I actually haven't missed a smartphone that much. I object strongly to the whole "You pay for the tech which then collects data and makes money on the backend optimizing the advertising feed to your pair of eyeballs" model that is more and more a part of consumer tech, so perhaps the right answer is to simply opt out of it. It's a recent addition to life. We can go back to what worked before.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
asddubs 5y ago
For any software I may need, I'll always look for open source first, and strongly prefer it even if it has significant disadvantages to commercial offerings, as long as it's somewhat tenable to use. Not for ideological reasons, just because I don't like having the rug yanked out under me. Although I guess you could argue those are ideological reasons

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

People put up with it, and we all suffer. Google recently shat out a similarly offensive update to Android TV, so now the only UI on people's $4000 Sony TVs is 1/3 advertisements for stuff the user often doesn't even have access to. Disgraceful.

ladyanita22 5y ago

> Thankfully alternatives exist. Linux and the BSDs keep evolving, Haiku and ReactOS continue to develop and may one day reach daily-driver status, there's still a thriving market for building your own x86-64 PCs (I'll be building a Ryzen 9 machine this weekend), and products like the Framework laptop, the PineBook, and the Librem laptop have me excited. Hopefully these alternatives will continue to evolve and take root so that way there's a formidable challenger to Big Tech. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahaha

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rchaud 5y ago

My first laptop was a Toshiba Satellite in 2003 and it was crawling with bloatware, e.g Norton/Mcafee Antivirus popups. If you want to go bloat-free, buy from the business product lines, not the consumer ones. Although with the always-online Windows 11, it might be time to dump Windows altogether.

beamatronic 5y ago
There are so many great Linux versions now which are end-user friendly. I've been impressed by Linux Mint and of course Ubuntu. The hardest part is just picking one and sticking to it.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
That's very easily resolved with a fresh install though. And it's always been. The problem with the more locked down nature of devices these days, especially mobile, is that that isn't an option anymore like with this Lenovo update.

Syonyk 5y ago

Alternatives certainly exist - I've been moving myself rapidly in that direction after my nearly 20 years of Apple use has come to an end (at a remarkably low sysadmin-hours-per-year level, that's going to go up substantially). Unfortunately, most of them aren't quite ready for standard daily driver use. I've been daily driving a PineBook Pro, and despite some custom kernel hacking I've done, I still don't have reliably sound after sleep... unless I don't have sleep enabled properly, at which point it won't last the night on battery. Pick your poison. Or do more kernel hacking. It's something related to device sleep/resume on the audio chip, which I eventually found some NDA'd datasheets for. Fortunately, I can use 2.4GHz wifi out where I live, because 5GHz is also weirdly broken unless you perform the right incantations after power cycle. At this point, I think "those who can" move away from the core ecosystems have an obligation to do so, and try to pave the road in front of us. Right now, it's cobblestones at best (if you ignore the potholes), and a lot of people simply won't go that way. As long as the alternatives start with "Well, as long as you don't mind..." and then a list of features people consider important... they're going to remain alternatives. But, at the same time, I find myself considering how much hassle is worth it to "remain in the ecosystems." Yes. I can do a lot of work to smooth out rough edges, write my own kernel modules to work around hardware quirks (I really should upstream the sleep changes), figure out alternatives to things that don't work, do Matrix bridges, and... At what point is it simply not worth it? At what point is trying to keep up with modern consumer tech, to de-fang it, and make it work for me instead against of me just more hassle than it's worth? If anything mainstream is eventually going to get updates that turn it against me (which I consider updates like this to be), then... why bother? The benefits are great, but if the downsides and workarounds and time cost are too much, then I should consider if I actually want to be part of that. I've already done this with cell phones. Apple pissed me off with on-device CSAM scanning enough (well, that was the final straw) that I've gone back to a flip phone. I could go Pixel, Graphene, etc, but I've decided to experiment with what I actually miss out on, going back to a flip phone. I've de-fanged my previous phone a lot, so it's less of a change than for a lot of people, but... a few weeks in, I actually haven't missed a smartphone that much. I object strongly to the whole "You pay for the tech which then collects data and makes money on the backend optimizing the advertising feed to your pair of eyeballs" model that is more and more a part of consumer tech, so perhaps the right answer is to simply opt out of it. It's a recent addition to life. We can go back to what worked before.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

asddubs 5y ago

For any software I may need, I'll always look for open source first, and strongly prefer it even if it has significant disadvantages to commercial offerings, as long as it's somewhat tenable to use. Not for ideological reasons, just because I don't like having the rug yanked out under me. Although I guess you could argue those are ideological reasons