The shift to SaaS and Windows 11 updates means you no longer own your software. Here is how free software tools can help you reclaim control.
I think I’m basically done after my current rig dies. I have no interest in being a peasant in some techno feudalist dystopia. Instead, I’ve been dedicating more time to reading books, writing, traveling, some retro gaming, and working around the house.
It’s enough for me.
These days, as a tech worker, I immediately log out at the end of my workday and shut everything down. I have no further interest. It’s not fun anymore. Frankly, I don’t think I can last until retirement in this space even if my job isn’t automated. I could retire today if I wanted to. But most people aren’t in that situation and I have no idea what I would do if I didn’t have the financial autonomy that I enjoy. And I got here–in part–by building parts of the platforms that harm us (social media). So that feels great.
We live in a dystopia. Everything fucking sucks.
Wanna be a goat farmer with me (https://www.goatops.com/) ? I’ve been in IT for 20 years or so and when I first saw that goat list maybe 10-15 years ago it gave me a chuckle, then over the years it made more sense and became a goal. Not necessarily goats, but something entirely separate from IT; for now I’m stuck trying to earn a bit of a retirement, but my eye is on the door.
There is still some good IT stuff to be done though. I have a homelab that I use to avoid Google where I can (degoog/nextcloud/immich/etc), and keep my data indoors as much as possible…
Farming is pretty expensive labor intensive and not profitable. But besides all that it’s very fulfilling
May you be cursed every time you brag publicly about your own wealth
After decades of digital life, I guess it’s back to the real world. They aren’t going to like what that shift of focus, time and energy results in.
You may be playing into their hands…
Your rig is how you communicate with the world - via unbreakable encryption if you choose to. It’s your source of information from sources of your choice more than theirs. It’s a route to be heard by your friends beyond your local neighborhood.
Yeah, big platform social media is a cess pit. Your rig is your portal to be a force against that tide. No, one pebble on the beach won’t stop it, but a billion pebbles?
I hear what you’re saying. But as of right now, I have no interest in any of it. The minute I start my workday, I’m already looking forward to turning everything off so I can go do something else. This whole digital information economy is repulsive to me.
I get it… I’ve been fortunate to be in a sort of “feel good” tech industry (medical devices) - and my current post is pretty low stress, light management touch which is really nice. People getting wound up about shipping on a particular day regardless of whether the product is ready or not and all that unregulated software jazz can be a real downer.
I still find joy in it. I work in tech support but I also am setting up my first homelab with ubiquiti gear and I’m having a lot of fun. Some parts are cobbled together from bits I can get free or cheap and those are the most fun. I don’t have a lot of money and that keeps it interesting.
I will carry the torch and have enough fun for the lot of us. I hope you have just as much fun doing what you’re doing.
yup… once my current rigs fail, I’m not replacing them. I’m just abandoning it and they can do whatever.
I’ve checked out. I have zero subscriptions, own all my software, could afford to replace if I need to but… why… it’s a literal cesspool of corporate trash and I want nothing to do with it.
same with the cellphone… when it dies, I honestly don’t think I care to even replace it. might get hosted VoIP somewhere and have a landline in the house… beyond that, whatever … not my issue and if places like the Bank etc try to force it well… tough. I’ll go into the branch like it’s 1995 and update my paper passbook and withdraw cash for the week
I’ll go into the branch like it’s 1995 and update my paper passbook and withdraw cash for the week
Tried that lately? Hours are shrinking, lines are growing.
I have a work laptop, and haven’t bought a computer for personal use in 10 years.
Same boat here, minus the “still in tech” that I left over 10 yrs ago. Picked up my last pc end of last year and packed up my previous rig for future use. With the old tech around my apt: Laptops, old pc’s, and raspberry pi’s, I should be able to last til I die. I will never use cloud gaming, only use for that I see is linux users that want to play certain “competitive” games, next phone will most likely be dumb as well. I started my journey on a Commodore Vic 20, never thought this would manifest
How do you get out?
I got burnt out and took a job that is not tech.
It used to be fun to trouble shoot issues, help people understand, on their terms, what the pc was doing and why. Then it got old cause everything started turning to crap, starting with vista (spent a week regressing ~30 laptops from vista to XP cause I didn’t want the headache of dealing with that brand new operating system). I used to build and wire, by hand, networks. I could whip out a cable in about 2 mins, from cut to crimp, and then set the Dell and/or Cisco routers/switches. I just couldn’t keep doing it and keep my sanity
Makes sense, I feel the same unfortunately. What are you doing now to keep your sanity?
Brainless job, for me anyway, hehe. Security supervisor, just directing people to where they need to go, making sure the company doesn’t try to take advantage of my guards. Also just play vr/stream and play other pc and retro games and hope no issues come up
fortunately, I could retire today if I wanted to
“I enjoy great comfort and privilege.”
I got here–in part–by building parts of the platforms that harm us
“I have relevant expertise and understand how these systems work”
I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford these ridiculous prices
“Remember, I have money and I’m gonna be fine whatever happens to everyone else”
as a tech worker, I immediately log out at the end of my workday and shut everything down.
I think I’m basically done
“I’m too fucking cowardly to use my knowhow to fight back because that might jeopardize my relative comfort.”
Go fuck yourself, really.
I have felt the same for awhile honestly sans the could reitre today. I may have been spoiled though because I used to workin a research lab and then corpo jobs were fine but man the meetings and sudden change in technology for no other reason than its the current fad. I think though its just hard to do something full time for decades and still find it fun at home. One of the things though is as an IT guy I stopped configuring my systems because it was kinda tiresome and so often I had to know how the default was because that is what I would have to help people with. So I limited it to things I just could not live without but did not get to minutia about it. Then I got sorta sick up spinning things up and started going with what was easiest. mac’s when their warranty would just cover anything and then back to windows and even with linux I use easy to setup stuff. I just want it to work and not spend a whole lot on making it work anymore.
It’s not fun for me either, also in IT. My joy comes from watching my kid play, we just finished split Fiction and reanimal, now starting the last of us.
The most I get is jumping into random L4D2 pub games and rushing the maps while blasting music.
C’mon, microsoft. What are you DOING with your life???
I’m no linux apologist. I BARELY understand what I’m doing. If ANY task needs terminal, then that task just isn’t going to happen for me.
All that said, it’s time to switch to linux. And for anyone asking where they should start with all these distros…Mint. If you’ve never used linux before, start with Mint.
Now I’m a bit of a hypocrite for saying that, because I’m on Zorin. There’s nothing wrong with Zorin. It is perfectly fine as a starter distro if you’re coming from Windows. It’s almost equal to Zorin in usability. Mint has one edge that cannot be overlooked for newbies.
Userbase.
EVERYONE uses Mint, which means there’s going to be a broader range of support. There are times I wish I had started with Mint. But I chose Zorin when I was new, and now my heels are dug in.
That being said, YOU should use Mint.
Ugh…I can’t believe this is where we are in this world. Where I have to reccomend linux, while still not knowing what the hell I’m doing.
Anyways…use linux. Fuck microsoft. It’s the only way to take back OUR hardware. They want to go full greed mode? I’m now using software which they don’t make a dime on, and never can. As much as I hate the structure, I can’t say anything negative involving bloat, or spyware, or anything else that I classify as “modern day bullshit”.
sigh Just use linux.
Microsoft is truly the most mind bogglingly stupid company of all time. How can an establishment be SO incredibly incompetent?
I would argue for Ubuntu because a lot of libraries and schools have used Ubuntu as an alternative operating system in the past, at least in the school district I went to, so the early connection/familiarity is already there.
I love mint, but much prefer LMDE over the Ubuntu based one.
I mean with every day passing there’s less and less desktop users anyway. Most teenagers know significantly less about windows than you know about Linux. They’re on iOS and android.
As an admin i see it as an opportunity to switch to Linux but the boomers are refusing to let go of microslop office so it’s a bit of a fight still.
The gaming PC sector is just fine however
Yeah, I’m about 40 and I don’t know any retired gamers yet
Do more people use Mint than Ubuntu these days? I’ve been on Arch for a decade now so I don’t know the popularity of distros as well as I used to.
Yeah Mint is pretty good for a “starter” Linux OS. This is subjective, but of all the Desktop OSs, I found myself fixing shit in terminal and nailing down obscure issues a lot less often in Mint than other distros. Also, whenever a friend/family member came to me with a very old and “broken” laptop that needed saving that’s what I’d throw on there. Modern Windows is way too much for the 4GB RAM dual core or whatever bullshit on those old machines. The only complaints I ever got out of them were that they couldn’t run .exes and had to use LibreOffice instead of desktop Office apps, but that’s about it. No crashes outside of legitimate equipment failure.
I ran it on my personal machines before I got more comfortable. Now my ideal setup is KDE/Debian though playing around with cachyOS in VMs has been pretty fun.
I don’t know but it seems that Mint is pretty popular: https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
Anyway, Mint is the closest to Windows 3.1/98/2000 by its simplicity. It shows windows, you can move your files and run applications, it’s all I need.
Sounds good enough for average people. 👌
Arch at around #15 btw. I would have expected it to be a little bit more popular than some of the other ones on this list but I guess I don’t know what the metric is based on here. Downloads?
Page hits. Good ‘ol clicks baby.
Arch, 150 million page visits, 0 installs.
Debian, 1 page visit, 1 install.
Arch more popular than Debian. 😎
Could you imagine?
I switched from popos to manjaro and later mainline arch about a year ago for the AUR. It’s a lot more streamlined then all the terminal stuff needed to install third party software on Ubuntu
I remember mucking about with all these custom PPAs when on Ubuntu. The AUR is a dream compared to that. I even made my own packages because it’s so simple and well-documented.
What’s the difference between Zorin and mint? I’m on zorin right now to get my feet wet on linux. I am not a terminal user as I’m not technical.
There is also cachyos, they are sooooooo smooth on kde plasma desktop environment.
As an arch user this is a terrible suggestion. CachyOS is a distro for enthusiasts who are ok with dealing with the Arch way of doing things. This is a distro that no beginner should be using unless they are prepared to learn how to use the terminal and learn how Linux works. Anyone else is likely to be scared away because it is “too difficult”.
OP is right, just use Mint.
I never denied Mint. definitely recommend it too. Although for gaming I had a lot of issues. I am definitelt not an expert by any means, so I would also put my hat in to say cachyos with kde plasma as the desktop environment is pretty beginner friendly. I understand the arch way is difficult, but in my ignorant (as I dont know linux terminal talk too well) perspective, i think kde plasma on cachyos is a good option to look into at the least. ‘A terrible suggestion’ feels a slight stretch. It isn’t too complicated, im saying this as a beginner
If you’re a Linux KDE gaming newbie, Bazzite is a good choice.
They have really polished the immutable Linux thing, and it is honestly the smoothest Linux experience I’ve ever had.
CachyOS (and Garuda, and Manjaro, and EndeavourOS) are fairly user-friendly at first, but then something bad happens and you’re on your own with Arch. It’s like walking on a spring meadow and then the hungry bear comes out. Very unexpected and very troublesome.
Still, I hope it works good for you. But, same as other commenter, I would absolutely not recommend CachyOS for Linux beginners. More often than not, it doesn’t end well.
If you can use a program like Octopi I think Cachy is just as friendly as any distro. Certainly moreso than any debian derivative.
And its bleeding edge enough to make a great gaming OS
And while at that, I recomend regular Mint (which is based on Ubuntu).
There is Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), but I have found it harder to use (while I can manage, I’m not that experienced with Linux to bother to troubleshoot and solve it [at least at the time], but I think it was dependency, incompatibility, or driver issues).
Plus, the main Mint version is still the Ubuntu based one, LMDE is kinda a side project and usually isn’t as up-to-date, as far as I know.
LMDE would indeed be a bad recommendation for a newbie. Regular Mint benefits from Ubuntus better hardware support, GUIs for drivers/updates, PPA support and if you have AMD graphics it’s not a newbie nightmare to get the most up to date Mesa.
Mullvadvpn is my vpn of choice. Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora are the recommended distros if using Mullvad.
Mint isn’t for everyone. A lot of picking a distro, at least for me, is will it work with the services I want to use.
To use mullvad on mint, download the .deb file. Double click on it. Click ok to installing it.
Done.
Edit (Download it off mullvad website if not clear)
You don’t actually need the official Mullvad program either, although there’s nothing wrong with it.
I prefer to just load the wireguard config directly with network manager (or whatever your distro uses).
The death of the PC market will greatly affect the next 50 years of computing worldwide. Corporations have successfully been pushing for a computer market where we rent computing power online and never own anything.
One could argue that the personal computer has been dead since the introduction of the Intel Management Engine which is an internet-connected spy chip inside every computer with full access to all hardware that you cannot observe, modify, block, or disable.
Imagine if an exploit was found for the IME. They’d have to recall all Intel PCs
A Raspberry Pi 5 feels every bit as capable as an Intel PC from 2005 - do we need anything more?
The Wiki link covers a few exploits for the IME.
I don’t think the personal market will completely die out, but it will definitely shrink by a significant percentage over the next ten years or so.
We’ll see a considerable volume of gamers move to thin clients, ditto for businesses, casual use (email, browsing, consuming media etc.) will continue to switch to mobile devices.
PCs will still exist as a hobby for enthusiasts, but we’ve definitely seen peak-component sales.
You’re making me sad.
The PC market has shrunk 80-90% in one year.
Even before that the GPU market was overvalued thanks to unusually high demand from COVID and unusually high demand from crypto mining the decade before.
Even consoles are reaching the $1000 mark soon.
The PC market has shrunk 80-90% in one year.
The cost of GPU’s and memory increased 5-10x in 1 year. What did you expect?
Also the old stuff still works great if you aren’t running AI. Hell I have a FX-8350 and a 1060 which is just fine for most things…and I think that CPU is from 2015.
Not just GPUs. This time is RAM and storage are also massively inflated because they’re allocated for a product that nobody really wants and nobody wants to pay for.
I heard a rumor that China is preparing to flood the RAM market - bringing prices back down.
It’s all artificial scarcity at the moment, they don’t spin up foundaries quickly because the capital investment is huge, but overall the chips don’t cost that much to build, even accounting for the capital up front. The problem is the market didn’t provide enough supply to meet the AI demand, so - like $100+/bbl oil - we’re faced with scarcity pricing (AKA record profits for those holding the stock.)
I’d wager that in 10 years, it will be illegal to own your own hardware.
Edit: pay attention to what’s currently happening in the tech and political sphere. Big tech corporations are a new branch of government and the end goal that most of these CEO’s want is a change to how the world is run. Read Curtis Yarvin’s slop diatribes for an insight into the ideology behind the global right.
It won’t be illegal, it will be unavailable. We just won’t have access to anything cause they won’t make it. Why make something they can only charge once for when they can rent the same equipment and earn multiples of what it would have sold for
You and I have come to the same conclusion. Compute as a service. I foresee it one step further - anyone with unlicensed personal compute that isn’t tied to a corporate subscription will not be legal.
Then I will be a criminal, again. If “they” implement the on OS ID, even if we are exempt from the identifying info on our systems (linux), there won’t be anywhere to really visit online anymore and as I said (here? another thread?) once my pixel 6 is dead I will be going the dumb phone route. No google play, no QR scanning, so I guess no more browsing except for the few non compliant sites. Will IRC networks need to comply? That would be my last stop (00s) before going back to the 80s where I read books, went outside, and didn’t worry about anything outside my little child world though it is hard not knowing what is going on in the world, tried it a few times. Hell, after my kinda “smart” tv dies (it doesn’t require an internet connection, has not been connected since I got it) I don’t know that I will find one of them that doesn’t require internet connection just to play a video off my pc. I saw shit going south 3 decades ago, never thought it would get so bad in my life
Fearmongering garbage.
A visceral reaction but aimed at the wrong person. It’s just an observation of the trends. The fact that tech companies no longer need to sell to consumers, the intermingling of tech companies with the US government, the trending authoritarianism of world governments, and the moral panic being manufactured to implement age verification, the erosion of encryption, and the now-illegality of VPNs by first world governments.
Go read some slop by Curtis Yarvin. He’s the mind behind the ideology of the new right. That is where it’s headed.
Or free money. Take the wager! Why don’t you fine folk both put your money where your sermingly-confidently-omniscient mouths are?
because I don’t eat my momey sir
The world is not America, there is no chance this would ever possibly happen.
I admire your viewpoint and wish it was the case. America will use its military and economic force to bend the world to do what it wishes. It already does that now and they’ve shown intent to further this behaviour.
That’s terrible, I honestly want those corporate cloud data centers to explode and we don’t have to rent computing power
The selfishness will definitely have negative impacts going forward.
You, maybe.
Subscribe to a privacy community and let the good times roll blocking all tracking of you online.
Degoogle your life. Leave meta platforms wherever possible.
Starve them of the data they want.
My phone shit the bed and I decided to just install graphene on the new one. One of the biggest hurdles in degoogling. Now I’m slowly migrating my accounts away from Google. I can’t do it all at once because that’s just too big of an endeavor.
My mom has even started to degoogle a bit and is switching to proton for email and cloud storage. She’s learning a lot about privacy and cyber security from me butching about corpos and dumb end users at work. She had her Microsoft account hacked today and she called me from the store as soon as she got an unknown MFA prompt and I helped her secure her shit immediately. So proud of her. She went home after that and immediately started resetting passwords to literally all of her accounts for different things and even appropriately prioritized them. I’ve trained her well lol
Just get rid of as much American software as you can. The US is a mess and the cloud act will always be abused.
Edit: or open source software
This is the way. I’m actually going to do my next YT video on options for repatriating your tech consumption and data, because other regions of the world have such better digital regulation.
For now though, I’m 99% on Linux and that helps a ton.
I guess the remaining 1% is YouTube?
Yes, that and the very few things I need a dual-boot to do.
Unfortunately there really isn’t a viable Fediverse alternative to YouTube. (Though I did include Peertube in my recent Fediverse video anyway.)