We own the hardware, but not the experience anymore — Big Tech keeps building smarter, more connected devices, but the user experience feels more intrusive, more confusing, and less human
8 months ago by Sahwa to c/technology
The line between helpful tech and quiet surveillance is blurring — and our devices no longer feel fully under our control.
Don't forget all the innovative ways they've found to make it harder to repair "your" device.
Exactly. I almost feel like many are hungry for something new and different. So much so, that you give them something completely useless like an Ai widget, and they are willing to accept it to scratch an innovation itch.
My dream phone would basically be a phone jammed into a small handheld console with a big battery. Like stuff a pixel into a gameboy advance and that'd be perfect.
There's kind of been an increase in things being more accessible and usable by the standard user where previously they would need to be quite savvy or know a language.
But, yeah, I can't think of much else. Not user-based tech anyway. Just the usual insignificant increases and a bunch of bullshit no one asked for and actually ends up using, but has to pay for.
I think smartphones are an excellent example. Most people wouldn't notice the differences between a second-hand $150 Samsung Galaxy from five years ago, and the latest flagship for 10× the price. The innovation is almost entirely unnoticeable.
In many cases that accessibility is a full-on neutered replacement for a previous system that offered more user control and customizability, removing options from power users, so one man's progress is another man's step backwards.
As someone with a second hand Galaxy from seven years ago, yeah there's not really much difference. Newer phones are slightly more annoying to use, actually.
There's no forced Gnome 3 (and it's not been called that for a long time either), because you choose to install it, have the freedom to install anything else you want, and can customise it infinitely if you so choose.
Besides, Gnome is great. Maybe you don't like it, but it seems odd to say that the way Linus Torvalds uses Linux is the "wrong" way to use Linux.
If you want to keep using Gnome 2 there are a million forks that are actively maintained, or idk you could just use another desktop. Nobody is forcing you to use gnome but you aren't entitled to having a project do things the way you specifically want.
I installed Lubuntu on my Microsoft Surface 2 and my custom PC from 2014 that couldn’t get upgraded to windows 11 due to lack of a tpm chip. We don’t need better hardware, we need better operating systems. We need more Linux.
We need more real Linux -- GNU/Linux, with compliant copyleft licensing -- not Tivoized crap like they put on TVs.
Roku OS, Amazon Fire OS, Tizen (Samsung TV OS), etc. -- all technically Linux, but you wouldn't know it because they've systematically butchered them to destroy everything that made Linux good (the users' freedom).
Because the distinction matters. The corporate raping of Linux has to stop being tolerated or else nothing is solved. The technical details of the kernel don't actually matter; the licensing and openness is what matters. Hell, if the Windows NT kernel got magically relicensed to AGPLv3 tomorrow it would instantly become the superior option just because of that.
Linux doesn't fucking matter. Copyleft matters.
Sigh. This kind of nonsense is why so many people get scared away from even trying linux. Who cares which distro you use, as long as it is linux it is a step in the right direction, and a whole lot of people (including myself) have taken that step very recently, despite some arrogant linux bros doing their best to gatekeep us away from even trying.
People just need to install lubuntu or some Linux distribution on their pc. Tech companies for years have forced consumer upgrades for average pc users when it wasn’t necessary.
I have a photo company in my town that still ruins dos off of windows 95 and has internet for email on windows 2000s for their point of sale machines is all dos. Even dot matrix printers. I was born in 1984 and remember this. Shows you don’t need the latest tech
That's great for the folks who have access to decades-old pre-enshittification technology and the means to maintain it, but what about everybody else?
Continuing my smart TV OS analogy, your answer is like saying just to use a dumb TV instead. There aren't any dumb TVs anymore! The TV manufacturer cartel colluded to quit making them!
"Just go live in the fucking woods like the goddamn Unabomber, eschewing modern technology" is not a valid solution for normal people! The law must be changed to protect them from predatory abusive corporations.
i use my tv as secondary display on my desktop and run anything i want to watch from it.
Continuing my smart TV OS analogy, your answer is like saying just to use a dumb TV instead. There aren’t any dumb TVs anymore! The TV manufacturer cartel colluded to quit making them!
Yes there are, every smart tv becomes dumb as soon as you disconnect it from the internet. Just use it the same way you would use a monitor for your computer.
The CNC machines I run at work run from windows xp. IT disconnected them from the network, so I have to get.dxf files from my engineer on a thumb drive to program machining paths from. Ain't that progress? No it's lazy.
Tizen is actually pretty fun to hack tbh
I have a computer capable of outputting video like 5 different ways: over the internet, near-field EM, HDMI, yadda
I just want a fucking standards compatible dumb screen
I heard a talk a few days ago, and the fella said that if you want a non-smart monitor, you'll need to pay somewhat more for what he called an 'industrial monitor'. He said the 'smart TV' is cheaper because of all the data it'll collect, and they can sell that data to make the price-to-the-user lower. (Don't know for myself, my old Samsung monitor's only smarts were to send data out to one URL, and I was able to change that URL to a site that doesn't exist.)
Pi hole is required internet safety
There's gotta be a market for taking cheap smart TVs, replacing the guts with dumb tv, and reselling it, right?
I get tut-tutted by other Linux nerds for this a lot, but I think Linux is impersonal in a different way because it simply demands more of the user. Sure, it gives freedom, but that freedom comes with responsibility, and a lot of people just are like "ain't nobody got time for that!" Which I think is a valid way to feel.
I've been a developer for decades. I've contributed to FOSS code and do a lot of my own development.
I just want a desktop that works. No fuss.
Yes I could compile my own x11 (and have) but I would rather spend my time doing my own shit than trying to stand up a new VM for some edge issue I'm having.
Just...just give me a UI I can use.
It's why I use Ubuntu.
In a lot of ways it's been like this for a long time. I recall back in 2007 when Vista was breaking everything, I installed Ubuntu and was shocked that there were zero driver issues. Even the fucking printer worked. Printers never work!
It's only gotten better since.
Freedom and taking ownership (responsibility) for one's actions go hand in hand.
People irritated at having to make their own choices don't get to then be mad that choices are being made for them when they outsource that decision making process, imo.
I agree. Linux has come a long way, and I love using it. But its definitely not for everybody.
Many times I just don't want to do something because I don't want to invest the time. I also get that there's a GUI that is very capable, but then why is the terminal easier sometimes?
I also need to look up everything I do. That's probably me just being a noob but I can never look through the system and figure out how to do something. Everything I do is an internet search first, then an implementation. Again, probably just lack of knowledge on my part but comparing that to the average Windows user, I can see the allure of adding AI to just do things you ask it to. Time is valuable and if you're not invested into your system then its not worth it to most.
Self hosting doesn’t make you immune, though. See how Plex evolved, for example. Self hosting plus free software that isn’t abandoned or compromised is the way, but idealistic developers need to take bread to the table too.
So the way maybe is self-hosted + libre software + a non-profit supporting the project. And that can too be corrupted, for example, the Mozilla Foundation and Google’s influence.
Always be ready to migrate.
This is why permissive licensing isn't good enough; copyleft is essential. (And not just GPLv2 copyleft, but copyleft with anti-tivoization and cloud loophole protection as well, such as AGPLv3.) Every part of the system -- the tech itself, the management, and the legal/business structure -- has to be designed to resist being subverted against the user.
Always be ready to migrate.
or be ready to contribute to the project you use, so they don't have to sell out to google.
or be ready to contribute to the project you use, so they don’t have to sell out to google.
that may happen despite your contributing or not
you can also have car accident with or without alcohol, but that doesn't mean that dui is good idea.
Ive contributed to several projects, code and translation, but you can really expect every user to be a programmer, or every programmer to contribute to every piece of software they use.
Besides, contribution is not a protection from capture, just look at MySQL.
Ive contributed to several projects, code and translation, but you can really expect every user to be a programmer,
i meant contributing with money. contributing code is nice, but that doesn't help them to pay for electricity.
Oh yeah linux people have been building like crazy these past 10 years.
Sometimes the user experience is so slick its boring. But the great past of.linux is even when the usage is simple I can always tweak it or modify it to my exact liking.
On Mac it either works nicely or I'm fucked.
They've been really holding back until now.
I switched to gOS and had to go back for NFC payments and auto.
It is great to see though, those are just necessities for me. Having gone back, I can say I hate pixel launcher and can't even change keyboard
I'm genuinely curious, what makes NFC a necessity? And what do you mean by auto?
I don't carry a wallet, and card contactless is limited to like 50. Can't even do the weekly shop.
Android Auto for driving is difficult to get working, I see gOS can do it but I couldn't get it to work.
It's been a while since I got mine set up and working, but IIRC all I had to do was install Android Auto from the preinstalled GrapheneOS App Store app
I'm just starting that journey .. Graphene is dope once you learn your way around
My favorite feature is honestly so simple. Denying network permissions during install.
I'm literally building my set-up...I love having apps but a profile without Google play!
The poor user experience is intentional. Compare FireTV to AppleTV. Everything about FireTV is carefully designed to coerce you into spending money. Easy access to the content you already have doesn’t make money, so the UX serves Amazon, not you. Apple does it, too, but with a more subtlety.
I agree, big tech should be trust busted to oblivion
Sure, I might own the hardware
Not for long. The goal seems to be to make RAM, flash memory, and GPU's so expensive that most consumers will need to purchase low-powered client devices and subscribe to cloud computing business models. It's a handful of companies who are cornering the markets, controlling the supply, and seeking rents.
I don't really see that happen. It would mean developers (or crappy AI code generators) would have to write efficient code for the low-powered client devices. The web is basically already other people's computers and look how memory hungry browsers are, or maybe more specifically the websites/apps that run in the browsers.
I bet it'll be more like a subscription for an LLM upgrade, since they're shoving "AI" into the OS, it'll need a bit of local processing power but then you pay to connect it to a beefier server
We well make some new companies
Linux does. Not all, but a lot, and more every day.
It's been years now, and it still hits me sometimes how insanely nice it is that my computers now work the way I want them to.
Yeah, that was an unexpected nice thing about switching to Linux, though also the whole point. Like I knew that I wanted to take control back over my computer and OS, but I was surprised at just how much nicer it is when defaults are set without any profit incentive. There just wasn't "spend time disabling MS attempts to get me to use their other software" or "dig deep for how to change a setting MS would really rather you don't change" periods and it made me realize that that was where I'd spend a majority of the "computer maintenance" time on windows.
I've hated and avoided 11 since I first experienced it. After Xmas I had to help setup my parents new PC. It of course is win 11. I spent so much fucking time getting that shit just to a usable state. I'm more convinced than ever to fuck off from MS for good.
remind me about the odds on whether a specific distro will work with my gpu or cpu
odds are pretty good these days, and if you're worried dont switch now, but next time you buy hardware buy it with the intention that you may switch and opt for some Linux friendly hardware, which is pretty simple - avoid nvidia and realtek (avoid realtek on windows too if I'm being honest), make sure things are compatible with standards.
What's Realtek done? I haven't kept up on them.
Older stuff, nearly 100%. New stuff, still really high to nearly 100%. The only place you'll run into trouble is with devices made with only windows drivers etc. So things like a USB label printer or glucose monitor or something like that.
Computer hardware though, very unlikely to see an issue. Servers use both the CPU and GPU. And most servers run some flavor of Linux.
Gamer's nexus did a great testing breakdown with Bazzite in a lot of different hardware configs.
Nvidia GPUs are all over the place in expected performance, AMD and Intel just worked from what I remember.
Odds?
Just look it up, or tell me what you have.
Regardless of what you have, the "odds" are good.
If you have something unusual that causes problems, that's too bad, but it doesn't stop the rest of us from having a good time. And now that I'm on linux, I can make sure something will work before I buy it, and if it doesn't, I can return it.
It's only at the time of when you switch you need to think about whether your existing hardware will work.
it says created for windows vista on the front if that helps
What's so hard about C:\users\skisnow, it's pretty intuitive. Also I don't think that has changed for almost 2 decades now. (XP was last I remember it being different).
Unless your talking about OneDrive or some shit.
What’s so hard about C:\users\skisnow, it’s pretty intuitive
Except it only plays out like that if you follow their entire plan for how you want to structure your files and do it exactly how they want. Yessir, I put my pictures in Pictures and my documents in Documents and my music in Music and my videos in Videos like a good boy and everything is taken care of, until the moment I have to do something very very slightly different to Microsoft's plan for my life, like get a second SDD or install one of the many many many applications out there that prefer to put themselves in the top level directory and store their own data in there.
Unless your talking about OneDrive or some shit.
You mean the OneDrive that gets bundled with every Windows along with an account that you have to really fight the computer to not give you? Why wouldn't I be including that?
You can move your home folder anywhere you want, like the second SSD you mentioned. This can be done with both a GUI and the command prompt. I'm forced to use a Mac OS for work, and use linux for my devices. But file systems on Windows are easy. Complaining about forced injections of ads or ai makes sense, but their file system is fine.
I'm working towards something like that. I'm hoping to ultimately drop the smartphone altogether, and I've set my current phone's end of life (2027ish?) as the goal.
I think the other thing that's necessary to keep the same sense of connectedness is a device to receive notifications, and I have an open source smartwatch I want to program for that. I've been working on a notification server too (kind of like Gotify), but at the moment it's a work in progress
I haven't committed to doing it full time, but I've had a GPD Win Max 2 for a few months now. A little 10 inch laptop that actually has solid new AMD internals. Love it so far
Honestly I do this a lot. Not a bad experience overall. Phone planes for hotspots suck in the US IMHO. Calyx's hotspot device was better, but I had device issues with them from time to time
Huh
Maybe it's different in other countries, but why would there be a different allowance for tethered/hotspot data?
Surely unlimited means unlimited and it makes no difference whether the ones and zeros go to a phone or something connected to it?
I've never had any problems
In the US it's typical to have to pay extra for hotspot privilege. There are ways around this by obfuscating the IP of downstreat devices, but by default the android "hotspot" feature places nice with carriers and will even fail to start if it isn't authorized.
I think the logic would be that it's easier to use more data on a computer and while using multiple devices. On my phone I sometimes get full speeds while tethered, and sometimes get half a Mbps.
Yes but they're like $60 a month
I'm no tech expert and I haven't done this for a while so don't know if that change but they were more packet loss/errors (not sure proper terms, not English native). For most files this isn't an issue but was for more sensitive ones like programs/iso...
Battery also suffered more from this used, keeping phone charged while tethering wasn't good due to battery management system. But things could have changed.
Last point is that bad weather does affect cellphone reception.
I mean tech innovation has been stale for a long time, even with hardware remember how the CPU market was before Ryzen? Completely dead, Intel was sitting on it's morals doing nothing because they were owning the market 10 to 1, but even now that I've got my i7-10700 I don't see any point in upgrading.
Software side? It's a mess companies will always be greedy, just today I wanted to upscale something with the cloud because my PC is great for 90% of the things I want to do, Upscaling is not one of those but guess what Topaz asks for credits in order to use their servers, yes CREDITS, so I said bye bye. I've also said bye bye to Adobe and moved on with Davinci Resolve.
sitting on it’s morals
Assuming that's not a typo, the phrase is "sitting on its laurels".
And they definitely have no morals
For upscaling, check out chaiNNer: https://github.com/chaiNNer-org/chaiNNer
And openmodeldb: https://openmodeldb.info/
It’s quite possible your PC can do it with Vulkan just fine, and if not, you can rent something online pretty cheap.
Also, for video processing, if you know any Python check out vapoursynth.
This highlights the problem: the primary obstacle to a lot of software enshittification is accessibility, and discoverability.
Once something like Topaz or Premiere gets SEO, it starves all the other cool efforts out there as they get buried under spam.
What people want often exists. They just don’t know it, or it’s too technically demanding to set up and no one is “in the middle” packaging enthusiast experiments to be accessible.
I don’t know how to solve this either. The open internet is getting worse, niches are moving to Discord, and it feels like people are losing patience to really dig for cool stuff. Heck, I see some open source efforts spin up, with thousands of man hours dumped in, without even a cursory check to see what they want already exists and is looking for contributors.
Honestly this is more complicated as I'm looking for something that just works, maybe I'll set it up later and yeah I've got an AMD GPU so upscaling is much much slower.
See: https://openmodeldb.info/docs/faq
The GUIs are basically just as plug-and-play as Topaz.
bye bye to Adobe and moved on with DaVinci Resolve.
This is the way. I skipped Adobe entirely due to how they conduct business. I really wish Resolve had better Linux support though. Like, it works and I use it, but having to use a third party tool (make resolve deb) is ridiculous.
Additionally, Gimp is just not on the level of Photoshop, at least from what I understand, I've never used photoshop. I mostly long for smart select tools where I can, for example, just circle a person and have them selected. Also, content aware fill would be incredibly nice to have. Of course neither of those things are worth shoveling money out of my wallet into Adobe's.
Affinity Photo 3 is also free and it's kind of like Photoshop, I haven't tried it yet but I've heard good things
I think that's the reason why I always change the operating systems of my devices – Fedora Linux for my PCs and custom ROMs for my phone. The stock ones don't feel "personal enough" to me anymore.
You don't even hold the hardware if it's not user repairable, customizable or upgradable
Repairability isn't about the physical realities of executing the repair - that's a user end problem to be solved and people are often eager to tackle those.
It's about the manufacturer not being allowed to explicitly make design decisions that make it intentionally harder to do so than is strictly necessary as a side effect of the basic design.
I'm taking at a device level not at a component level, think mackbook vs framework laptop
The other day my spouse was trying to watch a movie on prime I think it was, it started by playing an advertisement for the movie she chose to watch. I told her a copy was on the jellyfin server. She said I pay for this so I want to use it. It hit a 2 min 40 second ad break a little later and I saw her glare at me out of the corner of my eye, I chose to pretend to watch the commercial and not look at her, didn't want that conversation.
Our devices are no longer fully under our control, it's not a "feeling".
Big Tech keeps building smarter devices
Smarter or just louder?
They aren't building things for our benefit, they're building things for their benefit. All the idiots who gleefully bought devices with surveillance and tracking and data collection, normalized it. Now everyone has to use some of this shit or their life suffers. The masses showed them they can take from our private lives whatever they want and the masses of fucking morons will happily pay them to do it. Why the hell would they stop taking when the consumer market has lost any sense of caution?
Repost: The power and influence of billionaire tech companies over the government is enormous. Ofcourse workers/users don't get any (privacy) rights in america, none is lobbying for them lol, nobody in Washington is fighting for us
- A measure you would normally impose on convicted criminals or terrorist leaders is now being used by the U.S. against these three people:
- former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was responsible for European legislation including on social media;
- Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, who researches online hate, A US judge has temporarily blocked the detention of this British social media campaigner Imran Ahmed, who took legal action against the US government over having his visa removed. Mr Ahmed, a US permanent resident, had warned that being detained and possibly deported would tear him away from his American wife and child. 😳;
- and Clare Melford, who maps disinformation with her organization.
- Trumps inauguration lmao
their power and influence wont stop 100 million people breaking down their gates, grabbing them out of their beds, and throwing them into woodchippers.
I’m holding my breath, do it quickly.
The irl villains we're dealing with took inspiration from Bond... or vise versa.
Seriously, Tomorrow Never Dies and Quantum of Solace have pretty obvious real world examples.
Maybe Golden Eye would be nice, but only because they wanted to destroy the banks while robbing them.
The supreme irony of that message coming from Windows Central...
Have the day you paid for.
Because soulless ghouls can only pretend to be human.
I've been on Linux since 2016, and I'm honestly useless at Windows Administration now.
It's not just that, but a lot of software feels awful to use. It feels like when Cable stations would just start airing Infomercials (maybe they still do) late at night, trying to sell you things you don't need. Using modern software unfiltered is an onslaught of advertising, and pressure. It's not fun.
We need to stop supporting them. We’re just helping them build their empire to leave us behind sooner than later.
No no absolutely not Big Tech built a large spy network and now all of your lives are hot linked to every CEO across the planet.
Yeah it sucks. The more people that educate and switch others to open source community-run stuff the better. There is also https://alternativeto.net/, and https://european-alternatives.org/ for helping people find open source projects just have to search online if it is corpo or community-run
IF ITS too manage AI, no its not innovation at all.
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What innovation? The user experience hasn't undergone significant innovation (improvement) in the last decade
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