I always wonder where the line is for the majority of people, maybe there isn’t one and they know it. You’ve got to hand it to Microsoft nearly 30 years and they still have the majority.
I agree, I don’t think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they’re still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don’t care at all. They’ll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there’s no evidence to suggest that they’ll ever stop.
One of the biggest “mistakes” Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there’s a good chance that it’s not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.
It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.
This is the same false analogy people make as to why Americans drive giant trucks to shift blame… it’s not the manufacturers who are pushing these cars to circumvent taxes, it is the users for demanding it.
Very few people actually like these invasive shit Microsoft pulls, but the vast majority either do not know about them, understand them or feel they have another choice. For example, I hate MS, I understand what dog shit this Recall feature is, yet my job will provide a Windows machine with it and I have no choice but to use it.
I am a nerd so at home I do have everything running on Linux. But for the majority of people that would be a unknown option or just an unobtainable one
To most people, using a PC is like mopping a floor, or cleaning a car. It’s a boring - even unpleasant - task that you need to do every once in a while. They’d rather be on their phone or their iPad.
When you already view using your PC as a chore, and some Linux user says to you “hey, if you spend a day backing up all your files, creating an install USB, installing Linux, reinstalling your programs (and finding alternatives for those that aren’t available), logging back in to everything, moving your data back across, and relearning how to use a PC, it’ll be worth it in the long run!”, you will just ignore their advice. It’s easier just to say “nah, I only occasionally need my PC when I want to update my CV or write a long email anyway. Thanks for the suggestion though!”
They put up with an hour or two of MS’s bullshit every few months. They don’t like it, but they also don’t care enough about putting effort in so that in future, the chore of using a PC only feels half as bad. At the end of the day, either way, it’s still a chore, and they’d still rather be on their phone/tablet/doing something else entirely.
In the same way, they also don’t care enough about ultimately saving 10 mins every month when they clean their car to go out of their way and do the initial work of claybar-ing, polishing, then waxing it.
I use Linux. I like Linux. But I’m just another Lemmy nerd, not an average PC user.
Yes, small things could quickly put ordinary people off Linux with the current state of software. I’m involved in running an organization that needs to submit reports regularly to the government using their online forms. Unfortunately the forms are PDFs that only seem to work in recent versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Any other software results in a more or less broken form. I haven’t yet found anything in Linux (even on Wine) that handles these forms properly. So sometimes I have to use Windows.
For me there are still enough benefits to using Linux that I continue with it as my main OS, but for most people they’d quickly get annoyed by obstacles like this. Of course the government shouldn’t be using one company’s proprietary format that only runs on commercial OSes for their forms, but that’s the way it is for now.
There is no such thing as a line, it seems to be a long gradient and its about how fast you move on the gradient. If you ever so slightly introduce more and more crap slowly enough, people don’t care as they forget how good they had it much earlier.
I always wonder where the line is for the majority of people, maybe there isn’t one and they know it. You’ve got to hand it to Microsoft nearly 30 years and they still have the majority.
I agree, I don’t think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they’re still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don’t care at all. They’ll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there’s no evidence to suggest that they’ll ever stop.
One of the biggest “mistakes” Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there’s a good chance that it’s not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.
It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.
This is the same false analogy people make as to why Americans drive giant trucks to shift blame… it’s not the manufacturers who are pushing these cars to circumvent taxes, it is the users for demanding it.
Very few people actually like these invasive shit Microsoft pulls, but the vast majority either do not know about them, understand them or feel they have another choice. For example, I hate MS, I understand what dog shit this Recall feature is, yet my job will provide a Windows machine with it and I have no choice but to use it.
I am a nerd so at home I do have everything running on Linux. But for the majority of people that would be a unknown option or just an unobtainable one
This is the thing Lemmy nerds don’t understand:
For most people, using a PC is a chore.
To most people, using a PC is like mopping a floor, or cleaning a car. It’s a boring - even unpleasant - task that you need to do every once in a while. They’d rather be on their phone or their iPad.
When you already view using your PC as a chore, and some Linux user says to you “hey, if you spend a day backing up all your files, creating an install USB, installing Linux, reinstalling your programs (and finding alternatives for those that aren’t available), logging back in to everything, moving your data back across, and relearning how to use a PC, it’ll be worth it in the long run!”, you will just ignore their advice. It’s easier just to say “nah, I only occasionally need my PC when I want to update my CV or write a long email anyway. Thanks for the suggestion though!”
They put up with an hour or two of MS’s bullshit every few months. They don’t like it, but they also don’t care enough about putting effort in so that in future, the chore of using a PC only feels half as bad. At the end of the day, either way, it’s still a chore, and they’d still rather be on their phone/tablet/doing something else entirely.
In the same way, they also don’t care enough about ultimately saving 10 mins every month when they clean their car to go out of their way and do the initial work of claybar-ing, polishing, then waxing it.
I use Linux. I like Linux. But I’m just another Lemmy nerd, not an average PC user.
Yes, small things could quickly put ordinary people off Linux with the current state of software. I’m involved in running an organization that needs to submit reports regularly to the government using their online forms. Unfortunately the forms are PDFs that only seem to work in recent versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Any other software results in a more or less broken form. I haven’t yet found anything in Linux (even on Wine) that handles these forms properly. So sometimes I have to use Windows.
For me there are still enough benefits to using Linux that I continue with it as my main OS, but for most people they’d quickly get annoyed by obstacles like this. Of course the government shouldn’t be using one company’s proprietary format that only runs on commercial OSes for their forms, but that’s the way it is for now.
There is no such thing as a line, it seems to be a long gradient and its about how fast you move on the gradient. If you ever so slightly introduce more and more crap slowly enough, people don’t care as they forget how good they had it much earlier.
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