Comment by goku12
4 days ago
No thanks! It makes sense for them, not for us. Their rent seeking behavior, locking down of the OS and hardware and their hostility towards the FOSS mod community and users have all worsened lately. The only reason why they ever revisit such 'features' is a massive backlash from the community. Then again, history has shown that they try to smuggle them back in some other form.
Desktop and laptop are the last standing bastions of user modifiability and general purpose computing. The situation on smartphones is so desparate that I type this message on a half-crippled Android installation, hopelessly wishing that it was Linux in here instead. I don't mind sacrifing some convenience and functionality for a while while the devs figure out how to iron out the shortfalls of Linux on smartphones. I absolutely don't want to concede that same ground on desktops and laptops. We deserve at least some devices that we can experiment and modify to our liking.
I know that if the trillion dollar corporation is out for it, they will force it down the throats of naive people or those who don't know any better. Soon afterwards, the rest of us will have two options - a dwindling supply of heavily modified and refurbished used configurable systems, or locked down, dumbed down machines with arbitrary restrictions like everyone else. At least until then, I believe that it's well worth resisting the invasion of freedoms for as long as we can.
I share your fears, but I think the premise itself is valid. The project should be done, but fully Open Source.
I'd love to have Android (well, GrapheneOS) style sand-boxing for every app, I'd love to have it's granular permissions for every service. I'd love to have the battery management, the unified settings UI, the effortless disk encryption UX, ect. Who's using power, who's using data, who accessed the microphone 10 minutes ago?
Could this all be re-implemented in a Linux distribution? Sure, SE Linux is there. But it would take a long time to get to the same level of UX, and almost certainly fracture across different desktop environments.
Thanks, I completely agree with you! It seems that most people here will happily trade their freedom for some convenience by just handing their digital lives to Google though, which to me is crazy, but apparently how the majority thinks.
Yes. The big red flag here is that these are people who should know better. Not like the ordinary folks who may be ignorant about it to some extend.
I wish I could upvote this comment more than once. I'm appalled it's got a negative score. Are we not on Hacker News?
What the fuck happened to this community?
To be very honest, I'm not surprised. This has been a growing tendency recently. I have also noticed a few brand new accounts whose entire comments are praises for certain controversial actions by some corporations.