Comment by wartywhoa23
2 days ago
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
There is a couple more wild things here:
1) That there is an agenda, demand and total legal abetment from the top of the power/monetary hierarchy for such corporate policies
2) That there is a horde of individual employees working to those ends without any shadow of doubt, often even vice signaling their intent to be the first to attain the figurative A-bomb or full-blown BB telescreen.
A lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who decide to use it fall into two camps:
1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max
2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system
I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.
I have a reliable system running for years on a Surface Pro 2022, so not sure what your experience with Windows was. It does take a few tweaks to remove some of the junk but otherwise it is a solid work environment IMO. The same can be said of Linux, it can be a real PITA finding and configuring drivers for something that should not take more than a few seconds. So both environments can definitely be a shitty experience unless you know what you are doing.
> The same can be said of Linux, it can be a real PITA finding and configuring drivers for something that should not take more than a few seconds.
If you value your own dignity you should see that these scenarios are worlds apart. In one case you have a trillion-dollar company actively working against your own interests. On the other hand, you had some trouble finding drivers for a volunteer-driven project, which is a problem that you are actually empowered to fix.
I have been a decade long windows user (and still am), I administer a computer room with MacOS and use Linux. So I know all three pretty well.
Try reinstalling that surface pro with windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Windows is okay, but every update introduces new bullshit, bloatware, accounts you're forced to use, UI-changes. Linux is reliable in the sense that you can chose when and if you want to change things and there is always a way to do it the way you want to do it (something that is the big weakness of MacOS).
Additionally KDE Plasma is the best Desktop UI on all operating systems today. Scripting and automation on Linux is killer, ... The only reason for Windows/MacOS is certain software that doesn't performantly run on Linux (or if Linux scares you).
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I think it might be symptomatic of broader tech illiteracy: People don't know anything else or anything better. They want their software to Just Work, and ultimately the decision is made by an executive who decides that microsoft products are “the most stable” or “easiest” route.
I don't know if lobbied is the correct word, or they are directly bought.
Well some are, some are not. Some are simply invited to a nice dinner and given the hint that this might be a contact that gives them access to affluent circles. I have heard it all.
You forgot:
3. People who do not care and are not in IT or on Hacker News.
I doubt a lot of regular people care what Microsoft is doing. All they want is a laptop or PC that works or to be able to play their XBOX games.
3. People who play games.
Because alternatives are bad. After decades of being great, Linux gaming community finally gave up on it working and accepted emulation of Windows as the way to go. (No need to nitpick on tech specifics of how Wine works)
Gave up? There are more Linux games than ever. Most commercial games work fine on Linux now. Some through emulation of some sort, others completely natively, because most gamer engines support Linux natively, making it trivial to do so. And as a gamer, I can't really tell the difference between the two.
If you mean Linux-only classic open source games, like Angband or Battle for Wesnoth or something, they still exist, but the demand has clearly gone down because now almost all games work on Linux. Except the ones with anti-cheat systems that rootkit-style access to your system.
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Bad take, what actually happened was the realization that games wouldn't be released on Linux unless there were enough users there to warant it. Just as with ARM Windows not getting a single usable software when first released. What happened was Wine/Proton and FEX, with a lot of monetary input from Valve.
By allowing a lot of people who are willing to take a performance-hit to transition to Linux, they sow the grass-roots necessary for the game studios to release native games on Linux.
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You're saying this as if emulation (which Wine isn't really, more of a Win32 API compatibility layer; WINE literally stands for 'WINE Is Not an Emulator') was a bad thing. In reality, a lot of games benchmark better on Linux than on Windows today.
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What are you talking about? Lol, Linux gaming is fine and still growing.
Huh? I just finished Fallout 4 on Linux, a game that is famously unstable and it worked totally fine out of the box. Install steam, install Fallout, go.
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3) That half of HN works at these companies and loves to whitewash their conscience by commenting "look at how awful they are" on any company that's interpreted as 1% worse. You have MS devs who comment on Amazon who comment on Meta who comment on Palantir comment on Flock comment on NSO Group, as this is roughly the "perceived hierarchy".
If you're in US big tech you're working directly for the regime and fully complicit, end of.
That is true. We see that with Trump, where he tries to force the EU to open markets to the US corporations who will just steal data from EU citizens.
Why can't the EU learn more from Canada? Canada realised that with Trump there is no way to make a deal. So cut things down where possible, diversify - the EU still has to learn this lesson. In particular Germany is totally US-addicted - no idea why, other than, of course, the obvious answer ("we need to export into the USA", aka selfish greed from Germany here).
Because Germany is critically dependent on LNG imports from US.
" Gas covered a little more than a quarter of Germany’s primary energy use in 2025, making it the country’s second most important energy source. Germany is among the world’s biggest natural gas importers – around 95 percent of its gas consumption is met by imports, according to energy research data group AGEB. "
" Energy industry association BDEW said that Norway has now become Germany’s top gas supplier by far, with about 45 percent in 2025, transported by pipeline. Around one tenth of the gas used in the country arrives as liquefied natural gas (LNG) directly at one of four import terminals along the coast. In 2025, around 95 percent of that LNG came from the US. "
European countries are trading gas between them, we have to look into whole European imports. For example Germany is import lot of US gas through Belgium.
" Russia has continued to supply a sizeable portion of gas imports, although the EU has decided to fully phase them out by 2027. Most natural gas in a gaseous state was imported from Norway (52%), Algeria (20%), Russia (10%), and the UK (8%) in 2025. LNG came from the US (55%), Russia (14%), Qatar (9%), and Algeria (6%). "
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germany-eu-remain...
Canada isn’t that great either. We say one thing then do the opposite of that. Google is moving in to do age verification for Canadian services.
Can you name examples how the EU or Germany is US addicted? From my POV in central Europe this has changed long long long ago.
Doing some trading with a shitty country doesn't imply any dependency
Buying US helicopters when they've been developing one with France. But Germany has no choice: It has been literally occupied by the US forces and it's only recently that it has regained the right to have an army, but there are still 200k US troops in Germany (among other means of influence).
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