This. No matter how convenient and useful current smartphones are in daily life, there's always the nagging discomfort by knowing you are carrying a half-nefarious spying device. One where even the so-called reputable vendors can't be trusted to not put in malicious adware, planned obsolecense, and do everything in their power to ensure you don't really own the thing.
About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to.
By contrast, whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates. The OS suggests things to me I have no interest in. When I want to use Microsoft software, I have to log into accounts for some reason, which often means a round trip through email to reset the password. Once Windows even changed firmware settings without asking me which broke things in Linux.
The best things about Linux are not what it does, but what it doesn't do. I want this for my phone as well.
Do you? I don't. Microsoft is exclusively profit-oriented, they'll sell all your information in a heartbeat if they believe to have a legal way to do it and that it won't kill them in the next 5 years.
A group of open source maintainers (the more radical the better) will not. They will (usually) not polish the product as well, and they might be difficult to deal with if you found an issue (but you _can_ talk to them, unlike Microsoft).
I definitely trust open source people more, because they do their thing for ideological reasons and based on principles, not to maximize engagement and ad-spend and their yearly bonus.
This is why it's way more dangerous to give data to even open source apps that are encrypted and secure because if they ever do change your privacy policy and you don't pay attention to it, they could say they start selling your data and you continue to agree to it.
Have you really thought through that all the way?
Google has actually went even further in making it transparent where they show every bit of data they have on you. You can delete it all review it all have it auto delete, they don't need any of it
I'm running about 10 windows 10 machines, various builds, auto updates enabled. Some in a domain, some in a workgroup. The last time an update bricked a system, or even broke a feature, must be over a year ago.
Now on Ubuntu, I have the same experience as some other posters. I'm reasonably confident that I can update if I do it semi regularly. But the number of times I've experienced breakage that lead to hours of bugfixing during $DAYJOB, is way too high. Now everything is in its own tightly controller docker, no more random breakage (unless docker breaks, or a key expires...).
A debian 9 apt upgrade actually managed to render my install inoperable once. But that might be semi-unfair as it had to do with graphics drivers.
Are you running windows systems on semi-recent hardware? Or is it all decades old thinkpad laptops with shitty thirdparty drivers?
The same paranoia applies to my MacBook Pro as well that was provided by work. All user generated content gets backed up regularly to aid recovery if things go north.
If anything Google is so far ahead they are advocating more privacy and less data being sent if you choose, because they don't sell it directly to people like a local grocery store with its own app or Amazon does.
Federated learning AI is basically making it where Google can continue to have all the benefits of massive data mining without any personal information ever having to leak out
The parts involved with spying on you will update regardless of what you want or say. Unless of course you're not using the play store (or any other google services).
It's a huge advocate of keeping all my data private but now knowing how useful it is to anonymize, encrypt and use it all on my device with things like Google Pay, I strongly advocate if you're using Google or Samsung services to update.
Plus these updates usually are Android level and not related to Samsung or Google
My experience with Linux on the Desktop is that it wants to install updates. It doesn't force me to install updates, which I appreciate. However, eventually I also want to install updates. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions these updates have rendered the system unbootable. This is not a worthwhile tradeoff.
This has never happened to me with Windows. I'm aware that it does happen to some users, but I have trouble believing that I'm just really unlucky with Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora.
If you want modern-looking LTS, try KDE Neon.
Across well over a decade of using Apt on Debian, Ubuntu & Mint, the amount of times I have seen Apt crash, is never. By contrast I have seen Apt tasks fail leaving packages partially installed. If relevant, it may seem a trivial, semantic difference, but I think it is a little more important than that.
Following the typical Microsoft paradigm of 'just reboot and hope for the best' will rarely result in the desired outcome, and in the case of something like grub could well end up with a system that will not boot.
For me a key difference in this case, is I have never encountered an unbootable Linux system (outside of hardware issues), that I could not fix with some basic tools. I can't say the same of Microsoft products (Personally, I don't consider a fresh install a fix :) ).
Are these "updates" or "upgrades"? If the problems are with updates, I would say that your experience is not typical of most Linux users.
Its a shame that you are having problems because the modern Linux experience is pretty slick.
I don't think you can blame linux, it's just a specific distro trying to do a task which is too hard and fail.
Not sure if it's still the case with ubuntu, I just run Arch which is a rolling release distro; I decide when to upgrade and what it implies + their info on breaking updates is always punctual.
No, of course you can't but that's also the problem. It's always someone else's fault.
If you try to upgrade Ubuntu you're told to RTFM. If you try to upgrade Raspbian, you're told you should have just installed a new image.
Linux distros routinely offer up options and features that do not work and there's no responsibility to be had.
With Windows, it's Microsoft's fault and they fix it (eventually).
I've never once ran into an issue with Fedora.
Fedora (at around version 20 iirc) was the absolute worst in my experience. I haven't used it since.
Saying "linux" has a poor update process or stability issues is meaningless.
> If, for example, you are running Arch Nightly and constantly pulling in the latest and greatest features, you're likely to see some stability issues. If you're using something like Ubuntu LTS, you'll miss out on a few new bells and whistles, but you'll get a very stable OS.
"You're doing it wrong, if you did it right it would work"
That's true of software in general. You can use (often older) more stable tech and lose access to some newer features, or you can used the latest and greatest and get a few more features and accept a reduction in stability in exchange.
IME, there's a lot of talking past each other when it comes to OSes. The vastly superior experience that Linux fans describe requires a couple of one-time boxes to be ticked, like constraining yourself to known compatible hardware platforms and stable software versions. There are plenty of people who don't realize this dynamic exists and trip over it, and it's not dodging the question to make them aware of these limitations and let them decide whether the cost/benefit fits their situation. Eg, in my case, I like Thinkpads, don't game, and need a stable, reliable, and performant system that I can be productive on. The pitfalls of Linux don't affect me personally, and I obviously can't meet the needs I describe with a Windows system (or to a lesser extent, OS X).
[1] I hear this is getting much better with things like Valve's Proton, but I assume that Linux is still far worse than Windows for a dedicated PC gamer that wants to play new games.
I'm not trying to bash on Linux, merely point out that for everything it does right there's just as much it does wrong. The same is true of Windows and MacOS.
And to be fair, updates broke my Windows systems multiple times in the past as well. This isn't really a problem by itself since errors and mistakes happen, the problem is that the state of recovery tools in both systems is somewhat lacking. Linux can be repaired from Live USB and has Timeshift, but it doesn't have an easily accessible built-in rescue environment that's actually useful. Windows has DaRT, but all decent Live USB's for it are third-party and it's very hard to repair its internals if the existing tools don't work. FreeBSD is probably the closest to being bulletproof, but it has its own problems.
"Unlucky" is probably the wrong word, since I doubt all those failures were independent, but you're presumably in some niche with a high probability of update failure (just as the users failing their Windows updates are). For a counter anecdote, I've used Linux laptops/workstations (primarily Debian/Ubuntu, but dabbled in others) exclusively for 15 years and have never had an update break _anything_.
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's a hardware compatibility issue? Linux can still be a _terrible_ experience relative to Windows if you have strong opinions about the hardware you want to use. IME, all the people who talk about Linux being a vastly superior user experience to OS X/Windows are those whose hardware preferences line up with good Linux support.
Lucky you! When this happened to me with Windows last time, I had no idea what to do and how to diagnose it even though I spent a lot of time on it and had the knowledge of all of the Internet available. I had to reinstall and painstakingly redo my whole setup.
When it happened to me with GNU/Linux, it gave me enough rope to actually debug what happened, so I could fix it and get back to where I was before. And I went through several Ubuntu and Debian dist-upgrades, and now I'm even using Arch which is a rolling distro that's somewhat expected to break from time to time.
So sure, it does happen more often than it did on Windows - but I don't think I actually waste more time with that than I did when using Windows.
Its time to upgrade your PC. Now. We don't care you're running a presentation. yeah We'll let you delay it... for now.
Its time to dim your screen. We don't care if you're reading a recipe while you cook. No we won't put a widget to allow this temporarily. We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later.
Its time for feature X to not work or not exist anywhere. We don't care that it worked in the old version. We don't like it.
> We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later.
A criticism of the Settings App as it stands today based on your usage of it a year ago is very unfair as it's continuously improving and evolving.
How do you know his/her opinion is based on year-old usage?
As MS has slowly whittled down and removed features from the Control Panel, they have simultaneously added analogs where appropriate in the Settings App. The Settings App in 20H2 is very different and far from useless when compared to what shipped a year ago, or when Windows 10 launched.
You shouldn't need a third-party utility for re-disabling settings after updates, and it's pretty clear at this point that Microsoft just doesn't give a damn about respecting the user's choices.
There are settings that only apply to some "apps", there are "app wide settings", there are important settings hidden 4 layers deep under some category where one would never suspect them to be.
Then there's the fact that MS has the tendency to just silently revert settings, often privacy and telemetry related, after updates. On that end, Windows 10 very much feels like it's actively working against the user, it feels like you are only a tolerated guest on your own system.
This is so user-hostile it's not even funny. Imagine if you had someone in your life who silently went back on agreements when you weren't looking. You would work to remove them from your life as soon as possible.
My roommate in college refused the Windows update request enough times that it just took the decision out of his hands and _told_ him it was rebooting...in the middle of a LAN Starcraft game we were having. (Hilariously, Starcraft also ran perfectly on my Wine/Ubuntu and had all sort of weird bugs and visual artifacts on his Vista/7)
I truly can't imagine how anyone can consider a system that reboots without your consent, no matter whether you're playing Starcraft or giving a presentation or launching nuclear warheads, to be appropriate for serious work. It seems like one of the very basic jobs of an OS to _not turn off while you might be doing something important_. Perhaps the answer is as simple as "there's a setting buried somewhere that all technically-literate Windows users change", but the default behavior is beyond insane.
With all the editions and versions of Windows 10, there doesn't appear to be a single definitive answer to that.
I for one settled on https://github.com/marcosbozzani/Win10ActiveHours , which prevents reboots by scheduling a task to update Windows' own "Active Hours" twice a day.
But wow, phones and computers nowadays are like a giant steamroller, squashing users common sense, interests and privacy.
Maybe, even probably, no one have any nefarious motives behind the latest changes, but someone decided that if I want to upgrade my system now I have to start using systemd-resolve, and while I can and probably will alter it so it won't bother me, I wouldn't be installing it on my own.
Also, Firefox is the king of unwanted changes with little to no warnings, and while technically it isn't Linux, one day an innocent yum or dnf update install just killed my customized setup, flagged all my beloved addons as unsupported, and left them in disabled state.
>whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates
Yeah, it is really nice to have a consistent interface. But there is a flip side. Sometimes, people have to change in light of new security problems, and these sometimes need to be done quickly. The most obnoxious of these updates are interface changes (both UI and API). I think Windows does this too much and maybe for non-security related issues. The only real example I can think of is how OpenSSL uses envelope functions because ppl would abuse the primitives [Source: Alexandra Boldyreva, Christopher Patton, Thomas Shrimpton: Hedging Public-Key Encryption in the Real World].
May I inquire about the name of this app? Is it desktop-environment specific?
Definitely a refreshing feeling compared to the use of a million cloud services.
You nerd-sniped me there. I'm now trying to come up with some consistent metric of the nefariousness fraction of a product/service...
What I feel when using Android.
This will never happen. Personal radio communication is innocuous compared to what a modern cell phone is, yet personal radio communication is heavily restricted since decades.
Maybe we will eventually see an open source radio stack and truly open source apps. This will only happen once surveillance and kill switches have been moved to another layer.
A cell phone will never be on our side, it is far to dangerous.
If you’re contrasting it with the HAM/Shortwave community, there’s an obvious difference in transmission power. The Electromagnetic Spectrum is a public resource we have to share intelligently. All the core tech in a cell phone is about how to use spectrum efficiently, delivering high speeds with minimal interference. Shortwave is much less sophisticated and operates at much higher power. There are real costs to amateur radio enthusiasts blasting transmissions with incorrectly configured equipment.
You could use proof-carrying code or reproducible artifacts to keep the radio stack out of the users' control while still making it obvious what it is that radio stack does.
The BIOS analog would then only accept radio code that behaves in a particular way, but it would be clear from the (open) source that the radio code is not spying on you.
Radio firmwares can be open source. It's a red herring.