Of course Microsoft is evil. All companies are amoral machines driven only by profit. All basic search engines become more useless by the day, while Windows enshitifies in every way possible. The natural trajectory of all companies is monopoly, weakening all supposed benefits of capitalism by design. Capitalism requires heavy government intervention to ever benefit the customer, and by removing that as a viable option, liberal democracy has signed its own death warrant.
I wish personal choices could keep us safe from capitalism, but that will never be the case.
I didn't claim to be safe from capitalism, all I'm saying is that my operating system, browser, and most other software on my computer are community owned.
r/pcmasterrace on reddit is absolutely coping right now and members are attacking Linux users on sight
Holy shit, really? I have had some people genuinely try defend this by saying it's going to be done "on device" (kek) but holy shit.
Even if it's on device (lol), it is another of the resource hogs that microsoft loves
Requiring at least 50GBs of free space! Yeah, Microsoft’s spyware is exactly what I want to spend my storage on.
I found that thread because I was curious I've skimmed it and saw many instances of people going "but it's only on the snapdragon x chip", as if Intel and AMD aren't gonna release the same CPUs but capable of more AI shit
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TIL you can customize the icons on Libreddit.
Gonna have to check the docs -- can I make my own colorschemes??
Technically, not all corporations are evil.
For example, I'm a solo-entrepreneur and I own my own company/corporation and I'm the only one in it. I don't think I'm evil. (For now??)
But I get what you mean. I'm assuming evil comes with size, power and influence
i think the line generally comes specifically at "publicly traded company" that's when everything other than "line go up" is thrown out. publicly traded companies are inherently bad for everyone but those who invest in them.
privately held can be bad, but they aren't inherently so. it's possible for a decent person/idealogue to have a decent product that people want to buy at a fair price. they're just very easily beat out by bigger brands most of the time because they aren't ruthless like the big ones.
Nailed it.
There's a legal obligation to extract the most value for your shareholders. This doesn't apply in sole proprietorships or partnerships with a more centralized ownership, where there's the realistic potential to have a conversation with one of the others (or internally) and say things like "let's do y, because doing x would be fucked, even if it made me more money."
In a publicly traded company, you can literally be sued by your shareholders for not putting profits first. This puts a background pressure that slants the odds in favor of enshitification. And whole industries are based on utilizing slightly uneven odds, so that has a real impact.
As you said - without being publicly traded, people can still be evil, but they aren't nearly as likely.
You do have privately held companies that are owned/run by people who aren't complete shitbags until the ownership changes & it all go's to hell.
As am I. Also solo. I’ve talked to a ton of small business owners, and the difference between small business owners and corporations is you have to be willing to fuck people over to become more than “the little guy”. So, I think people like us are in the “not evil” category because our goals aren’t just to simply “make money line go up.” However, because of that, we will forever be “the little guy”
Yeah, exactly. I think it depends on your goals and aspiration.
The more a company/corporation grows, the more likely it is to become souless and evil.
For now, I'm a "little guy" and I love the freedom that comes with it. The moment you bring employees and people, then you have to start managing and stuff.
We'll see what the future holds.
Precisely. Best of luck to you my friend on your journey. Mine has been a wild ride and I’m not even a year into it.
Then you’d be a small business or company, but not necessarily a corporation, correct?
My understanding is that corporations are larger and generally public owned, and thereby focused solely on “line go up”
A corporation is simply a legal entity that anybody can register. You could have one tomorrow morning if you wished.
I do own a corporation, even if I'm alone. It's just that I own all the shares and equity privately. I'm also a business owner because I run a business with that corporation. But a business owner can also run a business without a corporation if he chooses to.
Now, you can do a lot of things with a corporation depending on your goals and aspirations. It has different rules, laws and purposes than a normal employee or a self-employed individual.
Examples: hire people, tax benefits, grow larger, own assets, sue and be sued, raise capital, loan/borrow money, go public, etc.
A corporation is what you make of it.
Guess I misunderstood the terms, then. I also thought corporations were taxed higher, is that not the case?
I wouldn't say higher but it is definitely different.
You might need to pay more tax because of double taxation. You are your own entity and the corporation is also an entity. This means that the corporation has to pay taxes on profits and you also have to pay taxes personally on the salary/dividend that you recieve.
But there are also other tricks to reduce or optimize taxes like tax reduction on business expenses.
When you're a business owner, you can usually optimize to pay the least amount of taxes possible with the help of an accountant. Things that you have less control when you're an employee.
When you hear large corporations and rich people not paying much taxes (if not at all), some are just being smart with their business and accountants.
That's so true. There was this time I was checking a Linux community here on Lemmy and someone made a post saying he was trying this new Linux distribution and said he was having fun with it. I genuinely asked what he meant by "having fun" and I received downvotes and no replies. Then, replied my own comment saying "Oh my, downvotes and no replies, what a lovely community" and my comment was modded out. That totally killed my interest in Linux.
Yeah people on the Internet tend to be very very jumpy at anyone It could very well have been that people just took your tone as condescending or whatever better adjective describes it. It isn't your fault
Yeah. Just got back for a 1 month ban from this community for transphobia when my attempt to call out J. K. Rowling for being transphobic was misread as defending her.
That was far from the only incident I've seen of people, especially on Lemmy, taking half of a comment out of context and getting mad at people for shit they didn't say. It's unfortunate.
No hate to the mods, especially seeing how common it is from everyday Lemmy users, but.. I'm just kinda sad.
Mint is pretty good at "it just works" thing and has a very friendly UI. It also comes with a few very handy tools developed in house by the Mint team (though these can be installed on other Debian/Ubuntu based distros). It's usually high on the list of recommended distros for people new to Linux or who just need general purpose computing without a lot of fuss.
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Seconding this. Along with the fact that Ubuntu wouldn't work properly when I tried it. I had an issue with the installer that prevented me from downloading anything. So I tried mint and it just worked.
So far I like it. All I want from my operating system is to just work & not spy on me/be secure.
Amoral for sure, but evil is relative I guess. A company can be both amoral and good when it is convenient to be.
Basically corporations are never your friend, but they can be less terrible if there is financial incentive. If this hurts their bottom line, they'll backtrack.
...but that assumes capitalism would provide the financial incentive to be less terrible in the first place.
"I knew, there's a reason why I haven't upgraded to 11, and once I'll be forced to do so, I'll be using some hacked version to get rid of most of the bloat that still has the upgrades, and doesn't put Brave as its default browser - no thanks, I don't need a Chromium browser for anything else beyond sites that broken on Firefox due to lack of testing and/or intentional breaking even with spoofed user-agent string (I'm looking at you, government websites).
"I'm looking at you, government website"
I don't think there is any browser that government sites actually work on.
Install VirtualBox or other VM software of your choice and try playing around. Nothing to mess up like that. But it won't reflect the hardware compatibility for your PC.
Proton from Steam allows any game that runs on Windows to run on Linux, alongside all the games that run natively on Linux. The SteamDeck's main OS (SteamOS) is an Arch-based Linux distro, if a steam deck can run it, so can your Linux computer. Thanks to proton, pretty much any Windows game can run on Linux. I literally stream from a Linux Machine.
That's really good to know. Besides Mint is there any other distributions I should check? Can you recommend a good source of Linux stuff in general?
I usually recommend Mint, Zorin, MX Linux and Pop OS starting out. But since Linux is free, all it costs you is time and energy if you want to shop around. DistroWatch.com has an expansive database of distributions.
There's a lot of good reading material and tutorials out there. And while you might find some folks who can be dismissive or elitist in the community, genuinely helpful and friendly people are out there too, so don't be afraid to ask for help.
here's a TL;DR from a seasoned linux user for distros.
For new users shit like mint and ubuntu are really good do to the OS itself being pre packaged, and having a large community. However once you become accustomed to linux enough i recommend most people move to one of the big three distros to get more familiar with how a linux system works.
Archlinux is great for this because it will literally walk you through every step from creating install media, to manually partitioning, to configuring the bootloader, to installing the system, to installing a DE/WM etc.
anyway, the big three i recommend are debian, arch, and gentoo, although it's worth noting that gentoo is the try hard OS, and it's arch on steroids. Still a neat OS, and a rather useful learning experience though.
Debian is super trivial to pick up, arch is less so, but i already talked about it.
It's pretty clear most of you can't be bothered to read past headlines.
Recall is local and they aren't using your data for upstream training.
"RecAlL Is loCal TheY" not gonna try to find out and im not trusting for sht anyways until independant network traffic analysis
Blah blah blah blah blah blah, I'm going to ignore 30 years of MS being open about policy and handling oodles of data because it doesn't align with what I want the policy to be.
Just as dumb as the Alexa is spying on us crowd.
right 30 years of selling user data an enshittification and the home assistants from a companny that regularly pays fines for privacy infringement
Please point out a single instance where Microsoft was fined not using the data in the way described in the terms of service.
https://www.cnil.fr/en/cookies-microsoft-ireland-operations-limited-fined-60-million-euros
And then there are the cases where European institutions got sued for USING Microsoft products.
Let's see if the Microsoft bootlicker has an argument other than "Oh but that was in the past, who's to say it's still happening?"
Tell me you are desperately searching Google for ammo without saying a word.
The links there have nothing to do with changing policy or not being upfront. The children thing is about MS missing alerts to parents over changes to specific property charges. It's not like they didn't even have alerts, just not for these properties. Real fucking evil right?
All of these legal challenge are on the implementation not MS lying to you in the ToS. They used both of these services as documentated.
So again, show me a case where MS lied about what is collected and not this desperate unrelated bullshit. MS isn't lying about how they are using your data.
Oh boy. Do I need to crack open the case from 2018 where a Dutch team found out that Microsoft was collecting data WITHOUT stating it in the ToS.
https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/16/microsoft_gdpr
Also: Even when stuff is written in the ToS it can still be illegal. (According to European law) Microsoft has broken GDPR laws in the past and will continue to do so. Whether it is written in the ToS or not.
(PS: I am not using the data hog google either) (PS: it is called "researching". Not " desperately searching for ammo")
Let's say for the sake of argument that is does remain all local. Hogging up your CPU, RAM, and Disk space, but its all local, unlike every other bit telemetry.
If it is completely local, why would I want it? What does the end user gain? I can think of what non-Microsoft agents would gain. If your computer got compromised, now a third party can see everything Recall logged. Could be completely mundane, could be private information, could be something worth blackmailing someone other.
Today I had to punch in my SSN and phone number to for my health insurance to confirm who I said I am. I don't want anyone to know that who has no direct need to.
So if it is completely local, and everyone is opt-in by default, why would I want it in the first place? What does the end user gain? If I wanted my CPU hogged up for no reason, I'd start mining Bitcoin. If it was harmless, why is Microsoft not really commenting on it on the same way they do other things like Office, Teams, Xbox, etc.
Don't care about the ram or CPU I don't have performance issues and I could not care less that I might be in theory 1.5 fps. If performance is a concern, turn it off.
As for what I'd use it for, global transcriptions, better search, per page search in documents, local searchable documentation, summarization of long contacts, etc. if that's not useful, turn it off.
As for security, this is nothing worse than a locally cached session. If someone already has os level read and write your already fucked. Same with bitwarden or any other app storing credentials. At the end of the day is written to disk. If you don't like that turn it off.
Don’t care about the ram or CPU I don’t have performance issues and I could not care less that I might be in theory 1.5 fps. If performance is a concern, turn it off.
you would be surprised what using a lighter OS would do for your system responsiveness. Your system will boot faster, become usable quicker, launch applications sooner, and use less ram. All of which is for free.