This really resonates with me. I haven't gone so far as to run LineageOS (because I want to be able to use Lyft, Google Pay, etc.), but I do some of this stuff. I have a Raspberry Pi controlling all my smart home hardware, with the internet-connected bit running on a server I control. My TV is from 2007 even though I'd really like a larger, better, higher-resolution TV, because I don't want a TV that tries to connect to the internet. I run Linux as my daily driver because I don't want Windows tracking everything I do and popping up ads in the start menu, and don't like Apple's trend toward locking down their OSes to the point where it's not even my hardware anymore.
I would love to get Google out of my life, but Google Photos is easily my favorite phone app, and I still get a lot of value out of GDocs, GDrive, etc., and managing a Nextcloud instance sounds like more work than I want to do.
I do feel like I have an antagonistic relationship with technology, and as someone who works in technology, that makes me really sad.
I'm reminded that, in the mid-90s, one of Microsoft's branding slogans was "where do you want to go today?" While that seems funny in retrospect, back then MS's software really did let you do more or less whatever you wanted. These days our platforms are becoming more and more locked down, and meanwhile they're actively leaking our personal information to third parties who are the poorest stewards of it imaginable.
I want to be optimistic for the future of technology, but it's really hard to be.
Today the slogan for all big Americans tech companies is more like "we are going in this direction and you are probably dumb enough to just agree with our terms".
No, the real problem is creators/stewards in technology (e.g. most of the people here) are dumb and oblivious enough to sign on to the idea that "average joe, who must use a baseline of our particular mix of technologies to merely get by in this world, is fully and completely consenting to the entire range of whatever those huge companies dictate because a wall of text flashed by them when they turned the thing on."
This notion is UTTER B.S. and needs to die quickly, and it is wholly unfair to put this on the users and not the creators and big companies.
(Yes, I am lawyer, and it is absolutely immoral to abuse our notions of contract law in this fashion. Gives the whole system a very bad name.)
GDPR tried to do that, and the governments charged to enforce it decided to not enforce it. It is one of the primary reason why there are people saying that only a few single digit percent of websites actually comply with GDPR, and why consent popup that most sites use do not actually conform to the law.
For sure. I was still glad to see it though; I think there's a lot of pressure for laws and policies to be exact, but honestly, in the very-quickly-moving world of tech, we should actually -- ha, fail early and often, even when it comes to policy.
How do you feel about software licensing, then? GPL and BSD licenses are certainly too long and heady for the "average joe" to understand when installing software, yet they're an essential part of software freedom. Are they also being exploitative, since they're subjecting the user to conditions they're unaware of?
IANL but just installing and using GPL software is not subjecting the user to any exploitative conditions. Only if the user tries to create a derivative work (linking) and redistribute that.
I think that is a little unfair. The tech companies still do some stuff that provides value to people and usually for free. Additionally, grandma isn't going to be rooting phones and installing toolchains and managing their own hardware and OS. Making tech trivial to use and "just work" at scale is hard. Doing it all for free is even harder.
And the problem with that is most users have definitively and repeatedly voted with their wallets that they would rather give up privacy and freedoms than pay money. The vast majority of consumers simply don't care, and the HN audience are outliers.
Right but freedom is never free. It is free if users think it is free. Companies use lots of chemicals that are unhealthy in/on/around all our food (even "organic") but growing all your own food is untenable, unless we revert to agrarian societies.
FWIW, generally proprietary apps will work just fine with LineageOS and Play services. Where things get nonstandard is using LineageOS + microG. The former still has most of Google's built in surveillance, but the advantage it brings is a consistent interface between devices.
No idea specifically about Google Pay though, like if it demands a proprietary device for "security". I personally don't see the appeal of new forms of surveilled payments - the plastic cards in my wallet work just fine for that.
Also I can't say this enough - if you're apprehensive about trying out LOS or LOS+microG, get a second device. It only runs on certain devices anyway, so most likely you'll be buying used for $100-$200. You don't have to take a leap all at once - rather you can try different apps gradually.
(Although at this point I hope Pinephone is gaining on LOS. You might consider focusing your attention there, even though it's much less ready for prime time from what I understand)
> managing a Nextcloud instance sounds like more work than I want to do.
there are multiple hosted options where you don't have to manage the server - instead, you'll get admin access to your nextcloud, you can add accounts for Family members or freelancers whenever needed and it mostly "just works". When using a Nextcloud client, the only additional step that is needee compared to Dropbox etc is providing the server URL.
Wow, that "where do you want to go today" really tripped a strong nostalgia vein and reminded me of the old Microsoft Interactive CD Sampler: https://youtu.be/FrD78hULKIQ?t=234
I’m curious, what’s so great about Google photos? I’m on iCloud photos but looking to move away from it in the near future in protest of the recent infringement by Apple
> I’m curious, what’s so great about Google photos? I’m on iCloud photos but looking to move away from it in the near future in protest of the recent infringement by Apple
Assuming you're protesting CSAM detection, you should know that Google has been doing this forever.
I like to think that most of the open-source/free software solutions the author mentions aren't _that_ bad. I've run a pi-hole and barely noticed it. Raspberry Pi or old Arch Linux laptop as a NAS? Worked for me and required basically no maintenance. PC connected to a projector/TV? Easier learning curve for me as it's "just" a PC and will do everything that a PC can do such as effortless playback of subtitled media, low latency twitch tv, playback from NAS, etc...) A slightly involved network setup (discrete router, access points, etc.)? Basically pain-free and if one device kicks the bucket replacing a single component is no big deal.
The one exception is the phone. Phones are a wonder (disaster?) of vertical integration and if you're outside one of the two walled gardens it's like living on another planet. Ride-hailing apps, games, dating-apps, even SMS! can be unsupported or flaky on the analogous open alternatives. After the recent Apple announcement I ordered a Pinephone but I'm not expecting much more than a toy.
Accordingly, you can do most of the above and have it fly under the radar when having guests over, but the moment you whip out the non *droid/iOS phone around friends you've outed yourself.
I think he had a point, some OSS software is objectively just bad - UX, UI, bugs, overly complicated. That’s not me trying to personally attack them it’s that just so many seem to lack any kind of QA - some bugs I’ve encountered are reproducible almost immediately with using the program.
Basic integration of all these solutions often ends up with a less satisfactory solution than a “commercial”/closed source version.
I’m sure some naysayers will come up with platitudes like “no funding makes it more difficult” and “well it’s open source just fix it”.
For the first one, like I said some of the bugs or cumbersome problems are not even difficult to reproduce. Basic pointing and clicking by the devs would find it.
For the second, come on, they can’t just misdirect all their users with “fix it yourself” - we might not know how, might not know the language or framework, or simply might not want to spend the time trying to figure out some tedious workflow involving self hosted Git repos or some poorly documented spaghetti build process. At the end of the day the devs themselves are in the best position to fix.
>I think he had a point, some OSS software is objectively just bad - UX, UI, bugs, overly complicated.
A lot of the closed-source software is also quite bad, but in a wholly different way: Sure, the UI is clean and the software is not complicated per se, but often your ability to simply retrieve information has been intentionally degraded in favor of an algorithmic discovery queue. The UI, while simple enough, changes for no good reason far too often. Often these UI changes are seemingly for the worse, so I can only guess that they improve "engagement." And of course, although the application may be simple to use, it's often built with "dark patterns," which are meant to shape your behavior. Yes, you can ignore or overcome these, but it's a hurdle which should never exist in the first place.
By contrast, I don't think anyone loves Rhythmbox, (the open source itunes clone) but I've been using it for a decade and the UI has not appreciably changed at all. The application is definitely not perfect, but I can at least work around its flaws because those flaws are consistent. And really, why would a file-based music player need to change its UI much at all? There are no dark patterns to speak of, it's not trying to addict me into consuming more content, or paying for some subscription service.
Unfortunately, at this point, it's just the price you have to pay for software freedom.
You're underestimating the difficulty of fixing bugs, even if they are "not difficult to reproduce". Most FOSS devs are doing all this work for free and most of the time the only feedback they get is "you're UI, UX is broken/bad". What incentive do they have to spend days of their free time optimizing the UX?
If they actually care about the project then the incentive is already there to make sure all of it works - not just everything apart from the UX/UI - this attitude is exactly why it's all broken.
To state something you probably already know: The goal of FOSS is freedom to view and change the code. It makes no guarantees about quality or usability. Despite that, a lot of FOSS software is of great quality. But it's not the goal.
This guy sounds like me ~8 years ago. Eventually I gave up on the idealism and settled on some compromises. Mostly I have a few bright lines I won't cross: I don't use Facebook or Amazon or any of the "gig economy" scams; I don't participate in any of the IoT or smart home/automation crap; I don't have wearables; I use an ad-blocker to do my part to kill the ad-economy. I've completely given up on privacy online: there is no such thing as computer security and the only winning move is not to play. Don't put anything you care about being private onto a computer. Your doctor will, but there's nothing you can do about that.
It's worth exploring where the limits of digital asceticism are for yourself, and then scaling it back to a place you find reasonable.
Yeah, it does. I'm often tempted to quit it because it's owned by Facebook, but my objection to Facebook is mostly their lack of content moderation and I feel that's less of a problem on Instagram. It's a poor justification and I don't feel great about it.
> My wife complains that none of the devices in our house work, and she’s right
This hasn't been my experience at all. I find my devices often work much better than my peers' devices. Just yesterday, I blew someone's mind by being able to unzip a password protected zip and open a password protected pdf with my phone. They had been sending people documents like this for years and never saw anyone open it with their phone. Open source software is often more powerful than the mainstream alternatives, and the algorithms are easier to control, rather than be controlled by. Yes, it takes a bit of knowhow and work to configure things and get them running smoothly. But even the discipline itself has benefits. My guiding principle in all this is "Program or be programmed".
This encapsulates something the article misses: those with technical know-how can typically still thrive with others while living a tech-ascetic lifestyle, but the facade is broken as soon as non-technical friends and family come into the picture.
My most-used means of file transfer is "e-mailed zip file", and generally this works well - until, of course, someone can't open a zip file on their phone. Which I'd assume is most phone users. The phone doesn't need an unzip utility, because a phone user expects a link to some cloud service (Google Photos, etc.) to achieve the same thing. The content doesn't live on the device; it's just a dumb terminal.
Taken to its extreme, I recently had to downmix several HD videos taken on a phone onto a DVD, and _physically mail it overseas_, because even the cloud option wasn't open to the user.
> The thing that has always bothered me about this, and which continues to bother me, is that I’m only able to live this lifestyle because I have the technical know-how. The average person would neither know how to do any of the things I’m doing (installing a custom Android ROM, setting up Nextcloud, etc.), nor would they probably want to, given that it’s a lot of extra hassle for a sub-par experience.
Back in 90s, I was trying to send a game to a friend via dialup.
After 3 hours of failed attempts I gave up and walked a floppy disk 2 miles to his house.
I'm deep into "I know how to do this stuff, or could work it out, but I really cannot be bothered and will put up with the mostly-adequate experience so long as someone else manages it".
I used to run my own mail server. Heck, I used to lease out shell accounts and run email for other people. But gmail is just better at dealing with spam, probably because they manage a huge fraction of all email.
I still have the 20-year old email address, ticking over, delivering mail into a shell account run by someone else. It's about 50% spam, 49% things I've not bothered to unsubscribe from, and 1% really important stuff from long-dormant sources that I'd forgotten about. And of course it's there if I need to go back for whatever reason.
I put a fair bit of work into making the foss tech things in my house _just work_.
For instance, I run a tablet on my kitchen counter with the homeassistant interface. It displays photos when not in use.
My piHole setup (multiple of them for redundancy) can be paused from the homeassistant dashboard.
There's a different dashboard for access to Plex or other web UIs. Everything runs behind a reverse proxy with pretty URLs and authentication is from a single source usually.
The one bit of magic is the vpn for when you're out of the house. So it goes.
I'm curious how you implemented the VPN for when you're out of the house. I'd like to have an always on VPN, but too many sites I need to access block VPNs.
> Just yesterday, I blew someone's mind by being able to unzip a password protected zip and open a password protected pdf with my phone.
Are you saying iOS and Android can’t do those things? Because they definitely can — the reason they never saw anyone do it is probably because most people wouldn’t bother trying.
> I blew someone's mind by being able to unzip a password protected zip and open a password protected pdf with my phone.
Yes but can you make a phone call? Have you ever tried to make a phone call on your cell phone and it did not work? I have, on multiple occasions. I cannot say the same thing for a land line.
This guy is me, I have pretty much the same setup.
I hate the latest wave of smart stuff, as it all seems mostly user-hostile.
But even without the latest internet connected, google/alexa integration etc, the microcontrollers in devices have been abused to inflict terrible UI's on users for a long time now.
We need a 'unix philosophy' for household appliances and gadgets. Do one thing, well. Facilitate composition.
For example, I want to switch some floor fans (PSC motors) to much more efficient BLDC versions. They all seem to come with LED or LCD displays, timers, remotes, etc, some even integrate with alexa ... No Thanks! I just want more-efficient and quieter fans, perhaps with potentiometer, or at least, much finer-grained speed control as an upgrade over the 3 fixed speeds I have now, which is inherently possible due to BLDC controller. Perhaps an SPI interface so I can add my own smarts if I want to.
> If you want to live in the eighteenth century so bad, why don’t you get a horse and buggy while you’re at it?
As someone who lives in the country, who does share our back country roads with horses and buggies as well as cars, trucks, and farm equipment... our local community works just fine with many different people making different choices about how much technology they choose to bring into their homes.
I believe thinking about such questions and making your own decisions is an extremely healthy habit, no matter where your final decisions fall.
> Nowadays, to the average person I probably look like a technology curmudgeon
Nowadays, most discussion & thoughts about tech are far more ambivalent & concerned than they used to be. What hope & optimism there is often feels shallow & vapid. Doubt & questions & concerns seem well justified & rampant. Few individuals seem like they are a driver seat- it feels like tech is steering it's own ship and the "where do you want to go" idea, the personal computing idea, is way way way way outmoded & most tech is now us, in the hands of far greater powers that shape what tech will be.
I adore Nolan's writing & thoughts, but to cast himself as an outsider & cantankerous & a crank is not how I read the tea-leaves of society today.
There's very little shiny promising & exciting on the horizon. What progressive technology camps there are tend to have their faith in weird cult-like high high high tech AI, Blockchain, Quantum or other deeply beyond mortal reach technologies. Most mainstream tech has had a shadow but that underbelly's visibility has grown greatly & dissatisfaction & untrustability- conservative, fear based minsets- have quite justifiably exploded in adoption. Almost no where is there a practical progressive view of technology as a can-do adaptable system that we all can use to shape & guide ourselves, our lives, our way of communicating, and our way of thinking.
I for one have unbounded optimism, but it's because I think it would be very easy to start doing for ourselves. I think our assessments are quite real, quite good, I think we understand how dastardly so many of the traps we've fell into are, begun to deeply comprehend the dangers of superficial low-agency software systems & "creator" economics. We're getting enormously better at information tech, even though we're still not using it for anything remotely empowering or good. But some day we'll start to, and we'll get better fast at personal computing, once we start to see & realize what progressive, positive computing basis could possibly look like.
Thanks for this. Having been a bit deflated by the state of tech, but this post has reinvigorated my optimism. Is there somewhere I can read more of your thoughts? And do you know of any forums or groups for tech optimists building the future?
One of the closest held set of beliefs that I hold is that software is empowering when it is malleable, adaptive, not fixed in nature, when it is observable & it's mechanisms are deeply learnable. A lot of these values are mirrored to me in Ursala Franklin's dichotomy of technology as either Holistic or Prescriptive, as tools that empower & enrich the user, or tech/tools that dictate & govern[1].
It's still a small & young community but these many principles line up very closely, are espoused by, in my mind, the Malleable Systems Collective[2]. I don't have a strong presence right now on the web but thank you, and I do want to be better gathering & gardening the digital aspects of my self online.
I kinda bounce back and forth between feeling like a tech curmudgeon, and freshly optimistic of the future...among some things that make me look forward to the future include:
* computer makers who focus on either linux or "fix it yourself" audience...like system&6, Pine64, and the newest Framework (laptop empowering DIY...though they sell it with Windows they mention adding formal linux support later)
* also more decentralized communications and networks...like the matrix protocol (and associated distrib. network) along with apps like Element, nheko, fluffychat, etc.), the Briar project, the fediverse (and all its apps and instances like mastodon, pleroma, pixlfed, etc.), and on and on.
* finally, there are more and more headlines related to privacy and controlling one's own devices...which continue to become mainstream. While i'm not expecting to have the big corps change overnight...but capitalism being what it is, at some point these big corps will start to adjust their offerings even if only a little to fill the needs that the layperson consumers are beginning to ask/talk about. Sure, plenty is still fluf - like Apple's supposed marketing around privacy...but that shows that at least Apple and other firms are listening to the signals being eminated that privacy - as only one example - is now a selling feature...i'll defer to the reader if Apple has actuaklly achieved anything here...but the fact that it is a topic that has come up in the mainstream enough for Apple to use it as marketing means that there's something to this...which means that some other big corp or med-sized corp might grab that and run to make services and products that cater to the crowds who favor privacy, control, etc.
...at least that what i'm feeling this morning...fingers crossed that my raspberry pi doesn't stop working because another sdcard has failed. ;-)
Great list. One thing I want to reinforce is that the leading edge engineers of the world are only just starting to surface wide-scale, acceptable, happy practices for running systems/software. It's only in the past couple years that "build a cluster of raspberry pi's" has become a "legible"/comprehensible pitch, something that makes a light bulb go off over people's heads. A couple years ago we wouldn't really have known what to think, what that would be good for.
But now we have the shared language, the operational tools (& culture) to imagine clusters of computing resources coming together, reinforcing & helping one another, providing reliability & stable known operating environments for a vast variety of "easy" to launch workloads. To the point that a hobbyist can bring up a pi cluster mini-data-center in less than a weekend. That's draw dropping amazing, & a colossal demonstration of how much mastery we've achieved over such a wide wide set of concerns. 5 years ago we didn't even have the shared language to express the goal/desire, the cloud was abstract, but now it's real & something we can do for $120 and a couple hours. And we'll only get better. We're only really just getting started with this inertia, only just started bringing a lot of big ideas into the commons. While the primary drivers are big & medium entities doing ops, this is a huge foothold for the home, for the hobbyist to get going with, to make running software simple but not too simple, to have a platform that scales from very low & easy to very big & fancy. There's a lot of epic & amazing home-cloud stuff going on, & this is all so new, & very technical, but over time I expect a lot of paths to be paved, a lot of lessons learned, and the amazing ultra-leading-edge works like onedr0p's homecloud[1] to spring into bloom & to seed new efforts. Having a rich, high-potential ecosystem that computing & the computing community can build atop of & get good & get more elegant with is a precondition for any other part of computing succeeding. Without good ops, personal computing can go nowhere, and we are so so so much better gathered & doing so much better than we were even half a decade ago.
Once our own computing becomes possible, the spread of p2p & distributed systems might start. Even that doesn't seem ultra-necessary to me. I believe the mediums we have are enormously powerful, enormously flexible, and incredibly distributed if put to use for those ends. Specs like ActivityPub and ActivityStreams can remake how almost all software works, can provide the fabric of connectivity that makes connected networked systems so compelling, so interesting to participate in, without the top-down-control, with self-determinism & agency & genuine ownership of data. That we can have amazing new online vantage points for these wide & diverse feeds of information when we harken to protocols & feeds.
Still missing right now, mobile/low power systems are still trapped in the old world: the most important device we own, our phones, can not participate in the new dawning better-ops cross-system-ops galaxy we are breathing life into. Unlocking mobile from the confines of narrow consumerdom is a long battle, and I mostly hope the overwhelming brilliance of self-hosting Linux makes Linux on the phone too compelling to allow these consumer,
Thank you. I really relate to the original post. Like the author, I am spending way too much time getting lineage to work on my phone while trying to run an ecosystem of self hosted services for my community that fewer and fewer folks seem to want, even as they complain about the role of big tech in their lives and culture.
I really appreciate the sense of maybe-I'm-not-totally-alone that your post conveys. Maybe the author would as well? "There are literally dozens of us".
This resonated with me, but instead of investing a lot of time and effort into a losing battle where everything I come up with will ultimately be obsoleted by the incessant churn, I guess I'm going to let my skills rot and live without.
I've lived without a TV (and without a streaming service) for 10 years. My phone has the bare minimum things on it I need to get by. I turn everything off I can. I've railed about location tracking because I know how it works, but damn it, I am not going to mount an all-out war against all my devices and fill my house with an armory of tech. I don't really want to live like that. I want to live like it was the 1990s, maybe, when a PC was just a thing at my desk and it didn't watch me. I guess. That's not coming back now.
All of reality is now infested with tech watching us. Let that sink in. Cameras, smartphones, surveillance drones, location tracking, even microphones, traffic cameras, facial recognition, smart TVs, smart appliances, cars, everything has got its eyes on us.
> My phone has the bare minimum things on it I need to get by. I turn everything off I can. I've railed about location tracking because I know how it works, but damn it, I am not going to mount an all-out war against all my devices and fill my house with an armory of tech. I don't really want to live like that. I want to live like it was the 1990s, maybe, when a PC was just a thing at my desk and it didn't watch me. I guess. That's not coming back now.
This is what I'm planning to personally do. My next phone will probably be only able to make calls and send messages and if I need to use the internet then it will be from the computer. I don't want access to the internet all of the time and I feel my life will be better and filled with more life affirming activities because of it.
At home the router stays off all of the time unless I need to connect. Most of my life is offline anyway. When someone says send me an email and I say I'll write you a letter and deliver it, you'd be surprised what gets done.
I feel that choices about whether to use technology are important and I always ask myself would this improve my life, and most of the time the answer is no. I know my priorities are different to most people but I think I am okay with that. I don't feel like I am missing out on anything and actually gain time, well-being and peace of mind instead.
One recent thing happened here that makes me sympathetic to this attitude. A few years back I bought an older mac mini to build iphone apps on. Wasn't fancy, was 2nd hand but it did the job. Then Apple decided they wouldn't release OS updates for it. Then because of that, it suddenly got impossible to install pretty much anything. I usually develop in .net, but that no longer is supported, and won't run. So Apple turned the thing into a shiny brick effectively. A company with billions of cash idling in the bank won't support older hardware? They could literally afford to do it until the sun explodes.
At this point, they are just giving people the finger simply for the hell of it. I'll bet debian will run on there and I won't ever buy another mac.
The machine isn't really usable with the current OSes, being dog slow at everything.
But you do bring up an interesting point. I have had the same issues with Windows on older hardware.
Which makes me wonder why hardware with 2.5-3GhZ CPUs and SSDs is not enough to run a current version of an OS even with 4-6 GB of RAM.
Probably the same reason for both companies: at some point doing regression testing encompassing a decade or more of old hardware becomes untenable.
Developers are always happy when they can deprecate old systems because their new code can assume the shiny new fast hardware and full-featured API of the new OS.
Newer CPUs have hardware for AES decryption and other such stuff. Hardware can do it about 100x faster than software. OS manufacturers have spread "security" all through their stack.
I still use a Mac Mini from 2009 as my main computer although I have upgraded the hard drive to a solid state disk and expanded the memory from 2 GB to (maximum) 8 GB. I run Debian on it with the window manager Blackbox. Other World Computing has great upgrade instruction videos for all models.
Of all the complaints you could have about Apple, supporting software updates on legacy devices isn't really one. The iPhone 6s which was released in 2015 will receive this years iOS 15 release. The 2014 Mac mini will support the upcoming macOS release. My Apple devices tend to be usable at least 2-3x as long as similar devices from other manufacturers.
I know it's a bit much to single out Apple on this, I have older hardware from other manufacturers that will never run Windows 10 and Windows 11 won't run on some current Microsoft hardware. But Apple don't have that much hardware to support, it's not like they have thousands of variations of mac minis. I find it frustrating that the decision to make this machine unuseable was a reminder that a company like Apple is really in charge, not the owner of the device.
Its like the razor companies always changing the cartridge formats so your razor handle becomes useless and you're forced to buy a new one or go back to safety razors. Its the waste that bothers me most.
I am back to safety razors for shaving and Linux is the closest equivalent.
I am on the same path but I don't see it as a problem.
I see it as a realistic mindset and mandatory skills for the future. Peer pressure must be ignored delicately.
Somehow I envision decentralized future in which people will use bootstrapped and FOSS software on small private networks. In my country, before big internet centralization there were small internet providers who offered all kinds of information services. When this time comes, some will be prepared to lead the way. And some will follow, as always.
The problem with 90% of the free, open soure technology is the lack of a decent User Interface. Want to make a change in the way it works? Dig through the config file to find the one setting you need, or query the DB to tweak that one little thing.
The day something like a pi-hole can be installed as easily as a sim card, and can be left alone running without having to interact with it via the terminal will be the day open source software would have gotten mainstream coverage (No, Linux is not mainstream, unless you consider Android)
I would love to start a small business selling pre-configured Pis with an external SSD and the basics of a self-hosted setup (Nextcloud, Bitwarden, Mastodon, hopefully Matrix once Dendrite is production-ready) along with a basic auto-renewable domain subscription. There _might_ be enough people concerned about the security of their nude pictures and the censorship/disinformation practices of FB/Twitter that they'd be willing to pay $150 + $10/year in order to have a turnkey 'your personal, private cloud' product.
Two issues I wouldn't know how to solve are:
(1) backups - not having backups for your personal data would be utterly irresponsible, but adding an E2E encrypted cloud backup to the package would come with substantial recurring costs
(2) public Internet access - from what I understand very few Internet providers will allow you to just run a publicly-accessible webserver from your home router, and for a lot of people it's going to be a bad idea due to having a crap router and horribly unsecured devices on their local LAN. You would have to add a cloud-hosted bastion server, which could be super small and cheap, sure, but it's still a monthly cost and now your 'personal cloud' is reliant on Hetzner or whomever, killing the product's sales pitch
I run a Mastodon. It’s not very good at de-duplicating media. Your SSD will quickly be filled up with a thousand copies of reposted memes if you do not configure it to aggressively prune remote media.
I see your point and I'm not contradicting you, but I do feel that this expectation of comfort is the main hook that locked down technology is using to get us. Once we're used to it we don't easily give it up. But I think it leads to passivity. And once everything is catered to the lowest common denominator, it starts to get in the way of any usage out of the ordinary.
Doesn't this also point the way to how FLOSS can win? Go ahead and have a config file with options for everything, but out-of-the-box everything should work, be smooth, attractive, and a joy to use. Create a more comfortable environment than the commercial options. Actually cater to the lowest common denominator.
I agree that this is the way. Fairphone, Pine, Librem, etc all try to provide their things along these lines. It would be great if we could make FOSS more profitable.
The whole point of technology is to improve our lives. What you call ‘comfort’, I call the entire point of the thing. If it takes more work to get a piece of technology to do what you want than it takes to do the thing without technology, why use it?
The expectation of comfort is why anyone pays for a service-and why people make them. What would you choose to do? Build all your furniture on your own, or get it built by a machine and pay for it?
That being said, I do feel that it does lead to passivity, particularly when there is a single dominant player in the market. Case in point: Office before GSuite.
It's a matter of definition, but I feel technology can do more than just make our lives more comfy. Anyway my point is that the chase for comfort can actually hurt us. Maybe we should try some carpentry?
Great work! and keep going, there are more of us out there than you think.
It might feel like you're tilting at windmills most of the time, but each one of us that does this makes it a little easier for the next person who wants to reclaim their privacy and autonomy.
First it's easier in that as more people use a piece of hardware or software, the more you start to see good tutorials and user guides, the more people file bug reports, the more developers contribute, etc.
Second, and possibly even more importantly, each new user reduces what I'd call the "weirdo" factor. Other people are going to be more likely to make the jump to software or hardware that's outside the mainstream if they see others doing it. And the more people there are who use a technology, the less it's seen as "weird". Even a few years ago, most people thought I was some sort of tin hat for using Signal. Today there are enough people using it, that even if it's not the dominant messaging app, most people see it as a reasonable choice.
I was like this for a bit, kinda loosing touch / interest in the latest fancy whatever. I used to get excited about new tvs, phones, whatever I could make an impulse purchase on and satisfy a need for a moment.
Still watch WWDC and other Apple keynotes but meh... I am excited about the new M chips. Had an M1 Macbook Pro until I quit that job and had to turn it in lol. It was hands down amazing / best Apple laptop experience I've had in a long time. Holding out for the next chip revision until I get a new personal one.
What excites me now - I've gotten pretty heavily into 3d printing. Have 2 printers working side by side now (thinking about a 3rd) Started out as just something to print random crap for around the house - under cabinet coffee mug holder, wall hooks, pen holder, etc... Now, I've gotten into (back into) RC cars and robotics - finishing up a motorized Wall-E Replica and an F1 RC car (based on OpenRC). I plan to design my own RC car soon. Have designed some of my own parts and am thinking about getting into production / trying to sell some stuff on Etsy or whatever.
Will it evolve into a career change of some sort? Not sure. But the path I'm going down is similar to how I got into web development; casual at first, then got an entry level job and been doing it for 20 years now. After 20 years, web development is blah. Constantly chasing the next best JS framework; trying to 1up the next candidate looking for the same job to stay relevant. Just getting exhausting.
There's something here between the lines I think I empathize with. That there's been a cultural shift from the tinkerer PC ethos, with decentralized vendors, respect for being "open" (whether open source or standard). This way of thinking seemed to be the default for those of us brought up into computing in the 80s up until the mid 2000s. Even on Microsoft products, the Evil Empire of these times, the amount of customizability and range of hardware and software supported in Windows shows how baked in these assumptions were.
Of course, the average user struggled during these times given the endlessly complexity and configurability of technology. A lot of work with tech required someone speaking technobabble to get everything to work -- Someone like the old SNL sketch "Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25J3u3P-HHg).
Users don't care about the idealism behind the original PC movement, maybe to their detriment. They just want it to work. Those of us getting in the way to espouse ideal of open source this and that just seem to be getting in their way of the thing that "just works" regardless of what MegaCorp they have to turn their personal lives over to.
Take just streaming videos for example - I use some services/devices that I find distasteful to stream content: In particular an Amazon Fire TV Cube.
Over the last few years, it's become basically impossible to use.
The UI stutters and lags horribly (even on the updated version)
The Audio output frequently desyncs with the video. I happen to know restarting the current streaming app fixes the problem, but the UI doesn't allow that - "Users aren't smart enough to manage app lifecycles!". So the next best option is opening the Hulu app - precisely because the app is such bloated garbage that it uses enough device RAM that the other streaming app will be evicted and shut down. Then I can switch back after waiting 100 seconds for Hulu to load. Hurrah!....
There's no way to mark an episode as "played" in the UI - you have to open the fucking thing and fast-forward to the end.
If you happen to have an "unplayed" episode in the season of a show you're watching, it will always play that first. Incredibly annoying given the above point.
More and more of the UI is clearly designed to drive me to specific "shows you'll like!" that I don't like, and see over and over again.
More and more of the UI hides actually scrolling through lists of things I might want to watch, in favor of shoving 8 giant auto-playing images of things I've already marked as "Not interested" in.
It's a fucking Alexa based voice activated device - We control it exclusively through voice and our phones with the remote app. Yet if it doesn't detect the hardware remote, after about 10 seconds of playing it STOPS playing, puts up a giant "We can't find your remote! do you need help syncing it?" screen up literally every time you play something.
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Basically - My point is that these apps might "just work" in some cases, but frequently they don't work at all, or work so poorly that they might as well not work.
And that's not touching my "idealism" at all. This product is noticeably worse than my self-hosted XBMC/Kodi instance, and at this point we mostly just use that.
Dear Google, I don't want to leave a review of my grocery store, it was cute the first time where I gave a 2/5 and said "not enough juggalos"...it was still kind of cute the second time I was asked to review the same grocery store, this time a 2/5 and "too many juggalos".
But now I'm out of ideas, and I'm still asked to review the same God damn grocery store every couple of weeks.
Whenever an iOS app presents an out-of-the-blue pop-up asking to review it, I always give it one star with a comment explaining that that is my policy. Don't bother me, or, if you want me to do work for you, give me something in return.
I tinker with some of this stuff, but almost never deploy it to production. The author, and others who practice this sort of purism, clearly have the luxury of time to dedicate to the hobby. And that’s great. But I have two kids and a wife who works online (as do I) and I just need shit to work otherwise the house doesn’t run and I don’t ever get to have whole days to myself to fiddle about with Nextcloud or whatever.
I have recently started to run pi-hole as I was appalled my the sheer number of awful in-app ads on my TV and my kids’ tablets. It’s messed a few things up but the trade off seems worth it for me.
I've gone back and forth with this mindset myself, swinging between "privacy all the things!" and "I can't win what's the point". I think I've reached a happy medium where rather than larping as Edward Snowden I'm larping as a privacy-conscious sysadmin. And I've managed to not annoy my wife too much along the way, which is a nice plus. In fact, she gets more annoyed now when she accidentally connects to the non-pi-hole'd guest network and all the ads reappear on her tablet.
I like to make sure all the apps on my phone are setup the way I like. Ban most from running in background, disallow from accessing services especially in the background. Adblocking services, etc. I use my phone alot for work, so rocking some custom OS in not an option.
Firewall rules, use of many networks & vlans, and different ssids for different type of wifi traffic. Make for a secure home.
Tinkering with free software is not necessarily a hobby. You are actually learning from it a lot about technology. This understanding and skills (fixing problems, debugging, patience, reading docs) can be converted to money.
There is nothing to say that a company must derive their revenues from a single source. It has always been like that, or at least it has been like that for a very long time. Newspapers derive their revenue from both sales to readers and sales of advertising. If you subscribe, they also sell the subscriber data. The same thing can be said of warranty cards. You don't see them as much these days since it turns out to be far more reliable to force people to register their product when they first turn it on, but it was always a way to get marketing (and marketable) data.
I don't see it happening. FOSS either forms companies and plays the same PR game as everyone else, or we'll be stuck in the same aftermarket-nothing-working-correctly feeling OP is getting burnt out on. This is why I think the Fairphone, eSolutions, Librem, the Pine gadgeds matter so much, because they are the step in the right direction: packaging the marketing and an OOTB solution, but built the Right Way.
> My wife complains that none of the devices in our house work, and she’s right
My wife is quite happy with her LineageOS phone. Its battery lasts days and days, though it's from 2014. She has not much trouble with LibreOffice, either running on her Ubuntu laptop or our common Slackware desktop (multi-user computer, that's Unix for you baby!). She happily uses jit.si for her meetings. My nextcloud works just fine; I stream music in my car from it (thanks to Ultrasonic from F-Droid repo), and use it extensively to share documents and pictures with my friends (Netxcloud links work just as well as Dropbox links), and of course to centralize all pictures from my wife's phone and mine into our common computer, automatically.
A Phone from 2014 is really really old... I feel for your wife.
I have no problems with IoT devices, and online services. As long as used in a smart way. Honestly for IoT Devices, use more advanced networking hardware. I'm all for home automation and smart devices, but they all are on private networks separated out with vlans and kept in line with firewall rules. They only do what is needed, and many private networks are key here. My Camera network doesn't even touch the outside world, but my DVR software allows me to remote view from anywhere.
I'm a heavy user of two factor auth, and really this is the biggest factor in keeping you safe. Not using Multifactor is the biggest flaw in peoples idea of being secure. I don't care if your password is complex.
While I do like Nextcloud, be careful with it. This is not something you should really trust you data with unless you have a pretty beefy setup under it. Like a Pretty well configured Freenas setup or something. Data rot is a real thing, and HDD failures are a real thing. Cloud backups are a thing for a reason, and Onedrive is a cheap way to make sure photos will live on. I can't stress this enough, as i've seen people loose everything from not knowing how to configure a proper data store.
As someone that isn't a fan on jank, used a computer on a TV is something I would have done years ago when I was in school and broke. But I paid for 4K and 7.2 surround and you are not going to get that via the web browser
Her phone is from 2014 and is perfectly satisfactory. Mine is from 2017 and will probably suffice for many years to come, too, at least as long as LineageOS supports it. My main PC is from 2008 or 2009 (it has been upgraded somewhat). I hate consumerism and waste. I change devices when they're dead and not salvageable. Ditto my car, my clothes and everything else.
My Nextcloud is running on a RAID6 server in a datacenter, with a backup on a secondary array. All data is at least replicated in 3 different places (my DC, my office, and my home). I think my data is pretty safe (and safe from prying eyes, too).
I have 3 years old degoogled Lineage phone, because you can't really buy new phone with good camera and normal size, I am using phones without gapps since I lived in China and not really missing Google apps, onyl Google apps in my phone are GBoard (with no internet access) and GTRanslate which I don't really use
I'm running 10 year old thinkpad with SSD and more RAM and hooked external dispaly/mouse/kbd
I don't use features of my smart TV, because smart TCL was unbearably dumb, coudln't sideload anything, didn't have app store, so I bought Android TV stick (some cheap Xiaomi for 40USD) just so my kids can watch Youtube (dummy account, not that I woud use Google services anyway even on computer) since the one built in was constantly freezing and when they were away for vacation I enjoyed playing old games through emulators with gamepad
I have camera in kid's room, so I can check them in night, while watching torrented TV shows/movies from USB flashdrive plugged in my TV in living room (I've had Netflix for year and only thing I used it for was show Peppa pig to kids, still rather downloaded all my stuff through USB stick or hooked laptop with HDMI cable)
besides these, no smart devices in my household, no speakers, kids not using phones or tablets at all, while older is starting primary school, though they read a lot books, play with real toys and draw, not sure when I will introduce them to phones, not rushing
only social networks I use are Twitter and Reddit, ofc not with real name, I'm not backing up my photos anywhere online, only physical backups
I've been trying to get back in, too, but its very hard to find a company that isn't doing bad things, and you're compensated for the degree to which you make those things worse.
It makes you want to cry, but it's honestly killing me. I hope you picked a job that forces you into the fewest ethical dilemmas and treats you well.
I'm on the same path. I even faced very similar problems. To avoid software failures, I keep two different browsers and two for mapping, OsmAnd and Organic Maps. And to not bother others in my household, I implement the measures only for myself, so no things like the PiHole. These both reduce friction and bring peace of mind.
I could've written this article, it is my life almost verbatim.
I was hanging out with this woman yesterday actually, and we were walking around Walmart and she looks at her phone, taps it a couple of times and proceeds to the aisle with the thing we were looking for. Later we were trying to watch a movie on my computer (because I don't have a TV) and it wouldn't play, because my machine doesn't have the necessary what have you for DRM for her streaming service. I said out loud "why do I make my life hard for no reason?" Then I immediately realized why, I have very good reasons.
The one place I diverge is that it is not a hobby for me. It used to be, but I don't enjoy it anymore. I just want to be free of the reasons I have to do it and this is what I have to do.
Did I have a long-lost twin separated at birth? It's good to know I'm not alone, at least. Some of my own specific choices are a bit different, but this could have been me writing it.
What's it going to take to get technology that actually respects BOTH privacy and freedom?
As someone like the author, I was a bit confused how quickly they brushed off the goals of this form of tech idealism. Hints at the problem, like star ratings for parks and ad blocking nightmares, but never quite reveals it.
Is it that the author has been "enlightened" and now finds the old ways to be less morally superior? Now settling for the nostalgic hobby form to continue.
I challenge this outcome. Yes, we are all pretty burnt out on moral outrage these days. Yes, some people will be frustrated, like your wife. Yes, progress feels slow (or backwards). But I still must continue, I see no other way forward.
I'm like the guys in your mastodon server. It's not a hobby it's an ideology. For example I sincerely believe intellectual property is a threat to humanity because it shrinkens the realm of ideas and it's impossible for us to notice. Humanity could go extinct because we can't imagine solutions to imminent danger like global warming. I'm willing to sacrifice a lot more than my comfort for this ideology.
Same here. No social networks for personal communication, Pi-hole at home network, degoogled LineageOS... But work force me to use Adobe and Windows. I often ask myself why I'm doig all of this "hide seek game". I can now clearly see that it is because of protection for my family. And they are absolutely ok with that.
I admire this guy, but I don't want to be this guy.
As someone says below, FOSS quality control is generally shit. Closed-source software's is, too, but at least they make the main path through their crap work. Woe betide you if you take any other path.
That having been said: there are lots of good ideas in OP and in the comments. I will check them out.
I use OSM as my daily in the US and I love it, even without the FOSS part I'd use it over google any day, it is better. It is particularly useful for rural areas. When I started using it years ago it was not so reliable in the US particularly in urban areas, but it has come along way, that trope about it needs to die. It works so well for me I have people who don't care about privacy trying it out.
Mapy.cz are superior to Maps.me for hiking trails and in general has better data 9at least for Czechia) than OSM in Maps.me, only reason why I keep maps.me in mobile is that great 3D bird view, no other app can match that
The value of Google Maps is real-time traffic data, because this affects navigation heavily. Osm is nice for biking and walking, but not for driving by car.
I manage my photos on my NAS, but I need a web software that I can use to explore the images I accumulated on my NAS without sharing them with third parties. What do you suggest?
God, I could have written most of this post myself. I made a few different tech choices - bought a projector instead of trying to un-smart a smart TV, and my ISP thankfully provides me with a static IP for free so I can easily access my Pi over the internet. But the core self-hosting and privacy tools are the same - LineageOS, Nextcloud, F-Droid, Pi server, Linux desktop. Same cursing when Nextcloud slows down or raises nonexisting conflicts. Same confusion/annoyance from my friends or dates when I send them a slow self-hosted link instead of just sharing via Whatsapp. Same asking myself why am I doing all of this, as I am no dangerous dissident or whistleblower (yet!).
One big difference between me and Mr. Lawson is that I'm not entirely opposed to running hostile apps. I do use WhatsApp because I live in Western Europe where not doing so would, sadly, cut me off from 90% of social life. I still use Google Maps because I need business contact / opening hours / restaurant menu information far more than I do accurate GPS navigation (but I would freeze it and whip out OSMAnd+ if I needed to navigate to my local dissident society meetup). And I use GBoard because it's just smoother than Anysoft or Floris or other OSS keyboards.
However, I consider them hostile apps so while I choose to run them, I don't want to let them run unrestricted; I sandbox them as much as possible. GBoard has no internet access, period; neither does Google Translate (after downloading the language files I cared about). My phone doesn't have a built-in Google Account, so Google Maps runs in anonymous mode (I send bookmarks to Joplin); it constantly brings up a popup complaining that it can't run without Play Services, but immediately proves itself a liar by running perfectly anyway.
For other apps, TrackerControl forbids them from connecting to any domain I don't explicitly allow. Insular prevents them from accessing my local data. Thankfully, the only data-hoovering apps that I need to janitor in such a way are WhatsApp and Tinder; everything else either has a FOSS client, or runs as a webapp (my browser, of course, has an extensive and very very clunky suite of privacy addons).
Most importantly, I have a simple rule of not doing or writing anything on WhatsApp that I would be embarrassed to see plastered on a billboard in front of my house - thankfully that encompasses 99% of my everyday life. For the remaining 1% of content, I find people are more understanding when I tell them 'mind if we discuss this over a phone call or Signal?'.
One last thing, since I mentioned the TrackerControl app - although I try not to be a tech vegan and simply say that I have a passion for tinkering and a bit of a paranoid streak, I've found most people's eyes to light up a little up when I open TC and show them how a random innocuous app is connecting to a half-dozen different social media websites. It's not enough to convert anyone - and I wouldn't try anyway, given how cumbersome even a plain LineageOS installation is to maintain - but it does give them pause, and they at least claim to understand why I may care about this stuff.
>I hooked it up to an old PC running Ubuntu so I can watch Netflix, Hulu, etc.
So he cut out Samsung and thinks he's somehow changed his privacy footprint?
When I read an article like this, or the "I don't use a Mac" article. I think of two people, Scott McNealy and his famous quote, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” I also think of Don Quixote, when most people think about Don they think he eventually went crazy, but I always thought he was crazy from the get go.
> So he cut out Samsung and thinks he's somehow changed his privacy footprint?
You have to expand on this. Of course cutting Samsung out changes your privacy footprint. If you want to say that surveillance is infinite, everything about you is always known by everyone, and there's no way to change any of that, you can, but you shouldn't think that's the sane position.
Dude, you need to chillax. I too have a love-hate affair with technology, but I choose the walled garden to get everything working seamless for everyone. It's a brave new world, and a way to cope is to embrace it with warts and all. In order to improve on what is not working you need to feel the pain.
It is pain. I'm not saying it is brave. It is a reflection on reality. You cannot improve if you don't exist on the same level of existence as everyone else. Avoiding the pain is just equal to sticking your head in the ground and trying to get everyone else to do the same.
But still eats genetically modified food, uses airplanes and electric vehicles, his home is (probably powered by the utility grid) and uses the internet to work.
I hate how technology only relates to his personal computer
I would love to get Google out of my life, but Google Photos is easily my favorite phone app, and I still get a lot of value out of GDocs, GDrive, etc., and managing a Nextcloud instance sounds like more work than I want to do.
I do feel like I have an antagonistic relationship with technology, and as someone who works in technology, that makes me really sad.
I'm reminded that, in the mid-90s, one of Microsoft's branding slogans was "where do you want to go today?" While that seems funny in retrospect, back then MS's software really did let you do more or less whatever you wanted. These days our platforms are becoming more and more locked down, and meanwhile they're actively leaking our personal information to third parties who are the poorest stewards of it imaginable.
I want to be optimistic for the future of technology, but it's really hard to be.