Substack uses dark patterns in a pretty random way (different dark patterns modals on different blogs, often different dark pattern modals on the same blog at different times) to confuse people about the nature of the site. They'd rather you be confused or intimidated to sign up for something and try to make it very clear that you can read articles online and that your refusal to subscribe to a newsletter could be permanent and not just a "not yet" situation.
Unfortunately this is endemic to the industry. Try using Windows sometime. Oughta be a law that any "not yet" button for a thoroughly pizzled [1] product or service ought to have a "never" button next to it and the font size of never has to be 3x larger than the "not yet" and the contrast of "not yet" has to be less than the square root of the contrast on "never". That would be about fair.
Well said. It can be even simpler than buying a new device. Personally, I use a $100 Android device and via some ADB commands have removed app stores, email, and even the web browser, keeping the most useful such as navigation, a camera, SMS, etc. If I really want to install an app, there's the additional barrier preventing me which is to plug my phone into my computer and sideload an APK for F-Droid, a web browser, Newpipe, or whatever. For the most part this has been working for me.
I too did this. Switched to a £99.99 Oppo A5 and followed instructions to remove chrome via adb.
pm uninstall --user 0 com.android.chrome
The only tricky part is explaining to people why you have no browser on your phone and can't follow any links they DM you. "To handle my addiction", while accurate, can sound overdramatic.
However I have concluded that although I'm 90% satisfied with a cheap device it's a shame to have a poor camera, so may try to repeat this process on a better device. Ideally I want the experience to be crappy to reduce the addiction (eg a terrible screen for instance) but the camera to be top notch, battery to be long-lived, and device to be lightweight and pocketable. Don't believe that exists unfortunately.
I've been the social media person (community manager) for a few large companies: HTC for a few years, a Google account for a bit, then more recently for Qualcomm. At least for the larger companies in general that I've worked with, "interns" never touched post copy. Outbound "posts" are typically written by a group of people outsourced to an ad agency, approved internally, then approved by the client, then scheduled to be posted. Typically dozens of people are involved for a single tweet.
Companies (at least the ones I've worked with) take their social media handles as "official" messaging from the company that could easily effect stock prices if incorrect messaging is shared. I once had a colleague incorrectly share that a budget smartphone was going to receive the latest version of Android (at the time) and several tech news sites picked up on it.
Direct replies to users is a bit different. Typically a response is drafted in a tool like Sprinklr then approved by a second person.
Wireless carriers have been pulling stunts like this over the last several years. For example, T-Mobile blocks all SMS messages with links that have a .xyz TLD. There's no indication that it was blocked by neither the sender or the receiver. I assume this was done to prevent spam and sketchy websites, but personally speaking I've seen way more sketchy .com sites and more spam coming from gmail accounts.
The author said that their experiences with Linux was slow (Debian and Lubuntu were examples) and had no intention of using Linux because of these experiences.
Personally, I don't know what they're talking about, but I've always had a smoother/faster (albeit a bit clunky/glitchy sometimes) with Linux than Windows. Even when I dual booted Win7 and Ubuntu, Linux was always faster. Currently, I'm using XFCE w/ Arch on a 6 year old laptop. Programs open very fast, I get regular sw updates, and I've been running it for work for four years.
Just seen this one on my ancient Thinkpad. Mesa-21.3.5 is fine, mesa-23.0.1 fails to pick up the graphics card and drops to llvmpipe software rendering.
It has to be said that llvmpipe seems usable even with Firefox, but not as good as reverting to mesa-21.3.5 so accelerated graphics actually works.
(17 years is a good run and I have my eye on a nice clean X201)
Do we need this comment parroted every single time someone mentions Linux on this forum? I get it, it's too complicated for you, can we move on instead of rehashing this point over and over again?
The past week we have had two major Linux discussions and in each thread there is a semi flame war that starts because some had to voice yet another "this is why Linux is so hard for nan to use", as if it was a novel or constructive observation. It's not.
> Do we need this comment parroted every single time someone mentions Linux on this forum? I get it, it's too complicated for you, can we move on instead of rehashing this point over and over again?
Yes, if it is a reply to a problem where someone "Tried linux and it was slow, so didn't use". If system configuration debugging were in their taste, they would have done so. So it's the "Just configure parameters <x>" which is the pointless rehashing.
I mean, we're talking about a fourteen year old computer. With a couple commandline options you can be supported on a modern, updated OS, which is more than you can say for any other major OS.
Once I tried to use a newish nvidia GPU on an old cpu. It was the pandemic and parts were hard to come by.
The minute windows update would automatically load the Nvidia driver in the background, the screen would go fully black with no going around.
Searching online, the combination was unsupported by Nvidia and there was nothing you could do.
Linux with nouveau worked flawlessly. No kernel parameter, just boot using a live usb and everything works.
Yes, sometimes you can hit a weird hardware issue and need to revert a firmware blob or add a kernel parameter to disable something. These are rare occurrences, not the norm.
Every platform has its quirks. It's just not true that windows or macos is perfect, you are simply used to all the weird quirks.
Amen. I bought a printer and trying to make it work with Ubuntu is just hell.
Ubuntu is great, but it would be nice if there was some Ubuntu+ addon subscription service where I could pay to make the bullshit go away. I've got other stuff to do than still trying to get peripherals to work, in 2023.
The problem with Linux is that people buy random hardware without any research and expect it to support Linux. Try installing MacOS on a random laptop or Windows on M1 Mac and get the same result.
There should be official compatibility list for laptops of all price ranges and whoever buys something not from the list needs to deal with issues themselves.
The problem with this argument is that the exact same crowd of people is saying
"just use linux instead of windows!"
at the same time as
"you can't expect linux to work on everything! do your research!"
So which one is it? Is Linux an OS that you can just replace Windows with straight away, or is it not? Most people don't care about the underlying reasoning why their printer doesn't work on linux - they just know it would have worked on windows fine.
Are you sure it's the exact same crowd? There are many Linux users who are quite fine with suggesting it as an option, while proposing a more rational approach to transitioning. Heck, part of the reason for live media is to ensure that everything works before taking the dive.
We're talking about a 21 year old OS as alternative. Back then, Windows would also require significant manual configuration to get it running. Windows may have become more "automagic" these days, but at least in the Windows XP era a common part of installing Windows was going to the local library to look at guides and manuals for setting up less common hardware.
Even something as simple as setting up a sound card with recent drivers required going to weird, slow-loading taiwanese websites with no english text to get the current drivers right from the manufacturer of the sound chip.
Even worse, with XP you had no GPU accelerated desktop at all. Sure, lower latency, but the PC noticeably struggled even moving windows if something happened in the background.
I never once went to the library or struggled to install XP, nor have I ever encountered anyone who did. It quite literally pretty much just worked. Maybe it comes down to hardware choice?
Then you pretty much only saw the tail end of XP, at the beginning it was very much a struggle. Especially with old network adapters and SCSI devices being problematic, as well as many old 9x drivers not running on XP anymore (after all, XP was the first consumer Windows on NT).
I was using XP prior to public release, and used every version of it, including Media Center edition. Like I said, and like you stated in a very roundabout way whilst dismissing what I had to say, it comes down to choice of hardware. For the average Joe, there weren't problems, they were building machines with current-gen hardware and eschewing yesteryear hardware too. Anybody who had problems just bought new hardware, they didn't muck around at the library. Perhaps libraries where you are provide better information, but libraries in the UK at the time were pretty much the last place you would go for technical documentation.
> Anybody who had problems just bought new hardware
And if you do so, Linux works just fine as well. But you were comparing Windows XP to people trying to install linux on old, specialty hardware bought for use with Windows, so we’ll have to keep the same circumstances as well.
I don't think that this sort of attitude will result in an environment that's encouraging for more people to use Linux distros. A better approach might be going straight into suggesting whatever information helped you in the past.
Not all of those are always up to date, though, so some digging around might be needed. Many will just give up or not even try, if they're faced with a dismissive attitude. Dialogue around what is the most helpful, accurate and up to date guide would be better!
> I don't think that this sort of attitude will result in an environment that's encouraging for more people to use Linux distros.
Linux crowd, seems have not made their mind on what they want to reach as a product for end user. Or even do they want to have end user, not another cool kid to hang on with in IRC and dig inside OS. Some say - I wanna Linux be used by everyone! Other say - works for me and I don't care on the rest [of the loosers who cannot read hex dumps, ha ha ha]. Somehow the success of Chromebooks being ignored and not learnt from.
Thus, without clear goal, mission, product vision and focused team of product managers it's kept being amorphous [as I see it]. Definitely something to learn from WSL project made by Microsoft. They found the need - they did it. You may even see it as cathedral vs bazaar issue.
The only distant focused effort I'm aware about is Canonical/Ubuntu here ( I'm not sure on RH/Suse efforts ) - they are working on MDM with Intune, they have at least some telemetry ( not totally blind on real user cases ), they have Pro edition and even cooperated to be the first WSL distro, naturally paying back in brand awareness, common approaches and so on.
You can either have a system where somebody else is deciding on your behalf how your system is going to be configured, or you can have a system where it's up to you to opt-in to the stuff you want. You can't have both.
I think he's talking about perceived UI speed. Things like moving the mouse, starting an application or dragging a window respond fast on Windows because of how the system is set up (mouse cursor practically has top priority and graphics are hardware accelerated). This is especially noticeable on slower hardware and can cause a machine to feel 'snappier'.
How old is old? I use Debian on an 11-year old cheap laptop, and it runs fine. No GNOME, of course (it's the performance equivalent of Windows on pretty much any hardware).
I dropped a comment there where I said that while I spent hours researching the "perfect dumb phone", there's certain features that are nearly exclusive to a smartphone or just plain work better on a smartphone, including having a decent camera and GPS/map with me at all times.
IMO, I think it's easier to simply dumb down your existing smartphone by stripping it of all apps except for just the bare essentials. For example, my phone only handles calls, SMS, maps, camera, books, etc. No web browser, social media, fancy messaging app, or even an app store. Though this may change sometimes and I'll sideload F-Droid or some other app depending on my needs (like traveling). https://chuck.is/phone
This only seems applicable if the form factor itself is not a concern for you. If I was to change to a dumbphone, I'd want a long (multiple days) battery life even with moderate usage, physical keys and robustness as a start. Similarly, a good camera or GPS would be features I would expect and hope are excluded from the dumbphones. There's no way to achieve these by taking a smartphone and stripping out software -- there are hardware changes needed.
What you've described seems to me more a 'locked down smartphone' rather than a dumbphone, and the two are not synonyms imho.
Correct. My phone isn't a "dumb phone", but it is certainly "dumbed down". I think that the people partially adopting or experimenting with using dumb phones are doing so to curb habits or escape something. Oftentimes, I think this can be done by simply dumbing down their existing smartphone, or "locking down" as you put it.
This is exactly it. I of course have a web browser on my laptop. If I'm running errand, going to the grocery store, or going for a walk, I have never had a need for it other than wanting to satisfy some random curiosity. Not having a web browser on my phone for the last 4-5 months, I haven't run into any issues. If I'm simply bored, I have koreader installed which is synced to my ereader at home. If I do have that random curiosity pop up, I'll take a note and research it later.
The most obnoxious and frustrating captchas are the ones that make you count the dice and to choose the image with the dice that adds up to a specific number. You're given three images, but if you take too long solving, it gives you 10. I spent nearly 30 minutes trying to log into my Airbnb account. After having to deal with this, I said screw and closed my Airbnb account entirely (for this experience, as well as other reasons). I understand Airbnb is using a 3rd party CAPTCHA system, but trying to solve a math problem seems like something for a computer, not a human.
I moved my blog from Wordpress to just a static html/css site that I maintain myself, including the rss xml. It's certainly simpler and I've learned a great deal but maintaining even a personal website this way can be a pain (it's far too easy to not catch a typo and breaking something like rss). Jekyll is likely what I may end up switching to.
The content I interact with is plain-text (Markdown). I use Jekyll just as a tool. I have tried Hugo and way faster locally. However, Github Pages has Jekyll built-in and so I stayed with it. I rarely run Jekyll locally to write.
