I want to be left alone (2024)

I bought a 5 year old Lenovo x13 and installed Debian on it, haven’t used linux in years but wanted to play around.

Installed, logged in for the first time and got the ‘welcome to KDE’ screen, dismissed it and then… nothing.

Every time I log in… nothing.

It just sits there waiting for me to do something. It doesn’t tell me to do anything. I’ve been mostly using it to play Civ2.

But how are they going to make money?

The idea of a technology device just sitting there waiting for your command, without bombarding you with notifications and dinging and buzzing, and without trying to beg and convince you to do something, is so anachronistic! I'm thinking back to my Commodore 64 or my DOS PC where you just turn it on, and it just prompts you, the user who is in charge to decide what to do this time.

Through selling durable goods that don't have planned obsolescence

Open-source / noncommercial isn't exactly a cure for the steady drip of "like and subscribe" type of harassment these days. Probably just because commercial interests have pushed user-harassment so hard for so long that the window has shifted and now users expect harassment, and because at least some makers actually feel their work is less professional if they don't engage in harassment.

Open your laptop, dismiss ubuntu wanting to update stuff; open firefox and have your adblock extension popup to tell you how many ads it blocked and to give you a helpful advertisement for updating your adblock; open a web page, any webpage, dismiss at least 3 popups for cookies, decline to signin in google/facebook, decline the newsletter. Get another browser extension to solve these problems, it will probably have pop-ups to tell you about "what's new". Open github to look at some code, get asked to star the project above the fold in the documentation. Forget what you even wanted to do with a laptop, close it, dive into much more productive work by figuring out the best way to feed your laptop into the kitchen garbage disposal in small pieces. Just another Tuesday

All of my Windows and Mac computers also do nothing when I log in so I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here.

I think they are trying to say that other OSes have many more annoying UX patterns e.g. Windows update, macOS permission popups etc, auto-starting apps. Not to say these can't be turned off, but the default experience is not great.

All my windows and mac computers periodically spring some bullshit like ‘log in to onedrive and back up your photos!’ or ‘Try the new Safari!’ they’re never truly quiet, and still. They’re noisy.

They want me to do something that serves their purpose and not mine.

... until everyone has one.

Don't you see that the "make money" is the actual problem?

And what is your solution? Abolish the medium which humanity uses to freely exchange goods and services?

“Make money” isn’t the problem. The problem is the expectation for infinite growth.

Maytag service repair, Toyota service repair, etc.

While the margins and revenue are lower on durable + repair vs. planned obsolescence, the owner can sleep better at night knowing they've morally served their fellow human and not unduly destroyed the economy and the environment.

Money is a store of value. Even under communism, in POW camps, and in primate groups, trade occurs behind the scenes with unofficial currency. It's simply too strong of an idea and too engrained to wave our hands that money shouldn't exist. Whether we do it by cumbersome IOU notes or have a generalized and widely accepted interface doesn't make a difference.

But if you want to argue that regressive taxation is bad, I'm on board.

Windows does this nonsense all the time. Recently I used my mothers windows notebook to show her some photos. Five Minutes in with Firefox in full-screen it pops up a Teams window for no reason. She didn't install Teams nor does she need it, but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided not only to install it but also that taking focus while another application is in full-screen mode is the perfect moment to prompt the user to login into an application they never used.

When I first started using computers, they were a tool like a hammer. You buy the hammer, and it sits in your toolbox until you need to use it, then you use it and put it away. You are always in total control of the hammer and it does not try to influence you in any way.

Modern software tries to invert this control loop and make you the tool. Pop up a message to remind you to use their software. Automatically pick the next item in your social feed to convince your hind brain to spend more time in their app. Convince you to turn on location services to see the weather in your current location, and then use it to track all of your movements. AI is bound to do even more of this, where it tells you in various ways how to live your life.

I don’t quite know the solution, because software that influences the user has better survival characteristics than tool software, but it feels like things are starting to come to a head where people are feeling overwhelmed by their phones’ constant demands.

He used 'money' for 'profits' apparently. Profitmaking is the problem. Money is just a vehicle. And you can abolish profit-making through an open-source world: Projects can get started to create infinitely repairable, durable, and modular products based on standards instead of profit-making through planned obsolescence or farcical 'new features'. These products can get used and maintained by their users for decades.

But again, we are required to make money/profits/bazingas/whatchamacallit to survive. Our production tools are computers and computing. How do you survive? Just have rich parents? There needs to be an evil demonic profit maker somewhere.

Survive by what you earn month-to-month and then by pension, like 90+% of the planet.

lol no I will mess with time!