Can you explain how a car accident lead to this?

Here you go: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/

Warning: This will open your eyes and make you want to dump all your major apps for FOSS alternatives.

Here are the trackers contained in Yelp’s app according to Exodus:

• Adjust (analytics)
• Braze (formerly Appboy) (analytics advertisement location)
• Brightcove
• Bugsnag (crash reporting)
• ComScore (analytics advertisement)
• Facebook Analytics (analytics)
• Facebook Login (identification)
• Google AdMob (advertisement)
• Google Firebase Analytics (analytics)
• Snowplow (analytics)

That’s a lot. They make money off of people having their app running on their phone. That’s why they push their app.

Never had that issue

I used to be annoyed by this. I’m running GrapheneOS so I denied Google Photos access to the network but it didn’t stop it from asking every few times I started the app. Sometimes it even ignored my response and tried to connect to the network anyway.

I just uninstalled it and installed Fossify Gallery instead from F-droid. Haven’t looked back since.

I used to have those concerns. But I still switched earlier this year from being a die-hard Microsoft user since DOS in the 90’s. It’s no where nearly as bad as you make it sound.

First of all, the controller not working is only the tip of the iceberg of the bullshit sandwich Microsoft has been serving its users and it has gotten far worse now with Windows 11. Microsoft has turned Windows 11 an anti-consumer nightmare of a platform that has zero care for privacy or even for treating paying users as anything else than a source of additional income to exploit further through things like ads and data mining. On a platform they paid for already, must I say again.

Secondly, you can dual boot which means you don’t have to abandon your current setup and always have the option to go back to it should it not work for you. That being said, I haven’t booted my Windows partition in months and am increasingly considering repurposing the drive for something else now.

Thirdly, what very little problems I encountered were a simple google search away to be fixed. And I am far from being a superuser in that environment. I tried to use Linux 10 years ago before and it was a PITA and I gave up. It isn’t like that anymore. It is much better. Things just work now unless you pick a shitty distro.

Finally, I’ve had a harder time finding the settings in a Windows machine after an update that moved things around than I ever had when I first used Linux. And with Linux, especially if you use KDE Plasma as a desktop environment, if something isn’t where you want it, you can customize it to be exactly how you like it. You can make it mimic Windows if you want. There are even custom themes that make it look exactly the same if you really don’t want to change.

And even if you don’t mind that rapidly growing list of major irritants, many people including myself cannot even upgrade to Windows 11 unless they buy a whole new machine even if they wanted to because of the arbitrary DRM chip requirements. And they’re dropping support for Windows 10 next year. So looking down the barrel of having to pay for a new computer while the current one works perfectly well, plus having to pay for another Windows license with which Microsoft will monetize the shit out of my usage of the platform with zero regards to my privacy, making the jump doesn’t sound that bad of a decision anymore. I did it and I’m glad I did.

This thread is weird. People complain about Microsoft doing its Microsoft thing but the moment someone suggests to stop using Microsoft products and switch to an increasingly viable and approachable alternative they get downvoted.

“I don’t want a solution, I want to be angry!”

There should be a legal requirement to call a targeted advertisement a targeted advertisement. Being allowed to call them “recommendations” only makes these assholes feel emboldened to push ads where people wouldn’t normally accept them. Microsoft is pulling that dirty trick as well.

Thanks for letting me know. Just blocked lemmy.ml from my feed.

• On Reddit: “Windows is being enshitified. How can we cope with it?”
• On Lemmy: “Windows is being enshitified. Good thing we’ve moved to Linux”

I think I see a pattern here.

This is the norm of what shareholder-driven companies in a situation of monopoly will tend to do. They try to see how much they can abuse their position of dominance on the market to maximize their profits. Microsoft’s primary goal isn’t to make a good user experience, or even a good OS. Their main goal is to milk as much money as possible from its assets for its shareholders. They’ve been playing that game for decades, only backtracking when the consumer backlash is strong enough to threaten their sales or when the government threatens to break them up.

On top of that, Microsoft has a long history of letting arrogant elements of top management take control of projects who will then force their “vision” down the throats of their customers who don’t want any of it. They will only backtrack once the sales numbers become disastrous enough. Then usually the control returns to more competent people and a decent product tends to result from it. Think how Windows Vista lead to Windows 7. And how Windows 8 lead to Windows 10. Or even how the XBox One was originally designed and marketed as some sort of stupid way to watch NFL games on your TV with Kinect controls until they realized they were losing the console war and then started treating it like a gaming console again.

What is your reason to pick Debian over Ubuntu?

Right now my computer isn’t supported by Windows 11 so I have some time. But seeing this crap coming eventually in my future, I started dual booting Linux Mint to see if I could live with it. Turns out I like it better than windows. I haven’t booted my window partition in weeks. When I finally upgrade my computer it will probably be running solely on Linux now and maybe have Windows 7 running in a virtual box for the very few programs I still need it for.

None of this would have happened had Microsoft not pushed their corporate enshitification past my threshold. Thanks Microsoft.

This is something that sneaks up on you as well. And all that started a few years ago when I finally decided to get myself my first smartphone and tried to optimize data usage and battery life. I then realized that not only some apps and “system processes” were using battery and data when not in use, but that there wasn’t even given a way for me to stop it from happening. I also got creeped out when I moved to work in another building and Facebook started giving me friend suggestions of people who worked there. Location wasn’t even enabled on my phone.

And now today I have no mainstream social media account, run GrapheneOS on my phone, Linux on my computer and have migrated to almost entirely FOSS software and apps. I have become the crazy privacy obsessed weirdo.

But just because it is in the EULA doesn’t make it legal. At a time where big tech is being kept under a microscope for antitrust regulation, I’d say that an OS that actively destroys other competing OSes on the machine it is installed on should be considered an unfair anti-competitor tactic.

Hear me out: Class action lawsuit

Can you even use a Tesla without it collecting and sending a ton of data without doing something that voids the warranty?

Ragebait had become the new tactic to generate engagement for a while now.

Hopefully people will soon catch on and become fed up with it because I am sure this tactic has been one of the biggest contributing factors in polarizing people against each other and making politics so toxic.

When the cooling consumes more wattage than the GPU

Subscription-based hardware business models, or anything that is cloud-based have a strong tendency to do this. They sucker you into buying their hardware with rock bottom prices and reasonable subscription fees and slowly they increase the prices and put more and more features and functionalities behind increasing paywalls.

Never buy anything that you don’t fully own after paying for it.