[QuadrupleA]

So much of what's aimed at nontechnical consumers these days is full of dishonesty and abuse. Microsoft kinda turned Windows into something like this, you need OneDrive "for your protection", new telemetry and ads with every update, etc.

In much of the physical world thankfully there's laws and pretty-effective enforcement against people clubbing you on the head and taking your stuff, retail stores selling fake products and empty boxes, etc.

But the tech world is this ever-boiling global cauldron of intangible software processes and code - hard to get a handle on what to even regulate. Wish people would just be decent to each other, and that that would be culturally valued over materialism and moneymaking by any possible means. Perhaps it'll make a comeback.

[rkagerer]

This was a nearly poetic way to put it. Thank you for ascribing words to a problem that equally frustrates me.

I spend a lot of time trying to think of concrete ways to improve the situation, and would love to hear people's ideas. Instinctively I tend to agree it largely comes down to treating your users like human beings.

[therobots927]

The situation won’t be improved for as long as an incentive structure exists that drives the degradation of the user experience.

Get as off-grid as you possibly can. Try to make your everyday use of technology as deterministic as possible. The free market punishes anyone who “respects their users”. Your best bet is some type of tech co-op funded partially by a billionaire who decided to be nice one day.

[jacquesm]

And still, there is plenty of software that you can't run on anything but Windows. That's a major blocker at this point and projects like 'mono' and 'wine', while extremely impressive, are still not good enough to run that same software on Linux.