They’re just being capitalists. Having 80% of your portfolio in a single entity isn’t smart.

Code Sherpa

Chances are your pants are not as fancy as the pair

Of very fancy pants that Mr. Fancy Pants will wear

When everybody’s marching in the fancy pants parade

He’s gonna pass the test, he’s gonna be the best

The best in terms of pants

The true test is, would you install it for your mom. Have fun figuring out her public library and ereader shit on Linux.

Most industry standard software that people use in their jobs is closed source. When you watch movies or listen to music or play video games you’re supporting proprietary software. Same with finance and basically any office job. Niche IT jobs are the exception but I’ve been in enterprise IT for 20 years and this is just how it is in a capitalist economy. I’d prefer for public ownership of technology platforms but it’s basically reduced to a consumption model within the current system. Like the platforms people consume media through isn’t very significant, which the open source community puts a lot of ideological importance on. Most open source projects are also abandoned and become obsolete too quickly. I’ve basically been relying on the same set of proprietary Adobe software for part of my income since the 90s, can’t name an open source alternative that does what I need it to do or has this longevity even though I’d prefer it.

Btw a way you can verify the security of a chat app is by reading case docs from law enforcement about what’s required to obtain communications through said platform. With whatsapp the closest they can get to message content is by retreiving cache from the iPhone chatsearch database, and metadata from WhatsApp about who sent a message to whom and when but not the message contents. Retrieval of WhatApp messages through proprietary security forensics software is limited to how certain phone models and OSs locally cache messages basically. This applies to different platforms the same way though and isn’t something special about WhatsApp or Meta. The unique thing to Meta is how quickly they respond to law enforcement requests about metadata collection.

The whitepaper explains it in detail. Closed source doesn’t mean worse by default. In a lot of cases the opposite since professionals were hired and paid for their work and the company thinks they have an edge on the competition. Open source is more of a grab bag. Commercial use of open source is plagued by abandoned projects and lack of support obligations, even though it might be better in certain instances.

Might as well use whatsapp in that case which is debatably on par or better than signal for encryption.

AtlasOS is great wish I discovered it before doing it all manually. All it really does is apply group policy changes and config management, which is what any enterprise workplace will do by default. I have 15 years experience as a sysadmin in a mixed OS environment in the operation of critical infrastructure. We’re bound by intense regulations and audited often, and Windows is the workstation OS that we can easily manage security-wise. This is in contrast to the notion of Windows as a garbage consumer product, which yeah not wrong there, but people might not be aware of it’s compliance with industry standards and security regs. Which is a shame because that’s ultimately what’s evil about the MS approach to business, they create a problem for businesses and offer the solution.

The only thing you can’t disable here are the vulns, technically MS is obligated to patch though so I’d be interested which ones apply, I’m assuming there’s a lot of vulns in certain features. My Windows SSD is 60GB fully loaded with apps and drivers. Search and other stuff are just basic config items and plenty of UI replacements and tweaks to be had.

My Debian servers and laptop run way lighter as expected, unfortunately I need the custom hardware support of Windows for some software critical to my livelihood. All I do is deploy Windows in the same way I’d deploy and manage an enterprise workstation. No store, no live, no “apps,” no overlay bs or news feeds, just pure Windows. Gotta say I prefer 11 so far to 10, the window snapping and some other changes have been good for productivity, which is really the only thing I care about since I’d switch that machine to Debian in a heartbeat if I didn’t have a use case.

Oh yay another Windows 11 being bad meme, and all the same comments about it too. Feel like it’s groundhog day cause this place only has 2 jokes that get recycled on repeat.

Depends what you use it for, there’s some great servers for a lot of things. I don’t really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives don’t have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them aren’t a very diverse group. Checking all the right FOSS and feature boxes is nice but it’s not what actually makes a platform good to use.

Problem I have with calling this a feudal arrangement is a lot of serfs actually had family rights to their land/means of production under land tenure agreements. It’s more the notion of private ownership of land and production that has led to these private technology increasingly mediating more of our lives. I’ve seen the concept of technofeudalism used in good ways but the overall thing is capitalism and they are more elements of feudal type arrangement within that.

It’s a route of exploitation. FOSS developers aren’t often paid for their labor, and what they produce is often commodified by capital. Products of people’s leisure are exploited basically, and they justify it through this moral framework, but no class dynamics are impacted and actually the opposite, they become reified even more.

If Linux or foss had the ability to impact political economy in some communist way we’d have seen it by now, so this is like a deus ex machina myth for tech hobbyists to elevate themselves, an evangelical tech religion. As a Marxist myself this stuff just makes me laugh, the irony of a creature like Bill Gates calling something communist and embracing it with pride.

If you want to put faith in technology and the internet changing the world for the better, just realize since the dawn of all this stuff wealth inequality and economic stresses have only increased until a full blown crisis in 2008 of the consenting economic model. Now as these stresses turn inward we see it culminating in what we might call neofascism.

Right, you’re establishing a moral superiority by your consumption model. I have the same consumption model but not vain enough to think the way I watch movies has any moral significance.

Nah it depends on physical infrastructure and programs which aren’t capable of having values and principles. You mean people ascribe values and principles as their motivation for working on said programs, which I don’t doubt.

“The movement values and principles” is a fairy tale tech hobbyists tell themselves to feel like their consumer preferences have grandiose importance.

My use case is finding good online communities for my offline interests wherever they exist, and I’ve found some solid ones on Discord. This is why I agree with every point you’ve raised but find them ineffective at making me want to not use it. I value the connections I make with people through the platform more than any of the nerd reasons why I’m supposed to be bad for using it. Ultimately I don’t care about the platforms that much, they’re just transient things which come and go. So I’ll host a Matrix instance until something else is better, I’ll use Discord for running my weekly dnd group because nothing else worked for everyone and it’s been solid for 3 years. “Discord’s product is not usability” …okay I guess I’ll stop using it now. /s That just falls flat. To stop using it the reasons I use it will have to go away.

I’ve faced similar arguments about how I have a Windows machine for media creation, people try to debate me that there’s better alternatives assuming I haven’t tried them or that I don’t prioritize FOSS, but they don’t even have a connection to the scene I use this stuff for and they think some nerd technology argument is a valid reason to stop doing what I love. It’s like yeah every point raised is completely valid, but people will debate the ins and outs of platforms and software before they ever apply them to something beyond themselves.

It’s like okay you don’t like the new Milwaukee battery line of tools, but here’s a kitchen I made with them so just stfu and eat your food.

Just goes back to what the use case is. You’re alluding to a case where Discord is being used for content that should be easily searchable on the wide internet. Platforms like Discord including the FOSS alternatives aren’t good for that by their very design. The notion that every web service should be wide open and searchable is antithetical to privacy, which is ironically often cited as a huge downside to Discord. With the privately hosted Matrix instance I use with close friends for instance being isolated from the wide internet is the whole point.

it really isn’t a replacement of something like a forum, website, or wiki.

Discord adds streaming channels and effortless multimedia which is huge. What I do on Discord isn’t possible on these other examples.

It sucks everything without any way to find it again.

What’s the use case here exactly? Some servers are disorganized af and trying to use the platform in the wrong way. The search function seems to work fine for whatever I need it for though.