Users are responsible for their own privacy.
Having Open Source projects providing the tools for that is extremely important. But ultimately the responsibility lies in the users hands. End to End encryption is the way. My files should 100% be encrypted on my side, with private keys that I own and nobody else. :)
Depends on the type of drives and your needs.
If the drive is big enough to be used as storage/back, get it out and in its own USB enclosure.
If the drive is either too small or you have too may already then :
Everything you say is what past me would have answered ten years ago, thinking current me is an idiot. Yet here we are. ;)
You are right and make good points. But you are not 99% of computer users. Just considering installing a linux distro puts you in the top 1% most competent.
(Speaking of which, I still have a laptop running EndeavourOS + i3. Three months in my system is half broken because of infrequent updates. I could fix it, I just don’t have the motivation to do so. Or the time. I’ll probably just reinstall Mint.)
It’s a bit more complex than that (and you probably know it).
When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board. Their UX is excellent. Their support is good. Things work well, applications are easy to use and pretty stable and well built. And if they violate your privacy like the others, at least they don’t make the open-bar sale of your data their fucking business model (wink wink Google).
Of course you there’s a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there’s that one thing that doesn’t work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It’s a nice golden cage with soft pillows.
I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad… I just don’t have time to “manage” my hardware anymore. Nor the urge to do it. I need things to work out of the box in a predictable way. I don’t want a digital mental load. Just a simple UX, consistency across my devices and good apps (and no Google, fuck Google). Something I wouldn’t have with an Android + PC setup. :)
The whole “special club” argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it. Neither the Apple nor the Google/Microsoft environments are satisfactory. Not even speaking of Linux and FOSS. We must aim higher.
Thanks for the clarification. I wonder if/when Microsoft is going to hop on the RISC train. They did a crap job trying themselves at a ARM version a few years back and gave up. A RISC Surface with a compatible Windows 13 and proper binary translator (like Apple did with Rosetta) would shake the PC market real good!
Not even soldered, it’s part of the CPU/GPU die now.
Interesting, I thought they had ditched the ARM license completely, my mistake.
If I wasn’t so broke, my 8GB MBP would enter the frisbee competition…
The Apple M series is not ARM based. It’s Apple’s own RISC architecture. They get their performance in part from the proximity of the RAM to the GPU, yes. But not only. Contrary to ARM that has become quite bloated after decades of building upon the same instruction set (and adding new instructions to drive adoption even if that’s contrary to RISC’s philosophy), the M series has started anew with no technological debt. Also Apple controls both the hardware to the software, as well as the languages and frameworks used by third party developers for their platform. They therefore have 100% compatibility between their chips’ instruction set, their system and third party apps. That allows them to make CPUs with excellent efficiency. Not to mention that speculative execution, a big driver of performance nowadays, works better on RISC where all the instructions have the same size.
You are right that they do not cater to power users who need a LOT of power though. But 95% of the users don’t care, they want long battery life, light and silent devices. Sales of desktop PCs have been falling for more than a decade now, as have the investments made in CISC architectures. People don’t want them anymore. With the growing number of manufacturers announcing their adoption of the new open-source RISC-V architecture I am curious to see what the future of Intel and AMD is. Especially with China pouring billions into building their own silicon supply chain. The next decade is going to be very interesting. :)
Fastmail as my main
Gmail for subscriptions and junk
Outlook for professional mail
Proton occasionally
Sorry just saw the answer.
Virtualbox is very easy to use out of the box, even if you have very little experience with virtualization. Everything is in one place and pretty much self explanatory.
Hyper-V is more complicated and requires that you have a Enterprise, Pro or Education license. It cannot be activated on the Windows 10 or 11 home edition.
You just want to get a feel for it, so I suggest what I’ve used with success in the past :
All free, Linux mint is newbies friendly and XFCE is light enough to run well in a VM. It is Ubuntu based so it’s very well documented (basically 99% of the tutorials for Ubuntu work with Mint) but it comes with less bloatware and a more ethics.
Of course no single Linux distribution is perfect or we would all be using it but I suggest you don’t lose time looking for a distro. Just pick one and install it. If you don’t like the look and feel, then try another. You can distro hop through several of them to taste the variations. But the general principles are pretty much the same across the board.
Completely agree on Linux Mint, even though it’s still one of my favorite distributions and the one I’m using usually. I’m comfortable with the base Ubuntu system but it comes without all the Canonical garbage (like Snap trying to quietly install itself back when I install an APT package).
Still too much bloatware though, and to my knowledge there is no modern, well documented APT based distro with a community active enough that I can fix my issues reasonnably fast.
I guess I will have to make the jump to Arch. Currently happy with my Regolith install now though, so I’m a bit lazy to explore other options.
How do you like the Snap store and snap packages being pushed on you silently when you try to install packages through APT? :)
It’s almost 2024 and we still don’t have any significant open source project for cloud storage privacy.