I'm a very light user and only moved to onlyoffice because it was freezing[0] on my then new laptop, but at least on mac, I feel like it needs a UI refresh, icons that are not blurry, a look at the performance when doing basic tasks, etc.
It's free and opensource, which is good, but it's not as polished as other paid alternatives.
That happened to my google workspace account in 2023, when I switched to Office365. Account was not blocked blocked per se, but they stopped the free workspace versions.
It was not a big problem as I use my own domains that I host separately. Get a new provider, adjust some MX and TXT dns records and you are live again. Backup emails by running thunderbird locally.
But it's not just one politician or just one election. The current guy was elected twice. His position on tariffs, NATO, and Greenland are not new. The movement supporting him is unlikely to disappear any time soon. From the outside, it doesn't look like one wrong step, but just part of the new normal.
It's also important to understand that those on the receiving end of the threats are not taking them lightly. No one's laughing. It's easy to understand the change in behaviour if you understand this.
Back to the European Alternatives stuff, I've been looking at the services I use and which ones might become unavailable if, let's say, the US takes Greenland. It has nothing to do with nationalism, I just don't want to be caught with my pants down.
> A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
I lost a VPS in that fire, but I was up and running a few hours later with a new VPS at a different OVH location.
Not to deflect blame away from OVH and their large screw up, but we should never rely only on the redundancy of the hosting provider. Even on AWS, I wouldn't trust them to not lose my data if one of their datacenters burns down.
At the time I was making regular backups to two different providers with servers somewhere else. When I noticed that it was serious, I ordered a new VPS and restored everything. If OVH itself went down, I could have used Scaleway, Hetzner, Contabo, etc.
I don't use Windows a lot, but still have a desktop for gaming.
With Windows 10, I started using "O&O ShutUp10"[0], which lets me easily disable (and revert the changes if needed) most of the crap enabled by default. There's no OneDrive, CoPilot, weather, "news", etc, annoying me, which makes my Windows experience bearable. I just have to open the app once after each major update because Microsoft loves to re-enable features.
My upgrade to Windows 11 was smooth. I didn't have the issues reported in the article. But man, it sometimes feels like they forgot to optimized it. Opening/closing the start menu, viewing all apps, isn't that smooth for me. I have a powerful computer, with a fast GPU and one of the more recent AMD CPUs... and at times it's like it's running at 24fps.
I mainly use a Mac, which is better, but after seeing the "Liquid Glass" UI lag on M1 machines, I decided to stay on MacOS Sequoia. Is everyone ignoring performance now?
They're not ignoring performance, they're ignoring experience on old machines or hardware outside of top tier. Part of it is laziness for sure but part of it is, I believe, intentional to push the refresh cycle as short as possible. I know people who count down the days to their 2 year phone upgrade just on the off chance the next update might slow their phone down a bit. Not even that they upgrade as soon as the phone gets slow - they proactively upgrade to prevent it from ever happening in the first place, even for a day or two. This is what these companies want.
There's nothing wrong with iOS and iPhones. If that's what works best for you, then that's what you should use. With this said...
Most people use their Android phone like iPhone owners do. They use the default launcher, default settings, and things work. Like you, they turn it on and it does things. They'll install their apps for work, social media, etc, just like iOS users. Maybe they'll install a different browser so sync works or have adblocking, but that's it.
Unlocking bootloaders, custom ROMs, perhaps rooting, getting to the point where apps are hijacking your phone (wth?)... I'm not sure if you understand this, but that's very extreme. If you get blasted, it's because that's the equivalent to jailbreaking an iPhone, replacing the OS, and so on. Of course things are going to break.
iOS lets you do a lot of UI customization these days. Home screen(s), widgets, icons, lock screen, etc, some of which I can't do on my Android phone and may have to use a 3rd party launcher! Why don't you spend hours tweaking that stuff, like many do? Why doesn't it bother you that you can do it? Just a guess, but I think you've changed. You no longer care about this stuff and maybe you also don't have the same free time? That's fine, but also shows that the problem wasn't Android or iOS, but the old you that didn't always know when to stop.
On a side note, things have changed a lot in the past few years. These days you don't install a custom ROM if you want features... you get a phone from a brand like Samsung because their UI is packed with features that custom ROMs don't have. You also don't need them for updates when a new phone gives you 5-7 years of support. Most posts I see here about custom ROMs are about privacy and security, removing Google from their phones, stepping away from the cloud and subscriptions, etc. Don't assume that that the wild side of Android is still the same because it isn't, at least not to the extent. You may also want to drop the idea that using Android requires doing all you've mentioned, because almost no one does that. You were the 1% of the 1%.
I care about privacy more than most people, so custom ROMs and the like were the "best" way to achieve that. I understand that most people don't do that. They just use the phone they got with their wireless plan to install gmail and whatsapp and facebook or whatever. The time I bailed on Android was when I also realized that Google was no longer the "don't be evil" company (yes yes, I know it never was, but they went mask-off). So, I've cut Google and Meta products out of my life and put all my privacy eggs in one basket, trying to reduce the attack surface with the one company who performatively claims to care about that. You're right, I changed and got old and don't have the time nor willpower to battle my phone anymore. I'm sure Android is just fine to use now, but I want no part of Google.
*edit* and everything I see about their Play Store is that it's still a lawless hellscape.
I'm a very light user and only moved to onlyoffice because it was freezing[0] on my then new laptop, but at least on mac, I feel like it needs a UI refresh, icons that are not blurry, a look at the performance when doing basic tasks, etc.
It's free and opensource, which is good, but it's not as polished as other paid alternatives.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43038942
reply