> I purposefully avoid Chrome because of its awful auto-updater tactics on MacOS which basically took pages from malware authors on how to ensure the service is always alive and present on your OS. When I explained this decision to colleagues, the response was confusion more than anything, and wondering why I even wanted to stop this.
I've noticed that on Windows as soon as Chrome appeared: they implemented a lot of malware-like concepts for the installation and updates even then. It never seemed right to me. And I still avoid Chrome as much as I can.
> the question just becomes "why would any of the mythical 'average consumer' even want to consider Linux in the first place?" As depressing as this may sound (and defeatist), as long as it gets them to Facebook and Youtube (and Instagram/whatever other social media they want), why would they care what does it and/or what that OS is doing?
My own issues: as much as I like Linux for programming, whenever I try to use Linux "just" to play videos on some non-gaming machine (and I've never bought gaming-only computers, and I'm sure an "average" user doesn't too), I still see significant problems compared with using Windows for the same task on the same machine. For various reasons it seems this joke still holds, even when removing "flash":
And my experience was even that those windowing environments promoted as "less demanding" aren't showing the videos better: they re maybe less demanding in some other aspects... but the videos which play smoothly on cheaper hardware is still a goal that is somehow hard to reach. My experience is similar to those I've had with music playing on Linuxes some decades ago, where every peace of the setup then worked against me simply being able to play (yes I've even tried modifying and rebuilding the drivers at these times...)
I've noticed that on Windows as soon as Chrome appeared: they implemented a lot of malware-like concepts for the installation and updates even then. It never seemed right to me. And I still avoid Chrome as much as I can.
> the question just becomes "why would any of the mythical 'average consumer' even want to consider Linux in the first place?" As depressing as this may sound (and defeatist), as long as it gets them to Facebook and Youtube (and Instagram/whatever other social media they want), why would they care what does it and/or what that OS is doing?
My own issues: as much as I like Linux for programming, whenever I try to use Linux "just" to play videos on some non-gaming machine (and I've never bought gaming-only computers, and I'm sure an "average" user doesn't too), I still see significant problems compared with using Windows for the same task on the same machine. For various reasons it seems this joke still holds, even when removing "flash":
https://xkcd.com/619/
And my experience was even that those windowing environments promoted as "less demanding" aren't showing the videos better: they re maybe less demanding in some other aspects... but the videos which play smoothly on cheaper hardware is still a goal that is somehow hard to reach. My experience is similar to those I've had with music playing on Linuxes some decades ago, where every peace of the setup then worked against me simply being able to play (yes I've even tried modifying and rebuilding the drivers at these times...)