Klaus on Tilde Town

Reaching an "end of the line" regarding proprietary OSes

a train reaching the end of the line and falling out of the tracks

These days, I cannot help but feel that the world is being encroached by a wave of privacy-invading and downright evil software, platforms and OSes. Telemetry, bogus or deceiving Privacy Policies, CoPilot+, questionable vulnerabilities that may mask backdoors - you name it. As fast as the mainstream Tech press is normalizing this as an "essential" part of how the industry works and your devices operate, we in FLOSS learn our countermeasures and ways to adapt around them in an eternal arms-race of sorts.

But there's a critical point that isn't covered through our expertise: the people around us that we care about.

Let's be real: knowing what the term "FLOSS" even means already classifies us as not average people. Maybe not even "normal," whatever that might mean in the context. We are computer people, we "get it." We know our ways around technology, but even all of this knowledge is faint when we the support is meant for somebody else less tech-savvy. Parents? Grandparents and extended family? They won't or sometimes can't keep up with this.

Which brings me to the topic of this essay: I feel that I'm reaching the end of the line regarding what OS will my dearest people around me use as this year comes to a close.

At this moment, their computers are stuck with two aging OSes:

Most of their Windows machines can probably be updated to 11, a few can't due to the TPM requirements. The few Macs, however, are stuck - their Apple-established requirements dictate that 10.15.x Catalina is the last Apple-made OS they'll ever get.

One could say that the solution for the Windows machines is straightforward (just upgrade them, right?), but this is not something that I can just accept with a straight face. Not when Microsoft keeps on playing with what they're doing with the OS and can go lower every time as they wish. If anything, I want to do something that will protect those people closest to me from MS.

And as for the Macs, the solution smells of money (just buy another Mac, bro!), which is another thing I want to avoid. They are perfectly good working hardware, with more than the capacity to withstand their current general computing tasks - new hardware is not required for this. If Apple won't think this way, then I say it's time to find an alternative.

And that gilded alternative is the crux of the question of the essay.

Switching to what, exactly?

Long story short, this is the dillema: what OS can substitute Windows or Mac in a familiar manner for someone not "too technical" which they can maintain and update (because of security) relatively without problems - essentially, not requiring my assistance?

If they require my assitance to keep using the OS for their daily tasks, then I'm sorry but I consider the mission failed. I may not be available at times (or even in the same timezone) for them to provide support for catastrophical things. And updates should be applicable in a more or less "safe" way so that they can be applied by themselves and in a way that doesn't break the system.

With this in mind, I've thought about the following OSes that may be able to fit the description:

Ubuntu

Would've been a fine and straightforward choice fifteen years ago, but the track record on the last decade has been increasingly shady for me. A little too "momma knows best" for my taste. And their choice of "unnatended upgrades" being done while you want to shut down the computer was the last straw. If I wanted Windows, I'd have stayed on Windows!

The good thing about Ubuntu right now is that they're copying so many (bad) things about Microsoft so much that it would probably offer the least friction for a newbie to try out. Including the support out of the box for - ugh so often used - Secure Boot. And of course, they're far, far from being as evil as Microsoft and most of the tools that I'm used to are the same as other distros if I need to give support, but it still would ache me a little to see my loved ones running Ubuntu.

Linux Mint

Mint is a breath of fresh air compared to my disappointments with Ubuntu in the last years. Snapless, no unattended upgrades BS, and it still aims for the User-friendliness configuration and updates. These make Mint my probably strongest choice of OS in this mission, and some of the default DEs offered like Xfce or KDE look familiar enough for someone coming from Windows. Plus it has a way to manage updates and install software in a straightforward way.

However, I don't think it's perfect either. Maybe I got used to the freshness of rolling release distros, but in the recent past when I busied my hands with mint, I found that some of its packages are out of date even against compared to the current Debian Stable distribution. Sometimes the differences were minor annoyances, but a few times even the kernel seemed to be quite old in comparison to Debian Stable. For a distribution based on Ubuntu, itself based off Debian's unstable branch, this seems really weird. At least not having snaps is already a huge first step.

Debian

In the stable channel, usually this would be my first choice, my "no-brainer" knee-jerk distribution to install in any desktop workstation. For someone not really technical, however, I would be a little more hesitant. Almost none of the administration tools for Debian that I know are graphical-based, and I'm not sure there's some sort of "graphical installer" a-la appstore that they can use if they need to install or update something.

The nice thing about Debian, however, is that it's very stable and the chances that something breaks unintentionally there are minimal. Yes, some things are out of date, some a lot, but for things like the browser, I can set up something like a direct install from the Mozilla website, and then the updates can be done from the application itself.

Fedora

Can't really comment as I never seriously used it, but I'd guess the experience would be similar to Ubuntu, minus most of the Canonical BS? Or perhaps closer to Debian, in a "purer" sense? I should test drive it indeed, since from what I hear it offers a nice balance between cutting edge and usability of software. I'm not sure how stable updates between major versions are, though.

BSD

Yeah, nice try, kid.

A sustainable support model for Linux?

If you have the standard parents' IT support model, probably you're the L1, 2 and 3 of all the computer troubles they have. This is probably doable enough - even if a little despisable - when you live in the same house or close by (in which case, every "come to lunch" ticket has a hidden "look at this issue" agenda). However, once you're far away, perhaps with a timezone difference, this becomes much less sustainable.

With a Windows machine, savvier users may be able to search for a solution on the internet and serve themselves when something minor doesn't work, and as a last resort take the machine to a repair store, and have them (ugh) reset the machine clean. I'm not sure many shops around even touch Macs, but see no real reason why they'd refuse it.

With Linux, however, I'm not sure if this workflow works anymore. Probably many shops will abstain from touching such an OS they never used before, and I'm certain that once they bring it for repairs, the clerk will probably just install a (pirated) copy of Windows and claim it's fixed. There goes the strategy...

And thus the reason why "self-support first" is so important for me when choosing an OS for this task. Less calling and trying to figure out things, and ideally getting to me only in a last, last case scenario. I believe that at least through a good search with the name of the OS they're using, my family may be able to find answers if they use a more popular distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora. Or at least the answers they find may apply (by using popular software stack such as systemd, etc).

Conclusion: the curse of "I know this isn't good for you, but how can I have you know this as well?"

Our knowledge that blesses us may just as well be our curse - how can we warn the people of the harms of proprietary software when they themselves can't perceive them the same way?

Many others carried the same cross before us, including that enlighted fellow back at Plato's Cave allegory who paid for it with his life, and it seems like a fruitless task in the end. After all, why care about making other people care?

For me, the answer is again because the people around me are the ones I care about. Maybe I can get them to change to care as well, or maybe they can understand that their negligence impacts me, personally, in a negative way. "No, it's not OK, $FamilyMember. Your not caring makes me sad, and even if you don't understand it, I wanted to make sure you just know that."

In the meantime, it's back to the drawing board shopping for beginner-friendly and self-maintainable distros. Perhaps by setting a secondary machine or an installation in another hard drive as a way to enable them to test it worry-free. Will Linux pass the user-friendliness test with people who are absolutely new to it? Only time will tell, I guess, and even that seems to be running out.

What will you suggest to the people close to you to do when October 2025 comes by and their Windows 10 installs are EOL'd? Will you suggest them to try Linux or something else? Let me know your suggestions in Mastodon!

This post is number #55 of my #100DaysToOffload project.

Last updated on 07/12/24