Ok, so this solidifies my desire to never buy a Windows PC/laptop and why my switch to Mac was a good choice a few years ago. However Mac gaming is nowhere near where it should be right now and I was thinking about getting a cheap Windows laptop for games that aren’t available on Mac.

I remember a push a few years ago to get some linux distros pre-installed on some OEM hardware but I didn’t hear much of anything past the hype. Anyone have any good OEM brands that have linux installed instead of Windows and are relatively affordable?

This is my big problem with the Fediverse right now, not just Lemmy but Mastodon as well. Signing up is confusing as hell, finding the same communities as what we’re used to on Reddit on Lemmy is borderline impossible when presented with the same communities across each instance. I follow several Politics communities and then I get a home page with multiple posts of the same link but different communities.

Grandma and Grandpa are on Facebook and Reddit because it’s dead simple to create an account on both and find communities. They ain’t coming to Lemmy without significant changes to the sign up processes. They don’t care about centralized vs decentralized, is it as easy as what I’m trying to replace?

I knew about Apple’s tactics and still went all in.

For me at the time it was a choice between sticking with Android (my first smartphone was the OG Moto Droid), trying to de-Google the Android phone I had at the time, or switching to Apple.

Android hardware may be better now than it ever has been, but that wasn’t always the case. Samsung especially pissed me off when they had an Android phone out that after an update to Android the phone would randomly go into Airplane mode without indicating it. They refused to release a fix. That was the last straw for me after trying to use a ton of different ROMS on the phone to get around the issue. Also, back then if you didn’t have Google Play installed that meant you missed out on a lot of apps or had to use Amazon’s App Store.

I got fed up with having to constantly fix things after ROM updates and didn’t have the time due to working so many hours at my job. I didn’t want to stick with Google because I saw where it was headed. I switched to Apple and never looked back. Part of that switch was also influenced because I wanted to get out of the Microsoft Windows ecosystem and gaming on Linux wasn’t great back then so I had to dual boot. Gaming on Mac’s weren’t that great either, but at least I had the “feeling” that things were more private with Apple than Google and MS.

I’m so tied into the Apple ecosystem right now that I’m just not sure I want to go back to hacking Android phones and al that even if things are 100% better than they were a decade ago. I “trust” that Apple handles my privacy concerns better than an ad-supported Google and Windows. I’m going to recommend Apple to non tech-savvy friends and family 100% of the time. Until there’s a phone OS competitor that is both easy to use and on decent hardware out of the box, it’s just a hassle.

That said, I’m thinking about looking at picking up a cheap pre-paid Android phone and checking out the ROM scene again because of the happenings in the US the last few months. I don’t know if I can trust Apple to not cave to the government and destroy the only good thing it had going for the ecosystem for me.

Herbalife