Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog
Paul's activities and perspectives around Free Software
Consumerists Never Really Learn
Via an article about a Free Software initiative hoping to capitalise on the discontinuation of Microsoft Windows 10, I saw that the consumerists at Which? had published their own advice. Predictably, it mostly emphasises workarounds that merely perpetuate the kind of bad choices Which? has promoted over the years along with yet more shopping opportunities.
Those workarounds involve either continuing to delegate control to the same company whose abandonment of its users is the very topic of the article, or to switch to another surveillance economy supplier who will inevitably do the same when they deem it convenient. Meanwhile, the shopping opportunities involve buying a new computer – as one would entirely expect from Which? – or upgrading your existing computer, but only “if you’re using a desktop”. I guess adding more memory to a laptop or switching to solid-state media, both things that have rejuvenated a laptop from over a decade ago that continues to happily runs Linux, is beyond comprehension at Which? headquarters.
Only eventually do they suggest Ubuntu, presumably because it is the only Linux distribution they have heard of. I personally suggest Debian. That laptop happily running Linux was running Ubuntu, since that is what it was shipped with, but then Ubuntu first broke upgrades in an unhelpful way, hawking commercial support in the update interface to the confusion of the laptop’s principal user (and, by extension, to my confusion as I attempted to troubleshoot this anomalous behaviour), and also managed to put out a minor release of Dippy Dragon, or whatever it was, that was broken and rendered the machine unbootable without appropriate boot media.
Despite this being a known issue, they left this broken image around for people to download and use instead of fixing their mess and issuing a further update. That this also happened during the lockdown years when I wasn’t able to personally go and fix the problem in person, and when the laptop was also needed for things like interacting with public health services, merely reinforced my already dim view of some of Ubuntu’s release practices. Fortunately, some Debian installation media rescued the situation, and a switch to Debian was the natural outcome. It isn’t as if Ubuntu actually has any real benefits over Debian any more, anyway. If anything, the dubious custodianship of Ubuntu has made Debian the more sensible choice.
As for Which? and their advice, had the organisation actually used its special powers to shake up the corrupt computing industry, instead of offering little more than consumerist hints and tips, all the while neglecting the fundamental issues of trust, control, information systems architecture, sustainability and the kind of fair competition that the organisation is supposed to promote, then their readers wouldn’t be facing down an October deadline to fix a computer that Which? probably recommended in the first place, loaded up with anti-virus nonsense and other workarounds for the ecosystem they have lazily promoted over the years.
And maybe the British technology sector would be more than just the odd “local computer repair shop” scratching a living at one end of the scale, a bunch of revenue collectors for the US technology industry pulling down fat public sector contracts and soaking up unlimited amounts of taxpayer money at the other, and relatively little to mention in between. But that would entail more than casual shopping advice and fist-shaking at the consequences of a consumerist culture that the organisation did little to moderate, at least while it could consider itself both watchdog and top dog.