I was about to say that this is ironic coming from the guardian, but their website isn’t anywhere as spammy without Adblock as I remember. Good on you, guardian.

Designed obsolescence.

Congrats you discovered Enshittification

edit: that term encapsulates more than just complaining how shitty everything is. It's not a "petty gripe".

Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers (such as advertisers), and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

wikipedia

Going from One UI 6 to One UI 7 on a Samsung has made me very excited to go get a used pixel or fairphone and install a custom ROM instead. Absolutely abysmal update.

They’re still doing ‘pay up or allow all cookies’ popups, so definitely not good on them as far as I’m concerned.

No one remembers how vulnerable windows server and windows desktop OS’s were before they revamped updates?

Forced updates are great. The internet is safer.

I'm on a Pixel 8 with lineageOS and microg and I LOVE it. It's so nice to not be bombarded by AI "features" in every menu.

Be prepared for some apps to be a little wonky, I had to install aurora store to download balatro because it said my phone wasn't compatible from the official app store. I've had more issues because I'm also rooted though, so there will probably be less to deal with if you just use lineage. Not sure if it's because it's lineage OS or the root, but Authy doesn't let me login, but I just use my password manager for 2fa now anyway so that's fine.

This is a good point, but the issue is that vendors have abused this need by not just pushing security updates, but also regular rewrites that make the products more invasive/full of language model shit - Exhibit A being anything at all from Microsoft

You only notice the bad updates. There are probably over a hundred good ones for each annoying one that you notice.

or changing their product from a one time purchase to a subscription model, I predict there's gonna be a lot more of that with this new forced app updates change.

Until they force an update that bricks your device because they want money from you upgrading hardware

That's good to hear! I've ADBed almost all of the Google & Samsung stuff off my phone already so I'm well used to fighting with Aurora to download certain apps by now. Nearly all my apps are from F-droid as well so that will make the transition a lot easier, and I do a lot of self hosting so I'm not relying on any proprietary services that are going to demand play services be installed. Balatro on my steam deck already steals enough of my time, so honestly if my phone won't let me install it that's probably for the best.

No one remembers how vulnerable windows server and windows desktop OS’s were before they revamped updates?

I remember how much it sucked when ignorant users ignored updates forever and MS didn't really seem to give much of a shit about security anyway, yes.

Nowadays MS is a great choice if you want to borrow a computer that someone else controls. Less so if you want a computer that is actually yours.

Security packed and system updates is one thing.

The constant reorganization of functions and apps and layouts and compatibility is a very different one.

It is a problem that the operating system is controlled by the largest apps and service company that make money from user data in various forms and keep pushing their business model in every device core operations.

And fuck fuck fuck that Google keeps trying to force Gemeni in every update. Let me keep using Google Assistant and stop making it worse by stripping out functionality or replacing shortcuts to Gemeni. Gemeni can still not do the very few things I want my voice assistant to do, namely set alarms and play music on whatever music streaming service I prefer to use.

When is this fad going to end?!

Why did they write such shit software in the first place? No, they don't get off the hook.

Let’s look at your code from 20+ years ago?

You can’t maintain security and feature changes separately long term.

All software is either shit to begin with or becomes shit when it gets big enough. If a Linux distro were forced to maintain as much legacy cruft as Windows it would be shit too.