The Moans And Groans of the Modern Internet and OS's

Sure did.  Love the lucky dips and cashies runs!

malcolm

Oh yes, it's insane how search engines have "evolved".  The top results are sponsored, the rest are there through "SEO" to shill a product.  I have had some luck with Google by using an adblocker and removing the sponsored links.  But even then, it's all still a game of chance.

Can you tone down on the unneeded swearing and try and conduct yourself in a civil matter? 

I know it seems like I'm singling you out and you find it annoying, but I equally find it annoying logging in and finding a report about you and having to ask you to shape up again.

- The general interface, fewer and fewer elements are customizable, the controls have become gigantic (sometimes larger than the sizes previously intended for the visually impaired), everything is meant to be too clean, almost sanitized, but at the same time, everything is much less coherent than before, with many programs that design their own controls. In addition, ergonomics is no longer taken into account at all, where before, it was the basis of UX design.

- Privacy seems to have less or less importance on proprietary OSes. Between telemetry, the incentive to the cloud, online accounts (like Microsoft account, Google).

- Bloatware has never been so frequent and heavy. On Windows, the number of processes that are disabled or killed has become enormous, and Android is a bloated system by design, because of the containerization of applications. Precisely, I also hate containerization and excessive sandboxing, even GNU/Linux seems to be affected by this scourge. This makes sense for security-critical uses, not for everyday use, especially for an experienced user who will not be fooled by social engineering. - Application performance has never been so bad, compilers seem less efficient than before, and some development platforms and web languages ​​are abused (for example, Electron's performance is horrible). In general, I use as many old applications as possible, because for a similar task, it consumes much less system resources. On mobile systems, it's even worse, because almost everything is based on web languages ​​(I hate JavaScript).

- The design of mobile OS (Android and IOS) is catastrophic: sanbdoxed applications, horrible design, authorization system that leads applications to pump personal data (applications like TikTok, Google or Facebook would be detected by an antivirus under Windows if they had the same behavior as Android). And the mobile device itself is poorly designed, it is much more difficult to change the operating system on a smartphone than on a PC, and the only alternatives are deggoglied Android, but not free from Android's flaws. In addition, Google did exactly what Microsoft did in the days of IE/ActiveX: many banking or public services web applications only work with Android (or IOS) with Google services installed, in the same way that in the 2000s, many banking or public services web applications only worked with Windows with ActiveX installed (the great era of viruses). I wouldn't talk about IOS, in my opinion the worst OS in the world.  In addition, Microsoft has started to sabotage Windows by copying the design of mobile OSes, both in front-end and back-end.

Under Mac, the OS has never been customizable, but in the past it was very well thought out in terms of ergonomics. Today it has about the same flaws as the others, but since it is difficult to customize...

- What worries me most about the future of the PC is the arrival of ARM PCs. When I see what this implies with mobile devices, ARM risks being the means to dispossess users of their PC, by breaking compatibility with all the old high-performance applications, and by making the installation of other OS much more complicated.

Concerning the modern internet:

- The current economic model is catastrophic; it is based on overconsumption (with the environmental damage that this implies) and on the pumping of private data. Today, everyone is bombarded with targeted advertising, according to their habits.
This also leads to slowness, because the trackers and advertisements are often heavier than the useful content of the page.

- The economic model also harms quality content, particularly in the press. Most press titles publish bad uninterestingcontent.

- Modern social networks have considerably weakened the old horizontal social networks, where content was not displayed according to popularity. However, horizontal exchange is much richer.

Overall, the modern internet highlights everything that is superficial, sensational and monetizable, to the detriment of real wealth, human and based on cooperation. Current social networks (such as Instagram, Tiktok, X, Facebook, etc.) on the contrary promote the reproduction of hierarchy and social divergences between people.

- Privacy is attacked from everywhere, and freedom of expression is increasingly threatened. In most states that were free, oppressive laws of control and surveillance are voted, while the medias (mainstream or dissident) talk little about it. The biggest common point of these oppressive laws is to attack the freedom of young people. At all times, it is young people who have made society evolve; at the moment, laws are passed to prohibit certain social networks for young people, to prohibit them from expressing an effective and sexual life, to prohibit them from having a private life ... I am French, and in my country there is a very famous revolt, that of May 1968, where young people demanded rights that they did not have, but which they ended up obtaining (when I talk about young people, I am absolutely not talking about children, I am only talking about mature people who are still too young to be legally considered adults).

In addition, with each law that wants to control young people's access to a service, it causes a loss of privacy for everyone, because of the request for identity documents when registering for the service. For each oppressive government, this kind of law can be a godsend to attack, for example, political dissidents or the LGBT+ community.

Personally, I will never show an identity document to register on an online service. If one day I have to withdraw from the internet because of oppressive laws, I will do it. Just as I will never accept that a document that I send is scanned en route by a state service (this is however the subject of a bill within the European species).

Maybe some of these paragraphs are too political for this forum, if so I apologize. The problem is that the use of the internet becomes a political issue (it wouldn't be if there were no oppressive countries, nor oppressive bills in free countries...).