Here’s an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.
This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they’ll mysteriously “forget” and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.
Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don’t have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.
(A previous version of this comment involved the word “lube”. I’m sure you can imagine the rest.)
That is a terrible analogy. In your weird alternate reality I just wouldn’t keep a garden. Also, I’d be pretty concerned with suing the patently illegal practices of this weirdly overbearing landscaping business, if I cared enough about gardening, which I don’t.
More to the point, that’s not how people present this to themselves and normies. At least not until they get some pushback. The pitch is always “it works now” or “it’s actually better and faster” or “everybody is going to switch any day now because of some random event or another, I’ve decided”.
It’s never “hey guys, maybe you can trade a whole bunch of convenience and a much higher minimum level of technical skill for the benefit of not being as impacted by enshittified services of the late online era”. Because in that scenario most people will take enshittified services. If not out of conviction, necessity or laziness, definitely out of not being able to clear that technical bar in the first place.
Bringing “no garden” back out of the analogy equates to no computer at all. The fountain is all the crapware and spyware shovelled into Windows these days. The billboard is the ads they want inject into everything.
The alternative is Apple. They don’t want to install a billboard just yet, and there’s no obvious fountain, but there’s a nightmare HOA who tell you how you have to live and if you don’t live their way you have to move.
No, that’s not the equivalent at all because I’m not a gardener but I do use a computer to work.
Look, analogies can be useful to explain things to people who don’t understand the paramenters in question, but we all know what an OS is. You don’t need to talk down to anybody here.
Turns out the question isn’t about gardening (or lube), it’s between a FOSS OS that remains finicky and not perfectly supported and a few commercial alternatives with different quirks and approaches to monetizing the crap out of you but that generally have decent usability for mainstream non-technical users with general applications.
You don’t need an analogy for that unless you’re talking to a time traveller from the 1800s.
Here’s an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.
This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they’ll mysteriously “forget” and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.
Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don’t have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.
(A previous version of this comment involved the word “lube”. I’m sure you can imagine the rest.)
That is a terrible analogy. In your weird alternate reality I just wouldn’t keep a garden. Also, I’d be pretty concerned with suing the patently illegal practices of this weirdly overbearing landscaping business, if I cared enough about gardening, which I don’t.
More to the point, that’s not how people present this to themselves and normies. At least not until they get some pushback. The pitch is always “it works now” or “it’s actually better and faster” or “everybody is going to switch any day now because of some random event or another, I’ve decided”.
It’s never “hey guys, maybe you can trade a whole bunch of convenience and a much higher minimum level of technical skill for the benefit of not being as impacted by enshittified services of the late online era”. Because in that scenario most people will take enshittified services. If not out of conviction, necessity or laziness, definitely out of not being able to clear that technical bar in the first place.
Bringing “no garden” back out of the analogy equates to no computer at all. The fountain is all the crapware and spyware shovelled into Windows these days. The billboard is the ads they want inject into everything.
The alternative is Apple. They don’t want to install a billboard just yet, and there’s no obvious fountain, but there’s a nightmare HOA who tell you how you have to live and if you don’t live their way you have to move.
No, that’s not the equivalent at all because I’m not a gardener but I do use a computer to work.
Look, analogies can be useful to explain things to people who don’t understand the paramenters in question, but we all know what an OS is. You don’t need to talk down to anybody here.
Turns out the question isn’t about gardening (or lube), it’s between a FOSS OS that remains finicky and not perfectly supported and a few commercial alternatives with different quirks and approaches to monetizing the crap out of you but that generally have decent usability for mainstream non-technical users with general applications.
You don’t need an analogy for that unless you’re talking to a time traveller from the 1800s.