“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

I've written previously about how I try and take some control of my digital footprint, but I've come to a more extreme stance over the past few days through a number of news stories. The key to being in control of your digital life is remaining the customer, and not the product.

As a first year Computer Science student in 2002, I bought a second hard drive to put in my PC and installed Mandrake Linux on it. By the end of my second year, I had installed Gentoo from source on a specific machine I built for Linux. Since then I have dabbled in Linux on a number of occasions, spent seven years running OS X, and eventually ended back up running Windows. This is a slightly rambling story about how I finally decided to make the switch to Linux (for almost everything).

Being a customer, not a product

The customer is always right

Attention is the only real currency in the modern world. Advertising technology is where our society will go to die, thousands of the best and brightest being paid ridiculous salaries to try and convince everyone else to spend money on things they don't need. Data to power ever better advertising is the justification for the massive surveillance capitalism machinery that Google, Meta, and others have set up over the past twenty years.

(As an aside, United Airlines are going to be putting personalised adverts in your seat back (CNBC) if you fly with them.)

If you'd have told the CIA (or equivalent intelligence agency) in the 1970s that people would not only put listening devices in their homes that would monitor their conversations 24/7, but that they would pay for the privilege, they'd have told you that you were crazy. However, the surveillance capitalism rant will have to wait for another day.

How you spend your attention

What I'd like to talk about in this post is how our attention is all we have... the clock outside Liberties department store in London has the following inscription:

No minute gone comes ever back again / take heed and see ye nothing do in vain

We have 1,440 minutes in a day and no more, and each one of them is single use. Since the birth of my daughter, I've become even more aware of how I need to use my time deliberately because there aren't enough hours in the day. I shouldn't spend my minutes being an audience for whatever big tech has decided to push to me.

Microsoft keeps devaluing Windows

Microsoft has recently caused a load of controversy by the botched announcement of the Recall feature for their new 'Co-pilot PCs', and it has brought to a head a lot of my dissatisfaction with Windows as an operating system.

When I built my latest PC I spent £120 for a copy of Windows 10 Home. This was the first time I've bought a retail copy of Windows, but with the loss of the Home Use Programme, I didn't have any other option. However, since I've installed it, I've been feeling pretty disappointed with it. From the moment that the Start Menu started showing me adverts for loads of random software, to the last six months or so where I've been editing the registry to stop being prompted to upgrade to Windows 11, I haven't had any confidence that Microsoft is doing anything to actually think of me as a user or a customer. I am essentially just a pair of eyeballs that's paying to be told what I want by a faceless corporation.

I found this that really sums up my feelings, My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore. The Hacker News Comment Thread is also worth a read.

The Recall announcement was the straw that broke the camel's back, so this week I have declared 2024 as the year of Linux on the desktop by installing Debian 12. This has been a breath of fresh air after my Windows experience. I installed the OS and while there is a lot of stuff preinstalled, nothing is being pushed on me, and I can install what I want, and only what I want. Sadly, since I do a lot of photography, I've had to keep the Windows installation for some editing software, but I'm pretty confident that it will be the only use case for Windows going forward.

One thing I wasn't expecting was for my machine to perform so much faster. I don't just mean it feels snappier or completes tasks faster. My Debian install on the same hardware downloads 20% faster than Windows. I assume there's a load of background processing and telemetery that is eating up a sizeable amount of my bandwidth.

At the moment, the only thing that I'm still working through is whether I can find alternatives to Adobe for photo processing and editing.

So this actually is the year of Linux on the desktop (for me, at least).

The Photo: "Easy Tiger", Nikon Z6ii, NIKKOR Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR @ 360mm, 1/400s, f/6, ISO 500.