Oooo, while I do feel that I am very aware of, and hostile to, intrusive advertising online I have actually bought a few things specifically because I had seen them in an ad. It makes me feel a little conflicted but all of those things were extremely niche, so it took extremely targeted ads for things I would have eventually found on my own to actually make the sale.
I originally switched out of privacy concerns, not that MS or someone else was stealing my personal data and work directly but that it would just inadvertently get leaked with some massive cloud fuckup as seems to happen regularly.
Since then I prefer it just because I can run it on decades old hardware, it's consistent between different versions of the same Distro (W7 through to W11 gives me anxiety), and I don't have to worry about a hardware change invalidating a product key so I have to re-buy my damned OS. Shit, yeah, it's an ideological thing.
When plastics were first introduced to consumers it was sold as indestructible, it will never wear out, never degrade! People were actually concerned at the time, why anyone buy disposable products that never break down, won't they just pile up forever?
After much lobbying the concept of recycling plastics was introduced to help consumers stop worrying about all this indestructible waste and help push the sales of cheap plastic products. Your mom has the right idea, not buying it in the first place is the only way to drive demand down.
It requires active user participation. Windows, Mac, iOS and Android will all "work" even if you have no idea what you are doing and no plans to to learn. Just keep running the apps or downloading .exes from cnet.
You can stumble your way through Linux as well but it's a lot less forgiving. If something doesn't work immediately it's up to the user to search the relevant keywords and see if there is a is a fix. That can be frustrating if you aren't so great with a search engine, you don't know what the relevant terms are or you don't know how to implement a fix that is not for your exact setup.
I got to "fuck you, I quit" a guy who then laughed it off. Two weeks later he wanted to know why I was emptying my tool box on a Friday afternoon. Already did the paperwork with HR on "fuck you" day, never seen someone so stunned in my life.
That is going to be annoying af. Good. If a strike can cripple business and disrupt international trade then maybe those employees should be payed proportional to the profit they generate.
Thank fuck. It's going to take a while but maybe this is the end of diskless middle management generating endless bullshit work to justify their own existence. Almost every job has been mired down with so much box-ticking, pointless, ass-kissing, ego-stroking, bullshit that the actual work like nursing or construction governing a country has become secondary.
When I to a 5 min repair job at work I have to hand write a report, make a photo copy, give the report to another person who then types it into a system to which I do not have access. This was implemented by, and is strictly enforced by, the boomer and gen-x management which has seen the factory floor for less than 40 hours of their entire career.
I can't wait until the bulk of the boomers end up in understaffed, under funded old-age care and can't figure out why nobody wants to work any more. It'll make for some funny Fox News.
That does explain my dislike of semicolons and case-sensitive variable names.