One upon a time, there was a kid…
That kid was me. I was 5 years old, and my parents had just brought home an unassuming beige box: our first family computer.
It was a rather old computer for the time: an old Pentium II system running Windows 98, but it was plenty for its initial purpose: doing some office work at home. But you’ve heard this story before, you already know that’s not what that Pentium II system was really used for.
How gamers are made
I for one was most interested in games, PopCap’s games being by far the highlight, with Bejweled 2 being a favourite among everyone I knew. But a game I personally felt more drawn to early on was a little known Mario fan game developed by Buziol Games called Mario Forever. Another game I sunk countless hours in was Chicken Invaders 2, a game in a similar vein as Space Invaders or Galaxin, but one which didn’t take itself seriously at all.
Those were by no means the only games I had an interest in, but with many of them being indie fan games of what I now know to be Nintendo properties, you won’t be surprised to hear I haven’t been able to find many of those games to properly name here. (Thanks, Nintendo)
But of course, I didn’t just play games on the computer.
The early fun of computers
This is the part where you might expect me to say I stumbled upon a programming book or a Linux CD which opened a whole new world for me… but not really. Instead I’d just delve aimlessly trough system files on the home computer running Windows 98, or my mother’s work computer running Windows XP, often times finding weird little hidden things like the wallpaper files, screen savers that at the time didn’t know were screen savers, or Stan LePard’s now famous song, “Velkommen”, which was supposed yo play during Windows XP’s initial setup but didn’t most of the time due to missing audio drivers at that stage of the installation.
Delving trough the control panel also led me to find the ways Windows provided to customise it such as taskbar toolbars or themes, enabling and disabling all toolbars to see what each did, or cycling trough each theme to see what each looked like.
Not the most exciting intro story, eh? But it was how I started, and once I finally got my first Windows XP computer in 2010, a hand-me-down Packard Bell netbook, it wasn’t long before I delved into… shall we say, “aftermarket mods”.
My internet access was limited, we didn’t have home internet, instead I’d get to browse when I visited a friend who let me connect to his WiFi when I took my netbook there. I spent countless hours on AskVG and DeviantArt looking at what Windows XP mods people made and what I could do to spice up my desktop. I found out about transformation packs like SevenRemixXP, tools like Styler, Rainmeter, and BorderSkin, and others I can’t recall the names of now, such as a Start Menu replacement, and a program which replaced the labeled taskbar entries with grouped, icons-only entries more like what Windows switched to starting with Windows 7.
I delved plenty trough Mozilla’s add-on repository for Firefox as well, stumbling upon themes like LavaFox and FT Deep Dark, or add-ons like Stratiform or Stylish, the latter of which would also feature Firefox themes in addition to the custom CSS one could apply to websites.
Another program I spent plenty of time with was ResourceHacker, a program which would allow you to modify .exe files to extract or replace various resources inside. Personally tho, I primarily used it to modify some of the custom login screens I could find on DeviantArt and set my own background images.
Needless to say, all of this gave me the taste of customisation, of making the system my own, which ended up being the seed of my increasing frustration with what computers were turning into.
Robots in your pocket
The next leg of my journey was with Android, I got my first Android phone in 2013, and amazed of having a phone that could do so many of the same things that my computer could, I quickly looked into trying to mod the phone the same way I had modded my computer.
But in some ways it was more… difficult. Some mods were easy, custom launchers, custom lock screens, but quickly I ran into things I couldn’t do, not because the phone was too slow to do something fancy, but because I just wasn’t allowed to. Some mods also talked of needing this thing called “root access”, which got me confused ‘cause I was still used to the wild world of Windows up until XP where everything was admin and nothing ever said no.
So, I started looking more into this “root” thing, and everywhere I kept seeing mentions of those things called “UNIX”, “Linux”, “OS X”. I had no idea what those meant but they did pique my curiosity. Another thing everyone said was that rooting the phone could “brick” it, or render it unusable, and it was darn near impossible to fix. Great, now I have to risk permanent damage to do what I want to with my phone. Of course, I didn’t articulate my thoughts quite like this at the time, but I was frustrated with it.
With all that in mind, I decided against risking it for a while, until I was fed up and just bit the bullet, and ended up regretting nothing. After rooting I quickly installed Xposed, a framework that’s not so popular nowadays but which back then would be at the core of most Android mods, with HoloThemer and GravityBox being 2 of my personal highlights. I also installed a file manager which allowed me to browse and edit system files, although I don’t recall which one exactly.
In short tho? More themes, more customisation, for features, a faster phone, and the ability to remove junk I didn’t use. Quite honestly, it was an absolute win. So why then was it such a pain to get to it in the first place? I wasn’t I allowed to do all of that by default?
The Modern Era
Many of those questions would go unanswered for a while longer, but they’d be ever more present in my mind as I got my hands on a shiny new laptop in 2015. It was nothing crazy, a Lenovo G50-45 80E3, but it was a massive upgrade from my poor netbook which was hardly even capable of playing YouTube videos by that point. But in one way, this new laptop was a downgrade. It shipped with Windows 8.1, which was… okay. I didn’t hate the charms bar and start screen as much as most people did, although I was rather frustrated with most Metro apps not even opening properly.
I didn’t stick with it for very long enough to delve into mods as I was very eager to install the then very heavily marketed Windows 10. I had been following it since the early Technical Previews so you can probably understand my eagerness to install it on my laptop. But then I installed it, looked at mods for it and… not much. There were some mods, but most came with a disclaimer that the mods could conflict with updates in ways that could render the whole system completely unusable. Having flashbacks yet? I ended up not messing with any mods as by then I still didn’t know how to recover a computer from a broken OS install. And besides, even tho Windows 10 wasn’t quite the fancy modded Windows XP desktop I had a few years prior, it was okay, at least for a while.
One thing I have to note here is I initially installed Windows 10 1511 aka The November Update as that was the latest version available when I had gotten my Windows 8.1 laptop (I switched to 10 within 2 weeks of getting it). From there I had installed the 1607 update, also known as the “Anniversary Update” or “Redstone 1”. Installing it was… a mess. All of my drivers would get messed up, bunch of junk got installed from the Windows Store, and overall I just ended up spending 2 days to get the computer back in working order after the update.
Taking the blue pill… kinda
By now I was just growing compliant, why fight to do what you want with your computer if the next update will break it all and then some? I mostly just used my laptop for games and youtube, gone were the days of fucking about with my desktop… almost.
I’ll skip over some details here as the story gets rather long and doesn’t necessarily add a whole lot to the story, but one thing led to another, and by early 2017 I had dualbooted my computer with RemixOS: a distribution of Android made for x86 computers with a more desktop-oriented UI, and on the Windows side I had some virtual machines with various Linux distros installed that I was messing with.
Then Windows 10 1703 aka Redstone 2 aka The Creators Update rolled out.
It was… such a mess. Repeat all the issues I had with 1607 but now also add the removal of the bootloader that let me choose to boot into RemixOS, and also the fact I had to fix the host drivers for the virtualisation software I was using. And for what? This update was disappointing even for my Microsoft-simp self from early 2017, it added pretty much nothing but came in like a wrecking ball to wreck everything I did care about. To say I was quite fed up would be an understatement, especially as I now had to figure out how to recover the data from the no longer bootable RemixOS install I had. Thankfully recovering the data was easy, but I was still left with a bitter taste in my mouth. At first I thought I’d truly give up and not bother at all anymore with anything that went out of line, but it really wasn’t what I wanted so before long I had dualbooted Linux Mint and started using that more and more.
It wasn’t out of a “that’s it, I’m breaking up with Microsoft” sentiment, but rather the fact that Windows just wasn’t fun anymore, meanwhile Linux Mint had given me everything I had been longing for since leaving behind Windows XP: themes, the ability to tweak every little thing, to make things look and function exactly how I wanted them to. But I was still stuck with Windows for some games as back then Proton wasn’t a thing and Wine was finicky to say the least. For about a month I had actually ditched Linux entirely as I wanted more space for games, and quite honestly this time sucked.
Well and truly fed up
This period of going Windows-only despite preferring Linux also coincided with me being stuck with no internet over the holidays, meaning there was no easy “just download an ISO, make a live USB, and install Linux again”. I was stuck with Windows, and it sure made sure I had no rest. Between poor performance and some Windows features outright crashing the whole operating systems when used (one of them being something I didn’t even have to engage myself but rather someone else on the same local network, literally a Denial of Service vulnerability!).
After all the bullshit Windows had put me trough during that holiday, the moment I got home and had an internet connection again I downloaded a Linux Mint ISO, put it on a USB, and installed Linux, wiping the disk, didn’t even bother with dualbooting or even waiting for the morning after, despite 2 days of travel I still couldn’t have any rest if I didn’t know the laptop was free of the blight that Windows had turned into.
So what was the point of all that?
Honestly, it was just the best way for me to explain why I’m so frustrated with where computers are today. When I was 6, computers were a place of wonder and excitement, quite frankly very close to magic. But today it’s anything but that.
As you probably already know, the 3 major OS vendors, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, have only gotten more intrusive in the last 15 years or so. All three have gotten more locked down, featuring remote kill switches (which allow the respective vendor to lock down the device remotely), the ability for the vendor to install or remove applications as they see fit, to track you everywhere you go (see Google Maps Timeline). And what do you get in exchange for this control you give up? You get the inability to move the taskbar away from the bottom edge of the screen in Windows 11, you get the inability to even run most games made for macOS, you get no access to emulators to play some real games on your iPhone, you get the lockscreen ads on Windows and Android. You get Apple knowing what applications you open and when, and if their tracking server goes down the local system shits itself because it refuses to launch the app before it calls back home to report it
You no longer own your computer, you’re no longer free to use it how you want to. You can only do the things approved by these companies, and you can only do it while letting said companies know about it.
And I fucking hate it.
But it doesn’t have to be that way
Of course, a lot of people are unhappy with this, it’s half the reason so many people use Linux and Haiku and various BSDs. It’s the reason you have projects that attempt to remove the tracking and control apparatus from the systems that have them.
But more people need to care still. We need to get people to stop accepting this shit before it’s too late, because at the rate we’re going, it won’t be a matter of “I have to go trough some extra hoops to do what I want”, it’ll be a matter of “I can’t do what I want at all”. Some systems are already locked down to the point we need to compromise its security to use it as we please, iPhones, game consoles, and Android phones from various vendors being prime examples. And if we don’t make it clear that we don’t want this, they’ll lock down everything and then we might not have a way out of the walled gardens companies built.
Post Scriptum
Got a bit dramatic at the end, eh? This is a subject I care about a lot, and I just couldn’t not eventually write about it, and get a bit heated about it.
But I want to make one thing clear: this isn’t a doomer post, there’s still hope, we can still claim our rights to own what we buy. The Right to Repair movement is fighting against scummy practices on the hardware side that I haven’t even gotten into in this pot, and new EU legislation is helping regain some control over our software, and while all vendors affected have been engaging in plenty of malicious compliance, with Apple removing browser-related features OS-wide inside the EU “because of security concerns with allowing 3rd party browser engines”, and Microsoft having already announced they will not make some features available going forward in the EU, blaming the new regulations for it even tho some of the features they said they won’t release are not even remotely related to the EU’s new regulations, we can and should keep fighting back, call out their bullshit, get legislators to fight back against it and not be fooled that any of that is a direct result of the new legislation.