does the computer trust me?

See, I'm a car guy. I love shitty old rusty cars, BMWs, Toyotas, whatever. It needs to be old, relatively unsafe, and give me a choice in how I wish to restore it. I don't love them for being old, prettier, more button-y, or anything like that. I love them because they respect me more. Every time I get behind the wheel of a newer car I get hit (with rare exceptions) with the same issues.

Start-stop systems, auto hold, safety systems that interfere with my already plenty safe driving (I am not saying that I'm a master at avoiding accidents, I just adhere to the basic safety standards and don't perform stupid maneuvers on public roads), lack of easily accessible buttons that perform basic actions, controls for some of the car's functionality that are buried 17 layers deep in some menu and need to be turned off every single time the car is started, or can't be turned off at all, etc.

The list goes on and on. I hate it. The problem is not that the car is new or ugly. The problem is that the manufacturer or the government decided for me what I am or am not allowed to do. You see, I am not trusted to look at the road, to put on a seatbelt, or to have the decency of being cautious of my energy levels on long drives. Yes, a lot of people really cannot be trusted. Unfortunately, new cars that do trust me are usually out of my price range by at least an order of magnitude.

Software, I believe, has the same issue. In the endless pursuit of the "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" quote tech started to slowly lose the magic of actually using it.

It is visible to me now.

the capability

We are getting less of it.

Yes, Moore's law is real. Yes, my phone is more powerful than the PC I've played AAA video games on 10 years ago. And, somehow, I... can do less on it? Apple was always the locked down one, but Android? I remember when in middle school me and my friend were modding his Nexus 5 to close to unreasonable extents, and now I can't remove a tile in the control center on my flagship phone? I can't get rid of a widget on the home screen without rooting my device or flashing a different OS on it?

"I am the product" is understandable when I'm paying heavily subsidized prices for a piece of tech that has no business costing as little as it does (e.g. most TVs nowadays, cheap smartphones, free closed-source software). Does it make sense when I'm spending thousands on a product? Should my system really have thousands of private undocumented APIs for basic functions that I don't have any way to explore, not even something along the lines of how Obsidian checks if you know what you are doing before letting you turn on vim keybindings?

I don't believe that getting more power, but in exchange always having someone holding my hand and/or watching over my actions asking "Are you ABSOLUTELY SURE you want to do this?", is getting more capability. When my phone tells me that an app me and millions of users have been enjoying for a decade is definitely malware because it's not downloaded through Play Store I want to throw it off a cliff.

the speed

All of these questions come along every time when I'm thinking about what is the next device I'm going to be upgrading to, which I do not indulge in every year. At the time of writing I'm still using a base M1 MacBook Air (which is by no means old, but Apple sure does make it feel so with its presentations).

We all know that the pace with which hardware is becoming more powerful is often the same or even slower than the pace with which more power is required by the software. This argument is mostly alluded to when Electron and similar tech is brought up, but think about it this way: it's a miracle that I can develop an app once and, mostly without hassle, distribute it on every single platform in existence. This is a miracle. And yet, software that needs not distribution on every device on earth is becoming more unoptimized too.

I take great care of my tech, and yet my flagship Samsung does not provide me with a full day of battery life as it did a year ago. My MacBook is even worse, as the laptop that was praised as a revolution of personal compact computing and something that forced the industry to take another look at ARM now needs to wait a second before the gnomes inside of it decide that I am worthy enough of seeing the WiFi menu...

It's 5 years old and behaves like this with an OS that is supposed to be native and most performant on it, yet the updates that it brings make it worse over time for some nicer "chrome" and an emulation of a real material? In exchange for the speed of a context menu appearing? No amount of clean wipes helps with these issues. Accessibility settings don't help with this issue. macOS 27 isn't going to help either. And, somehow, what actually is faster in day-to-day use is a piece of software based on reverse-engineering of the M1 architecture by a couple of nerds passionate for open-source (Asahi Linux). Wow?

Not the right kind of "wow", I believe. No wonder that 2025 and 2026 are touted as "the years of the Linux desktop" more than ever before. The community is far from perfect, as are the desktop environments for a lot of people, but we seldom see any real regressions in the space.

the respect

Respect goes a long way in all facets of life. Most used operating systems in the world seem to lack it. macOS is thousands of undocumented (for seemingly no reason) APIs and commands that perform basic tasks, Android is getting worse and worse in its openness, Windows is just pure garbage (no need to discuss it I believe), and iOS feigns the expanding customizability while keeping the system more locked down than ever.

Just like my anecdote about cars, these operating systems are things that I use every day and would like a semblance of control over. No, not even control. Respect towards the operator of the Operating System. Yet, finding a tiling window manager for macOS that works with no real issues or doesn't require SIP (system integrity protection) to be turned off is close to impossible (at the time of writing there isn't one that doesn't use some workarounds that a proper system should handle and provide on its own), and some of Apple's own advertised features haven't worked at all since launch and to this day.

Yes, most users won't ever even remove the default icons from the dock and thus would actually find the new Siri to be the thing that makes their computer easy. How am I related to that? How are millions of others?

the why

This seems like a rant, and for a long time it was just that - a rant. Nevertheless, I am trying to put my thoughts to paper and give some weight to my rant, a rant that started as a discussion with my friend on what kind of tech ecosystem we are building around ourselves.

It is a silly question on paper. "Who cares? It's just tech. You can always replace it, and you get the same everything everywhere". But this dismissal always misses one thing - just like a car, tech is something we use and rely on every day, and while some are more than comfortable enough with what they are offered, some wish that they are respected on a bit of a deeper level by stuff they use.

Tech is, after all, getting more and more expensive. There is little chance that the prices will go down to levels they were at before [insert event that you thought of]. Hardware that one chooses to buy today is likely to stay in their possession and active use longer than before, and we are (I believe) at a point where this long and active use can keep being comfortable long-term for basic OS usage (even if some of the innovative capabilities will be too heavy to work there). It is important to pick right, now more than ever.

Some operating systems provide such opportunities (10+ year old hardware in 2026 can keep being comfortable for daily operations of an average user, even if Apple/Microsoft/Google make it seem like the opposite). Some don't. In a year or so there will likely be almost no difference in the software one can install on either side.

The question, for me, is now solved as I am writing this. No matter what feature I see a large corporation try selling me as a differentiator for their product, it is likely that with the power of a bit of thought and deliberation, open-source community, and a powerful AI that I rent for pennies on the dollar from another massive corporation, I can likely set myself up with a set of features that are better suited for me and respect me more than even the software-producing company most aligned with my tastes.

and the what

At the end of the day, what you pick is up to you and you only. While I chose to buy a laptop with no OS pre-installed you might still choose a MacBook, and while you choose Google Maps, I chose to petition my city to make the transport schedule into an open-source feed for Organic Maps.

Everyone picks what they want and need. What I ask of you is to maybe just think what you are optimizing for when you make a hardware/software choice if you are even the slightest bit interested in being respected by systems you are supposed to be controlling. I'm just happy that I have found my way and understanding with tech choices that left me wondering for a long time.

And thank you for your time here.