Big tech just has us by the short hairs, don’t they?
Besides fighting to get Ms. Tuckers MacBook Air working properly1 and running the gamut of Apple nonsense2, I’ve had to backtrack, again, in a couple of major areas.
GrapheneOS
After a few months on Graphene, I had to bounce my Pixel back to Google Android. There were a couple of work apps that simply would not play nice, including the app we use for on call which, for obvious reasons, I need to work. A couple of my financial apps were randomly not happy with Graphene and only behaved half the time. And this was with the Play services installed and enabled.
That being said, I did take some lessons from Graphene and apply them to Android: mostly F-Droid and open source. I’m still using Auxio, Aves Libre, Acrticons, and I’m still trying to make alternative map apps work for me but, holy hell, are they just not there yet.
While I’ll give GrapheneOS a try again in near future for sure, for right now, I need to stick to stock Android.
Linux
This was was harder for me. I love Linux and holy shit was the Linux install itself rock solid. It turns out there were a couple of minor compatibility issues that forced my hand back to Windows. The main one being issues with Scrivener.
I’d purchased Scrivener, a very robust writing app that’s Windows/Mac only, back in 2024 when I was nearing the end of my novel and needed to start organizing it. After trying out a number of writing tools, Scrivener was the standout. When attempting to move to Linux, getting Scrivener to work was a must have and, on my desktop PC and, after a ton of trial and error and cursing and swearing and sheer force of will, I got it running on Linux using Lutris3.
Font formatting was a minor issue (italicized P’s looked like F’s), moving/organizing folders worked some of the time and froze the app the rest of the time. Those were small issues compared to my attempts at compiling my work which was crashing Scrivener/Lutris. Admittedly, I didn’t even try that hard to find a solution. I was at the point where I needed this functionality to work, so I just bounced everything back to Windows.
But let me tell you, I did not want to go back to a Windows where I needed a Microsoft account and had to run the gamut of opting out of security/marketing bullshit. And for that, Rufus is a major fucking godsend. It lets you create an installer that completely bypasses the need for an online MS account, allowing you to setup a local account, and disables the data collection/marketing/opt-out bullshit. Once the install was done, I did go in and check the usual places and was happy to find that all the shit you’d normally see enabled was, indeed, disabled. Sure you still have to go into Apps and uninstall a bunch of shit – but that’s the same on Linux as well4.
So, for now, here I am back on Windows 11, this time with a plain, ‘ol local account. To me, it’s not a bad OS if you cut out the bullshit. While it’s a pain in the ass to go in and turn off the cruft and spyware, at the very least we still have that option. And I don’t know how long we have until we simply can’t cut out the bullshit.
- It’s been flattened, macOS reinstalled, and is still running like shit. It also needs a new battery of which I’m skeptical will solve anything. I’d take it to the Apple store, but it’s a 2017 model so it’ll just be “buy a new one” which Ms. Tucker does not want. Her last MacBook Air lasted her over 10 years before it got this bad so she’s pretty much done with Apple computers. We’ll just squeeze every last drop of life out of it. ↩︎
- Have you ever tried deleting a huge amount of photos from iCloud? JFC what incredible hurdles one has to climb. I climbed them and it’s still not competed. ↩︎
- Yes, I tried Bottles and, yes, I tried it in Wine proper but, in true Linux fashion, Scrivener would only run in Lutris on my desktop. On the old laptop I’ve been playing with, running the same Linux distro, Scrivener will only run, sometimes, in Bottles, so ¯\_(••)_/¯ ↩︎
- And, honestly, if you can believe it, there is way more pre-loaded shit to uninstall from Linux distos and it’s not as easy as uninstalling pre-loaded apps from Windows. Dont @ me, bro. You know it’s true. ↩︎