My take on it: most people do have foresight or at least understand the issue, but they still don’t act on it or ignore it as long as the status quo is still convenient enough. So it’s purely a matter of pain and inconvenience. Once enough pain and inconvenience has accumulated, they’re much more ready to make an actual switch. Thankfully, with Microsoft’s services also becoming increasingly enshittified (forced AI chatbot integrations everywhere, even more cloud dependencies, ever more expensive subscriptions, …) there’s also Microsoft shooting itself in the foot a bit in order to accelerate this process. Vile actions from the current US regime are also accelerating the process of course.

Data gathering and analysis is still happening in the background. They just won’t show you these 2 things in the frontend.

I’ve always wondered where the line was, or how blurry it is, between “haha, look at us, we’re the PC masterrace and those are the console peasants” and actual chauvinism…

Some of the better RPGs allow you to play as an evil guy (equally fleshed out as the good guy playthrough), e.g. Baldur’s Gate 3 (it even has a special evil background storyline called The Dark Urge) or (some of?) the Mass Effect titles.

Cult of the Lamb is also a great game where you play a cult leader. Although the game’s design is strong on the entertaining/funny side, it’s kind of dark also.

Stellaris is a grand strategy game where you can play anything, from a ruthless ruler trying to destroy the whole galaxy to a pacifist trader.

It’s definitely a form of Linux. Their own product Windows Server is just for small and medium businesses and mostly used for managing Windows devices (with Active Directory domain controllers) and various Windows application/terminal servers in an intranet scenario. It’s never really used for anything serious. Linux is basically the only relevant server OS these days, except for some specific use cases or specific preferences (I’ll count the *BSDs to that category).

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/gov.whitehouse.app/latest/

As usual: this can be interpteted as Malware. That said, many apps are like this these days: full of trackers and way too many permissions. Most people never know or care.

Mildly interesting: one of.the trackers seems to be related to Huawei.

EDIT: Someone decompiled and analyzed the app in detail: https://blog.thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app

Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS (fully degoogled)

Be the change you want to see in the world. Instead of (only) complaining about it, take action and donate a bit to your favorite FOSS projects. I do. Many more should do. I get that one of the major draws to FOSS is that you can use it mostly for free. But developers still need support. In some form or another.