this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Unlike the polished experience in Windows where the UI completely changes every 5 years and there are, literally, 6 different menus for adjusting the volume because removing them literally breaks the kernel.
Never experienced anything like that with KDE Plasma.
Experienced having more than one way to change the volume? Or you've looked into the source of kde and confirmed there aren't old sliders sneaking around taking up 3 kB of space?
What, precisely, is the user-facing problem with this (the volume one)?
I'm not going to argue that tech companies change UIs and usually for the worse and usually dont fix them. I mean look how shit gnome is after it merged together the worst parts of windows 8 and windows 11. It's awful. Or chrome's insistent efforts to return chrome to chrome even though it's point was being a low chrome browser. Or Firefox deciding that small chrome was too complex to support and dropping that feature. Or every bank turning their website into the shittiest form of single page app. I agree -- all of these behaviors are not great. KDE gets and deserves credit for being the same clunker with tiny incremental improvements it's been for years. I saw in kde6 they rounded some buttons? Good for them!
If I'm using VoIP, it reduces the system volume by 50%.
There isn't an option to change this in the Windows 10 UI. You have to dig through the options to find the Windows XP menu to change it. This setting no longer saves between reboots, so every time I boot I have to dig through the same 3 layers of volume settings.
Lots of network settings are unavailable in the modern settings menu. You have to find the "advanced" menu which is just the menu from older versions of Windows.
Each major system update there's a new layer of configuration menus, each with a different set of options some are redundant. They're all integrated with the system in their own unique way and the people that worked on them are not part of the team that's working on the next iteration.
They can't remove the old menus so they just add another one on top. At least in a Linux DE, you know that pipewire is the sound system and there is one way to configure it. You can choose from many different GUI applications if you want a graphical interface, but they're all editing the same configuration.