Moving over to Linux soon
Gonna be an open source tycoon
When I think about moving away from the hobbled-together patchwork of social media platforms I’m on, the possibility of moving everything away from the grind of corporate shenanigans and enshittified bullshit comes up again.
This means making decisions about things on two different lists:
- Operating system
- Software
- Hardware
- Platforms
In relation to:
- Money
- Time
- Energy
Get even one of these things wrong, and “production” (figuratively as well as literally) grinds to a halt.
As such, I don’t take moving over in this way lightly.
Further, making a significant choice about one of the items on the first list, then acting on it, can screw things up for a while if you get things wrong. Days, if not weeks, in some cases.
Did I mention that most if not all “indie” artists create most if not all of their work on spec? In other words, they provide all of the up front costs and labor themselves? At some point, things may shift, or not, but everybody has to go through this, and for a lot of us, the period of time invested is significant.
So that just adds to the risk aversion. Eventually, or even quickly, it means that things I might have created, simply don’t get made.
This is bad for everybody. It’s not a trend to endorse, in my view — *BUT*:
Eventually, through the magic of “capitalism” (aka “neofeudalism“), things become so horrible, that making this kind of shift becomes increasingly viable, because the time that gets wasted on trying to wrangle enshittified bullshit into some workable shape, becomes larger and larger, and eventually, the turd-encrusted corpse of whatever it was you were working in, just lies there, dead.
For example, look at creating music these days.
The increasing inviability of some of the available tools (all the BS that goes into registering and activating music plugins, as well as the flood of mediocre plugins for increasingly higher prices, for example), combined with the same for some operating systems (Windows), as well as the rising costs and lowered quality of music hardware, and the larger trend of selling off already kind of sketchy, broken social media platforms, such that they become even more sketchy and broken (or in the case of Facebook, both without being sold off at present), means that the time, energy, and if you’re not careful, money that gets spent on this sort of thing keeps increasing.
So, what does this all mean?
I don’t know yet — but I’m seeing a shift take place in my own creative practice, slowly. I’m not ready to move everything over to Linux, and I’m also not ready to get a testing box set up for music production and possibly, video creation as well — but I also can’t risk doing spec work on what looks more and more like the software, hardware, et. al. version of freelance bullshit jobs, either.
That said, what is starting to happen is that things in the wide, not-always-so-wonderful world of free software feel more friendly, overall — this is especially true for social media, and has been for a while now. (Thank you, Mastodon.) I still have one account on a corporate social media platform that I use sparingly but somewhat regularly, but that’s it at the moment.
In the meantime, the available software options for Linux are looking better, as in, things I already know and use are on there, and appear to be stable enough to at least consider using. Further, getting Linux up and running has been an option for years now. As in the OS itself, not necessarily software, it depends on what you want to use it for.
To close this out for now: I do think that, unfortunately, the enshittification trend is going to continue. Just this week, it’s taken hold of Bandcamp and Letterboxd well enough that at least making contingency plans, especially if you spend any amount of time and energy on either, is a wise decision, and the short-term future of things seems to be heading towards more of this sort of thing.
So I’m getting ready, or at least, “staying ready so I don’t have to get ready.”
