What kind of pre-enshittification tech do you all use? Stuff where ppl look at you like you’re an alien b/c nobody does it that any more.

Me ->

Oldschool offline mp3 player rather than Spottify or other streaming or phone app, to use when running.

Paper books rather than e-books.

DRM free games I buy on GOG to avoid rootkitting my own comp.

Wired speakers rather than smart speakers.

Old ass pre-connected car.

Prob more but I can’t think of it all rn.

  • Kristell@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol
    5·
    24 hours ago

    Admittedly a lot of my audio stuff is either wireless or built-in now. Either laptop speakers, or bone conduction headphones since I want to hear what’s happening around me when I’m walking on the roadside. Not clear on what you mean by pre-enshittification tech, but here’s the stuff people either need explained, or look at me weird for:

    • Gentoo linux
    • FreeBSD
    • Thinkpad T430
    • GrapheneOS (this one’s weird to me because it feels almost exactly like stock android?)
    • A lot of my games are from itch.io for the same reason you listed for GOG, though I do use steam a lot too.
    • My files are synced through syncthing between 4 locations, depending on what’s getting synced
    • The fediverse in general
    • Having my own website? This one confuses me because you’d think that’d be a bit more normal because of the SquareSpace ads, but nope. The idea of just… having your own website is weird to people
    • The Linux terminal. I occasionally go to the library and write books in a TTY, it’s a little funny seeing people react.
    • Emacs
    • Pick any terminal application. Ranger, w3m, cmus, cava, etc etc.
    • I occasionally play MUDs/MUSHes
    • Browser games that are text/image based. The ones I’m playing now are all 20+ years old, so well pre-enshittification.
    • Honestly I’ve had people think it’s weird that I download my music to play locally, even though it’s through a phone app with a relatively modern interface.

    We’ll be moving into an owned home soon, and I have some plans for tech, and non-tech stuff. Can’t wait to see how many comments we get about having awnings in 2026.

    • JamesBoeing737MAX@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      I wish I had time to use Gentoo, but I barely have time to upgrade my Suse TW and Artix systems (to be fair, suse’s packaging system is shit compared to arch/artix, but it is more stable if upgraded after a long time).

      How do you manage to upgrade it regularly? Do you have an extremely powerful PC or just the T430?

      • Kristell@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol
        1·
        4 hours ago

        Gentoo is on the Latitude; it’s slightly more powerful, but it’s still an eight year old laptop. The big thing that’s cut down on compile time is using binary packages by default, only compiling when I either need to because my USE flags are different, or because there’s no binary package available. I don’t have that many packages installed that take hours/days (and I do mean days, I gave up on the source package for qtwebengine after 3 days of compiling) anymore. Average update takes maybe 30 minutes now, updating weekly.

        For a more direct comparison: Same PC, installed Gentoo twice (I managed to bork my install), the source install took 3 days to actually get a GUI, binary install took 3 hours, and there is essentially no difference

        I will also say: You can absolutely use your computer while the upgrades are going. Gaming won’t be great, but doing office/coding stuff, and watching videos is usually fine