While you’re technically right, I’d say that FOSS in general is more than just a tool, and Linux is The FOSS project.

Deciding to share your work freely and cooperate with strangers as a contributor is, especially in a world driven by profits, a pretty major lifestyle/philosophy and an act of resistance against capitalism.

Of course, you can just exploit the ecosystem and treat it as any other tool, that happens to be free, but I would say that that is the explanation about “people that worship the altar of Linus” that you’re looking for. Spending basically your entire life to help make something, especially as complex as an operating system, for others and for free is something that, at least in my eyes, is worthy of admiration and I have utmost repsect for people who contribute.

Windows 11 recently had to start enabling some kind of turbo CPU mode just to open a right click menu on files, because otherwise it took more than 5-10 seconds. Same with File Browser.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-11-low-latency-profile-cpu-boost

They are extremely incompetent.

I had to use Teams for a week because of a second jpb I do occasional contracts for, and it was baffling how extremely worse has it gotten in the last two years.

Three times! It has happened that the teams would load (after going through login loop twice times for some reason) that it would load and show everything as usuall. Only after like three hours of waiting for answer I’ve noticed that my message actually didn’t send, without any error or indicator, and that everyone’s, including mine, status is “Undefined” and nothing works - messages don’t send, just appear sent, and I’m not getting any messages.

The only indicator was that everyone’s status dot was a hollow grey circle, and that messages did not have the sent checkmark but just a hollow dot next to them. Even refreshing did not fix it and I had to relog it for it to start working.

Ah, fuck. Of course.

https://www.ecosia.org/, a search engine iirc non-profit that is trying to be as energy-neutral on renewables as possible, while also investing all of their profit into climate action, i.e planting trees. They have transparent budgets and do look pretty trustworthy, although I’ve never really looked into them too much.

noai.duckduckgo.com a version of Duck Duck Go, a pretty well known search engine, that disables the AI summary by default via an easy link.

With Ecosia and noai.DDG right there, I don’t see any reason why would you ever use Google.

I only see it when I open a new browser on a VM or something by accident, and it just sucks and makes me immediately leave.

Most of my search usage is looking up concrete websites because I don’t have history on and am lazy to remember or type the whole URL, and google is the only one where I have to click through a screen blocking dialog then scroll through LLM bullshiting about something before I can get to the link.

Yeah, this will be a vibecoded disaster.

IIRC they had to start overclocking your CPU a while back, when you right-click on a file so the Win11m rightclick menu loads faster than after like 8 seconds.