It’s also sad that Nextcloud with their pile of hot PHP garbage seem zo be the ony viable option (apart from selfhosting) when looking for an alternative to OneDrive.

ROMANI ITE DOMVM

Leaning out of a window

Consumerism, Fanboyism and a feeling of superiority. In Germany Apple had a much smaller market share than in the US and people liked to show off that they can afford a Mac.

Slightly incorrect. Anyone identifying with Nazi ideology is a Nazi. There are genuine American Neonazis for example.

The irony of having to buy a Google phone to get rid of Google services will never cease to amaze me. :/

It’s not “just advertising”. It’s trying to force AI into absolutely everything. It’s trying to force people to use it and not giving a shit if customers even want the product. This is way, way worse than "just advertising“

Training to better mimic corpospeak in that ecosystem, is my guess.

“Somewhat disappointingly, the images and videos shared in the report were taken in the vicinity of the ROV shop at the Marine Institute”

There, saved you a long read

Any Tipps on how to do that in a business environment? Preferably from people who are actually using Linux in a professional environment? I’m using Linux at home for more than a decade now, and I don’t miss Windows at all, but transforming a smallish company to use Linux in a way that is remotely as comfortable as the Windows stuff seems impossible for now. I need to find solutions that don’t make it harder for our staff to get their work done, because they are busy enough with actual work.

Simply replacing MS Office with LibreOffice and Nextcloud for example does not cut it. The tight integration of MS Teams, Office and Cloud functionality is seen as a huge benefit there and I can’t just take that away from them unless I find a combination of tools that work in a similar fashion. Using Google products instead is obviously not a viable alternative. Every cloud based solution I have found so far is underwhelming at best and lacks a good integration.

Serious answers appreciated.

I just saw your post during a meeting and I’m about to apply this mantra now

Life of Brian

I don’t trust Germans too (Source: I am German) but you’ll have to take into account that the Stasi members were German as well. And they had a very German approach at running things. Torture, murder, propaganda, organising a system where basically everyone was forced to spy and snitch on their neighbor was carried out with great bureaucratic precision and accuracy. They had learned this kind of inhuman technocracy from the Nazis and perfected it.

The SPD was always like that. There is a quote by Tucholsky saying that about the SPD in 1932.

Translation by deepl, original below

“It is unfortunate that the SPD is called the Social Democratic Party of Germany. If, since August 1, 1914, it had been called the Reformist Party or the Party of the Lesser Evil or Here Families Can Make Coffee or something like that, the new name would have opened the eyes of many workers, and they would have gone where they belong: to a workers’ party. But as it is, the shop does its bad business under a formerly good name.”

“Es ist ein Unglück, daß die SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands heißt. Hieße sie seit dem 1. August 1914 Reformistische Partei oder Partei des kleinern Übels oder Hier können Familien Kaffee kochen oder so etwas –: vielen Arbeitern hätte der neue Name die Augen geöffnet, und sie wären dahingegangen, wohin sie gehören: zu einer Arbeiterpartei. So aber macht der Laden seine schlechten Geschäfte unter einem ehemals guten Namen.”

You really think the Stasi (Secret Police in the former GDR, East Germany for those who don’t know) existed to protect the citizens from fascism? That’s the most outrageously boneheaded tankie propaganda I have ever read.

Heroic effort, nonetheless

It was similar in Germany. I owned a pickup truck campervan a few years ago (really old ford ranger which was tiny compared to current models) and they suddenly taxed the vehicle as a commercial truck instead of an RV, this made it really expensive. Taxes are the way to go to discourage people from driving these cars.

Yuck. SAP the most backwards closed up software company imaginable. Enjoy not being able to search for anything on the web and to pay for every bit of documentation and training resources. I’m all for buying European but this is the worst choice.

It’s an interesting discussion to witness in these posts: convenience vs privacy and control.

The convenience and integration you get with commercial products like IOS or Android comes at a price. Everything that matters to you on a daily basis bundled together in one convenient package means that all things which define you as a person are conveniently interconnected for corporations to sell out your data for everyone who wants it.

GPS: your current whereabouts at any moment in time and a complete history of where you have been in the past

Payment functions: what you are buying and where you have bought it

Communication (Messengers, Phone): Who you communicate with and what you are talking about

Photos and Videos: Real life evidence from all the stuff mentioned above.

Web Browsing: Interests and Needs which will be used against you in a totalitarian surveillance state, at a glance

If you in 2025 still think this convenience is there to please you as a consumer I have bad news for you.

Convenience and interconnection of services look nice and useful but at the same time they’re a privacy nightmare that makes Orwell’s 1984 look like a bedtime story for children.

What this all comes down to: Strictly airgapping the boundaries between the different services is the only way to have a modicum of privacy. Photos do not belong in a cloud controlled by someone you don’t know and should be taken from a separate device. Navigation belongs on a separate device with no internet connection, payment should not be done with a personal identifier at all (if avoidable) etc. Living your life this way might seem terribly inconvenient, but as someone who was alive at a time where all this convenience didn’t exist I can tell you it has its advantages too. You’ll rediscover what really matters.

Always has been. “We cannot afford x any more” has been their standard argument for dismantling social security and lining up their own pockets for decades now.