After my adventure with GrapheneOS for my mobile device, I switched my laptop to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a free, mostly open source linux distribution.

It’s just like any other operating system, it has an App Store, works with all of my favorites including Obsidian, Fire Fox, etc.

I like it. Windows and MacOS both collect data about users for advertisers, but my bigger concern is the use of machine learning to customize the OS, and to learn about users, because as we have seen, machine learning algorithms are used to exploit users, motivate them to take actions they wouldn’t have taken, and to change their minds about products, but also about fundamental beliefs on topics as wide ranging as health, climate, and politics.

Linux and Ubuntu specifically don’t use machine learning, and they don’t report back my activities to a big tech company to use against me.

Before switching to graphene and Ubuntu, I’d see relevant ads cross platform and even on different devices. A funny thing actually happened the other day, my work computer is still running windows. In a news article there was an ad for powered wheelchairs, and I accidentally clicked it. From that point on about 80% of the ads I’ve seen are wheel chair related, which tells me that the algorithms that put ads in my feeds don’t know anything about me that’s relevant anymore.

I don’t see many ads on my devices because I block them, and both GrapheneOS and Ubuntu don’t allow advertisers to access advertiser IDs, or don’t have them at all, depending on how the device is configured.

A few years ago, running Linux or graphene meant giving up a lot of usability, but today, it is relatively comparable to using closed off systems from big tech companies.

The weird thing is, a lot of times you hear that if a product is free, then you are actually the product, but open software is still often free even without data collection, so at the end of the day, it really just comes down to making different choices.