What's your list of banned brands?

SethranKada@lemmy.ca to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 174 points –

What brands do you avoid at all cost? I don't keep up with the news all that much, and many of the reasons to avoid something don't make it there anyway. So I'm asking here to make a big list of things to avoid. It could be anything from bad security practices to really frustrating packaging. Working as a cashier myself, I definitely know there are plenty of brands I avoid purely on the basis that their product is a pain to stock.

On the flip side, what's the alternative? If you avoid Pepsi, for example, what do you turn to instead?

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Ugh god... Tech brands, off the top of my head:

  • Asus (Scammers)
  • Lenovo (Fuck lenovobios, bad hardware quality past 2010 or so)
  • Sager (Scammed me by selling a laptop with too high power draw that resulted in crashes)
  • Microsoft (Mega spyware corp, bad software, worst OS on the planet)
  • Apple (Likely spyware corp, Bad locked down devices, anti right to repair, overpriced)
  • Google (Biggest Baddest spyware company, monopoly on many platforms)
  • Nvidia (Extremely hostile to open source, will likely never work on OpenBSD unless Nvidia seriously changes their stance; even then there's so much bad faith at this point I wouldn't trust them)
  • Meta/Facebook (Mega spyware corp, zuck is a lizard)
  • Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams, proprietary software ecosystem that won't work on my phone)
  • All major phone manufacturers (Android sucks, iOS sucks harder)
  • Pine64 (Charging circuit is software controlled for some insane reason, supports Manjaro)
  • All major smart TVs (spyware, always-on microphones, locked down OS with ad-ridden clients)

Okay companies:

  • Valve (Still hosts a shitty DRM platform, but it's the best one; only listing because the Steam Deck is awesome)
  • Framework (Pro user repair, good hardware, no complaints; look forward to RISC-V board)

So, uh, how do you live in modern society?

Framework laptop with OpenBSD for prod, Steam Deck for gaming, Pinephone with pmOS for phone stuff (even though I put Pine64 on the bad list, if I could buy again I would have tried the Fairphone or other pmOS compatible device instead); self host everything possible (mail, git (got), gitweb (gotweb), http, ipsec vpn) on a cheap VPS running OpenBSD. It's comfy.

Why openBSD though?

Good documentation, good in-house servers, correctness, secure defaults.

Fair enough, what's software/hardware support like in general?

https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html

All the x86 hardware I've tried at least boots. Suspend/other acpi stuff can be a problem, as well as wireless card support. Intel devices are the best supported at the moment by iw*(4) drivers.

Tesla (Loudest most-punchable most-hatable fascist at the helm, employees caught spying on users through interior cams)

Cars less reliable than ICE, despite having a fraction of the parts. Absolutely proprietary and probably going to start enshittifying over the air at some point. Still some degree of expense-adding hype.

Pine64 is not one I expected to see dissed on Lemmy. I can't say I'm impressed with the one I bought, though, and it has some kind of electrical issue that would be a pain to fix. It's too bad, I love the concept of OS phone hardware.

Pine64 is definitely tenuously on the list, I simply can't recommend a device thats status as a bomb depends on what kernel you put on it (and theo forbid an attacker manages to get access to the circuit).

Let me give you a complaint for Framework: apparently they were having a hard time releasing bios updates in a timely manner (as in, they were over a year late iirc) which pissed a lot of people off.a

A colleague of mine bought a framework and is always complaining about it. Says he wish he'd got a thinkpad again.

Framework sounds great in theory, but it's hard to justify nearly double the cost compared to a Lenovo T-series.