It'll only affect 32bit systems with ancient operating systems storing dates in epoch time.
Not a small number. But nowhere remotely near what Y2K could have been.
Hopefully by the time we need to account for a 64bit rollover, I'll be comfortably retired. But by that time, proton decay may be a more worrisome problem.
I imagine there are fan groups for Our Flag Means Death.
The term, "enshitification" is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn't you like a stepping stone.
Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that's not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.
I think that it's absolutely fair to jump on Microsoft for this.
There is nothing wrong with this hardware. RAM and CPU clock speed plateaued a long time ago. The overwhelming majority of these systems being thrown away would run Linux flawlessly.
Microsoft has never given a damn about security before. These new security "features" do more to lock people in than they do to keep them safe.
I stopped caring several years ago.
It's like when Disney bought Star Wars. They homogenized it to make it more palatable and ended up making it dull and unappetizing. Neither franchise has a soul anymore. Just a formulaic plot with a set of waypoints in a dull 3 act format. Sprinkle in some in-humor, pedestrian jokes, and a special effects budget that would make the Pentagon blush and you have a recipe for dull tripe.
It's more than just centralized control.
They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.
That's right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.
Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don't worry your pretty little head off. We know what's best.
I genuinely want Gopher back.
I want to share information and to communicate. I don't want every bowel movement tracked and monetizes. I don't want 30 cross site requests when going to a news site. A single story should not require 10MB of JavaScript libraries.
I have no doubt that most of the authors of the original internet are aghast at what their high-minded creation has itself created.
Some of us like control over our hardware but still want feature parity with our friends and family.
I want Proton to evolve to the point where my CAD/CAM software works flawlessly.
I'm trying to adapt to FreeCAD, but I have so much muscle memory invested in Rhino that it feels like being a beginner again.
I think it would take a pretty major sea change for them. They technically split up into Alphabet, but I don't know of a single person that actually uses that when describing them.
Even if they did change things around, and I would wager that the entrenched bureaucracy will make that impossible, their name is toxic to a lot of tech nerds. We may be a minority, but we talk and people listen. Even the non techies in my life know that they can't maintain a simple messaging app, responded to (rightful!) concerns about data loss by locking the support threads, and has jacked up the price of YouTube on a yearly basis.
They've spectacularly failed at video game consoles, social media, banking/credit cards, IOT, messaging, video, and can't even maintain a semblance of consistency in their office suite. At work I have three different ways to receive instant messages, and it's a crapshoot as to which one a coworker will use.
And let's not even get into how absolutely useless their search is now that everything has been gamed by SEO. Duckduckgo has been my default for years, but now it's consistently returning better results than big G.
If they managed to correct course tomorrow, it would take multiple years for me to even begin to trust them again.
I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.
After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.
Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.
But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.
Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.