Needy Programs

Summary

Needy Programs If you’ve been around, you might’ve noticed that our relationships with programs have changed. Older programs were all about what you need: you can do this, that, whatever you want, just let me know. You were in control, you were giving orders, and programs obeyed. But recently (a decade, more or less), this relationship has subtly changed. Newer programs (which are called apps now, yes, I know) started to want things from you. Accounts The most obvious example is user accounts. In most cases, I, as a user, don’t need an account. Yet programs keep insisting that I, not them, “need” one. I don’t. I have more accounts already than a population of a small town. This is something you want, not me. The only correct reaction to an account screen And even if you give up and create one, they will never leave you alone: they’ll ask for 2FA, then for password rotation, then will log you out for no good reason. You’ll never see the end of it either way. This got so bad that when a program doesn’t ask you to create an account, it feels refreshing. “Okay, but accounts are still needed to sync stuff between machines.” Wrong. Syncthing is a secure, multi-machine distributed app and yet doesn’t need an account. “Okay, but you still need an account if you pay for a subscription?” Mullvad VPN accepts payments and yet didn’t ask me for my email. How come these apps can go without an account, but your code editor and your terminal can’t? Updates Every program has an update mechanism now. Everybody is checking for updates all the time. Some notoriously bad ones lock you out until you update. You get notified a few seconds after a new version is available. And yet: do we, users, really need these updates? Did we ask for them? I’ve been running barebone Nvidia drivers without their bloated desktop app (partly because it asks for an account, lol). As a result, there’s nobody to notify me about new drivers. And you know what? It’s been fine. I could forget to update for month...