Not Your Personal Computer

In the second half of the first decade of the XXI century, Apple ran a memetic advertising campaign (Get a Mac) that famously featured a “casually” clothed young man representing its computers, and a perceivably if slightly less young man dressed in a suit, representing “the competition”, introducing themselves with «Hello, I'm a Mac»/«and I'm a PC».

I never liked those ads, finding them conceptually wrong at such a fundamental level as to be distracting. This write-up is not an analysis of the many ways in which those ads were wrong, but the main fault in the campaign was the presentation of a false dichotomy based on a fundamentally broken misnomer, with the ads largely focusing on differences between the Microsoft Windows and OS X operating systems, completely ignoring the growing adoption of Linux on the desktop, and gliding over the “hardware convergence” that had brought the Mac of the time so deeply into the camp of compatibility with the hardware of the IBM PC descendants, that Apple itself offered the tools necessary to install Windows on their hardware.

The biggest lie in the ad was the pretense that the Mac was not a PC, even in the restricted meaning of IBM PC compatible.

Or was it?

What's a PC?

I'm well aware that I'm in the minority defending a definition of Personal Computer that breaks free of the Wintel monopoly that has been strangling it for the better part of the last half century, but as someone who has been running Linux on commodity hardware as my primary when not only operating system for two decades and counting, I can attest that there's more to personal computing than the infamous combo.

In fact —and this will actually be the main point of the article— there is a growing discrepancy between said combo and what a personal computer is, or rather should be. But to get there, we should start by making very clear what a personal computer is.

A personal computer is a computer that does what its user wants it to do

I'm not picky about the concept of computer. I'm fine with any hardware capable of general computing falling into the category: desktop computers, tablets, “smart” phones, and soon possibly even pregnancy tests1. To run with a now classic meme, anything that can run Doom.

I was actually wary of going with “user” in the definition. At first, I wanted to go with something like “assignee”, but ultimately I convinced myself that “user” works fine here. For example, if I let someone else provisionally use my personal computer, I'm fine with them still not being able to do what they want, because it's not their personal computer, but as long as the computer doesn't prevent me from doing what I want with it, it remains my personal computer.

And of course I'm fine with not being able to do on my personal computer things that are materially impossible within the constraints of the hardware. But, and this is the key, I should be the one in control.

A personal computer is a computer over which the user has control

This is why most “smart” phones and tablets and such are not personal computers: it's not a matter of form factor or other hardware choices,but a matter of control. If I cannot install the operating system I want, if the operating system they ship with prevents me from doing things like making a full backup or even just opening any file with any application, I am not in control: somebody else has made decisions for me, and if I cannot subvert them on my device, then it's not really my personal device.

I am even fine with restrictive defaults, as I'm aware there are benefits to them for the general populace. But if the vendor does not provide a means to overturn the defaults and allow the user to gain complete, unfettered access to the device, then it's not and it cannot be a personal device, a personal computer. It's someone else's machine that I've been provisionally allowed to use.

Beyond the personal

There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer.

The early XXI century was also the period in which Cloud computing started gaining widespread recognition and adoption, a growth soon met with a healthy does of skepticism summarized in the quote above, a quote so successful that cloud computing business and pundit went on a spree trying to debunk it, largely completely missing the point of the quote.

It is undeniably true that the “just” in the quote is carrying a lot of weight. But it's also undeniably true that the whole point of cloud computing is to delegate to someone else the management of the hardware your software runs on. And that's the whole point the quote is making. There is nothing “magic” about the cloud. You could achieve the exact same results as “running things in the cloud” by shelling out money to purchase equivalent hardware and manage it yourself —it's entirely a matter of whether or not it's worth the price.

And of course, one of the things that you're giving up with cloud computing is control: you are trusting a third-party to provide the services they claim at the convened price. And there's literally nothing you can do if they choose to terminate your account with no recourse by mistake or because you're persona non grata to the fascist regime du jour.

So while it could be argued that it's not just “someone else's computer” (or «“just” by appropriate definitions of “just”») it's undeniable that it's not your (personal) computer.

The death of personal computing?

This article has been prompted by a tightening of the grasp GAFAM has on personal computing, such as the recent news about Google moving to kill sideloading on Android and further closing down development of the operating (hindering alternatives built on the Android Open Source Project in the process), or the “cloud-first” approach to data storage Microsoft is pushing for its office suite and operating system.

This has been a long time coming, from all sides.

For example, Microsoft attempted to leverage its weight in the “personal computer” market to make UEFI's Secure Boot a requirement for Windows 8, and although the massive pushback they received ultimately led to a reversal in the form of allowing said Secure Boot to be disabled (thus making it possible to install operating systems without having to go through Microsoft for the appropriate cryptographic signing keys) at least for non-ARM machines, the fact remains that Secure Boot takes out of the hands of the user control about which software can run, restricting it to what the machine vendor (and Microsoft) allow, so that a machine where Secure Boot cannot be disabled, or where at the very least users are not allowed to register new cryptographic keys, cannot be classified as a personal computer. (Yes, I am aware Secure Boot has its uses. Again, that's not the point.)

Apple has been fighting the Digital Markets Act, and they straight and clear claim that the DMA is bad because it forces them (Apple) to let users download and run the software they want on their iPhones. Behind the paint of “security and privacy” pretense, the main issue is, again, control. Control that the corporate vendor is being forced to lose, to the benefit of the user, on a platform that has historically being designed as a “vertically integrated user experience” (which is another way to tell “corporate-controlled walled garden” and which I like to call “the Apple virus”: an approach to computing that seems benevolent if not even beneficial to the end-user, until they try to step out of the inflexible constraints of the design: remember You're holding it wrong?).

And of course I've already mentioned in passing how the giants that currently control the web browsing market, Google and Apple, with the connivance of the purported “opposition” (Mozilla), are removing user control from their web browsers, perverting them from user agents into corporate surveillance tools.

But it gets worse.

The “Apple virus” has moved beyond corporations and leaked into the free software world, from the “our users don't really know what they want” attitude of GNOME developers to Wayland's “you can only do what the compositor allows” design passing through systemd's “our way or the highway” steamroll, all coincidentally aided by RedHat's “gentle push” for the adoption of anything they develop through a “vertical integration” that shouldn't even exist in FLOSS.

(Remember when the poor design of GNOME and dbus user session management got so fucked up that logging out failed to work correctly and this had to be tapered over by changing a systemd default which in turn broke everybody's terminal multiplexers, pissing off a lot of people? And let's not even talk about the PulseAudio clusterfuck.)

In the grand scheme of things, it matters little that the entire software stack is free software: just like for Chromium and the web, the money behind the development of the mainline implementations is the only thing that matters, and this affects the entire ecosystem. (And don't even bother trying to pushing back with arguments about “intent”. The purpose of a system is what it does.)

There's a classic screenshot from a social post making the rounds, which I'm going to quote here because it's quite relevant:

Sun Solaris used to be the OS that required overpriced proprietary hardware and still couldn't compete with Linux. That OS is now MacOS.

MacOS used to be the colorful and friendly walled garden OS that your non-techie parents would enjoy but was completely useless to you as a power user. That OS is now Windows.

Windows used to be the OS that could run a lot of apps, but was a headache to setup and maintain correctly and would sometimes blow up for no reason. That OS is now Linux.

Linux used to be the techie and developer oriented command-line OS that was lacking in desktop apps and might not support your hardware, but once you got it going, was rock solid and had no limits. That OS is now FreeBSD.

This may seem like all a digression, but it is actually a sharp representation of the shift in the Overton window computing (and in particular personal computing) has been subject to in the last couple of decades.

Do you own a personal computer?

Do you have a machine that you control?

Do you have a machine on which you can install the operating system of your choice? How hard is it to install a different operating system? Are there operating systems you cannot install because the hardware vendors refuse to provide the necessary drivers and/or specifications that would allow said drivers to be developed?

Can you customize your execution environment to your needs and preferences? How hard is it to do that?
Can you do a full backup of your system, to be restored to exact functionality if anything goes wrong?

Can you run any software of your choice on that machine?
If there are protections in place in the default configuration, can they be bypassed? How hard is it to bypass them, if it is possible at all?
Can the software you want to use interoperate smoothly with the other software you want to use? Are there constraints or restrictions beyond what may be expected by the software design, imposed by third-party entities?

Do you own a personal computer?