EDIT: Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
Right now! And no, I don’t mean corporate software and services or generative AI bullshit…
The hardware market sucks right now for sure, and it’s the AI bubble’s fault. The rate of advancement of hardware is also slowing down. But at the same time $2000 still gets you a significantly better PC today than what you had 10 years ago. Hardware isn’t as affordable as it was just a couple years ago, but it’s still good.
On the software side, you really just have to embrace FOSS. The Linux ecosystem is going wild, and it feels like the entire thing is snowballing, growing at an accelerating rate. I now run Linux as my main OS on all of my PCs, including gaming PCs. I have a Linux home server with self-hosted services that are accessible to me whever I go thanks to tailscale. I feel pretty much immune to service and software enshittification, because I have almost no subscriptions and mostly to use free and open source software.
I really feel like I’m getting more out of my technology than I ever have before, and it’s a lot less corporate.
Free Software is better than it’s ever been, but that doesn’t outweigh the enshittification going on in the rest of the world. Way too much of my effort using Free Software is spent actively defending myself from surveillance, propaganda, and other threats.