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?

  • @ssm
    16•2 months ago

    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)
      • @ssm
        5•2 months ago

        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.

    • @theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
      8•2 months ago

      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

    • @CanadaPlus
      8•2 months ago

      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.

      • @ssm
        5•2 months ago

        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).

    • @vext01
      6•2 months ago

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

      • @ssm
        5•2 months ago

        must miss the clit

        • @vext01
          5•2 months ago

          We call it the nipple, but I know what you mean.

    • @howrar@lemmy.ca
      4•2 months ago

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