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?
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)
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.
All the x86 hardware I've tried at least boots. Suspend/other acpi stuff can be a problem, as well as wireless card support. Intel devices are the best supported at the moment by iw*(4) drivers.
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
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.
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).