They try to do it all the time, but there is actually some push-back from the law - google recently lost an anti-trust case, the eu passed laws to protect “side-loading”, etc. This new legislation gives them a legal backing. “Oh no, I’m sorry you can’t get your app store working on Android. We aren’t stopping side-loading or other app markets, we are just complying with the legal age-verification requirements”.

They already know the age of their users… They bloody well know. They backed that bill because it gives them a legal leg to bully out smaller 3rd parties and solidify their respective monopolies.

The entirety of what little remains of independent media discovered the apparent undiscoverable over a month before our Tech-corp’s AI super-intelligence overlords. Amazing.

I do like the look of that form factor a lot… And I don’t see any major red flags in the specs that make me think it won’t work with Linux… Thanks!

It requires every Operating System and “App Store” to know the user’s age. It requires every piece of software installed to receive the age-range token. It could be catastrophically bad for the open source community - the bill does nothing to define how these tokens are communicated and received. The largest players in the industry can use their market share to exert control over how it happens and bully anyone that doesn’t get on board. For example, Google could tie it to the Play Integrity/Services and effectively kill 3rd party roms and possibly even open source app stores like fdroid, or all side-loading entirely if it was tied into the Play Store enough.

The bill isn’t specifically a privacy dystopian nightmare, but it is still a dystopian nightmare. We need the government and mega-corps to have less influence and control over our devices, this gives them more.

I’m pretty sure I watched some random youtuber’s video explaining how circular this shit is nearly a month ago… I guess it’s 2025, so human observations doesn’t matter, what matters is “what does the AI think”.

The CA bill is also dystopian nightmare fuel… The US isn’t going to build an enormous firewall like other countries have, we are just going to pass a bunch of stupid laws and threaten companies to block our citizens from access instead. Put the burden of building the wall on someone else, the modern American Way™!

An entire generation of fuck-wad parents that just gave their kid a tablet and zero supervision instead of actually raising them are now using their failings as an excuse to control the population; control their devices, control their habits, control their knowledge, and control their thoughts.

My god this. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought “I wish I could buy a steam deck with the controllers ripped off”. At a point, I’d take that and then a cheap nokia flip phone that can do wifi-hotspot and call it a day. Separate all the bs I do on my phone from the calling and texting part.

I’m perfectly fine with Mint as a recommendation. It’s not what I would choose, but it does work for a large portion of people without issues.

I am very glad that I hardly ever see Manjaro recommended to new comers anymore though - that’s a curse/trap. There are so much better “Arch but easier” distros now that are rock solid.

They are done wrong a lot in my experience, unfortunately.

Honestly, just being less hostile to Linux and not purposefully pushing out updates that break it under wine/proton would be great…

AppImage is still kinda trash though.

If it’s a company computer, it is probably safest to let the company manage it. If it is your personal computer, your job shouldn’t be requiring you to install anything on it.

This is pretty accurate. Wine (and really Proton) have gotten very good recently. Most software that isn’t actively hostile to Linux users will work.

Winboat is apparently working on and close to “hardware accelerated graphics”. I haven’t tried Photoshop with it, as I never learned Photoshop, but it is one of the flagship programs they claim works well by default. It likely won’t get to the point of being an option for gaming (KAC wouldn’t work anyway as they all flag VMs, so that feels like a moot point) without setting up GPU pass-through, but I can’t imagine those programs need full bare-metal access to a GPU to work well?

Worth keeping an eye on anyway :)

1. Winboat or Winapps - Both will let you use Adobe programs in linux pretty well with a sandboxed vm. Getting better every day. That is assuming you can’t get done what you need on Open Source software alternatives - some are really good, others are a bit of a let down.

2. If you are fully on board with Kernal Anti-Cheat, then you have already given up on actually owning and controlling your PC. That said, there has been talk recently by windows about kicking 3rd parties out of the Kernal, so KAC might actually die soon (we can only pray).

3. I’d be curious to know what you are regularly using regedit and group policies to change. For a start, I bet a lot of it can be changed in the settings GUI or aren’t problems that need changing to start with in Linux. Secondly, I think learning CLI is significantly easier than learning regedit - the navigation at least is a lot simpler imo. Unless you are just running .reg files you find on the floor of the internet, if you learned to use regedit you can definitely learn the Linux CLI (as much as you’ll need to in order to do what you want).

Just saying, it is constantly evolving and most of the road blocks are out-dated or hinge on reliance on some other big tech company besides microsoft that is just as far down the enshittification rabbit-hole. It is not a decision you made once and have to keep living with. None of us swore a life-debt to our “team”. :)

Damn it, it’s been too long and I forgot the name of slow fall… I think that means you won the internet today.

Hope you’re quick on the levitate, cause we are going to summon you off a cliff.

Oracle makes money. They don’t care how.

Shit I miss Ventrilo… Setting up custom binds so I could talk shit about the raid leader directly to the other warlock in the group just by pressing a different “talk” button was amazing. And I can still here the push-to-talk notification sounds… When the guild moved to Discord, I died a little inside and didn’t even know it yet. Yea, we have a meme channel now, but at what cost??