For the implications, I believe it would create a first class commercial level competition for Windows. It would open the door for a vendor trusted platform that implemented all the anti-cheat technologies. Paving the way to lift the virtual Linux ban on first day AAA games compatibility.

All distro’s differences come down to how the chain of utilities is stringed up together. You have:

• Bootloader
• Kernel
• Init and service daemons
• Package manager
• Display server
• Window manager
• Widget toolkit
• Desktop environment
• User applications

And a whole lot of in-between. Essentially Fedora and Debian each have defined and originated a set of core software that work as standards for the first 4 parts of this chain. Arch is another, even on pure Arch a wizard installer has to deal with those in order to set up a properly working system. For some, those are the most technical and difficult parts of setting up and designing an OS. Then every distro is a variation on the rest of the chain or customizations on the first few parts, but almost always based on one of the —current— three standards.

There are also philosophical differences that drive technical decisions in the background. Favoring one way of doing things over the other. Debian is usually focused on stability, reliability, security, function over form. Arch is usually about the bleeding edge, speed, max efficiency, innovation, customization, user freedom. Fedora is pragmatic and down to earth, compromising between the two and focused on smooth user experience. Usually different distros will provide some variation or adaptation on those themes. Like making Debian more corporate, or updated, or making Arch easier to install, or making Fedora but optimized for gaming, etc.

Even worse, it proves that they themselves don’t understand the entire psycho-social scope and workings of cheating. Cheating is not an entirely technical problem. It’s multidimensional.

In my country there was a story about a lady who got viral because it had been customary for shops to make people leave their backpacks and purses on a locker or with an employee. Then a security employee also had to check your receipt against the items in your bag before you left. It’s extremely annoying and cumbersome, it can add up to half an hour of extra time when the shops are full and there aren’t enough employees to do the checks.

So one day she went to buy groceries, before giving her purse to the employee she emptied it and itemized everything there was in there on a piece of paper. Then she bought her groceries and had the clerk double check the price and weight of every item she bought against the price tags and content labels of everything. Including the prepackaged meats. Then, when picking up her purse back, she had the list of items and emptied the bag again in front of the employee.

The manager noticed and went to her mad at what she was doing. She argued with him that they treated her as a thief so she would treat them as thieves themselves and pointed out how she had been charged for an extra plastic bag they didn’t gave her (we get charged the price of the bags) and demanded her plastic bag or money back.

Of course nothing came of it, but it riled social media discourse over here for a while. Some low end (local bodegas) and high end stores stopped the practice as the economic situation stabilized later, but it was still a quirky detail of that dark era. Some employees did steal stuff from customers bags sometimes. Same lady had a field day during the days of stores trying to return change on payments with lollipops and candy. So she tried to pay with a bag of candy and lollipops. That one was wild as well.

As a graphic designer, you don’t really have much of a choice

I’m sorry for your suffering.

Only game I know for sure I could install on a toaster and would run at 300fps.

Anti-cheat: shame, but I don’t play them anyways.

Adobe products: I guess it sucks for corporate zombies, but again not giving money to adobe makes me proud.

Shows you where Valve’s values are. Make it work and be functional first. Think about making it pretty later. I rather like it.

Apple is the worst, most unintuitive UI in the world. It’s pretty, but it is not functional. The same shit you just said about Linux applies to macOS. As soon as someone wants to do something other than the most basic shit with macOS, it won’t let you, will force you to jump through hoops or will require a higher than novice knowledge and skill with computers to make it do what you want it to. But I think Linux is ever more leaning towards mass appeal without losing it’s flexibility and power. Something that neither of the corporations can claim.

It’s almost always a compatibility issue. It’s kind of arcane obscure stuff, like the particular version of the particular sound chip that somehow works 99% of the time with the same kernel drivers for the chip family but has some small bug that makes the audio engine bork. Allegedly Pipewire has been working hard at being more resilient to those issues and it’s been integrated progressively in more and more distributions.

Reduce, reuse, recycle!

Does he use two condoms at the same time to avoid pregnancies? Same principle.

Steam will let you play pirated games through their Proton and compatibility framework. What kind of DRM is it truly if it helps you pirate?

From your own sources:

Section 84 of the Canadian Criminal Code

prohibited weapon means

(a) a knife that has a blade that opens automatically by gravity or centrifugal force or by hand pressure applied to a button, spring or other device in or attached to the handle of the knife, or

Or in other words, legal context matters, and this only applies in Canada, and only to knives who are intended to act as and be used as weapons. Not to kitchen knives. Idiots like you need to start using your head to actually think and not try to construct this stupid gotcha attempts.

Also, the entire section 86 is about firearms and the prohibited weapons is just there so prosecutors and judges can make ad-hoc decisions. So, as the law has proven: no, leaving a kitchen knife on a counter top or using WiFi without passwords do not make you accessory to crimes.

That’s decidedly not how the world works. There are no laws mandating kitchen knives to be locked. And there are no laws mandating to lock down network connections. At all instances a judge would have to determine whether you were aware that a crime was being committed and willfully or by criminal negligence facilitated its occurrence.

That’s not how anything works. If you leave a knife unattended on a counter and a murderer picks it up and kills someone you are not an accessory to murder. Even if it was indeed your knife.

Except they get it wrong all the time. People who have never pirated a single thing still receive ISP notices all the time.

They never mentioned that the IP they found sharing the pirated movie might as well no longer belong to the current subscriber and that proving the link between the subscriber and the IP would’ve been a major privacy issue. As a subscriber you don’t own the connection, much less the IP address. I guess they just never got to a point where that had to be argued.

The fact that they arrived at this by purely legal logic is surprising to me. They never even touched on the fact that IP is not ID. Not all but some ISPs assign IP dynamically, many persons can hold an IP over a relatively short period of time. They sent this letters to the ISPs and considered some imaginary person served a notice. Then they wanted the judge to fail against, imaginary people who they didn’t know who they were. I don’t even know what kind of precedent or case they wanted to make here. Are they going to send the routers to jail?

I’ve been crucified for mentioning this before. But Bottles is another alternative that allows easy configuration of Wine prefixes for gaming. It is another alternative worth considering, not better or worse, just different.