And if you want both piracy and the convenience of Steam, there are always key resellers.

I did post an exact description a bit higher above, but you focussed on the one detail that really doesn’t matter in this equation (ARM vs x86, even though it’s exactly the same in that regard, and there are also x86 Android devices) and neither read nor understood the rest of my answer.

And you used that missing knowledge on your side to invalidate my answer without even understanding what it was about.

And you could, very big revelation, also just google before posting nonsense.

u/EatYouWell responded exactly the right way.

Have you heard of Android running on x86?

I had an x86 Android tablet and that was exactly as locked-down as an ARM Android device.

But anyhow: I can lock down a x86 laptop or PC the way I was describing within a very short time.

So again:

• Put a password on the BIOS
• Set Secure Boot on
• Wipe all Secure Boot keys and put your own in there
• Encrypt the disk so that you can’t just plop the drive into another PC and modify its content
• Set the root user to “Can only login with private key” and don’t give the key to the customers
• Remove all users from sudoers
• Use chown root:root and chmod 700 on anything you don’t want the user to touch

And if a company was doing this to their products (e.g. the Steam Deck), they’d replace the first 3 steps with a custom BIOS which just doesn’t let you change anything in regards to Secure Boot and Secure Boot keys. That way, removing the BIOS battery won’t help.

There are countless embedded devices using an x86 PC at their core, where they did exactly that. (E.g. ATMs or medical devices)

Also Chromebooks are exactly that.

And the Playstation 5 does the same thing, only it’s based on FreeBSD.

Tieing down a Linux installation is actually pretty easy.

• Lock the BIOS down so that it can only boot a Valve-signed OS
• Remove root access on the OS
• chown root:root on anything you don’t want the users to touch

It’s pretty much the same as Android device vendors are doing.

Next time get high after doing the troubleshooting ;)

UltimMC is good. It’s a fork of MultiMC that allows playing without account.

Thanks for the warning. What’s IGG?

Huh, doesn’t sound too bad. Adblocker takes care of the ads. Slow host, oh well. And the last point I don’t understand.

So they just call it pre-installed because they zip it? Oh well…

Yeah, plenty old enough^^

It totally does, that’s why I was asking.

I just wonder what the scam is.

I guess, someone with a copyright background came knocking at their door. It’s one thing to defend against a lawsuit if you are a big for-profit company with a well-funded law department and a nice financial buffer. But it’s an entirely different thing if you are hosting a non-profit platform with your own money because you are a nice guy.

Tbh, I am negatively surprised how many people don’t understand that the person hosting a lemmy instance is someone who does it as a hobby and not a big corporation.

The good thing about Lemmy: if you don’t like an instance or it’s admin, you can just host one yourself. You just need a Pi or an old laptop and a few hours of time. Did you try that?

Windows Defender, everything else is malware itself.

If you want to be extra sure, check stuff using virustotal.com

The thing here is that, for the most part, it’s not actually competition, but a collection of monopolies.

You want to watch show X? You have to go to the streaming service that has the monopoly on show X. It you want to watch that show, in many cases you can’t just substitute it for a different show.

If you have five stores selling all sorts of food, then that’s competition. If you instead have a butcher, a baker, a candy shop, a dairy shop and a fruits/vegetable shop, that’s splitting the turf. You can’t just substitute the ground beef for your burgers with skittles, because the butcher is more expensive than the candy shop.

Caveat to this argument: If you really don’t care about what you watch, then these different streaming services really are interchangable competitors and then the competition is good, because e.g. a shared Disney+ account is much cheaper than the now-non-shareable Netflix account.

As evidenced by the brief moment in history when Netflix was all that and it drove video piracy all but to extinction.