I’ve spent years championing Linux as the only escape from Big Tech, but I’m starting to get twitchy.
While we’re distracted by the Steam Deck making Linux “mainstream,” the corporate players and politicians are busy building a digital cage. Between California’s AB-1043 mandates and Microsoft’s “Face Check” infrastructure, I’m worried we’re heading for a hard schism: “Sanitised Linux” vs the “Free Rebel” distros.
If the compliant, age-gated version becomes the industry standard, where does that leave the rest of us? Digital exile?
I’ve put some thoughts together on why the “Golden Cage” is closing in and why education, not mandates, is the only real fix.
My real worry isn’t that Debian will cave, but that the services we use every day—banks, government sites, DRM-heavy media—will start checking for a “compliant” kernel. If those “invisible borders” get built, you might have a truly free OS that’s effectively useless for 90% of the modern web.
It’s not about the distro failing; it’s about the “compliant” versions becoming the only key to the door. We have the choice now, but the gap between “free” and “functional” is definitely getting wider.
Reminds me of all the banking apps that rely on Google’s “secure” crap to run.
How will they check for a compliant kernel, at a technical level? I haven’t seen any proposed way to do that that can’t be easily circumvented.
It’s less about a “scan” and more about the “handshake.” Look at things like Windows 11 requiring a TPM and Secure Boot, or the Microsoft Pluton chip being baked into newer CPUs.
They don’t need to inspect your code. They just need a cryptographic “attestation” that says your hardware and kernel are in a “known good” state. If your DIY kernel doesn’t have the right digital signature from the manufacturer, the service whether it’s a bank or a Netflix stream, simply says “computer says no” and denies the connection.
Sure, we’ll find workarounds, but for 99% of people, that “invisible border” is a brick wall.
I’d phrase it as “we might occasionally find workarounds that kinda work sometimes”. I tried running de-Googled Android on my phone for a while, and the only reason I could use it for online banking, pay for public transport, contact health services, etc. was because some people had reverse-engineered Google’s services (i.e. microG). It also stopped working every now and then when something changed, and to my knowledge Google could also shut it down instantly if they started encrypting their APIs. I wouldn’t bet on there always being workarounds if this push to lock down operating systems and online services continues.
Someone else posted something interesting/alarming the other day… With AI becoming more advanced and also more accessible, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to keep spam, scams, etc. at bay. If the mainstream computing world ends up in this gilded cage trap, even if a minority choose to maintain and use forks that stay outside the system, it might be quite difficult to keep for example a forum functional.