Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately I’m no expert in the matter. I bet that some mods are compatible, I bet some aren’t. I bet some open source client/server pairing implementation might give more freedom but aren’t necessarily as popular. I have no idea how that impact culture or the size of projects. I imagine that the community of each project, e.g. Minetest, would know better if the limit itself is technical, e.g. mod compat, or not, e.g. network effect and thus a lot of people “sticking” to the “original” proprietary implementation not because it’s better but solely because their in-game friends are there.

I like risky sports (relative for some people it might be boring) but when I have to work or even play I want stuff that just works. I can’t imagine using a laptop and wondering every day if this is the last update to my OS I might get.

Sure Apple laptops might be great hardware, you might love the design, etc but just the fact that this question exists make it impossible to consider such hardware.

TL;DR: I don’t know and I don’t want to care. Please support OEMs who are not making money by selling locked hardware.

Yes I’m serious and I’m not a troll. I don’t know what in my questions or suggestions make it sound like that but feel free to dig deeper.

Anyway, AFAIK Minecraft has an official client which connect to official servers.

It’s possible to replace clients, as listed earlier, but they might still rely on official servers with their accounts as you pointed out. There are though, AFAICT, compatible servers too, e.g. https://glowstone.net/ so one could connect an unofficial client to an unofficial server and thus have a similar experience with no reliance on anything related to Microsoft, no?

No worries, if you want you can “test” that via a virtual machine, even a container e.g. https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ and see what you would genuinely miss.

It feels like our computer is very unique, very customized, but often it’s done in very few key places, e.g. browser profile data, ~/.bashrc , etc and once you locate those, transitioning to any other system is way easier.

the sheer amount of content that was added over the years, and the enormous amount of mods, and the entire community, aren’t remotely comparable

Are they compatible though? Like can I load content, connect to open source servers, uses mods on any client? Please don’t presume I know anything about the topic, I’m genuinely trying to understand exactly why alternatives are not good enough.

How about any open source alternative e.g. https://www.luanti.org/ or Minetest or Terasology or Voxel.js or…?

Pretty much what nix (distinct from NixOS) is.

That being said I would recommend NOT to do that because you most likely need 10 specific packages at most. That should take you 15min tops to install with few minutes paying attention.

Just make sure /home is its own partition, or even disk, the distro hop if you want. You can also have in your ~ directory an apps directory where you keep binaries, AppImage, etc.

For most people this is not a real concern.

• get top recent commiters with https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pulse
• click on 1st link https://github.com/bluca and see https://github.com/microsoft in profile

Just 2 steps.

Yes Poettering isn’t at Microsoft but seems the person driving the project at the moment is.

Freedom is overwhelming.

You can change everything and anything… so that means a LOT of choices.

Author wish he was born in 1880 and is not going to give up! (context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophone )

PS: thanks for the links, between this PIXHELL, GAIROSCOPE, or SATAn clearly air-gap is just a concept. Fascinating to go through his work basically using everything potential to go through. Great overview in https://arxiv.org/html/2409.04190v1

The fact that I’m having more and more discussions with non tech people about what even Linux is, that they heard of GrapheneOS or /e/OS, makes me thing that yes, it’s possible.

What also makes it potentially possible is that Microsoft is doing like NVIDIA alienating gamers. They are “just” gigantic corporations which only go where there is more money. There is no ideology except capturing whatever drives profit up for the next quarter. They currently see AI data center as they place to earn more so they are giving up on the rest.

Heuristic : if you don’t know, trust your distribution. If you don’t trust your distribution, pick another one, repeat.

Might be off topic but if you are thinking of rdp for 3D modelling or gaming then IMHO there are better solutions, e.g. https://moonlight-stream.org/ or https://selkies-project.github.io/selkies/ so I’d argue it’s not a distro question, more a client/server one.

FWIW I moved away from Ubuntu to what it relies on, namely Debian, and for modelling (e.g. Blender) or gaming (Steam, 2D, 3D, VR) it’s been great.

I’m using a 10 years old Razer Blade Stealth 13 on Debian and so far no only minor problems with it.

Consequently my advice is :

• do you actually “need” a new one or do you just “want” one? if the later then could be 2nd hand
• if you do then share either what your “main game” is or what its requirements are, because e.g Slay the Spire runs on nearly anything
• do not buy something brand new unless you are ready to tinker, consider something a year old
• whatever you do, check online review specifically on Linux installations, that will let you know if something somehow (typically inconsequential, e.g. LED tweaking) requires proprietary software
• consider buying directly from a Linux pre-installed vendor, this way you are 100% sure it will work (but it’s typically not cheap)

No and honestly I don’t think it matters. Set the age of your OS to 18 (assuming you are 18) and move on. What’s the issue?

That being said if you are really interested in the topic and use this as an “excuse” to learn check out https://jsandler18.github.io/ and don’t worry if you don’t have an RPi to run it, you can use QEMU. After that you can dig into https://wiki.osdev.org/ really a fascinating journey.

I tinker with VLC using and… so far my “trick” is a bit dirty, namely I don’t “control” it as much as I killall potential running instances then I start cvlc again with the right parameters. If you want continuity though you might not want that.

Note also that if you plan to do scripting check mpv as it’s a bit easier to tinker with IMHO.

Python

Check https://pypi.org/project/python-vlc/ then for Python bindings, that should give you the affordances you need.

I bet if you replace 3.5mm jack by USB-C and use an adapter you’ll have a lot of choices. Also Qi isn’t efficient so unless you have a specific use case beyond “I just want to drop it on my desk” then relying on USB-C again is better.

… that being said yes I understand but unfortunately one has to fight not just everything they want but a realistic compromise, otherwise you can check https://www.crowdsupply.com/ and if it’s not there propose your own project, maybe there is a market for it.

No idea with whom your arguing as I mentioned both.

If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults.

That’s my point of Internet Archive software and emulation section : no need to be smart, open a Web page that provides a VM and voila. You don’t have to do anything hard, only understand the concept and know where to find a VM.

Also if it’s properly all in the browser (no backend setup, no tailscale, which I’m not sure it can be done due to networking, but maybe) then any static host can have it, heck even download a .html and open it would do. In such a situation I can’t imagine it can be blocked/limited at all.

Yes I also would much prefer everything to be done locally and have no 3rd party that ultimately I won’t trust (one just has to look at leaks from large companies to understand why) still “it’s their responsibility” when I tried to demonstrate it’s fundamentally impossible when emulation exists is a fundamental problem.

PS: FWIW https://ktock.github.io/qemu-demo/

In theory yes.

What’s bad though is that it’s meaningless. Sure the OS can say you are 10 years old or 100 years old and you can’t change it… but then you open a page in your browser which runs a virtual machine and that VM now says you are, arbitrarily 50 years old. The VM is just another piece of software but put it in fullscreen (if you want) and voila, you are back to declaring whatever age you want to any application or Web page within that VM. If that’s feasible (and I fail to see how it wouldn’t, see countless examples in https://archive.org/details/software or https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ even though that’s running on another machine, so imagine that was a SaaS) then only people who aren’t aware of this might provide a meaningful information on the actual age but that’s temporary, the same way more and more people now learn to use a VPN.