You're technically correct, but you're slicing the argument so thin it disappears
The YouTube drama you glossed over is the point: we've reached a stage where explaining how to bypass Microsoft's arbitrary hardware requirements gets censored for "physical harm"
On systemd: calling it a Red Hat/Microsoft, driven monoculture that mediates everything from device mounts to DNS is accurate, the same consolidation that gave us Microsoft signed boot chains also delivered one init system to rule them all, dismissing this as "merely ideological" is exactly how normalization works, by the time it's a technical dependency, it's alreadt too late, look at the "cloud" ecosystem..
You listed exceptions, but let's be honest, they are only just distros.. Tails and Qubes are security, hardened research tools, not daily drivers for "elderly relatives". Alpine, Gentoo and Void require deep knowledge, technical skills and an ongoing maintenance that defeats the "set it and forget it" goal
And yes, you can buy a Purism or System76 laptop, but that's the exception that proves the rule: you must pay a premium and choose their hardware to escape the shim problem, that's not freedom; it's choosing your corporate master from a smaller menu, all subject to the same master/ideology
*BSD remains the only ecosystem offering a complete, usable desktop without either a Microsoft signature or a sprawling, vendor, controlled init system, if that sounds hyperbolic, it's because the Overton window has already shifted so far toward corporate control that stating the obvious appears radical
Today Linux supports most HW but Tomorrow, if the Chip Security Act passes, chips will be legally required to contain tracking and kill-switch mechanisms, while the Act doesn't directly mandate Linux to restrict hardware support, it creates the legal infrastructure for exactly that: either mainstream distributions cooperate with the surveillance architecture or risk being barred from running on modern hardware
The 'choice' becomes BigTech-approved Linux that supports backdoored silicon, or niche distros that can't run on any new machine
I could continue with many more examples, but I feel like none of the people over hear understand the point
Strongly disagree on this one. All operating systems require maintenance of some sort, but you singled out Void and I find I'm doing far less maintenance with this one. Even with the venerable Debian, it always required some sort of regular maintenance to work around the bugs of it's legacy packages; Void does not have this glaring issue.
The YouTube drama you glossed over is the point: we've reached a stage where explaining how to bypass Microsoft's arbitrary hardware requirements gets censored for "physical harm"
On systemd: calling it a Red Hat/Microsoft, driven monoculture that mediates everything from device mounts to DNS is accurate, the same consolidation that gave us Microsoft signed boot chains also delivered one init system to rule them all, dismissing this as "merely ideological" is exactly how normalization works, by the time it's a technical dependency, it's alreadt too late, look at the "cloud" ecosystem..
You listed exceptions, but let's be honest, they are only just distros.. Tails and Qubes are security, hardened research tools, not daily drivers for "elderly relatives". Alpine, Gentoo and Void require deep knowledge, technical skills and an ongoing maintenance that defeats the "set it and forget it" goal
And yes, you can buy a Purism or System76 laptop, but that's the exception that proves the rule: you must pay a premium and choose their hardware to escape the shim problem, that's not freedom; it's choosing your corporate master from a smaller menu, all subject to the same master/ideology
*BSD remains the only ecosystem offering a complete, usable desktop without either a Microsoft signature or a sprawling, vendor, controlled init system, if that sounds hyperbolic, it's because the Overton window has already shifted so far toward corporate control that stating the obvious appears radical
Today Linux supports most HW but Tomorrow, if the Chip Security Act passes, chips will be legally required to contain tracking and kill-switch mechanisms, while the Act doesn't directly mandate Linux to restrict hardware support, it creates the legal infrastructure for exactly that: either mainstream distributions cooperate with the surveillance architecture or risk being barred from running on modern hardware
The 'choice' becomes BigTech-approved Linux that supports backdoored silicon, or niche distros that can't run on any new machine
I could continue with many more examples, but I feel like none of the people over hear understand the point
https://www.centerforcybersecuritypolicy.org/insights-and-re...