i will never understand why people will flock to this but opensnitch which is just better, fully open and has existed for longer (on linux) gets ignored.
there is little reason to use two application firewalls at once so at least functionally it can replace it. ofc it will still keep existing regardless and i do appreciate the steps towards going open source.
the current law requires no verification at all simple attestation, you could put in _any_ age. it also does not effect linux distros as a whole, only distros in jurisdictions with the laws.
Sure, for now... I simply don't believe it will stop at "simple attestation", because we all know that simple attestation is practically useless, but once the various distros accept this "trivial" inconvenience, "Age verification 2" with harsher requirements will soon be on the way.
I would be ecstatic to be proved wrong on this, but experience tells me that is not likely to happen.
We all know it's not about age, it's about user identity. As above, it's clearly a wedge so it's not rhetorical to observe more invasive and controlling features are coming.
I wouldn't be surprised if it is being done to help microslop and AI companies lock in their profit margins.
Right now, if a handful of tech companies crater they'll take the whole world's financial systems out with them, so the government could easily be made complicit in any scheme they can conceive of to bolster their finances.
Simple attestation is very useful for the case where a parent gives a child access to a computer and wants that computer to block porn. That's the use case everyone is clamoring for, and asking the root user "how old is this user?" solves it in a simple, open, privacy-preserving way. Everybody wins, except the teenager who wants to watch porn. If this were not legally mandated, everyone would support it as a useful feature, but since it is legally mandated, we have to get angry about it.
This has got very little to do with children - that is just the excuse that sounds good. "Think of the children" is a rhetorical tactic that anyone who wants to get unfettered access to your data rolls out whenever they can. It is a tactic that unreasonable people use to influence reasonable people, because it is so difficult for a reasonable person to argue against without coming across as uncaring and/or bigoted.
If it was an excuse to get your data there would be some data-getting involved. It may be hard for you to believe, but lots of people really do want parental controls that actually work and are bound by the force of law.
This is likely the first step, and in itself is not much of a concern but only if it stops there, which it almost certainly will not. The next step, where the government argue that simple attestation is not secure enough to protect the children, and now we need to show a government ID is when the true damage starts.
This is a little like the joke: "Madam, would you sleep with me for 1 million dollars?", to which she replies "I would". "Madam, would you sleep with me for 1 dollar?", to which she replies, "Sir, what sort of woman do you think I am?" To which he replies "We have already established what sort of woman you are, now we are just trying to establish your price!"
By agreeing to this initial Age Verification, companies are establishing that they are willing to implement checks on age for their users, now we will see just how much more they are willing to do - all to protect the children of course.
Yes that may be true, but parents are being misguided by efforts that are trying to control aspects of data.
If you, as a parent, make yourself open to this attack, you will find that you are making us less free of a society by expecting others to parent for you.
If you oppose minimal, sensible parental controls, you open the door to whatever someone can jam down our throats that also happens to implement parental controls as a side effect.
If you oppose the law to force liquor stores to deny service to minors, but people are still upset about minors getting alcohol, you have no right to be surprised when the next proposal is to ban alcohol for everyone, and you have no right to be surprised if it passes.
Worse, they are making society less free for their children - the parents themselves will be either dead or too old to care by the time the consequences are in full swing.
If you think you are anyone can stop motivated teenagers from watching porn then I have a bridge to sell you. That is such an absurd goal that you really should be asking what the real motivations for this are.
If you think you are anyone can stop motivated teenagers from getting alcohol then I have a bridge to sell you. That is such an absurd goal that you really should be asking what the real motivations for [forcing liquor stores not to serve minors] are.
Literally the entire purpose of the law California passed, which Linux is responding to, is to preempt such laws: If someone says "we need identity verification because think of the kids looking at porn", it's now trivial to say "we already solved that problem, without deanonymizing everyone on the internet".
>if a website or an app can be compelled to push an update to a specific user, then they can intercept anything they want
yes which is why i hoped they would implement a verification system like with a browser addon that compares the website client code used for encryption and alerts the user if it does not match the one served everyone else.
In my experience AI is unreliable more often than not. It is conflating topics, uses outdated information or straight out hallucinates. It can be good if you already know enough to call it out on its bullshit.
That is not true. Proton and steam linux runtime which are the components actually responsible to run games are literally the exact same code provided by the steam client.
Absolutely not. If you ever actually used it you would know that the only difference is a custom big picture mode like interface. Anything else is literally the same code.
SteamOS is Arch with atomic updates and some custom patches here and there. The system stack is pretty standard; Mesa drivers, Steam Linux Runtime, Proton, it's all what ships on every other distro. The only significant difference is that games run in gamescope-session by default, but that isn't exclusive to SteamOS either and doesn't meaningfully affect the execution of software, it's just a different window manager.
In all your posts I haven't seen you actually explain what it is that's so different about it.
Let me take the game developer lens. You love Linux and want to support Linux. What is the cost to you?
SteamDeck is a very specific set of hardware running a very specific OS with a specific runtime. This is very easy. The fact that it is Linux is almost immaterial. If it were not Linux at all it would require a similar amount of effort. Might as well be a Nintendo Switch.
Now let’s imagine you want to support generic Linux desktop with a native Linux exe. May God have mercy on your soul. Deploying pre-compiled binaries that run on an infinite number of hardware variations running an infinite number of local variables env permutations is an unfathomable nightmare.
Once upon a time I shipped a native Linux binary (Planetary Annihilation). Somewhat infamously our Linux users were less than 1% of users but ~50% of bug reports. And no it wasn’t because Linux users simply report more general gameplay bugs.
These days you can support Linux by just giving them a Win32 binary. Which is objectively hilarious.
In any case. It would be profoundly fascinating to know the number of gameplay hours played across OSs. And I would imagine that SteamDeck accounts for over 90% of Linux gaming hours.
The Year of the Linux Desktop is still not here. Not yet. IMHO. YMMV.
Steam Deck is an x64-based PC running Arch Linux with FOSS Mesa drivers, which are shared among all modern AMD GPUs. There's extra wrinkles with Nvidia GPUs, but their proprietary driver is the Windows driver with a bunch of kludges to get it to work on Linux and if you're using Vulkan then it's mostly the same code paths. It's also improved greatly in the past couple years.
You're right about native Linux binaries, but the rub is that you don't need to create generic binaries, there's a bunch of options that use containers to deal with environmental permutations and given the Linux version of Planetary Annihilation uses the Steam Linux Runtime environment, you know this.
It is funny that supporting Linux is as easy as providing a win32 binary, but it's not a joke. This is the case because it works.
I think your experience is a little out of date, or you've somehow been missing what's been happening over the last half decade, because in practice gaming on Linux is now absolutely fantastic. Not just on Steam Deck, as since Valve is using the same general software stack that every other distro uses, all the improvements they've made have permeated out to the rest of the ecosystem. On my CachyOS PC with an RTX 3090, the only games that consistently give me problems anymore are titles that ship with kernel-level anti-cheat. Otherwise when I buy something from Steam I simply assume that it'll work.
Steam Deck sales have actually softened quite a bit over the last couple of years, all this recent explosive growth has been driven by desktop users.
I've been following this all pretty closely, it's been exciting. The year of the linux desktop is kind of a punchline, but it's sort of a misnomer anyway. It was never going to happen in the span of a year. But it has been happening; when online discussion spaces can never seem to shut the hell up about all these new idiot users asking all these stupid questions, that's when you know you're seeing a lot of growth.
PA Titans is pretty good! Definitely niche. In hindsight the whole spherical planets thing is definitely bad. Vanilla flat rectangular maps would have been better.
One of the interesting consequences of Kickstarter is you get hard locked into “promises” even if those ideas turn out to be bad. Naval was so bad but it was a stretch goal so had to ship it. Lesson learned!
"Just log into our online account" is not a concession at all. This sideloading drama is laughable anyways since the bigger issue should be there rootkit access and appstore monopoly.
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