Back in the day I preferred Afterstep; when that bitrotted to the point of no longer quite working I switched to Windowmaker, and when that too fell to bitrot and ongoing integration issues with the rest of the ecosystem, I held my nose and switched to G2, where at least everything _worked_ even if it didn't map cleanly to my mental model.

When G3 landed, even in its not-quite-fully-baked 3.0 release (what, 12 years ago?) it was a breath of fresh air, mapping nearly perfectly to how I work. I haven't looked back since.

Funny, I remember people saying the same thing about GNOME 2 versus GNOME 1.x

Yet here we are today, with GNOME 3 continuing to be the overwhelmingly most common desktop, and that's even without bundling in Cinnamon (ie G3 tech stack with a G2-ish skin) and Mate (G2 fork but using most of the modern GNOME libraries, tooling, and applications). KDE Plasma is easily in second place. ....It's almost like all the complainers in their echo chambers don't actually represent the majority of users. And with rare exceptions, said complainers don't actually contribute to the upkeep of the stuff they use, expecting $other_people to cater to their needs in perpetuity. It's almost like those doing the actual work get to decide what they work on. Go figure.

And thanks to PornHub's lawsuit, I guess we'll eventually find out who's correct.

(It will be particularly ironic if the EC forces PornHub to collect and process *more* personal data about their users in order to defend themselves)

Sorry, it is very much binary -- Under the DSA, you're either a VLOP, or you're not, and under the criteria laid out in the actual text of the DSA, PornHub etc is too small. [1] ...That's not to say that non-VLOPs don't have to follow various regulations as well, but as the article states, PornHub is being hit with stuff that only applies for VLOPs. So again, why the special treatment?

[1] As of January 31, 2024, Pornhub has 32 million average monthly recipients of the service in the European Union, calculated as an average over the period of the past six months. The DSA's VLOP threshold is *45 million*.

...under the DSA's own definition, these companies don't have the EU userbase to qualify as VLOPs. So why are they getting singled out for special reacharound treatment?

And are they going to leverage this into scamming the Indian government's equivalent of an H1-B visa?

....And will all of the Qualcomm platform and driver code be made available in source form?

So, in other words, Apple has to hand signing keys to third parties that can do whatever they want with 'em.

And Apple can't ever revoke those 3rd-party keys, because that would be "anti-competitive" no matter what egregious acts are committed with those keys.

If you want your apps to actually _run_ on an iOS device, it has to be cryptographically signed by Apple.

So what you're actually asking is for Apple to either (1) completely remove the DRM on their products, or (2) sign everything no matter what, which is effectively the same as (1). Oh, and (3) not be able to enforce _any_ terms in their EULAs (ncluding the terms that the EU mandates), effectively forcing Apple to do business with (==perpetually support and subsidize) everyone.

Personally I'd _love_ to see DRM lose its legal protection, but the EU has too much of a hard-on for DRM to let that go.

I believe the EU's working theory is that Apple can be forced to do business with someone, no matter how badly/blatantly they violate Apple's ToS, because it's about freedom or ethics in app stores or something.

This whole debacle is only possible because the EU, much like the US, treats breaking DRM as a heinous crime.. All of this "app store monopoly" or "developer fees" or whatever all rest on that legal protection that forces developers and end-users to get prior permission from apple to do pretty much anything.

So if the EU really wants to open up their digital markets to competition, instead of effectively nationalizing Apple's marketplace (except without the ability to levy taxes to actually pay for the upkeep), strip away the criminal penalties for breaking DRM that make all of Apple's shenanigans possible.

By your logic, Epic is robbing me of the choice to run the game on a platform of my choosing because they didn't port it to my TI-86 calculator.

What's that, you say? Nothing entitles me to such a port to a platform of my choosing? Well, then nothing entitles J. Random iOS user to a port either.

....It's the year of Linux on the Microsoft Desktop!

(I'd bet the $3 in my wallet right now that there are more WS deployments of Linux than there are baremetal/native Linux Desktop installs. And I say that as someone who's been using Linux on the desktop full time since since about 1998...)

Bzzt, wrong. It's not Apple or whomever removing those freedoms; it's your domestic legislatures (including the US every EU member state) who made breaking digital locks into a felony.

If the EU wants to really shake things up, they can repeal those laws; that will do _far_ more good for the overall market than the DMA's utterly naive "it'll be the same as before, only more open with no negative repercussions whatsoever" fantasy. Apple's to-the-letter malicious compliance is proof of that.

You can't remove something that was never there to begin with.

The lack of sideloading has been a literal selling point for IOS from its very beginning.

That has _never_ been true; From day one, all iOS devices have always been a closed ecosystem under Apple's exclusive control; backstopped by laws (eg DMCA s1201, enacted *nine years* before the first iPhone was released) that make attempting to hack your "own" devices a literal felony. Apple has explicitly advertised this as a *feature*; literally everyone who ever chose to develop an iOS application (including Epic!) had to explicitly agree to these terms as well.

Apple didn't pull an enshittified bait-and-switch here; their basic terms are essentially the same, and their fees are, if anything, *less* than they used to be. But that's not good enough for Epic, who wants to have all of the benefits of Apple's investnment in IOS without paying any price whatsoever.

(And for the record, I put my money where my mouth is and purchase devices and use environments that _do_ allow me to freely tinker without risking ruinous legal wrath)

My five-digit UID should answer that question for you.