Not disagreeing with your argument, but even if all of that could be fixed, fundamentally any anti-cheat that isn't going to be defeated relatively easily needs some sort of privileged access to stop you modifying the game or running other software that interferes with it in some way. That necessarily requires a degree of access to your system that is dangerous, so anti-cheat software will rightly be told where to shove itself by any operating system with a security model worthy of that title.

I don't see the Linux community ever accepting that it's OK to deliberately undermine that security model just for anti-cheat, as a matter of principle. With so many games even at the highest levels already running very well on Linux, I doubt it will ever be a big deal for most Linux users, even keen gamers, to play the 90+% of titles that work and skip the few that insist on more intrusive anti-cheat/DRM measures either.

It sure would be nice to reach a critical mass where the games companies actively catered for that market, though, instead of mostly relying on tech like Proton to make what is essentially a Windows game run OK.

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

That's not how you spell serfs.

You're correct. TIL that Bill Clinton, Dubya and Trump were born in the same year.

Sometimes they're so aggressive that I couldn't reply if I wanted to. "Are you satisfied with the product?" when the delivery tracking shows that it's not even in-country yet.

No, you're thinking of

chown `whoami` /lib*/*.so

it is what you want to say, not me obviously, stop lying.

There are literally millions of people doing nothing today, what you are advocating here has already happened, why aren't you happy anyway, is it because it's never enough? AFAIC everyone who can work should be taking care of himself/herself, government must not steal from one to subsidize another, especially in the system basically designed for complete corruption (and it is designed for complete corruption).

It is up to everyone individually to survive on this planet, if there are too many people unable to survive then it's a self correcting issue - they will not survive.

Back when my secondary school replaced its network of Acorn Archimedes with Pentiums running Win 95, all of the pupils started with the same password: lightly anonymised, it was xypupil. It didn't take long for some of us to guess that the teachers had all started with password xystaff, and not all of them had changed it... Curiously that didn't work for the headmaster's account. I don't know whether I was the only person to guess that his password was xyhead. One hopes that nowadays school IT staff are a bit more clueful, but seeing the summary talk about guessing teachers' passwords brought back memories of sending winpopup messages from the head's account to try to scare my friends.

We don't have a problem with teens viewing porn in the UK. It just doesn't happen any more. In fact, we've been remarkably effective at stopping it compared to half the other countries in Europe, which have seen a recent surge in porn viewing for reasons no-one can identify.

Me too, though of course in our day, the world was much less connected and much less reliant on the technology. The worst we could have done after getting root access to the entire IT infrastructure at my school would have been look at what our classmates had been drawing in Paint or something. Today these systems host much more important and sensitive information and security breaches would be a much bigger deal.

And on that note, am I the only one less concerned by the behaviour of an impressively curious seven-year-old and more concerned by an official, professionally-managed system holding potentially sensitive data that is so insecure that even a seven-year-old could hack it?!

drone batteries have to be heated otherwise drones may not even take off, Ukrainian soldiers in the field use all sorts of ways to keep the batteries warm, for example chemical hand warmers are used for this.

Regulations may have changed, but in 2019 I was able to rent an e-bike in France with no licensing requirements. It wasn't as restricted as in the UK either: with the electric assist the highest speed I reached was just over 40 kph. (It was, however, assist, unlike some of the bikes under discussion).

What I gathered from a different article I read this week is that they attract gig delivery workers, who may have experience on bicycles but want more speed and don't have the stamina for eight or more hours of riding.

It's not clear to me whether the authors of the article caught the difference either, because all of their "adoption" figures are percentages, not percentages per stated unit of time.