Why the timid language? Call it utterly dumb, greedy and immoral, because that is what this is. Just some assholes trying to get rich quick and damm the rest of humanity.

Indeed. Which is why it is so excessively stupid not to support them a lot more, even if you completely ignore all other angles.

What makes you think they can be fixed?

Not a bad characterization either.

Indeed. But that requires looking more than 3 months ahead.

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.

Coding exams (which I do not do) are a problem. You should have the documentation, an editor and the compiler, but no AI. In principle easy to do, you just need a computer room set up for this. But the decision makers are often too cheap to do it and do not understand the need anyways.

There is a difference between trying to not submit to authority because you do not want to (kids...) and actually fact-checking what said authority claims. Only the latter is relevant to this discussion.

No. What Rust calls "unsafe" is essentially a lie. You can still write blatantly unsafe code in Rust, it is just not memory-unsafe. Or why do you think things like PHP, JS, Java, etc. java security problems like crazy?

Unless and until we all admit this is entirely and exclusively a skill issue, things will not get better.

What else is new. If they cannot even get it right for the demo by the CEO, who in their right mind would buy this?

That is simply nonsense. Obviously, people like you deeply fear change.

No argument. These constraints are artificial, not something the system needs to work. Hence they can be circumvented. Makes the whole thing even worse though.

Yes. I do that for my CS students. I have never had to justify that even once, as they all understand what it is about.

That one is dangerous. You just nicely summed up what Adolf Hitler promised the Germans and what got him elected. And, to be fair, he delivered on those promises. For most. And with rather crass caveats. I am sure you did not intend that, but freedom always and critically includes freedom of mind and speech and access to knowledge and education.

Ah, yes. Animism. Not a sign of a strong mind. (That PhD is an indicator of, but not a sure sign of a smart person.)

As they are trained, general purpose LLMs are really just search engines with some aggregation and adaption capabilities. Obviously, no insight or understanding and obviously not a person in any way.