Because laws have been passed that require it. The problem isn't the OS vendor, it's the law. Any commercial backer of a distro that doesn't comply is, in one way or another, complicit in breaking those laws. Many backers will withdraw support in that scenario. So basically it will come down to community forks and patches that the official distros avoid condoning. Probably it won't simply be a case of 'store date of birth in user database' in future, rather they'll have a government ordained supplier of age verification and you have to store some kind of cryptographic token that ties a user account to their official proof of age. Then browsers will be required to present something based on this token to websites. It's gonna get more 1984 as things go on. But Linux distros aren't in a position to oppose this.

That's the opposite of how that works. It's LGPL 2 or later. That means you can follow the terms of redistribution from either license. Either. Or.

It will do the same jobs. Most of the software on which we depend predates the GPL3 and/or uses an even more permissive license without an anti-tivoization clause.

Was it the monopoly that made the difference? Or was it simply management smart enough to not only not kill the goose, but also to feed it? They had wins, they got more funding, they had more wins, repeat until they no longer got more funding and stopped getting wins. What's probably more important than why they succeeded is what happened at the end.

If you're a Debian derivative user, it's called Devuan.

Otherwise...*

* Note: Removing systemd from a systemd-based system is madness. There's a reason Devuan exists, and it is that simply changing the init system on Debian results in a lot of breakage, which best illustrates the biggest problem with systemd.

Yes, that is literally the entire ethos behind systemd.

Yes, that is literally the entire situation with systemd.

This change literally could not be more on brand for systemd.

That's systemd in a nutshell. Only people like that would willingly work on a project like that.

The Linux kernel is GPL2 and glibc is LGPL, and you can construct a complete userland without any GPL3 components. Also, you seem to be under some weird misapprehension that the federal government will follow the law, which it has never done across the board.

Amendment XIII
Section 1: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction".
Section 2: "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation".

Emphasis mine.

Collaborators can get it.

Everyone is doing it wrong, that's why we need to sandbox.

Even if you were perfect, you wouldn't have time to do everything yourself, so you would still want sandboxing to protect you from the efforts of others.

I can imagine Apple later removing the "paste anyway" option and requiring you to go to Settings > Privacy to confirm the action, like how they've done with running apps downloaded off of the internet

It's a function implemented in the shipped terminal.app. If you use a third party terminal app, it won't have the protection. Chances are if you're using a third party terminal you're probably sophisticated enough to not blindly run shell commands

Why is it the business of my OS vendor how old I am?

Because it's an alternative to websites asking your age.

The option is the website could verify your age. Or it could hand it off to the OS to handle that part. (Its not like there isn't precedent - things like passkeys and video decoding are passed from the browser to the OS).

If the OS handles it, great. The age verification gate is passed and you can do whatever you're allowed to.

Else, well, you then need to submit 2 pieces of ID to the website to prove your age where that personal information will be stored for an indefinite period of time on an insecure server waiting for someone to hack it.

OSes from Apple, Microsoft and Google pretty much know your age. This lets sites do the age verification check without you have to lift a finger. Of course, a certain other popular OS is not mentioned. For those wanting to "fight the system", chances are you'll just be like those using a VPN hitting CloudFlare protected sites. Either having to submit ID, or the site refusing you entry because they don't want to hold onto people's ID.

Of course, the better idea is to fix the legislation but that would likely push age verification back to the site and ID submissions. So maybe the better solution is to fix the legislation so sites don't have to check ages and just not do dark pattern stuff.

You also forgot things like virtual memory - both in separating process address spaces and in using disk as memory, protected memory, memory management, and all leading up to virtual machines (partitions) letting you run multiple OSes on the same machine.

Some of IBM's latest mainframes are just wild in their I/O and interconnects. Even the CPU specs are just strange and off the charts.

About the most annoying this about IBM is that their names for stuff like this doesn't match what most people would call the technology today - they have a totally different set of jargon for computing that's basically completely different from what people who didn't grow up with IBM computing had. I know at least one difference that tripped people up - bit 0 is the LSB in basically all of modern computing. Escept it's the MSB for IBM CPUs, and it tripped up people when it made it to consumer stuff like PowerPC. I know the first few PowerPC boards we had needed a re-spin because the hardware engineer messed up the bit orders.

Well no Switch 2 or PS5 for me. Going to stick with my Switch 1 until things settle down.

The Switch 2 is probably one you might want to get sooner rather than later (i.e., before Nintendo jacks up the price - they haven't yet).

Even if all you do with it is play Switch 1 games as memory bandwidth problems with the Switch 1 meant many games were stuck at sub-30 FPS and basically unplayable. The Switch 2 runs them at a buttery smooth 60 FPS locked which turns your games into something actually fun to play.

It's not just that the Switch 2 is faster, it's that the Switch 2 fixed a number of bottlenecks with the Tegra chip so Switch 1 games no longer ended up with sub 30 FPS or such.

The PS5 can be held off especially if you have a PS4 as there's nothing really that's PS5 only that isn't already on PS4.

But going from the Switch 1 to the Switch 2 is well worth the upgrade price especially as later games just couldn't do 30 FPS.