It gets a lot worse when you realize that state propaganda operations can greatly maximize on this.

You are quite correct that this is very old news (Cambridge Analytica was how many years ago now?) and that state propagandists have been using this for years now (I seem to recall the last TWO presidential elections being heavily influenced by a FUCKING RAFT of state misinformation campaigns by multiple foreign nations, and even some domestic thinktank operations).

I agree that the technology itself is not directly harmful. If it was kept inside word processors as advanced text prediction, or advanced grammar checking or something, it would be a fine, safe, and legitimate use of what it really is-- however, Money Talks, and if the empowered-and-unscrupulous demographic out there can further increase their grifting, *THEY FUCKING WILL*.

Sometimes it's important to understand and appreciate why we cannot have nice things.

Usually, those reasons revolve around the existence and activities of such people, and how cozy they are with government.

The baloney detection kit has never been more essential to install in children.

Unfortunately, this has been actively stymied by certain political groups (on both sides of the aisle, for different reasons), and almost nobody comes equipped with one, "Because its easier!"

Humanity is doomed.

It COULD (in theory, at least) get directly cabbaged up by something like ReactOS though.

MIT allows re-licensing under new terms (GPL Primacy), IIRC.

Whether or not ReactOS is .... Mature enough.... (giggle)... to accept the newly opened code as a viable POSIX subsystem provider is another matter entirely, however.

Still, Gift horses and mouths, and all that.

If you want a start-menu interface, though, you dont really want steamOS.

You want normal linux with LXDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, or KDE.

That, and Heroic Game Launcher, and Proton Tricks. (So you can set up D3DVK on the containers in question. Heroic does not use VKD3D by default, because it wants to be able to run on devices without vulkan. DXVK support is fail-safeable behind wineD3D modes, but D3DVK is not. The latter *ONLY* does DX12 libraries, but shares the same infra/backend as DXVK.)

DX12 only games work very well with VKD3D, and Vulkan.

Proton supports this out of the gate on SteamOS. DX12-only is a nothingburger, on hardware that has suitable vulkan drivers.

In a surprising number of cases, they work *Better* than native DX12 on the same hardware.

Unlike other game launchers/stores, Steam (even in handheld mode) is very easy-going on setting up and using alternatives.

See for instance, Heroic Game Launcher, which can very painlessly integrate games from Amazon, Epic, and GOG into a steamdeck's library.

Steam in Handheld mode (which is basically what SteamOS is) already supports native mode for games that have it.

For everything else, there is Proton.

SteamOS and Bazzite are "Functionally the same thing".

They are not exactly the same thing, but close enough that Steam itself does not give 2 shits about the difference.

(SteamOS is a customized Arch distro, and Bazzite is a customized Fedora distro. Both are set up with a read only binary filesystem, both use btrfs by default, and both use KDE for the desktop mode.)

I run Bazzite on my GPDWin 4 (2024 version), and it works just fine.

Valve does not officially support GPD handhelds with SteamOS at this time, and is focusing on the ROG Ally instead.

Other than a somewhat screwy accelerometer, the Win4 is actually a better offering than the official steamdeck. (More RAM, better processor, hardware keyboard, etc.)

I am able to run modern and retro titles on it just fine.

The *ISSUE* is going to be the tinkering steps needed for some very retro titles, which may need things like DGVoodoo2 (Old DirectDraw based games that dont play well without extra love and care, or that need Glide emulation), or Joy2Key (Keyboard+Mouse only titles being hamfisted to work on a gamepad, like STALKER), or need a DINPUT filter in the pipeline to work right (Heretic II / Quake for windows, Need4Speed titles, etc, but also modern things that are officially "broken" on steamdeck, like Dragon Age: Inquisition, which work absolutely fine with the filter DLL present.)

This is in addition to the dreaded "But OUR WONDERFUL ANTICHEAT software wants to make indecent liberties that only windows lets us doooooooooo!" many modern game developers are so high on. (Which SteamOS/Proton has problems with. SteamOS has a native version of EasyAntiCheat, but a lot of publishers want to do bespoke dumbassery instead, and brick/ban people that do the "Unforgivable Sin!" of playing on *DREADED LINUX*.)

This is because SteamOS, in its attempt to be Safe_For_Idiots (and please, I am not trying to be elitist or rude, just pointing out that "Highly curated, to the point where all control is removed, because it's scary for users, and they 'get easily confused' and 'set the wrong things'" results in a systemic lack of understanding, coupled with a platform that does everything possible to slap your hands even when you DO understand, and NEED to do something) makes it much more difficult to set up such things to make them work. Bazzite tries to cut both ways, in that it too wants the root filesystem to be a curated read-only thing, with any and all linux userspace things being handled by flatpak, but it *DOES* let you override that and make local patches to it as well (So that you can create a symlink for /snap for instance, for those things that only ever get released in that cursed, unholy manner.)

In both cases, this kind of lockdown stops you from installing useful system functionality, like NFS, or from changing the default compression level options (Both use BTRFS with zst compression, at level 2. Changing this to something tighter, requires editing /etc/fstab which is on the root filesystem, and--- IS READ ONLY.) Naturally, by design, it prevents you from using native distro-curated binaries from the package manager as well.

Again, Bazzite lets you local-patch this, if you jump through all the right byzantine hoops. Actual SteamOS is less forgiving, and just says no.

If Valve goes ahead with this, I hope they offer 2 channels. The first one for the fully curated experience, and the other for "Tinkerer" mode.

Sadly, I feel that the "But our sacred and special anticheat!!!!!" hysterionics will result in any such split channel distro having the latter completely blacklisted by everything, even though the people using it just want to set some quality of life settings. (like the compression level)

The "Users are easily confused and dont understand!" philosophy precludes making these things into easily set GUI options.

To get around this "We applied mittens with duct tape!" curation, and actually manage the system library registrations, and individually tailor proton container instances so that such things as DGVoodoo2 and pals can work, you need to use things like ProtonTricks. This *IS* available as a Flatpak, but it will go against the "Users are easily confused!" mantra.

SHOULD have pointed them to 'suzyqable' adapters on ebay, and mrchromebox.

Then we'd have kids posting fun videos of chromebooks playing videogames instead.

But alas, we get to point out that 'maybe its not smart to skimp on short isolation circuitry on the usb port', and that 'maybe regulations are needed' instead.

The message nobody in power wants to have!

What a shame.

Quite a few 'newer' models use i3 chips in them.

On 'newer' ones, you need a 'suzy-q' cable. This basically exposes a debug serial port over usb, and lets you instruct the firmware to unlock and accept an out of band update.

'Strangely enough' these are not very plentiful, or so mrchromebox.tech says.

I seem to find chinese clones on amazon OK enough though. Havent bought one, but maybe I should.

If you have one, putting coreboot uefi firmware on is not that difficult.

You can run linux (or windows.. if you really wanted...) on them well enough. For some of the higher end chromebooks this might be OK.

You will still have to contend with the 'by design' cripplingly small eMMC onboard storage that you cant upgrade.

In theory, some models expose a mini pci/ mini pcie card inside for the wifi chip,which can be subverted with aftermarket goodies and doublestick tape to get an nvme socket though.

https://www.amfeltec.com/flexi...
https://www.aliexpress.us/item...

You are better off spending the money on a real laptop though.

I always just stick a microSD card of a suitable size in, put tape over the slot to keep it from being ejected, and set it up with ext4 using the '1 disk RAID' silliness options to make linux do properly sized atomic writes, despite the 4k cluster size.

See also, this article about 'magic soup'.

https://thelastmaimou.wordpres...

That, plus judicious use of tmpfs for temp files and browser cache, will allow you to use the microsd as /home, without burning it up.

You might need to have / there too, if the emmc is truely small, and use the emmc for /boot.

I'd say it can be (and likely is) a combination of these things:

1) employers dont want to accept the actual consequences of discarding 99.9% of the labor pool, because 'they only want the creamiest cream', at 'bargain, wholesale prices', resulting in billions of gallons of 'skim milk' looking for a place to go in the market.

2) even with the despressed wages caused by desparation of all that milk in the economy, if they feel they *must* have to begrudgingly accept that milk, it wont be at market prices, so they need to engineer the appearance of a shortage, while simultaneously welding thicker and thicker reinforcement on the door, due to the flood just outside trying to get in-- so they can pillage milk from a developing country at a fraction of the price.

Together, both just cause the amount of skim milk to accumulate until it becomes something else through attrition. (Job seekers change vocation, or just stop seeking all together.)

All the numbers and indicators point to a glut of ordinary performing workers in the talent pool, with employers screaming there's just not enough cream,

Says the anonymous coward (who's clearly bad at math, as that's the only plausible takeaway from his suggesting a single plutocrat with a 9mm pistol that holds between 15 and 17 rounds, will do anything more than cause a riot that will result in his eventual dismemberment, by firing into a crowd of thousands that are after his excessively fat wallet.)

When the reason your risk of mugging keeps going up is rampant income dispartity, and refusal to own up to the consequences of that, (which is more or less what seems to be happening with ghosting), pepperspray will quickly become insufficient to fend off the torches and pitchforks.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

This isn't hard.

No. Wasting an employer's time like this is wrong.

Additionally, trying to 'weed out' potential hires in ways that basically *force* job hunters to apply to hundreds of openings to have even just the 'statistically guaranteed' prospect of a callback, because of how paranoid you are that 'a bad one might slip through!', is ALSO wrong.

(So is creating job postings for openings that dont actually exist, or that you have precisely 0% interest in actually seponding to applicants about, ever, because you either want to hire a very specific person internally, want to play fast and loose witu Equal Opportunity law, or, just to justify telling congress you 'neeeeeeed' more H1B visa placements, to avoid paying SS and pals on them.)

Given there are like, 5 different reasons employers ghost applicants, and usually only 1 actual reason applicants ghost employers, I would suggest that maybe the phenomenon is a natural consequence to the employer's behavior, and NOT the other way around, but this is STILL a '2 wrongs' situation.

The CORRECT behavior, is for none of this shit to be happening in the first place.