I’ve spent years championing Linux as the only escape from Big Tech, but I’m starting to get twitchy.
While we’re distracted by the Steam Deck making Linux “mainstream,” the corporate players and politicians are busy building a digital cage. Between California’s AB-1043 mandates and Microsoft’s “Face Check” infrastructure, I’m worried we’re heading for a hard schism: “Sanitised Linux” vs the “Free Rebel” distros.
If the compliant, age-gated version becomes the industry standard, where does that leave the rest of us? Digital exile?
I’ve put some thoughts together on why the “Golden Cage” is closing in and why education, not mandates, is the only real fix.
Linux becoming mainstream would be a trap too… It will lead to the enshitification of the distros as they get more and more watered down to satisfy the average dumbass using it.
There have been bloated “easy to use” distros for a long time. But the based Linux distros like Arch & Debian have stayed pretty much untouched in my opinion. And, even tough I’m using plain Arch now, I also started into Linux using EndevourOS. It’s just more convenient and not too big of a hurdle to get into the Linux universe.
we all have to start somewhere
Yes, and we all got by fine with things the way they have mostly been. The last thing we should be advocating for is this stupid trend of removing features and calling it “user friendliness”
Give the user the ability to torch their system - it’s up to them whether they want to use things they can’t handle or not. Not up to the devs to baby-proof the software and strip abilities away from capable users.