I think the issues are more likely to happen if you update less frequently. I used an Arch distro on my secondary PC for a few months. I admit I never ran into any major breaking issues, but every week or so when I did an update it sure felt like I would run into an issue since the updates were massive. I didn’t even have that much installed. Also reading through PKGBUILD and changelogs was annoying, but if you didn’t do it and ran into an issue the forums would just blame you for not reading them.

So while I didn’t run into any major issues myself, I could sense that maintaining it was more work than I wanted. And later on I read this lemmy post which validated my decision: Realizing Arch isn’t for me after updating broke VLC.

Compare this to the update process of Bazzite. It happens in the background, and automatically applies when you reboot. You don’t even need to be aware of it. You can easily rollback if something breaks. And it’s pretty guaranteed to be stable because all Bazzite users have the same base, so it’s well tested before being released.

Since you liked Fedora but not GNOME, sounds like Bazzite or Fedora KDE could have worked out well too. Just something to consider if you want something more stable and less cutting edge

There are obviously more such cases under a forced-digital regime

I wouldn’t just dismiss it as “obvious” when that’s the topic of the entire discussion. You first have to prove that digital methods make it harder to boycott certain companies. We already discussed how offline access can still use third-party services when processing the data (like OCR services). And on the flip side, digital methods can avoid third party dependencies (like the government hosting their own email).

Indeed in the end forced-digital is just all about saving a buck at the expense of our freedom.

Maybe try to convince the other citizens to pay more taxes in order to maintain an offline system. Forcing everybody to pay for a system that that most don’t care about, isn’t very “free” either

My point is that if you truly want boycott power, even when dealing with mandatory government services, then you need to minimize third-party dependencies for those government services.

You rightfully recognize the difficulty of such a proposition. Let’s say the government outsourced prison food to www.pizza.com. Then those prisoners would not be able to boycott www.pizza.com.

So if you recognize that boycott power has to be waived in certain cases for practical reasons, then it is fairly reasonable that you might just have to use MS to use a government service. Offline access is very expensive to provide, and very few people want it, thus it’s not a practical alternative.

You seem to have a strong distinction between direct vs internal systems. I think you underestimate how easy it is to add a facade and convert a direct dependency into an internal one. In software this is called “adding a layer of indirection”. For example, if the government wanted to hide the fact that they use MS for email, they can simply use email aliases. If you send an email to [email protected], you will have no idea what provider they are using (assuming that they take measures to hide it).

Minimal processing does not restrict /who/ may do the processing, just that excessive processing is banned

I was talking about minimizing third-party dependencies, not minimizing data abuse.

Without copyright, game creators work even harder to protect their games from copying…

Those same creators would work just as hard to work around laws that require offline access. Because as you just established, they want to protect their games from being copied, and online access is their technological measure for doing so. These game creators would just add an online leaderboard to their games and say it’s an essential component.

But if we go so far to abolish copyright, presumably other forms of creator compensation would become dominant. Forms that don’t rely on copy restrictions. After all, not all industries can just add DRM and technological measures to protect their creations. Photographers and digital artists also want to protect their works.

Though this is a big topic I’d rather not get into. I’ll just say that trying to force game companies to provide offline playability, is fairly unrealistic. I’ll wait to see how the “Stop Killing Games” initiative shakes out.

I prefer internal data abuses because it removes me from being at fault. If I send e-mail to a gov agency whose MX lookup leads to a Microsoft server and MS abuses the data, I have a hand in the abuse of my own data. A well-lawyered opponent would rightfully argue: “you handed your message to MS; you reap what you sow. If you did not trust MS with your message then you should not have handed your message to them.”

You’re not at fault if email is the only option. The lawyer would rightfully recognize that. So making (online) email the only option absolves you of the blame. Is that really all you want? I really don’t understand this reasoning behind the idea that only “internal data abuses” are ok.

To keep things short, there are two things that I feel like would satisfy a lot of your concerns:

1. government services should minimize sharing data with third-parties
2. copyright should be abolished

The first addresses your issues with interacting with government services. It would allow you to say, boycott Microsoft while still using government services. It would extend to internal data processing. And it would even cover things like allowing Tor, since Tor is used to minimize data sharing with your ISP, which is a third-party.

The second addresses your desire to play games offline. The main reason why games force online connection even when the game doesn’t need it, is to prevent piracy. Without copyright, there is no piracy.

These are both fairly big goals, especially the latter, but still more reasonable and achievable than enforcing offline access imo.

they’re not controlling her, they’re trying to provide an alternative that she’ll stick with

It sounds like you assume that if offline access was a fundamental right, the government would not only respect it, but the offline access would also be private by default. I think that is a bold assumption, but I think we’ll just have to disagree because it’s impossible to know what the government would actually do. I just know that society tends towards efficiency, and offline methods are simply inefficient, so I expect it to go away in the future, unless there was some fundamental reason why offline access was necessary (and not indirect reasons, like the right to privacy).

I think at this point it’s also good to revisit your original comment at the root of this thread so we can clarify what exactly you are asking for. It sounds like you are asking for two things: for offline methods to interact with government services and utilities (in other words, things necessary for survival), and for offline methods to use commercial services, like games.

What is the reason you want offline access to government services? Surely it’s not privacy, since you usually have to provide your government ID to interact with the service. My guess is that you want to avoid giving data to commercial entities, and also avoid interaction with commercial entities, like Microsoft. Your primary concerns are third-party data collection and boycott rights. So it sounds like you don’t necessarily want offline access, you want to be able to interact with government services without any other dependencies.

But the postal service is just one example I brought up. There are tons of other dependencies in the background. I’m positive most governments use Microsoft Word. They’ll be using it to draft the paperwork that they send to you. They probably scan and OCR your letters for archival, and their scanning software is probably commercial and collects data. If your goal is elimination of external dependencies, then offline access is just the tip of the iceberg. And just because these dependencies are hidden, doesn’t mean one can ignore them. If that was the case you could just send your documents to a friend and ask them to send it to the government for you, and ask them not to tell you how they did it. That way you wouldn’t know if a commercial service was involved!

OK and as for offline methods to use commercial services, like games, I think in this case your goal is privacy. However I think this demand is fairly unreasonable as well. Obviously there are certain services that require online access, like real-time chat applications. The problem is that any company can construct artificial reasons for why they need online access, or even data collection. Youtube can say that they require personal data to curate your feed. You already mentioned that data minimization laws were ineffective. I don’t see how you can reasonable expect companies bend over backwards to provide offline access, when it’s far simpler for them to just make up a reason for why they need online access, or why they need your personal data.

I should clarify since I realize I got a bit mixed up in earlier comments: when I argue that privacy should be a fundamental right, I don’t expect to force all companies to follow some vague definition of “data minimization”. I just want to make sure the government can’t ban encryption and anonymizing services like Tor. In other words I’m not forcing companies to perform certain actions, I’m preventing certain consumer actions from being criminalized. I think this is much more realistic of a goal. And I believe that as long as encryption and anonymization is possible, then certain individuals will want it, and certain companies and groups will provide it. Anti-trust is important here too.

Of course the market for privacy is tiny, but that’s simply the reality. Not many people care unfortunately, and it’s unrealistic to force companies to care about something few people care about. However, the good news is that some people do still care. There are FOSS re-writes of some of the games you mentioned. For Age of Empires theres 0.A.D and OpenAge. I think this is the best one can hope for.

That is an incredibly detailed reply. Thanks.

Not in the case at hand. But yes, I do believe offline ppl are entitled to the same benefits w.r.t. public services. E.g. our human right to healthcare and education is not preconditioned on being online. It’s inalienable.

The problem with offline is that it’s more expensive, and often less convenient. I don’t see a fundamental reason why offline communication must be available. Let’s assume that your country added a fundamental rule (for example for the USA this would be a constitutional amendment) saying that all goverment services should collect the minimum amount of data necessary to function. So they would have to support things like Tor, to avoid collecting IP addresses, etc. Would this be enough for you to waive the offline requirement? Because the world is always marching towards more efficient communication, and an offline requirement could hold society back for little benefit.

Another factor, for example, would be that if I boycott Microsoft and the gov uses MS for email, I effectively lose my boycott privileges if email is the only means of communicating that the gov accepts.

I fear this is unavoidable. If you depend on certain services (like interacting with the government), then you simply can’t fully boycott that service or any dependency of that service. For example, if the government only accepted post mail, you would not be able to fully boycott the postal service. But I feel like your idea of boycotts is also too extreme. If you want to boycott Microsoft, and all local grocery stores used Azure somewhere in their infrastructure, would you stop buying groceries? I see boycotting as simply doing your best to avoid a company’s products.

The problem is not lack of possibilities. It’s lack of competency.

Lack of competency is often simply lack of incentive. What incentive does the government have, for providing privacy-friendly services? Of course, they have incentive for the opposite. Tracking users gives them power, and makes their job easier.

Likewise, if they have incentive to track people, why would they provide an offline option, which is both more expensive and bypasses their tracking measures.

Based on your entire reply, it sounds like what you mainly want is privacy. It’s an important distinction, because I reckon that it will be easier to ask the government to enshrine privacy as a fundamental right, rather than offline access as a right, since offline access is much more expensive to provide.

is it privilege escalation if docker already had root access?

IIRC adding docker to the wheel group is actually an optional, manual post-install step given in the official installation guide.

without it, everything works but you have to add sudo to every docker command

Sorry for necro but your ideology is fascinating. It sounds like you believe offline people deserve the same benefits as online people. Why do you believe this? Why shouldn’t the world move towards an expectation of online existence?

If I were to guess, your goal is not offline existence, but privacy, and doing things offline guarantees privacy, the same way that high-security environments use airgapped machines. But that’s just a means to an end. There are other ways of achieving privacy, like using vetted open source software that take privacy seriously, for example a fediverse client running in Tor browser. Privacy does not necessitate being offline. Going to a cafe to download articles to read offline, is not really offline either. It’s just an intermittent internet connection