sudotstar

I think that’s the rub, in my theoretical scenario, Apple is not blocking the distribution or sale of iOS applications through third-party means, they’d enforce their existing restrictions on and power over building iOS applications in the first place. Developers would absolutely still be able to distribute unsigned applications - end user iOS devices would just be unable to install them.

It sounds ridiculous to me, and as I wrote earlier, it would be a clear violation of the spirit of the DMA, but I don’t see any reason why this scenario would not be technically possible for Apple to pull off.

I’m not too sure that these actions violate the letter of the law here, even though I agree that they’re 100% in violation of the spirit of the law.

It’s been some years since I’ve put the mobile development world behind me, in no small part because of Apple’s shenanigans, but the way I understand how this might work - Apple may be required to allow “iOS software” to be installed from third party stores, but software that runs on iOS must either be signed using a certificate that only allows installation in a developer or enterprise context (which require explicit and obvious user consent to that specific use case, and come with other restrictions such as the installation only lasting for a limited period of time), or through an “appstore” certificate that allows installation on any device, but the actual application package will need to go through Apple’s pipeline (where I believe it gets re-signed before final distribution on the App Store). All certificates, not just the appstore ones, are centrally managed by Apple and they do have the power to revoke, or refuse to renew, any of those certificates at-will.

If my understanding is correct (I’d appreciate if any up-to-date iOS devs could fact-check me), then Apple could introduce or maintain any restrictions they please on handling this final signing step, even if at the end of the day the resulting software is being handed back to developers to self-distribute, they can just refuse to sign the package at all, preventing installation on most consumer iOS devices, and to refuse to re-issue certificates to specific Apple developer accounts they deem in violation of their expected behavior. I haven’t read the implementation of the DMA in detail, nor am I a lawyer, so I’m not sure if there are provisions in place that would block either of these actions from Apple, but I do expect that there will be a long game of cat and mouse here as Apple and the EU continue to try and one-up the other’s actions.

I can see the use case for someone who wants a single OS install on the Steam Deck that does gaming just about as well as SteamOS does, but has a more fleshed out desktop experience (or even just a different one). The linked article goes into detail on various desktop-focused developments within Bazzite that wouldn’t really make sense for Valve to prioritize in SteamOS itself.

In this case it’s referring to the fact that the OS is built upon the same containerization technology used on cloud platforms such as Kubernetes. As a marketing tool it’s a bit buzzwordy, but it’s not about running the core OS components outside of the physical machine here.

If I’m not literally touching the content I’m trying to scroll, I’ll stick to the default orientation (scrolling down moves content down). Wayland touchscreen input handling seems to handle this just fine and not couple touchscreen scroll direction to trackpad/mousewheel scroll direction.

I wasn’t a fan of the built-in weather widget so I immediately replaced it, so I have no experience with it being nonfunctional, sorry.

Yes

It’s not like Nova Launcher, but I’ve been really enjoying Kvaesitso. It does support icon transformations (better than Nova does IMO) but provides a very different interface that’s focused on search.

I haven’t adopted this kind of setup, mainly because Proton just does such a good job I have almost zero need for Windows, but my plan for eventually doing something like this was to also maintain a passthrough Linux VM for any GPU-intensive work on that side.

When I realized that the practical end-state of my system would mean I’d just be running things from within the Linux VM 98% of the time (games that can run on Linux) I kind of dropped the idea.

For me it’s always been after I tried to resize a partition.

I recommend using whatever is the “least hands-on” option for your boot drive, a.k.a your distro default (ext4 for Debian). In my admittedly incompetent experience, the most likely cause for filesystem corruption is trying to mess with things, like resizing partitions. If you use your distro installer to set up your boot drive and then don’t mess with it, I think you’ll be fine with whatever the default is. You should still take backups through whatever medium(s) and format(s) make sense for your use case, as random mishaps are still a thing no matter what filesystem you use.

Are you planning on dualbooting Windows for games? I use https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs to mount a shared BTRFS drive that contains my Proton-based Steam library in case I need to run one of those games on Windows for whatever reason. I’ve personally experienced BTRFS corruption a few times due to the aforementioned incompetence, but I try to avoid keeping anything important on my games drive to limit the fallout when that does occur. Additionally if you’re looking to keep non-game content on the storage drive (likely if you’re doing 3D modeling work) this may not be as safe.

This is, IMO, the biggest yet least obvious advantage of immutable systems. A traditional Linux environment is “just as safe” as the immutable setups, if only the user/administrator is perfect, never makes a mistake, and always makes the right decisions for now and the future.

Given reality tends to differ from the above, having a system that, at a bare minimum, provides you the “oh shit go back” button to system-level changes, and at best provides a clear, reproducible, trail of actions, is a huge advantage for long-term stability for all users, experienced or not. I’ve been through the school of hard knocks far too many times maintaining everything from server setups to gaming desktops the traditional way, and have committed to “early adopting” immutable distros for pretty much everything except the gaming setup (given the whole suite of proprietary and out-of-date/out-of-touch applications that are basically necessary in that space and not-fully-compatible with the sandboxes and abstraction layers necessary).