What Happened to Running What You Wanted on Your Own Machine?

A much bigger problem for running Linux on phones is that standard Linux runs like crap on phones. It doesn't have the mainline driver support amd64 computers have, and the battery life optimizations that make Android usable need to be reimplemented on top of Linux to get a day's worth of use out of your phone. Unfortunately, most Linux applications are written for desktops where they expect the CPU to be running all the time, the WiFi to be accessible whenever they want, and for sleep/suspend to be extremely incidental rather than every two minutes.

there are plenty of "honestly-pretty-good reasons" we plebs shouldn't have access to general purpose computers, and we're only a few decades away from them reclassified into the equivalent of fully automatic rifles.

Then I have raspberry pi and steam deck which I use for messing around with and running whatever weird software.

I would characterize it more as Google is responding to the needs of the vast majority of its users, most of whom do not care to run unsigned software, certainly don’t write it, and have no need of escape hatches. Escape hatches are great, but each also represents a security weakness waiting to be exploited.

And not to leave it merely implied: they are also responding to large development organizations who want locked down platforms in which they can distribute, and more importantly crack down on those who would pirate their, software.

So it sucks ass that a greater and greater share of what we consider computing has to occur in platforms that are utterly locked down to the core, but again, at the same time, putting my "regular user" hat on here: I don't want my phone to run anything from an untrustworthy source. My computer? Shit yeah, I'll try just about anything with a healthy skepticism as required, but not my phone. Losing a computer is irritating. Losing a phone is a fucking MESS.

Trusted computing and even remote attestation have legitimate use cases. It's good, great even, that they exist. But just like everything, they can be used against you.

On UNIX, Sun was the vendor that introduced the concept of SDK SKU, thus for having developer tools, an additional SKU had to be bought, and the until then largely ignored GCC sundenly got a new focus of attention.

Mainframes and micros always needed having a group of folks from the vendor professional services for specific kinds of configurations.

I still remeber working on traditional timesharing UNIX systems, one single server for all teams, what you get to do is decided by IT for your role.

There are plenty of examples from the past on how this has been happening already.

if the computer won't allow to install or use other software until you install a vendor-signed version of systemd on a vendor-signed kernel we'll be there. it's about hardware attestation, not signed software, though.

https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html

If my bank requires me to use a phone for transfers (mine doesn’t), it might be acceptable to leave one in a desk drawer powered off as you would do with a hardware authentication token. It’s a special device for occasionally accessing a service. Fine. But when governments and industry collude to force citizens to carry these devices in order to live life normally, that’s not OK.

My intent is to be as stubborn and obnoxious as possible in resisting this until they either give up and provide an alternate path or lock me away for noncompliance. Fortunately there is still an alternate path available for most things, primarily thanks to elders who have trouble with new tech. (Thank you elders!)

I recently found a plugin that can alert to JS doing shady "fingerprint-like" activity. I did not expect it to go off quite as often as it does now.

It would seem that some sites are already asking _very_ probing questions about the browser so it's only a matter of time before they go one step further and demand proof and gate on furnishment of that proof.

Having important info on your device and having that device accessible to the wild, wild, internet is a very real problem. If the "walled garden" is a flawed solution we should work on a better one.

Is that a problem these days? It was over a decade ago that I last needed to jailbreak a phone, nowadays it’s just "I’d like to unlock" "Ok".

This in combination with using webapps where possible

The only place it seems to fall flat is network I/O - LAN access requires permission, but dialing out to the wider Internet does not.

Compare Windows, which has jack (except for bloated anti-malware hooks in NTFS.)

Linux is _trying_ to replicate macOS with Flatpak/XDG portals, but those still need more time in the oven.

Source: I use both a MacBook and a Linux desktop daily.

No it isn't, and no it doesn't.

So then the problem gets moved up to why are you (or group of you) not powerful enough to negotiate being able to run what you want and either not need “them” or be important enough that “they” need you.

And the answer will come down to the fact that 90% of people don’t care about running whatever they want on their machine, and they want the cheapest, quickest, easiest solution.