The best part of the blogpost: They are going to invest even more next year.

Last week, the budget committee of the Bundestag decided to increase the Sovereign Tech Fund’s allocation by €4 million for next year. We’re honored and thankful for the German Parliament’s recognition of the importance of open source technologies, and for their continued trust in our work.

Years ago I tried Ubuntu which used GNOME and assumed that its desktop layout was “the default” GNOME.

Ubuntu never provided a “default” GNOME experience, or at least not since the early 2000s. At one point Ubuntu had it’s own desktop environment, unity, and when they abandoned the project and switched to gnome shell, they modified it to look similar to that. So we went from this:

to this:

I later tried PopOS which also uses it and it was the same

I doubt that. Pop_OS was never the same as Ubuntu. In the beginning it provided an experience that was arguably much closer to vanilla gnome than Ubuntu:

later they started to add their own flare customising the desktop a lot and rebranding all of this as Cosmic Shell:

I installed Mint I saw that it’s still fundamentally the same

Mint never used Gnome. They have their own desktop environment called Cinnamon, which uses some of the same underlying technology, manly the GTK toolkit but is it’s own independent project.

Well, few days ago I installed Bazzite (Fedora) which is also GNOME. It doesn’t look anything like anything I’ve seen before

It still should be familiar in some aspects. The grid-view of all apps for example should be something that you know from Ubuntu (Pop replaces that part in more modern iterations - kinda). Bazzite still does modifications, they’re just a lot more subtle than the ones from Pop and Ubuntu. But I agree with you: Gnomes workflow doesn’t agree with many users. There are those who like it and they tend to really like it. Gnome wants you to heavily use keyboard shortcuts and virtual desktops and I found that casual users aren’t really a friend of either.

So what is the default Gnome experience? try it out. There is an extension manger installed that ships with bazzite (and if not use the software store to install it). In it you can disable all the modifications. You can also install extensions to fix some of the usability problems. “Dash to Dock” tends to solve like 90% of them (It’s also what Ubuntu uses for their modifications)

He’ll, even an Intel based thin client would probably be enough. You can get them on eBay for like 30 bucks, which is about as much as a pi costs. You’ll probably have to replace the ssd though. That’ll set you back an additional 30 bucks.

I would probably go with bluefin. KDE is great, I myself use aurora on one of my devices, but it can also be kinda fiddley with all of it’s options.

The user has never even used a PC and therefore won’t profit from the familiarity that KDE’s default desktop layout provides. Gnome on the other hand offers a more simplified experience with few options and big icons. All of that might be an asset here. You can use menulibre to hide menu entries from the menu and use the official documentation to remove command line access: https://help.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/lockdown-single-app-mode.html.en

Plus it’s still atomic which I actually think is helpful here. For once all the important system stuff is read only. Secondly if one manages to screw something up you can just rebase.

That they leased

A UK petition is in the works. It might take some time until that goes up because your election a couple of months ago reset a lot of work, but it’s comming

Would they be mandated to give out the server code that people could run their own servers?

Sort of. The Idea is that people should be able to run their own servers, but developers wouldn’t need to give out their code. All you need is the server binary. After all server software is just that software, just like the client and they don’t need to give out the source code for that for you to run the game. Alternatively they could patch the game so it’s peer-to-peer. (and yes in this case that would be unreasonable as the game is not successful enough to even break even)

The initiative is so ambiguous (to the extend that it is - I’d argue that it’s a lot clearer than many people claim) because it’s not actually legal text. It’s not supposed to be. All it should do is describe the problem and explain why the problem falls under EU jurisdiction. Everything else is supposed to be handled by EU lawmakers after the initiative has met it’s signature goal.

Yes there was one but the Tories didn’t have anything to do with it closing, at least not directly. If an election happens all open petitions are closed as a matter of process, because “it’s a new parliament”. And then you need to resubmit.

A UK petition is in the works. But it might take a month or two until that goes online.

There is another downside. The local and global feeds are potent discovery tools. But they only work if you group people with similar interests onto the same instance. Your proposal assumes a certain amount of homogeneity. If everyone is interested in the same content anyway then yes you can distribute it randomly. But all the people interested in Linux memes are already here. If we are to expand our reach we need to have instances catering to other interests.

And it also doesn’t work with international communities. German speakers for example go to feddit.org, precisely because that’s where German content is going to be amplified via the local feed and therefore easier to discover (for people an that particular instance)

I considered that. Unfortunately silverblue doesn’t do live systems and aurora therefore doesn’t either. So a VM is the only way of trying it out. OP stated that they have someone to help with the actual installation so I left the whole create install medium for bare metal install out intentionally since I assume this person will be capable of helping with that.

Also small Markdown help: If you use dashes lemmy will automatically format bulletpoints correctly. You can’t use •s for it. Doesn’t take anything away from your comment, etcher is still the best tool to create a bootable usb drive, but for the future consider using dashes.

You can try Linux out without installing it to get a feel for it before you make the jump. Set a weekend aside (or at least a couple of hours) to test drive a Linux distro and check if it is your cup of tea.

This is one way of doing this:

• Install Virtual Box on your (Widows) PC
• head over to https://getaurora.dev/ and download the latest iso
• In virtualbox create a new VM
  • set the OS Type to fedora (64 bit)
  • after that you can keep all the standard settings, just be aware that performance is not going to be representative of an actual install
• Then select the newly created VM and open the settings panel
  • here you go to “Storage” and click on the slot under “Controler: IDE” labeled “empty”
  • click on the CD symbol on the right side of the window, in line with “optical drive” and select “choose a disk file”
  • pick the iso file you downloaded in step 2
• close the settings window and start the VM
• go through the installation wizard to install Aurora OS in your Virtual Machine
• Profit

I know that these instructions can seem daunting but it is easier than it reads, I promise.

Why Aurora OS

Aurora OS is based on Fedora Silverblue meaning that it is what is known as a immutable distro. That in turn means that it’s harder to mess stuff up and break your install. It also means that some things are harder to achieve. But I also think that you are probably not interested in the hard stuff anyway.

Aurora uses the KDE Plasma Desktop, the same desktop used by Valve on the Steamdeck. It has a familiar Windows like layout by default but also allows you to customise it like crazy to fit your particular need (whatever that may be).

Aurora flatpak as it’s app format. To see what kind of software is available for this distro you can check flathub.org . It’s not going to be as much software as Linux Mint for example (Mint uses flatpak and deb), but everything the average user needs should be there.

Here is the quote I paraphrased in my comment (I’m sure I got something wrong):

The immutable file system from Fedora Silverblue will be very helpful in implementing our anti cheat system but it is not our anti cheat system. We are planning to generate signatures for each version of our OS (easy with Silverblue) as well as all the DLLs we install dynamically. Basically using our SDK, a game developer will be able to obtain a signature of the current config on the device then call our backend to verify that this is a genuine Playtron version.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/19/24106356/playtron-explains-how-immutable-file-systems-are-not-but-could-help-with-linux-anti-cheat

Then please, enlighten us!

What is a game that brands itself as a web3 game (not a game that just uses blockchain tech but specifically calls itself web3) that isn’t also play to earn.

It’s bazzite with a custom UI instead of Steam Big Picture and no desktop mode. Their big claim seems to be that they say that they have solved anti cheat on Linux: the system generates a checksum of the kernel space, the anti cheat then compares this checksum with the one on file. No custom kernel module needed on the part of the anti cheat dev. At least in theory.

yes

Although this game has a Linux-native build available, Steam does not list it as having Linux support. This can happen if a game has an unofficial, unfinished, or unsupported build. You may need to force Steam to enable Proton for the game in order to run properly.

https://www.protondb.com/app/203160

Square where early adopters of Linux back when Steam Machines V1 came out commissioning ports for a bunch of their Eidos (western) IPs. And then they stopped support for those ports when Proton came around

As far as the initative is concerned such a game would not be covered.

However there is a chance that shutting down the servers and therefore robbing players of part of the product they bought is already illegal under EU law. And if that’s the case then it will ultimately up to whatever consumer protection agency takes on the case. (The initiative has been trying to get either the French or German organisation on the case for months)

There is a UK petition in the works. It’s not quite ready yet, because thanks to your recent election the team behind the initiative had to redo all of their work. (Your government requires everybody to resubmit petitions if a new parliament is elected)

Right, I knew I forgot to mention something in my post. 1000% this