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.

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.

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

Can’t I just not update the microcode beyond what the manufacturer provides, and instead keep updating the kernel and userland and in essence keep updating my android version?

You can’t update the kernel because your phone isn’t running mainline Linux. The device manufacturers (which in this case mostly means chip manufactures) don’t upstream their code. All the device specific kernel drivers are only in special device specific branches. You can get the code for the drivers (because GPL) and do the work to mailine it yourself. In fact that’s what Postmarket OS does to get “proper Linux” running on phones.

I don’t even read this as allowing proprietary apps. They are investigating allowing different monetarisation methods for open source apps and building open source tooling to help with that.

The universeal blue family of operating systems also comes with Homebrew, the Linux port of the popular Mac package manager. The idea being that flatpak is for GUI apps and homebrew for the cli

Update: Yesterday the German government introduced a constitutional amendment that would protect the Constitutional Court from some of this. It’s not perfect but it is still pretty good and it has the necessary 2/3 majority to pass

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-moves-to-protect-top-court-against-far-right/a-68403671

That sort of depends on the type of electoral system. There are a couple of systems that are not fptp but do produce a winner for each district such as “open list” and “mixed member”.

Gerrymandering doesn’t do as much harm in those systems as it does in FPTP but can still be an issue

In the case of Germany: a lot less, but it’s not impossible.

The German equivalent to the supreme court is the Bundesverfassungsgerichtshof (BVerG, federal Constitutional Court) and in stark contrast to the highest American court, it is not an appeals court. A lower court might refer a case to the BVerG, or ask it to clarify a constitutional question, that has come up during a trial but most case don’t even have a theoretical path to Karlsruhe. Political parties and NGOs may also go to directly in front of the Constitutional Court to protest the constitutionality of laws.

New justices are confirmed with a 2/3 majority which means that you need to convince roughly 30% of the opposition to vote for your candidate. That in turn leads to more moderate candidates put forward. Justices are also limited to one term of twelve years. Outside of that a justice may be removed from office by the German federal president* if 2/3 of BVerG justices vote to impeach their colleague.

So far so good. Unfortunately there are some weaknesses in the entire setup. The law responsible for needing a 2/3 majority to elect a justice can be changed with a simple majority. A right wing government could also expand the court by introducing a third senate and pack it with their appointees. But that requires them to get into power first.

German late night show Die Anstalt did a segment about that problem a while back: https://youtu.be/ljjZ6AZsmGk (Video in German)

Tldr: the highest German court is not going to stop a fascist government from doing fascism but it is also not working to put the fascists into power, the way the US supreme court is.

• Yes Germany has a president. The role is largely ceremonial though as he isn’t head of government