No need to, but no need for it not to either. And no way to verify it isn’t beyond “trust me bro” and I don’t trust them

Also that was supposed to be their replacement to the old RDP app from the store, except it still doesn’t actually support RDP

Surely that’s not zero knowledge since the government can see every site you visit, which is the whole point of these laws anyway

That was one of their best specials

I looked further into it and it seems to be because on iPhone the restrictions were purely technical, it just wasn’t possible to publish anywhere other than the app store which apparently isn’t monopolistic.

However Google were apparently making deals to make the play store the more attractive choice despite the alternatives existing, which did count as monopolistic behavior.

Now in isolation I can sort of understand both of those decisions, and I don’t really care either way because fuck Google Apple and Epic, I want them all to lose. But in the context of both lawsuits happening pretty much at the same time this was literally the one result that made no sense. I could understand Epic winning or losing both cases, or even beating Apple and losing to Google, but this way round was just stupid and I think Googles recent behaviour is partially because of it.

Basically Epic weren’t happy with the 30% cut that Apple and Google take from app sales and in-app purchases so they introduced a direct payment method which bypassed Apple and Google’s payment methods, but was in violation of their app store rules. In response both Apple and Google removed Fortnite from the app store. Fortnite remained playable on Android because of sideloading but was unplayable on iOS (I’m not even sure if it’s back yet)

In response Epic sued both companies claiming they held an illegal monopoly. Somehow Apple won and Google lost

I also blame the Epic lawsuits. How the fuck did they lose to Apple but win against Google, the platform where Fortnite was still fully playable and monetised?

Apple shat all over those regulations with their implementation and got away with it so now Google are doing the same

You’re giving them too much credit. Their intentions are not benign and they are the authoritarian state

If you’re very quick about it, iOS 26.3.1 is still signed so you could do the update and downgrade using iTunes if it does ask. You would have to factory reset the phone to downgrade again though and Apple could potentially stop signing it at any point leaving you stuck on 26.4

Thanks, I think I probably will end up on Artix eventually. I’m going to try Gentoo first just because it interests me though!

Yeah I think I will. This change alone isn’t actually that bad but it shows an eagerness to comply which I can’t accept. I’m not sure which distro to choose though, it’s probably between Gentoo, Artix and Void

So its time to move to a distro without systemd?

Hopefully you can find something suitable, sounds like a Surface would be ideal if you can find one for a decent price!

No problem! What are you planning on using it for? I’ve had a look at the specs and it looks like the surface 3 is quite a lot weaker in single core performance, but multi-core seems about the same. It also only goes up to 4GB RAM, if you’re wanting to use Waydroid that probably won’t be enough as I struggle a little bit on 8GB (if I try to do split-screen in Waydroid it seems to run out of memory and one of the apps will crash). Despite that this one has enough power for what I use it for, although if I had paid for it I’d probably want a bit more power. It probably depends what price you can get one for.

Battery is hard for me to comment on, as well as the lack of Windows 11 support the other reason it was on the scrap pile at work is because they were complaining they got less than 30 minutes battery life out of it. I suspect a lot of that was because they used it outside so it got too cold. I’ve been getting about 2-2.5 hours out of it since I got it home which isn’t that great for a tablet, but good enough for me especially since it was free! I don’t know to what extent the battery has degraded so it may be possible to get a unit that lasts much longer. I think the one I have was originally purchased in 2018 so it’s fairly good for a 7 year old battery! The battery life is probably the biggest risk of buying a used one.

Having said that I’m not sure you’d ever get iPad levels of battery life from one, it’s more of a laptop that happens to be in a tablet form factor so even brand new its closer to a laptop in terms of battery life.

Sleep seems to work ok, although for some reason it takes 2 or 3 button presses to wake up as the screen immediately turns off again after the first press.

Which model have you found? Mine is a first generation Surface Go so I didn’t think there was a previous model?

I’ve honestly been quite impressed with it so far though, it seems to run Linux quite well! I didn’t even have to use the Surface kernel as everything worked fine with the standard kernel. The touchscreen worked fine straight away with no config needed. The gyroscope works as well for auto-rotate, although you may need to do a bit of config to get your DE to recognise it (there’s a GNOME extension to fix it). I even managed to get secure boot working with custom keys.

I found it a bit tricky at first as it was difficult to find an on screen keyboard that had extra keys such as tab, eventually I switched from KDE to GNOME as their on screen keyboard was the best. You probably won’t have that problem if you’re getting the keyboard cover anyway, and tbh if you don’t need a good on screen keyboard KDE may be the better choice for a touch screen.

I’m also quite impressed with Waydroid. There is a bit of a performance hit from it being virtualised rather than an actual Android tablet, but considering how weak the CPU is the performance is still pretty good. Its fairly noticeable if you compare the performance of a native web browser vs an Android browser running through Waydroid, but depending on what you’re doing it’s nice to be able to run Android apps since they’re more touch focused. It also doesn’t have perfect compatibility, I couldn’t get IronFox to work at all.

The only bit that was a bit dodgy was the camera, you need to install libcamera for it to work and even then some programs don’t recognise that you have a camera, or if it does you just get a green screen. But I have no need for the camera so I don’t really care. Switching to the Surface kernel didn’t help either so I’ve stuck with the standard kernel.

Governments have been pushing for more censorship and surveillance long before AI came onto the scene

Republicans are absolute scum but they only exist in the US and are not in charge of every state. This is a bipartisan push around the globe.

Best I can do is a bunch of age verification laws to take even more control away from you

Let’s see if it gets released before GrapheneOS and unlockable bootloader get outlawed