Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately I'm no expert in the matter. I bet that some mods are compatible, I bet some aren't. I bet some open source client/server pairing implementation might give more freedom but aren't necessarily as popular. I have no idea how that impact culture or the size of projects. I imagine that the community of each project, e.g. Minetest, would know better if the limit itself is technical, e.g. mod compat, or not, e.g. network effect and thus a lot of people "sticking" to the "original" proprietary implementation not because it's better but solely because their in-game friends are there.

I like risky sports (relative for some people it might be boring) but when I have to work or even play I want stuff that just works. I can't imagine using a laptop and wondering every day if this is the last update to my OS I might get.

Sure Apple laptops might be great hardware, you might love the design, etc but just the fact that this question exists make it impossible to consider such hardware.

TL;DR: I don't know and I don't want to care. Please support OEMs who are not making money by selling locked hardware.

Yes I'm serious and I'm not a troll. I don't know what in my questions or suggestions make it sound like that but feel free to dig deeper.

Anyway, AFAIK Minecraft has an official client which connect to official servers.

It's possible to replace clients, as listed earlier, but they might still rely on official servers with their accounts as you pointed out. There are though, AFAICT, compatible servers too, e.g. https://glowstone.net/ so one could connect an unofficial client to an unofficial server and thus have a similar experience with no reliance on anything related to Microsoft, no?

No worries, if you want you can "test" that via a virtual machine, even a container e.g. https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ and see what you would genuinely miss.

It feels like our computer is very unique, very customized, but often it's done in very few key places, e.g. browser profile data, ~/.bashrc , etc and once you locate those, transitioning to any other system is way easier.

the sheer amount of content that was added over the years, and the enormous amount of mods, and the entire community, aren’t remotely comparable

Are they compatible though? Like can I load content, connect to open source servers, uses mods on any client? Please don't presume I know anything about the topic, I'm genuinely trying to understand exactly why alternatives are not good enough.

How about any open source alternative e.g. https://www.luanti.org/ or Minetest or Terasology or Voxel.js or...?

Pretty much what nix (distinct from NixOS) is.

That being said I would recommend NOT to do that because you most likely need 10 specific packages at most. That should take you 15min tops to install with few minutes paying attention.

Just make sure /home is its own partition, or even disk, the distro hop if you want. You can also have in your ~ directory an apps directory where you keep binaries, AppImage, etc.

For most people this is not a real concern.

• get top recent commiters with https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pulse
• click on 1st link https://github.com/bluca and see https://github.com/microsoft in profile

Just 2 steps.

Yes Poettering isn't at Microsoft but seems the person driving the project at the moment is.

Freedom is overwhelming.

You can change everything and anything... so that means a LOT of choices.

Author wish he was born in 1880 and is not going to give up! (context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophone )

PS: thanks for the links, between this PIXHELL, GAIROSCOPE, or SATAn clearly air-gap is just a concept. Fascinating to go through his work basically using everything potential to go through. Great overview in https://arxiv.org/html/2409.04190v1

The fact that I'm having more and more discussions with non tech people about what even Linux is, that they heard of GrapheneOS or /e/OS, makes me thing that yes, it's possible.

What also makes it potentially possible is that Microsoft is doing like NVIDIA alienating gamers. They are "just" gigantic corporations which only go where there is more money. There is no ideology except capturing whatever drives profit up for the next quarter. They currently see AI data center as they place to earn more so they are giving up on the rest.

Heuristic : if you don't know, trust your distribution. If you don't trust your distribution, pick another one, repeat.