The current American regime is a good reason for them to not only move to whatever the data storage equivalent of a tax haven is, but also move fully to Tor/I2P to cover their tracks against any enemy powers, assuming Trump and Musk don’t figure out how to deanonymize Tor and I2P.

There’s not really a whole lot of options unless you like Manjaro mobile, Fedora mobile, Arch mobile, or Ubuntu Touch that I’m aware of.

One more reason to use Lemmy.

Framework’s doing a pretty good job standing out for laptops anyways, with their user-repairability focus.

Then it’ll support Rockbox. I would recommend flash-retrofitting it for long-term reliability if it hasn’t been retrofitted already, though, the spinning rust is a known weak point on older iPods.

Even on older kernels, if anything hardware like GPUs will benefit more from running newer drivers than a newer kernel, ie. AMD cards from GCN1 up to present-day RDNA3 are actively being supported by Mesa and the dev branch generally tends to have more optimizations especially for newer cards but also older ones as well, than the latest stable branch.

The EL distros - CentOS Stream, Alma, and Rocky, all have a package which allows you to install a manufacturer repo that lets you install the latest AMD drivers from, for example, and CentOS Stream 10 and Alma 10 are both on the 6.12 kernel now.

Like I said, it’s rare especially for games, it’s more common in productivity software though…

cough Adobe… cough

The current standard DRM for the games industry, Denuvo, will work in Proton.

There might be some cases even for single-player games where DRM platform-locks you into Windows but that’s rare from my understanding.

You’ll need an original iPod, iPod Mini, or iPod Video or Classic for Rockbox compatibility. iPod Touch is just an iPhone without the phone, so it’s locked into iOS, but the original iPod, and iPod Mini, Video, and Classic all support Rockbox.

I presume any generation of iPod Shuffle or Nano is also locked into Apple firmware.

As I pointed out, if you have an older iPod, eg. like an iPod Video or Classic, or any other player that supports it, Rockbox is a thing you can flash onto it.

I’d recommend Lutris over Heroic both because it runs locally where Heroic is Electron, and because Lutris allows community-based native Linux ports for games where applicable, eg. for Ultima VII: The Black Gate + The Forge of Virtue, Lutris gives you the option of installing that game with Exult instead of DOSbox, for Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II, you have the option to install those with OpenLara, for Doom 1 and 2, you have the option to install those with ZDoom, for Little Big Adventure, you can install that with the ScummVM runner, etc.

Also, at least for DOS games where you don’t have the option to install a community-based modern port, you can use native DOSbox as a runner instead of Windows DOSbox as well through Lutris.

Oh, and one more bonus particularly for GOG games in Lutris’ favor over Heroic, is Lutris uses the offline installers so that if anything ever goes wrong with any given GOG game, you can just reinstall from the offline installer where Heroic operates more like GOG Galaxy or Steam in that it’s always downloaded from scratch.

Fooyin’s a really good alternative and if you can flash Rockbox onto an older iPod that supports that custom firmware, then it’ll just function as a normal external drive, no iTunes sync needed unlike with stock Apple firmware.

If you have nothing to lose, ie. if you don’t play anything with anticheat or you don’t use any productivity software with crazy DRM platform-locking you into Windows, do it, switch over.

The bulk of all games will run in Proton or even vanilla WINE now and the minority that’s platform-locked into Windows is anything that uses kernel-level anticheat, if you only play single-player games or even virtual board games like Civilization, those will broadly work fine in WINE/Proton and even in the case of the aforementioned Civilization, those games starting from Civ5 onward even have native Linux ports, but the Windows versions tend to perform better in Proton, and as for productivity software, there’s plenty of alternatives to things like Maya, Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere/AfterEffects to choose from that isn’t platform-locked anywhere, eg. Blender as a Maya alternative, Krita or GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, RawTherapee or Darktable as a Lightroom alternative, and KdenLive or Davinci Resolve as a Premiere/AfterEffects alternative.

Oh, and as for Illustrator, you have Inkscape as an alternative, and for Paint Tool SAI, you got MyPaint as an alternative.

As for a good distro to get you started, Debian or OpenSUSE seem pretty solid for beginners, and Debian Stable at least has a backports repo for newer software, and there’s also ChimeraOS if you’re building your PC into a games console.

Also, if you’re looking for a good Foobar2k or iTunes alternative, Fooyin is great for that, and Whipper’s a good CD ripper and basically an open Exact Audio Copy clone, although it’s text-based. You could also use CUERipper in WINE as another good open alternative to Exact Audio Copy, which is proprietary. CUETools will work fine in Mono as well.

Alright then MS, (this is hypothetical as I haven’t ran Windows as my main OS in years and don’t plan on going back) since you want me to trade in my hardware, how 'bout I trade in your OS instead? :p

There’s plenty of single-player games that don’t use any sort of anticheat you can play and that work fine on WINE and Proton.

X is one to talk given how bad they are about censorship themselves.

I’ve been blocking and reporting these nicole accounts as spam bots lately. I hope this doesn’t become as bad as the spam bots in the YT comments.

Debian’s pretty good, or if you need something a bit newer, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed seems pretty good as well in terms of a beginner’s distro.

Super-slim distros like Tiny Core or Puppy will be a rocket on a P4.

Stuff like this is why if you develop an emulator, that you’re better off self-hosting your own git repos, and optionally hosting on Tor/I2P to completely cover your tracks for good measure.