This is just going to push people who aren't locked into Windows, away from Windows, and Linux is making a pretty good argument for itself as a viable alternative atm, particularly for gaming.

Although another option would be to virtualize Windows on a Linux host too, that's what I'm doing right now /w Win10 LTSC for general apps that aren't entirely WINE-friendly, and then Win8.1 for some older games that aren't entirely WINE-friendly, and the Win8.1 VM has my R9 270 being passed through to it over vfio-pci for graphics for that reason.

The Win10 VM is using VirtIO paravirtualized graphics because its intended use case doesn't need anything more than basic acceleration as it was spun up mainly for running CUETools on for the things that app can't do in Mono, eg. like transcoding FLAC images to Vorbis or Opus.

As for gaming beyond the few edge cases that don't run well in WINE that are due to just being old code, I don't play anything that has an anticheat so 99% of my gaming is easily doable in Proton.

It's only on Linux though, for Windows, CUETools and CUERipper are some of the most powerful OSS tools for ripping CDs you can get.

Whipper is pretty much a text-based clone of EAC.

Good luck with that too, especially as GPL3 has a clause specifically forbidding tivoization built into it.

The type of thing RH is doing with the RHEL EULA in order to attempt to circumvent GPL2 protections? Yeah, that wouldn't fly under GPL3.

The current administration is seemingly trying to kill the very concept of free speech and expression.

Good luck, especially if they try to ban people from ripping their CDs to FLAC as well, like, how would you even find out if someone is doing that, for instance?

Unless you somehow force a backdoor into rippers like Exact Audio Copy, CUERipper, or Whipper, the latter two being OSS, you can't.

Even SCMS never phoned home to anyone simply because the capability to do that didn't exist yet when that copy protection scheme was first implemented, and it only applied to dubbing a CD over to DAT, MD, or DCC over S/PDIF on consumer gear.

The Goanna browsers will run on pretty low-spec hardware, and there's also h.264ify for sites like YT, unless Google blocked YT from loading on Goanna browsers.

An i9 for a work PC? Seriously? What did they think you were going to do, compile massive amounts of code all day? Even my current CPU, an R5 4500, is probably overkill for basic office tasks (but it's perfectly adequate for gaming on if you're not interested in the latest AAA slop), and it's truly a low-end part, but an i9 or R9 for basic office tasks is ridiculous.

PeerTube seems fine for a YT alternative (only because it's pretty much either it or Odysee, that's what happens when you have an effective monopoly on user-generated content like YT does, and PeerTube IMO needs to take off sooner rather than later given how ridiculous YT's censorship has gotten lately), and then of course Lemmy (this platform) is looking really good so far as a Reddit alternative and I've only been on it for a day now, ditto for Pixelfed as an Instagram alternative.

And then of course there's Mastodon for a Twitter/Facebook alternative.

Also, Matrix seems fine for a Discord alternative, but moderation is all over the map.

Assuming it's not completely useless for this purpose, you could load FreeDOS on it and use it for playing older PC games.

MS-DOS 6.22 would be sub-optimal as it was designed with 486-era and older hardware in mind and since it doesn't support FAT32 and only supports FAT16, you're limited to 2GB partitions, while FreeDOS is actually designed with newer hardware like this in mind and supports FAT32 and thus larger drives.

Good luck trying to ban OSS next, which would criminalize basically everyone who's ever used a browser that isn't IE, everyone who's ever used an Android phone or a Chromebook, everyone who's ever used any modern audio or video codec as the bulk of those are OSS too, and would destroy both Big Data and the Cloud, both of which are primarily Linux-based, and send the US back to the web's dark ages, as in going back to when BBSes were popular.

Also, since this bill punishes people by making them spend most of their lives in prison, how are they going to lock up everyone who’s ever used Chromium or Firefox browsers, for example, or everyone who’s ever used Android or ChromeOS, which is most of the country’s population at this point, should that ban extend to a general OSS ban? (this part was originally a reply but I moved it to the main post)

Hopefully this trade war doesn't devolve into an actual war....