No Stupid Questions

Linux on the phone has come a long way I hear. I have been meaning to buy one and see if it can be my daily driver. Google being shitty would definitely push me there

Such pcs already exist and are used by buinesses and schools all over... Mostly chromebooks and i suppose apple also fits that criteria.

But it would be very hard to stop a determined hacker who has physical access to a device and doesnt mind voiding any warranties or user agreements.

IIRC, I had a PC (since sold) that had secure boot permanently enabled from the factory. That is, in spirit, a PC with a "locked bootloader", but you might not even notice because many Linux distros have that Microsoft-blessed Linux loading shim... but it is still Microsoft inserting themselves between you and your hardware; they could decide in the next few years they no longer "support" Linux, hypothetically.

Expect specialist "open" hardware capable of installing any software/OS to become increasingly expensive, while increasingly locked-down, mass-produced consumer hardware remains at current price. You only need to look at TVs for an example of this - try finding a recent non-smart TV at a reasonable price as the cheap models are all subsidised by the revenue from pushing ads into your face.

It'll just be another day for apple users.

For phones Google gets to decide, as an os maker. For PCs, there are multiple OSses so hardware manufacturers get to decide.

I personally don't see AMD or Intel doing that anytime soon, and if they do, at least Arm and Risc-V are making some good progress in the desktop space

I have a feeling, that Windows 12 PCs will be just glorified smartphones with voice control as the default.

It's almost already like this. In my country every single bank reinvented the wheel by creating a single purpose app which does what aegis does (otp generation from a seed) but with some bits changed (one for example "encrypted" the seed with ROT13) and with draconian measures like bootloader must be locked, adb must be disabled, and are using literal exploits to see if you have "forbidden" directories on /sdcard like/sdcard/magisk even if no file access is granted

Never

It isn't gonna happen

The enshittification would be too much, and people would gravitate twoards the more usable tech.

People liked Apple and Google because they offered simplified UX that still let people access what they wanted, as soon as people feel too restricted they will stop using the tech.

This trend is independent and unimpeded by the legality of the tech.

Fortunately, Microsoft is too incompetent to pull this off on Windows.

They tried. See the metro app push in Windows 8+. But it’s kind of incredible how much they bungled it; even now, it would be totally dysfunctional with Win32 apps locked down.

And if Windows doesn’t do it, hardware makers aren’t really interested in that sort of thing.

Stuff like SteamOS does worry me a tiny bit. It’s obviously fine now, but I can see a future where, say, Valve (or any hardware seller with some kind of successful storefront) starts to not like rising competition on their own stuff.

Android is opensource. ROM developers like lineageos should be able to create nornal ROMs with sideload enabled

Just use Linux?

I don't understand the question...

They'd have to completely kill the ability to build your own machine (the whole "IBM compatability" thing) and I don't see that happening when almost every business and factory uses their own custom shit for specific niche reasons.

Absolutely not, that would never happen. Why? Because there's a load of stuff that runs on Windows that is ancient and only exists as legacy software and never receives updates.

If anything, Windows is the last operating system that will have locked bootloaders, because if they do, there's gonna be some bank somewhere in the world suing them because their ancient counting software was originally made for Windows 3.0 back in the day and Microsoft has had to build their entire operating system around making sure that software continues to run.

They might have hardware requirements like the TPM chip, but they're never going to make it so you can only install software approved by them, because they've got over 40 years of software they'd need to approve before they can do that, and they won't.

That is already a thing in ARM laptops