Airports in Europe do not make most passengers remove shoes, but nobody has blown up a plane there with a shoe bomb. It’s probably not a serious threat.

It’s likely their priority is continuing to collect all the fees they can for as long as they can rather than the fine itself.

I’ve used Linux as my primary OS for many years, but I keep a copy of Windows on my current laptop for gaming. I know the gaming story on Linux is pretty good now, but having to hibernate and reboot is enough of a barrier to launching a game that it helps me stay more productive.

At home, my laptop sits on a stand with great airflow, but when trying to play The Witcher 3 on a desk while traveling, it overheated and throttled to the point it wasn’t playable. On Linux, the thinkpad_acpi driver allows setting the fan level to “disengaged”, which sounds like “off” but actually means unregulated and results in a considerably higher speed and cooling performance than the usual maximum. Some research led to the conclusion that while manual fan control is possible with certain apps on Windows, there is no way to exceed the maximum automatic speed.

It only took a couple minutes to set up Lutris and Proton to run the game, and as expected the mild abuse of my laptop’s fan does make it playable. What I didn’t expect is considerably faster load times, but I got those too.

It makes me suspect they’re not talking about the stock systems OEMs ship.

The developers of GrapheneOS, an independent, security-oriented Android distribution are probably not only talking about stock OEM Android. What they’re saying is true about stock OEM android though.

That’s a separate issue from whether users are forced to get all their software from a specific source, which is also separate from whether users will actually use other sources when given the option.

On Android, developers can offer users a way to install an app that isn’t easily traced to their identity and on iOS they can’t. Furthermore, an Android app can be both on the Play store and available from other sources; there’s no exclusivity.