At least personally, I don't find this all that surprising. Windows privacy took a crash with windows 10 and given that I don't trust it, I'm surprised people committing cyber crimes do.

This doesn't impact graphene at all

Yeah exactly...risky...I meant without doing that

But Linux also has containers and I haven't found a networking setup I can't do with it so while this may be true it seems anecdotal

To be clear, I'm not saying I don't want open hardware, what I'm saying is I don't get the point of allowing closed hardware that doesn't require a firmware blob as opposed to closed hardware that does. That's a very arbitrary and silly line that does nothing useful. They're going on this crusade of "no blobs." But why? There's lots of hardware that already has closed blobs on the HW, but because it's not uploaded by the driver those blobs are ok? You either have to say all closed firmware is bad and we're going to take a stance against any devices which have any amount of closed firmware, even when shipped on ROM in the HW. Or, closed firmware is tolerable so long as the driver is fully FOSS. I love the idea of not having closed firmware but I just don't get the intellectual inconsistency here.

What would likely happen is VPN providers would be IP banned but people could still setup their own custom VPN solutions as that's hard to ban without banning corporate VPNs? Of course my fear is as this idea spreads VPNs and even Tor will become increasingly useless as all exits will be age gated and censored as well. This is something where technical work arounds will only work in the short term, laws like this are a slippery slope that we seem to be sliding down.

In contrast to most people here who talk about solutions to this problem with tooling often used for batch deployment what I'll say is just my opinion on the matter. Outside of OEM or fleet deployments the advantages of nix just aren't that apparent. You feel like your system was a house of cards but I've personally never felt that way and I suspect neither have most other users. Every OS to ever exist more or less behaves in a similar way, i.e. it's mutable, so most users have only ever known this behavior. Installing software and then having to configure it in a software specific way is the norm across all existing computer platforms for all of time and for most situations it's worked well enough. It isn't nearly broken or painful enough for most people to care. Honestly if nix was the norm for Linux it might even scare away windows or Mac users looking to move. Linux is already a learning curve and completely changing the software installation and management paradigm(beyond using a package manager which can conveniently be explained like an app store) would not help the situation.

This might be the first time I've ever approved of the use of DRM

This honestly makes some sense though. Legacy bios is virtually dead on all modern systems. CSM still exists on some stuff but it's fading out. The A20 gate no longer exists, the PC industry is moving on. DOS on real hardware at this point is just going to get progressively more and more rare as the hardware further diverges from the IBM PC heritage it's clung to. Real mode is the next thing on the chopping block and that will completely kill the legacy bios and DOS outside of VMs.

Eh? I daily drive only FOSS software with basically no problems, the only exception I make is for firmware and JS, firmware because it's realistically not a choice and JS because it's extremely sandboxed and I use librewolf with container tabs to isolate cookies etc cross sites, even drivers are not exempt from this rule. FOSS specifically being programs under a GNU approved free software license or software found in the Debian main repos and therefore complying with the DFSG. It's, surprisingly easy. In fact when I made the decision to do this it was primarily because I needed so little proprietary software that it just wasn't even much of a challenge?? I guess my main point in saying this is I don't get where you're coming from, I'd love a Linux phone but it's not realistic there, but on the desktop? It's extremely realistic??

That you should turn and run like hell? Probably lol...

LOL, I also use DNS based filtering soooo I feel your pain.