Surely you jest but truth be told this is the direction I have been watching companies move albeit slowly and carefully.

Microsoft are slowly baking in this concept into Windows 10/11 to become more like an XBox at least for the home version. I envision a future version of windows will operate very closely to the method you described. I suspect all of the OS vendors want an app store in front of everyone whenever possible and telemetry to see what needs tuning to keep interaction with the app store as high as attainable. I do not believe it would be a stretch to see a future home version of windows not allow login if their authentication servers can not be reached or if ones cached remote credentials expire.

I could even see this eventually happening with Linux. The latest version of the Fedora desktop F36 interacts heavily with admin.fedoraproject.org and they have an app store. AFAIK Redhat/IBM have not yet implemented any centralized authentication servers with corresponding default client configurations to utilize them and I do not know if they intend to.

Yeah iOS already doesn't let you activate if you have no network connection of any kind. As well as having a closed app store.

The desktop OSes are heading there too but they're still a bit afraid of pissing off their legacy users. Besides the lock-in they're all aiming at that sweet 30% app store commission.

> I could even see this eventually happening with Linux. The latest version of the Fedora desktop F36 interacts heavily with admin.fedoraproject.org and they have an app store. AFAIK Redhat/IBM have not yet implemented any centralized authentication servers with corresponding default client configurations to utilize them and I do not know if they intend to.

I disagree. It might happen to some flavors of Linux like Fedora, Ubuntu and others that are backed by companies. But because the source is open, there will always be distributions that do not have such a restriction.

Governments might make it illegal to run these "dangerous" unsupervised OSes though. Or what could happen is that your bank, government website etc fails to work "for your protection" because your machine fails attestation. This is something that's already being done on Android with SafetyNet, albeit with apps instead of websites.

In addition the EU is also working on an online ID so a website can request your real identity and verify it. This would link in with that, validate the user as well as their hardware.

Right now? No. But I could see it happen in 10 years. Especially once CSAM is no longer the scapegoat and they have admitted they want the data for a lot more surveillance. I can already see the posts of people that think they have nothing to hide.

I agree with you. My personal hope is that the smaller distributions do not garner enough attention and the big companies leave them alone while at the same time having enough community developers keeping them alive and not infiltrated by developers that want to drive people to the corporate distros.

There are far too many distros out there. There are hundreds if not thousands listed on DistroWatch

I know that HN policy is to take the best faith interpretation, but I'm really struggling here. The ramifications of what you suggested are boggling to consider- any developer of any system must implement and require a network at the lowest of levels... That would be impossible to enforce, and a nightmare to implement. Secondly, theres still nothing to prevent dark networks from emerging. Once its out there, its out there. Key/license servers would be even more of a target for corruption, exploits, and circumvention than encryption servers, with all of the same problems we see currently. In no world is this possible, never mind livable. It would be Orwellian to even imagine.

I believe it's meant to be read as sarcasm.

All machines require networking or refuse to boot? That's quite a solution...