This is an order to sell, not break up.

Currently, it’s still recommended actions to the court. Nothing has actually been finalized in terms of what they’re going to actually end up trying to make Google do.

Google must not remain in control of Chrome.

While divestiture is likely, they could also spin-off, split-off, or carve-out, which carry completely different implications for Google, but are still an option if they are unable to convince the court to make Google do their original preferred choice.

A split-off could prevent Google from retaining shares in the new company without sacrificing shares in Google itself, and a carve-out could still allow them to “sell” it, but via shares sold in an IPO instead of having to get any actual buyout from another corporation.

Don’t ya love it when people comment saying something that they think must be true as if it were actually true, without having the slightest idea?

Selling user data, selling ad placement, subscriptions for paid services, enterprise-grade support contracts, and the like.

They could also take an approach similar to Google, branching back out from being just a browser into a suite of related tools that Chrome can then convince users to switch to (similar to how Chrome gets users to not just use Google search, but also services like Gmail too.)

I assume by continuing to sell data.

Unless you’re at a company using Microsoft services, where you have no choice, other than chrome (at my company), which hot take, is worse than edge.

it was good at launch, but they’ve added so much bloat

I use it and love it tbh

Maybe we’ll actually see people switch to Firefox if that happens.

That would end the internet/world.

Just going to say, I do those things too, on Linux, and while I can’t say I never have to mess with config files, it’s not frequent. And, the computer acting like it’s my computer rather than on loan from a megacorp is nice.

It’s not all the way there yet but it’s so very close and the bits that are still pain points aren’t nearly as bad as the pain points of Windows.

As the other commenter said, you should give it a serious try. Mint is very smooth overall.

Hey I will give my anecdotal recent experience. Several months ago I switched to Pop! OS and have had basically no issues. I have an Nvidia GPU and I play a lot of games. I don’t play any games that are blocked by anti cheat (not because I can’t, I just don’t happen to play the few that are blocked).

I spent the first day getting everything signed in, installed, set up and tweaked to how I like it with very minimal terminal usage. Mostly gui and clicking.

Steam+Proton along with lutris makes it easy to play any game for me.

Side note: I have 4 monitors of varying resolution, size, orientation and refresh rate and it hasn’t caused problems other than the initial setup (I used cursr to help with this)

If you can live without games having invasive anticheat, then everything should be doable, and probably a lot easier than in Windows.

You owe it to yourself to try it out! I recommend dual booting into Linux Mint Cinnamon for a while and have your windows install to fall back on to. That or one of the gaming-specific distributions, but from what I’ve seen Mint does all with gaming too. It’s a good all-around starting place, and there are a lot of resources because it’s popular and built off of the most popular distro. I installed it on my work machine (software engineering) and I’ve felt no lack of capability or a need to switch to a more “hardcore” distro.

Sure, but GPL would prevent the Chrome tracking addons and other pleasant closed-source paraphernalia (the difference between Chrome and Chromium)

Too much for me, I’m out 🏳️

how about the tuvalu government?

My comment is more in line with the corruption aspect. As much as I think they deserve it, giving it to the employees would be more akin to them winning the lottery. In the space of a year, they will have gone public, shareholders would have stormed in and we would be at square one.

Nationalisation at least has a chance of getting rid of the money corruption aspect. Sadly, the three letter agencies are probably deep in every browser already so I don’t think any solution takes care of that.

I understand your point though. Personally, I will never use chrome no matter what happens, ha.

I literally salivate at the thought of it happening to the telecom industries.

Most definitely. They need viable competition.

Exactly. There are workable alternatives to most of the others, but YouTube has a stranglehold on that type of content due to the network effect. Examples of alternatives:

• docs/sheets/drive - Microsoft Office 365, OnlyOffice, or self-host LibreOffice Online (through Collabora CODE builds); if you just need drive, there’s also BackBlaze, AWS, DropBox, etc
• phones - I use GrapheneOS on their Pixel devices, but plenty of other Android phones support LineageOS/DivestOS/CalyxOS
• calendar - still looking for a replacement for my smart watch, but I’ve been using my Nextcloud install; there are also some FOSS calendars that support CalDav as well, so look around
• maps - I’ve been using Organic Maps, which has been great; main problem is searching for addresses, but if it’s in there, the directions so far have worked fine; there’s also Apple maps, Bing maps, and probably some others
• translate - it’s built in to Firefox, and it seems to work well enough in a pinch

But there’s really not much for YouTube. I guess there’s Odyssee, Rumble, and a few others, but they don’t have anywhere near the content as YouTube, so they’re not really practical alternatives. I actually sub to Nebula which is the closest to a replacement so far, but there’s still a ton of content that doesn’t have a direct replacement there.