> This means installing software at scale (any number of systems), or the question how to cleanly uninstall software it not a question you should ever ask in a Linux environment.

And yet this is a problem that so many third-party vendors who try to support multiple Linux distributions have been struggling for years.

> Tools like gsettings are culturally alien to the unix world.

Sure, Linux and UNIX are coming from different roots, but "cultural" means nothing in large organizations, where computers are basically tools not that far from printers, projectors, even hammers. A way to do someone's job. I may hate locked systems, but then I don't have to support users who cannot find their trash bin on the desktop anymore.

You can seed dotfiles for all users, but you can't really enforce that user cannot for example move his taskbar from bottom to the top of the screen without policy enforcement. gsettings/dconf may be culturally alien to this world, but it is (or at least was) solving an actual problem. A problem we may not care about, but some companies do.

Now, I think there is an interesting discussion here to be had - given this latest push from Windows to Linux, as a way of distancing Europe from US, would adding features that bridge this policy enforcement gap between Linux and Windows is desirable?

15-20 years ago I was going to say yes, but back then I cared so much more about Linux as Windows alternative for office use. Today I actually prefer Linux Wild West and how hard it is to lock it into any sort of MDM.

Group Policies also allow you to enforce things like browser configuration (proxy, homepage, search engine etc.) wallpapers, screen locks etc.

Can this be done on Linux? Honestly, I have no idea - I think gnome with gsettings/dconf can do that, but can KDE?

Now, how well is dconf integrated with all the software you want to run is another thing (it was done by GNOME, and ignored by KDE), and whether this is still the way they are all moving is yet another question but the infrastructure was being built.

1: https://datablocks.dev/blogs/news/white-label-vs-recertified...

I'd really hope that if something new is proposed it will be only once every player have decided to put their weight behind it to propose and push for a change.

By the end of the day I agree, if you have any "real" reason for using VPN you pretty much have to implicitly trust your provider to not keep any traffic flows and connections that could correlate traffic to your IP, but not even sending money in envelope saves your from that.