And turns out, everything that they give you in the package is actually third party! Meaning, stuff that has access to the lowest depths of your hardware, to stuff that you use to enter your bank details are all made by different people. So many people you have to put your trust into.
And if that’s not enough, the people who compile it and send it to you might be totally different people from those who made the code!! What kind of heresy is this?
You joke but I’ve met people that actually think like this
There’s a difference between telemetry/tracking which can at least be limited using an isolated VM, and malware which will attempt to take over your computer/network, so it really depends on why you don’t trust the program.
Imo, if you just want to run a program that’s made for windows (and you trust that it isn’t malware), then a VM or potentially even wine by itself would be sufficient. If you want to run something you think might be malware, don’t. No amount of virtual isolation will guarantee protection from malware.
any small PC
This is a pretty small niche though. I feel like (except for dev boxes and single-board computers) there aren’t too many small PCs that would fit well near a TV. Even something like a steam deck SOC in a case around the size of a Mac mini would be great. Bonus points if they gave it a more powerful GPU
Your points about enterprise support are fair but I was more talking about people that believe that FOSS is inherently less secure than something closed source controlled by a single large company (i.e. security by obscurity which doesn’t actually work)
Honestly I do agree in some ways support is better for enterprise products but at the same time companies could still use some sort of source-available license to promote transparency/security auditing while having the same control as a closed source product. It’s not FOSS but would definitely be better than having everything closed off