O RLY? They will? Suppose that hypothetically they go through with this dastardly plan. What would I do? If everything becomes age gated by sketchy agencies then I think I'd leave the internet. Or at least that's my initial reaction. I might still be able to use the internet minimally, to download distros or run apt upgrade occasionally. Perhaps I could still continue to eek out an existence on the Dark And Scary Web of i2p or Reticulum.

Life on the DarkWeb is not all that exciting though. Cryptocurrencies make me feel ill, and I am not at all interested in having government spooks as friends. So in all likelihood if "ministers force" whatever bullshit I will just lose interest in the internet even if I'm still nominally able to use it. I have spent most of my lifetime "in tech" though, so it would be a big change.

My expectation in this scenario is that not all distros will comply with age gating. Even if they do, things like buildroot will still exist and so I am enough of a computer nerd that I will be able to build an operating system from scratch with the antifeatures removed. I've done it before, but typically only for tiny embedded systems, not the "everyday carry".

What would I call my own operating system? Bashnix. Bashian. GNU/Anarchnix. DistroMcDistroFace. Naming things is hard.