China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week

I spent a LOT of time gaming in my teen years, but my parents practically forced me to play outside with friends, ride my bike, be a part of a church youth group, and greatly encouraged my hobbies programming and designing software formally starting at age 8.

I already had a pretty well-balanced life, and by this policy's standards, I would be "too addicted to gaming" and breaching its rules.

Today I work a wonderful job in tech getting paid well, and by and large love my life.

While in some ways, I can agree with the outcomes these policies are driving at, I can never get behind a government enforcing these at the risk of penalizing a family or children for breaching it.

Wars have been fought and won (rightfully) over the culmination of these types of far-reaching policies that seek to determine how an individual spends their recreational time outside of other obligations like school and work.

It also sets a terrible precedent for controlling the amount of time an individual spends on any other activity. I fundamentally reject the reasoning behind viewing gaming as a potential addiction when any other recreational activity could be classified as such if one spends a great deal of time pursuing it, especially given that many games incorporate history; useful story tropes for understanding life, myth, and relationships; and for online games, the social bonds, management of guilds/clans/resources, and other portable skills that readily translate to corollary activities in a multitude of career fields.

China really knows how to bum its citizens out on so many levels, and the fact that so many in Western cultures seek the cold-calculated utilitarian outcomes of policies like these for Western civilizations without considering the tangible, psychological, emotional, and cultural impacts (among others) on societies is absolutely appalling.

Western civilizations didn't endure wars and literal genocide over freedom from authoritarian lawmaking (and taxation) only to have these freedoms challenged again and again by a select few who have the audacity, hubris, and arrogance to impose on them in the name of the better good. Fuck that.

When it boots successfully and can connect to the internet we then move on to helping them do any daily task they once did on Windows or MacOS, including gaming, art, schoolwork, etc on the new system.

Most choose another distro eventually once they know how to patch any software when needed, but some stick around and go on to develop operating systems themselves.

Many are doing very well in the industry today.

Unless the genre is grindy, micro-payment games in which case... Consider not playing them.

It is an extreme government overreach, whether in the US or China. It's an abuse of human rights. China is about one step away from treading into classic Mao Communist cultural attack mode.

The interesting thing about pursuing so much control, is that more control requires ever more control, it's a negative spiral. More oppression requires ever greater oppression to keep the system from rupturing.

Anyone championing this as borderline acceptable, those people have little terrifying monsters inside, little psycho dictators, yearning to violently oppress and control people. Societies are always filled with these little monsters running around trying to violently control people, they always have to be pushed back against.

In China's case, Xi is pursuing a new cultural revolution, as he sees fit to implement. One thing after another is being taken out, targeted.

They took out all traces of freedom of speech, years ago. They isolated the people with the great firewall, to restrict foreign influence, control domestic influences, and keep the people contained. They installed aggressive censors at all tech and media companies. They eliminated all independent news and media. They've further cracked down on all religion, religious expression, religious worship. They banished nearly all foreign reporting from the country. They banished all joke apps. They banished all gay culture. They're culturally cleansing the Muslim Uyghur regions. They implemented the social credit scoring system. They've entirely taken over Hong Kong and are proceding with wiping out its formerly independent culture. They've installed direct party control over all major private corporations, tech or otherwise. They've neutered all of their most prominent business persons, one after another. They've purged, vanished numerous prominent celebrities. They're in the process of banning all negative discussions of anything economic/financial. They're initiating an effort to prevent any consequential companies from publicly listing stock overseas, looking to increase economic control and reduce foreign influence. They're wiping out private education (classic cultural revolution move on education). They're about to flip to a digital currency, to further increase the ease and application of economic controls over individuals. This is the short list of what they've done since Xi took power, and they're only just getting warmed up.

It's a science fiction nightmare, set to become real. This gaming restriction is just one little drop in the ocean of what they're doing broadly, it's all moving in concert.