Lol it reads like a uno reverse card against the Linux trial articles in previous years:

converting my Linux gaming PC to Windows just to play the same games seemed silly

As far as I can tell the article comes from real Windows experience though.

Is it truly free and open source?

Yes, both podman and podman-desktop are FOSS under Apache-2.0 license. And they prefer more open image hosts like quay.io by default (dockerhub is still available OOTB for it to be a drop-in replacement of docker)

Does it run only in Linux?

No, it runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS (through VMs on the latter two) and my experience is that it works better than docker on non-Linux machines.

The headscale integrated one is mostly enough, you can choose to include the tailscale official ones with their URL as well.

Which sounds good at first until you think of SEO. I think it has been discussed multiple times in the project.

It runs in the kernel of the OS as a driver, which means that it's basically a trusted malware that has even higher permission than the admin of the computer, and have access to more things than yourself, to closely monitor the whole system in order to find signs of cheating.

And yet, most of the world still runs on the same five languages: C, Java, C++, C#, JavaScript.

Did you just assume that those languages exists since the dawn of computing? Or they run the world as long as they came to existence and were never "the new thing"? You are just contradicting yourself at this point to defend yourself from anything you don't want to accept.

mindlessly chanting “tools”

That's what you were doing in the first place. Instead of evaluating and trying new things, you are putting them in an imaginary cycle, ignoring any actual value that they brings.

Also Rust has been on your "stage 2" for 10 years. It's now widely used in multiple mainstream operating systems for both components and drivers, driving part of the world's internet stack, and is used to build many of those "shiny and new tools".

Currently it's a long chain from an early version of GCC to the latest one, then mrustc (in C++) which can compile rustc 1.54.0.

I assume that you do know that tools improve objectively in the cycle and are making a joke on purpose.

Did they fixed the kernel panic problem that persisted in the last two versions? I don't dare to try it, last month their proprietary driver has almost destroyed my machine.

Because it gives the wrong impression that it is not proprietary, just like how you are making this exact mistake.

You can use Nix on Guix System and vice versa, but it's like installing them as a package manager on a foreign system. The store and packages currently are completely isolated between the two, although there's a very early plan for a common store interface.