It’s already the case that banks don’t allow their apps to be used on rooted phones. I can imagine a similar possibility for desktop computers. A dreadful possibility, but a possibility nonetheless.

Practically speaking, people already have cell phones that are impossible to own, because in many cases, users are not allowed to unlock the bootloaders of their phones.

They’d have to. It would be the only way to make the changes uniform across distros. And of course, we could always use the unmodified version.

That’s my guess. These people have no clue what they’re doing.

Technically, Linux is not an operating system, just a kernel, so I’m not sure how this would be implemented.

Well you don’t “scan” a book that’s already digital.

The fact that they destroyed the books is the most reprehensible thing to me. They could have resold or donated those books to libraries. Instead, they chose the ugliest and most wasteful thing they could possibly do. Despicable.