The distribution “managed by a single person” depends on hundreds of people working on different sofware to keep up. It’s not “one person doing better than the thousands of Microsoft employees combined” implication they are pushing
Windows 11 beat the linux distros by up to 20% in 1% lows which are argued as much more important by most tech reviewers. It wasn’t consistant at all which means that there was a giant margin of error.
I love linux and linux gaming has gotten radically better, but I am tired of tech “journalism” literally just cherrypicking, misleading, clickbait trash.
Not to mention the major hurdle for Linux gaming is anti cheat software being brought over. Too many games are 100% unplayable because the devs don’t allow their anticheat to be installed on Linux systems
It also doesn’t work. I know that’s what the parent comment said, but it’s a total scam at the company level too.
“Oh, server networking is hard to do right. Let’s do it client side”
“Oh, people are cheating. Let’s add anticheat”
Ensue 3 years of fixing network consistency bugs and playing whackamole with cheaters
I’ve developed games where the client is the source of truth, and games where it’s the server. It is almost always better to do anything that will be developed for more than a few weeks serverside.
Also from an engineering perspective it makes LOADS more sense as you can apply patches to the servers instantly vs. requiring the users patch the game themselves.
Oh, absolutely. I can’t believe we deployed web apps on IIS for instance. What a shitshow that was. If you can run the important bits on something predictable like linux with all the serverside tools that gives you, why wouldn’t you.
In the defence of client side AC; if the entire game runs on the server, then network delay makes FPS:es awful to play. Being able to trust clients and let them do hit detection is quite important in making online FPS:es responsive. In addition, cheats that remove walls/grass, highlight players or even autoaim are near impossible to detect server side. One could try to use heuristics and statistics but it would be difficult to tell the difference between cheaters and players who are just good at aiming and map awareness.
Honestly I can't say that I miss installing rootkits with terrifying privileges just to play games. I'd rather limit the privileges games have with Flatpak etc., not give them even more.
Yup. People always latch on to the “Sony (it was actually on Philips, who ran the disc factory that Sony had a stake in, but that’s just nitpicking) installed a rootkit on PCs in the 90s via CDs” and say about how awful that is, and they’re right, then they throw that out the Window and install more advanced rootkits filled with god knows what telemetry when they install games.
Sure but gaming is predominantly a social pastime. Meaning that most gamers will make the trade off between installing anticheat and not playing the game their friends are all playing, much like the overwhelming majority of people will trade privacy in favor of being able to send a message to friends on Facebook.
It doesn’t matter how much you value your privacy: most people don’t care and never will. So without the option to give away privacy to play the latest Ubisoft game they won’t be using Linux. Full stop.
I really wish valve would make this more clear on steam store pages. It says games are “unsupported” on steam deck due to anticheat when really it should say something like “The developer of this title does not allow players using the steam deck” so that people are more aware it’s not linux or valve’s fault
If you compromise your system with software that you don't know and potentially can introduce a backdoor (even involuntary via bugs), you have a rootkit installed.
If you don't trust it, don't install it with admin privileges. Maybe don't install it at all. Anticheat is a shady business. And mostly not owned by the company that produces the maybe trusted product to be protected.
“A rootkit is a collection of computer software, typically malicious, designed to enable access to a computer or an area of its software that is not otherwise allowed (for example, to an unauthorized user) and often masks its existence or the existence of other software.”
That’s the Wikipedia definition, in CompTIA Security+ the concept of the malware masking itself is quintessential to the definition of a rootkit. I hear this shit all the time from people on here who think anything that gets elevated privileges is a “rootkit” and hasn’t the slightest idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
“But you don’t know if it could install a backdoor!”
You don’t know if half the shit you install is doing that either, or is Easy Anticheat known for doing this in some official investigation? Did someone find out that Activision is deploying malware in ricochet?
If not, you’re operating on suspicion that you don’t harbor for other software without evidence, based purely on things you’ve probably just barely heard about.
You should notice that I use the word "trust". I install stuff on my servers and PCs from people who I trust. Why should I trust someone who makes an anticheat engine. Why should I have a reason to do that?
You should also understand that a kernel-level piece of code that can be updated is a very good rootkit. It contains all essential tools to modify hardware, kernel, install drivers, keyloggers etc. It satisfies the definition of "rootkit" very well.
One single piece of code is enough to be a rootkit.
Rootkits: The rootkit is considered to be a type of Trojan horse. Many Trojan horses exhibit the characteristics of a rootkit. The main difference is that rootkits actively conceal themselves in a system and also typically provide the hacker with administrator rights.
This is because most anti cheats for windows are kernel level rootkits that have full access to your entire system, and gamers just trust that known to be ineffective, scammy and profiteering, anti cheat companies software companies would /never/ do anything nefarious.
How can you trust them?
You can’t! Black boxed code, babyyyyyy.
Anyway yeah on linux systems basically the designs of all common anti cheat systems would be laughed at as hilariously insecure code that no sane person would allow on their computer because you would have to give it root level access.
This is basically insane as in the linux paradigm, root level access is reserved only for a bare minimum of system processes, whereas on Windows, well with the new Pluton tech in the latest lines of major CPUs, Windows has the ability to DRM literally anything you install on it and just get rid of your ability to run or install it, as they see fit, with a network enabled sub layer of the CPU that you as a user cannot override from within Windows.
The only hurdle for linux gaming is for more gamers and game developers to realize the truth of what I just said.
Its possible to do anti cheat in less invasive ways. But that requires more work from game development studios, and is costly.
Anyone else remember when servers had like actual human admins that would respond to player complaints, and would work on the backend of a server to come up with their own ways to detect cheating server side?
Yeah, the only time proton can actually outperform windows is when it spots a fundamental performance error that the app has made, and is able to optimize it out, AND no windows driver does the same. This is comparing Linux+proton at its best vs windows+native at its worst.
What we really want to see is Linux+native at its best vs windows+native at its best. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of demanding games that natively support Linux.
Possibly licensing reasons. Linux is GPLv2 only, Hurd seems to be GPLv2 or later, there could be reasons you may want to use something under the GPLv3.
That’s debatable, since what people generally call “Linux” is more GNU than Linux anyway. “Linux” as the Linux fandom considers is it big and professional like GNU, because it is GNU (among other things).
But what about Linux distributions compiled without GNU tools? Most popular Linux distribution’s kernel currently is compiled with Clang, not GCC, and as far as I am aware does not include anything from GNU. Of course Linux is historically influenced by GNU, but in current day and age they are orthogonal
It doesn’t change the larger point that GNU is way bigger than Linux, though. There are a tonne of things that are larger than Linux, and GNU is one of them.
I guess this is a matter of perspective. What I was saying in my previous comment is that what people commonly refer to as “Linux” (as in “Linux distributions”) is not just Linux (which is just a kernel) but also includes a bunch of other stuff, including GNU (that is what GNU/Linux refers to). If you’re talking about the actual thing called Linux, you’d be right, because most GNU systems are GNU/Linux systems, whereas arguably most Linux systems are not GNU systems; Alpine and Android are non-GNU Linux systems.
However, if like many in the Linux fandom you discount Android, then most Linux systems are GNU systems and vice-versa.
I wouldn’t either, but you see the sentiment especially among the !linuxphones crowd. The fact that Android is Linux is significant because it does in fact allow you to run so-called “Linux apps” (either under Termux or under a dedicated chroot set up by something like UserLAnd) and that is something to be lauded. Android has problems but not being “real Linux” is not among them.
I mean the GPL allowed linux to become a commercial entity. And the whole “professional” outlook is because theres a ton of companies who contribute either funds or development to the project.
If it makes you feel any better, I decided earlier today to experiment with “castnow”, a command-line program for casting to a Chromecast device.
I grabbed the url of a video off of Archive.org, used wget on a box I was ssh’d into to download the video, and then ran my “castnow” command to cast it to the Chromecast.
I got a progress bar and current/total time on the TV, but aside from that only a black screen and no audio.
I tried getting the latest version of “castnow” from the Git repo. I tried transcoding 7 different ways with FFMPEG. A bunch of things.
Finally, copied the video to my local machine and ran it in mpv.
The video itself was solid black with no audio and the Archive.org page had comments on it saying “why is there no video or audio?”
Beautiful story. Feel that we’ve all been there. Every now and then, when the assumption is that the stupid piece of tech isn’t working, and there it is, just functioning as intended :)
TPM is basically never for your benefit. It's becoming a requirement because Microsoft is going to one day say "you can only run apps installed from the Windows Store, because everything else is insecure" and lock down the software market. Valve knows this which is why they're going so hard on the Steam Deck and Linux.
It seems unlikely Valve will ever make Windows the primary OS for their devices. And they’d lose a lot of user support if they ever required the TPM for their own software, so hopefully they wouldn’t risk it.
TPM is basically never for your benefit. It’s becoming a requirement because Microsoft is going to one day say “you can only run apps installed from the Windows Store, because everything else is insecure” and lock down the software market. Valve knows this which is why they’re going so hard on the Steam Deck and Linux.
This is the comment I was replying to. I was simply pointing out that for a company “going hard” on SteamDeck and Linux, it’s curious that they would spend any amount of effort at all enabling the TPM to allow people to run Windows. I guess my point is I don’t think they’re “going hard” quite as much as the person I responded to thinks.
Also it was just pointing out that this specifically can affect the SteamDeck since they use an AMD processor with AMD fTPM.
They are “going hard” the way I see it. Without Valve doing legwork behind the scenes and collaborating with anticheat developers we wouldn’t even have Apex Legends running on Linux like we’ve had for a year and a half. They’ve been talking about wanting to use Linux as a viable PC gaming platform to escape Microsofts lockdown of their platform since the days of Steam Machines when Windows 8 and the new store app were giving bad signs.
Either way Valve would be silly not to provide a compatible way to use Windows on the Deck. Even though the situation is much better these days, they know very well that a lot of enthusiast PC gamers would be dismissive of the Deck if Windows couldn’t work properly on it and that word of mouth would bring less confidence in the product.
I don't see how it affects the Steam Deck. It's entirely possible that the Steam Deck supports fTPM purely because it was part of the motherboard template Valve chose and it would have been more trouble to change it than to just leave it in.
Why does everybody seem to think that userspace attestation is the only use for the TPM? The primary use is for data to be encrypted at rest but decrypted at boot as long as certain flags aren’t tripped. TPM is great for the security of your data if you know how to set it up.
Valve is never going to require TPM attestation to use Steam, that’s just silly. Anti-cheat companies might, but my suggestion there is to just not play games that bundle malware.
Anti-user features which are enabled by games and programs that were already anti-user before this. Hardly worth getting upset about, nothing has really changed. You already should have been avoiding them, because they were already anti-user.
Sure, but does a grandmother’s Solitaire & Facebook PC really need quick encrypting and decrypting? Anyone not dealing with sensitive info doesn’t need one.
Sure there are. If it gets compromised with malicious code, I have no way of removing it.
I can protect ring 0. I can keep crap out of ring 0. If all else fails, I can nuke everything in ring 0 and boot a fresh OS installation. But I can’t do a single bleeping thing except throw out the whole machine if malware takes over ring -1.
This is already the case with your motherboard firmware, which fTPM is a part of. You are correct in that you have no real way to handle malware in it except throw it away. This doesn’t change in any way if you get rid of TPM.
I’m sure you’ll be ok sending me your social security number, home address, bank login details, credit card number, a copy of all the files on your hard drive…
TPM actually provides some useful components to isolate encryption outside of Ring 0, which is a trust win. But any technology must be weighted against its power to oppress.
And its power to make the system less secure. Isolating things outside ring 0 means malware can isolate itself outside ring 0 as well, and then it’s impossible to detect or remove without throwing out the entire machine.
Which is much, much scarier than anything an ordinary rootkit can do.
It’s the way everything is moving. Hardware protected keys can be very useful but it’s a double edged sword. It’s more secure but also allows companies to lock consumers out.
We need rules that say when this tech is used the consumer still gets full control over it. Like what Google does with their Pixel phones and the Titan chip. Not what Apple does.
Like what google does? You mean disallowing people who use a privacy respecting android rom from using their banking apps and such? Soon very possibly banking websites included?
It’s only more secure until someone discovers yet another RCE bug in the firmware, and then you’ve got malware in your machine that’s impossible to detect or remove.
yes, the reason is to securely store cryptographic keys. even your own. It comes preloaded with microsoft ones usually, but you’re free to delete them and install your own
Sadly, I agree. I’m at the point now where as long as I’m not trying to game I can thrive on Linux. But even then I spend way more time than necessary getting things to work that do so out of the box on Windows. We have a long way to go before legacy apps is the only reason to run it.
Personally I found the time I saved from not having any control over my system has more than made up for tinkering that I have to do to get things running. My laptop would regularly become unusable for 20+ minutes on windows because of disk performance issues, and I as the user had no means to prevent windows from running the service that locked everything up. That along with other times windows just decides your use case is less important have added up to far more time then having to debug a game here and there
Ungh, yeah I used to have that problem with my laptop when I was in college.
I only booted it up for classes unless I had a test coming up I needed to study for or something. Because why the fuck would I not do that - I had a regular computer at home for everything else.
Every couple weeks, that meant it was updating instead of being available for note taking, and usually for the entire hour I needed it. Because apparently setting the updates to run during shutdown wasn’t good enough, they needed to be run on boot, because fuck you that’s why.
Linux is just… hey I should probably update this shit at some point… meh, tomorrow.
Because apparently setting the updates to run during shutdown wasn’t good enough, they needed to be run on boot, because fuck you that’s why.
Oh it also loves to install updates on shut down. So when you need to leave the class room to go home that fucking thing tells you to not cut power because it needs to install shit. Fuck you, I need to catch my bus!
Legit idgaf if you want to be plugged in for an update, if it’s inconvenient I’m unplugging it, fuck you for thinking I won’t, and it’s above 60% battery so it doesn’t matter anyway.
Maybe if my computer wasn’t buying so much avocado toast it could manage resources better.
The people that prefer Windows for gaming are not the people that will have performance issues on an OS basis, their rig is powerful enough to run complex games, the OS based performance loss is negligible in comparison. Hell, I sometimes don’t reboot the work computer for days and it doesn’t freeze at all. The system is on an SSD and there are no hiccups nor disk performance issues. In any case, with current day prices, buying a new m2 stick and new ram is less than 100€ total, and to be honest, I’d rather pay that and be fine for 4-5 years than spend a big part of my free time trying to make witcher 3, baldur’s gate 3, path of exile, tons of steam games and league working perfectly for Linux. It’s just not worth it.
I use WSL for work because coding in a Linux environment is better but I still need access to office tools, because companies work with those tools.
Linux won the servers war, but it still has to do much to win the home/work computer war.
"Long way" won't be long, because Google 2.0, err, MS' direction continues to make Win worse over time (cloudify everything, extract more data and strip more rights+control from each user, and gain more money via price-increasing subscription models) while the open source desktop ecosystem around Linux is getting noticeably better for almost every user every ~5 years or so. The era of Windows as a "pure" OS died with W7. Since W10, it's OS + integrated malware. Start of downfall.
Those things matter to you and me but we’re in the minority. As long as Johnny Gamer and Grandma Facebooker can still do their preferred activities in Windows there’s a close to zero percent chance they’ll put the effort into making the switch.
And now Imagine Linux had actually more market share on the Desktop. But for that, Linux needs at least a little more software support to be reliable for other people. And that software is usually not open source. Maybe with Flatpak, it will finally get somewhere in that regard, if there’s enough interest from people.
Sorry but that’s just wrong. Enough people simply don’t even consider Linux because their needed software doesn’t work + there’s no equivalent alternative. And my PC/OS is not a hobby or a Ideology. It’s a tool that I use to work with.
Is it really wrong? Do you have numbers? I think the most people claim above is at least plausible. It surely fits my personal experience, but that is of course not worth much.
I would argue that most people use their PC for web browsing, light photo editing and personal office stuff and maybe gaming (at least outside work) and those people are not affected by “the software I need does not work and there is no alternative”.
Your first point is web browsing. Even that doesn‘t work properly on a linux desktop lol. Browser performance is abysmal because the browsers lack out of the box support for hardware acceleration. Even if you get it to work it might not work reliably and an update might break it again.
Try using a discord call and open a youtube video in 4k at the same time on a a freshly installed linux desktop. The audio will be choppy and the video will drop frames like crazy. Just moving around windows on your desktop is not nearly as smooth as it is on windows.
You seem to be very misinformed. Browsers do not lack hardware acceleration. Some distributions do not include the necessary packets in their default configuration. Some. And when you get it to work, like in Arch Linux, where almost nothing is installed by default, it works flawlessly for years, never had an update breaking browser hardware acceleration.
I can run 12 4k youtube videos at the same time and route the audio to different channels of my different audio devices AND accept several calls from different webapps and the only thing that is not smooth is your way of discussing things LOL
I‘ve had this issue on several distros and multiple friends have the same issue. Video hardware acceleration in a browser is a mess. This is definitely not only affecting me as there is a significant amount of complaints on forums and reddit.
And there is no way that the average computer user will use arch. And as long as you gotta fiddle around with your system to get even the most basic shit running smoothly like watching a high resolution youtube video and moving around windows on your other screen at the same time linux will stay irrelevant as a desktop os. It‘s still a system for nerds and I kinda feel like that this is okay.
I would argue that most people use their PC for web browsing, light photo editing
Maybe just me but I know nobody who still uses a PC for this things anyway. The vast majority of people use their smartphones or tablets for basic stuff like that. People who still use a PCs or Laptops, usually do more work than that.
I am a gamer and I run into “the software doesnt do what I want, and theres no way around it/alternative” very often.
almost always cause I want to run another file in the same proton instance of a game to install a mod or do something else.
Or because something just doesnt work, despite following the instructions and others getting it to work.
Like, Cyberpunk is my most recent example. CET doesnt work, followed the guide, installed the packages the guide said to, still nothing. It doesnt prevent me from running the game, but it certainly stops me from enjoying it the way i want to.
Gaming is fine if you use Steam and the compatibility layer or jump through hoops, and don't play basically anything online.
The photo editing tools on Linux are dogshit.
Web browsing is fine, but not if you want to stream any content, because no one will serve you anything even medium quality without DRM.
Office stuff can kind of be replaced, but mostly by using the browser versions of the shit people actually use, because the tools to collaborate with others (particularly non-techy people) don't exist for open source alternatives.
The software available is absolutely a massive limitation.
Basically the entire multiplayer space is locked out. It's a massive compromise. And every platform that isn't Steam requires significant manual configuration and still has issues.
No, they're not good. And they're not suitable for any normal person because the UX is a dumpster fire.
Nobody with normal tv/movie content gives you comparable quality on Linux.
Yes, normal people do need to collaborate. And no, none of the office options on Linux are capable of functional collaboration for normal people, except Google/microsoft through browser nonsense.
Basically the entire multiplayer space is locked out.
Not all multiplayer games use this anti cheat techniques (and those might just be working in the near future anyway). CS:Go works perfectly, Rocket League does, Dota 2 does, LoL did at least (I don’t know what they’re up to these days), 7 days to die does, paradox grand strategy does, Mordhau does, Path of Exile does, and those are only sone of the games I personally can confirm.
And they’re not suitable for any normal person because the UX is a dumpster fire.
People who use Photoshop professionally mostly agree, that GIMP is a great app that has just a few drawbacks compared zo photoshop. The UI was a dumpster fire, but they sorted that out. Photo Editing is on par with photoshop, at least with other free plugins. If your UX sucks, maybe it’s an error on osi layer 8.
Nobody with normal tv/movie content gives you comparable quality on Linux.
I’m still running 1080p on everything and Netflix delivers 1080p to all my linux boxes. Is there a problem with 4k?
Yes, normal people do need to collaborate. And no, none of the office options on Linux are capable of functional collaboration for normal people, except Google/microsoft through browser nonsense.
Which tools on windows allow easy collaborative office projects other than microsoft or google? Well, other than cryptpad, OnlyOffice, koofr, almost every nextcloud provider, etherpad…
I think it’s more that there’s a perception of things not being compatible with Linux nowadays. A lot of the games that didn’t work 5 years ago now do, and I’m still seeing people complain that games like Halo Infinite don’t work on there when they actually do.
The only things I can think of that aren’t compatible and required for some tasks are Photoshop and professional CAD/CAE software. For >90% of the population Linux should be able to handle everything they need
Most people dont want an OS to be different. They are happy if it boots up and does what they want to do. It’s not lazy, it’s an active disagreement with the premise.
This is why nobody upgrades to Windows 10 from 7, or to 11 from 10. Security risks and lack of features aside, their OS just works for them.
Fedora doesn't provide binary drivers even if they exist, you need to get a pluggable wifi usb tool that is supported and install the repositories and configure binary drivers to get wifi working on a huge amount of laptops.
Ubuntu does provide binary drivers but the configuration tool can just crash by itself a lot of the time and just fail to load the driver.
Ubuntu's desktop sometimes just crashes.
Fedora uses some strange memory compression driver to handle its paging file and this can sometimes just crash the OS entirely by itself.
These are major issues that shouldn't be issues, they should either have been fixed as a priority for the crashes or have some kind of workaround that doesn't require owning specific USBs that regular people just won't have. There's no reason for the memory compression thing either, it probably doesn't do that much for performance overall but random hard-locks are a huge negative. Linux is its own worst enemy on the desktop.
Sometimes the issues with WiFi chipsets is not the distro but the manufacturer. Debian for instance now includes non-free firmware on its installation ISO image, but some manufacturers do not allow the distribution (e.g. Broadcom) of firmware, so Debian can’t legally include them. And unfortunately the manufacturers don’t make it easy to “just download the firmware” so you can put it on the USB stick so the installer can see them. (Literally the only issue with putting Debian on my old 2013 Macbook Pro was the Broadcom firmware - but fortunately, having a Debian desktop I could install the firmware downloader there to get the two files the installer needed).
This is not a fault of the Linux distro, but a fault of the hardware manufacturer. Unfortuantely, like the smell of piss in a subway, we all have to deal with Broadcom.
Realistically windows is really good at repairing itself (or just getting it to a state where its usable again, to most users would be ‘repaired’).
Until linux has some sort of system like this, its just not worth the headache to 99% of users. The linux errors aren’t even that descriptive when they happen, and could be cause by like anything.
they dont even bother to give anything else than an error code which is applicable to 482885 different roots of errors.
Indeed the repairing functionality works. but yeah. the problem will be solved. linux has moved exceptional towards usability and will continue to do so.
It will never be the year of the linux desktop, until linux is easy to use and easy to troubleshoot and fix.
and let me tell you, every minor problem requiring some kind of arcane terminal ritualism in ancient enochian that only veteran sysadmins know, is not, and will never be, easy to use or troubleshoot.
There, I just gave you 2 ways to turn that arcane terminal ritualism in ancient enochian that only veteran sysadmins know, into a plain english service manual that any literate human being can use to figure out basically any terminal application ever.
Yeah, I’ve done --help. It doesnt make it simple. and it doenst magically let you figure out how to solve the problem, assuming you even know what package is causing the problem.
I’ve gone through more than enough fixing of more than enough problems as an average, not-sysadmin person. I know how bullshit it is. Just because you are used to it doesnt make it easier for regular people to use.
Microsoft has done a lot of shit wrong, but the one thing they got right is the usability of the OS, how any idiot can be sat infront of a computer and know what they’re doing with less than a day of faffing about, and can easily fix most common problems in a few clicks.
I can’t speak for other distributions, but Pop!_OS has had a “Refresh Install” option for a while now that does exactly this. This hasn’t happened often, but there have been a couple of times when something borked my system to the point of making it no longer boot, and re-running the installer in “Refresh Install” mode got everything back and running within 30 minutes while preserving all of my non-system files; in particular this meant that I didn’t have to re-download my Steam and other locally installed games, which is significant because they are the largest apps on my system.
Most people are unable to administrate their own systems, therefore GNU/Linux–an operating system built on empowering developers and administrators–is basically unimaginable.
Microsoft and Apple have co-opted the admin duties for users, and that’s why people use their operating systems. It spares them from the disaster we all saw and experienced in the Window XP days–but that comes at a price.
It’s not software support, it’s not anythign to do with Linux. It’s a computer illiteracy problem.
Android could, in some respects, be considered linux’s biggest success story among regular users and that’s because Google co-opts admin duties.
You are only seeing what TPM is now. Not what TPM will become when it become an entire encrypted computing processor capable of executing any code while inspection is impossible.
Yes, it’s right in the name “trusted platform module”. There is no secret that their ambition is to become a space to run code outside the user’s reach and scrutiny.
They start with the most legitimate and innocuous purpose. Once it is adopted and ubiquitous it will not suffer the fate of the other attempts and rotting on the vine.
Then surprise TPM 5.0 become full scale full speed trusted execution environment and it’s too late to do anything about it. Eventually , non trusted processing capability will be phased out and only Intel and signed code will run.
I’m still on the hunt for a desktop Linux distro that has no security features or passwords. My usage for this may not be common but it can’t be rare enough that there are zero options
I agree that there should be an easy setting to at least allow updates without password. I installed Manjaro for my mom, after a while she complained “there are updates every day and I need to input the password too many times”
I’m an engineer with trade secrets on his laptop. I’ve heard of dozens of people getting laptops stolen from their cars that they left for like ten or fifteen minutes.
The chances are slims, but if it happens I’m in deep trouble whether those secrets leak of not. I’m not taking the risk. I’m encrypting my disk.
It’s not like there’s a difference in performance nowadays.
TPM’s not going to help with that situation, though, right? Either you’re typing in your encryption password on boot (in which case you don’t need TPM to keep your password), or you’re not, in which case the thief has your TPM module with the password in it.
From what I understand, TPM is “trusted” because of the fact the secrets it contains are supposed to be safe from an attacker with hardware access.
This is what makes it good at protecting data in case of a stolen laptop. This is also what makes it good at enforcing offline DRM or any kind of system where manufacturers can restrict the kind of software users can run on their hardware.
so you never caught a team of government officials in your living room brute forcing your bootloader at 4am as you got up to use the bathroom, huh. Lucky guy.
I mean, i do have some stuff that i encrypt, but encrypting the folder or packing it on a small partitiin and encrypting only this fs after booting makes more sense to me.
Why do you need full disk encryption in your day to day life? Are you a secret agent? I feel like that would give you our though.
It’s not a matter that I would have nothing to hide, this defense is stupid. It’s a matter that you should use a security adapted to your need, because the cost doesn’t offset the benefit otherwise. And with disk encryption you will far more often be sorry than happy if you’re a normal person.
People are imperfect. People have left laptops full of personal and/or commercially sensitive data on trains or planes, had them stolen from cars and houses etc. Full disc encryption is a defence against data breaches especially for computers that are not bolted down. Or it might be as simple as a person not wanting the embarrassment of their porn stash being found.
This seems to be the most popular one, though I can’t use it in the way its written here, because it will fuck up DNS. I’ll substitute the dots with dashes and then it should work.
Most shells usually default to a truncated version of the hostname that only uses the hostname up to the first dot. Of course one can change that by setting the PS1 env var and using (in case of bash) H instead of h.
I tried with emojiea and it worked. what would break it though?
edit: nvm something broke after a reboot. neofetch reports the hostname as ‘archlinux’ instead of whatever is inside /etc/hostname. matlab drive connector reset and initializer dialog poped up which it did not do before.
Of all the circlejerks this one is really silly though. You can complain about so many fucking things about Windows but Windows 11 is really damn easy to install and setup and I’m pretty sure you can do it in 30 mins.
The OP’s whining about Linux playing all the games feels like bait to me. Linux just doesn’t run every game that Windows does and it’s not about how graphically intense it is.
Even for a Windows user Windows 11 is kind of extra. Install is simple as 10 was, but the nice ends there. First thing you notice is all icons are just gone. No recycle bin, the start button isn’t. I only even know because my wife got a couple of laptops from her grandfather. She wanted one just reset. 11 is what she got. I hate it. The other laptop is now purring on Ubuntu. I like it. It’s not what I’m used to, but I have Blender on it and a slicer. I was hoping that Linux music production might be a thing, but nah. So, I also still have to keep my Windows 10 desktop alive, because that’s where my no longer supported Reason 10 lives.
Thanks, that does give me a bit more to check out. I have Ardour and Muse, neither works without more dabbling than I have been in the mood for. Renoise looks interesting, I may try it next. I know I’m just spoiled, but I’m just not interested in trying to speed run the growing pains. I’m fine with baby steps. I sincerely appreciate the link. I bookmarked it for later delving.
I’ve done so many windows 11 installs and always had the recycle bin. I really don’t see the hate for Windows 11 other than the account login shit but most people I know still use Geforce experience and that requires a login.
I agree with this. I use Linux exclusively at home, but for work I have a windows laptop. It’s really not that bad. I for sure don’t like it as much, but it isn’t atrocious.
Yeah, I genuinely do not understand having used Windows, Linux, and MacOS. They are making it sound like it’s trying to decipher some unknown language. Even a quick YouTube would have solved how to install a exe.
I have found windows is easier to install every time. This is just another windows bad linux good post. Windows has so many issues, but installation is not one of them. Even my 10 year old cousin installs it fine.
In my experience, installation of Win or Lin has been pretty easy. Lin has less options to opt out of (I like) than windows, but windows set everything up just fine. The only time I ever had issues on either is if I try to install without an active ether net connected. If I don’t have the os update during install, I run into random driver issues on either os.
Oh wow the comments on Phoronix for this one are bonkers.
From what I understand (because it wasn’t clear to me from either of the TLDRs posted here) Nvidia’s proprietary graphics driver has been calling parts of the kernel that they shouldn’t be, because their driver is closed source.
These seem to be parts of the kernel that another company may own patents to, but has only licensed it to the kernel for free use with GPL open source code only, i.e. closed source/proprietary code is not allowed to use it.
Nvidia seems to have open sourced a tiny communication shim to try and bypass this restriction, so their closed source driver talks to the shim, and the shim talks to the restricted code in the kernel, that Nvidia does not have a license to use. This is a DMCA violation, hence why the Kernel devs are putting in preventions to block the shim, as far as I can see.
I don’t understand the small minority of commenters there defending a la soulless corp Nvidia, who is blatantly in the wrong here. Some commenters have gone as far as to call the Linux kernel maintainers “zealots”, would not be surprised if they are alts for Nvidia devs…
Because we don’t care about open source drama, we want an operating system that just works™ with our existing graphics cards and doesn’t get in the way of gaming.
The user experience is based around audited, reviewed, open source software. Everything from the licenses, distro policies, and kernel maintainership is based around that model and it has benefitted users far more than if Linux was a mess binary blobs that do not interoperate with each other in a well-defined and transparent manner.
AMD and Intel both manage just fine, along with hundreds of other companies supporting hundreds of other pieces of hardware on top of dozens of different CPU architectures. If Nvidia insists on being a special snowflake about this then it is 100% their problem.
It’s not going to effect 99% of users. Nvidia will update it as they have in the past. The large majority of distros use stable kernels by default, and it will be fixed before this makes it to one. You’re getting upset over something completely irrelevant to you.
That’s a fair point, I’m not super familiar with how the Linux dev cycle works beyond “I download Mint or Ubuntu because I don’t feel like shelling out for Windows 10”.
Distros like Ubuntu and Debian (and by extension Mint) will have their own kernel and driver packages. They will test to ensure that the package combinations they are shipping will work. I am certain they would not ship and update without functional nvidia drivers. Nvidia will most likely update their driver to function with these new protection before this change reaches a stable kernel anyways.
Just so we’re clear, you don’t feel like shelling for Microsoft but are okay to do so for NVIDIA? Don’t get me wrong, I also want a system that just works and I had never had a problem with using proprietary drivers, but if this doesn’t get “fixed” by the time that kernel becomes stable I’m switching to open source rather than keep an outdated kernel version, and I’m switching to AMD asap. Over a decade ago I switched to NVIDIA for a similar reason, and I discovered back then that it’s just not worth fighting against a proprietary driver that doesn’t co-operate with the system.
I’m still rocking the Windows 10 education license I got for “free” through college, but once Microsoft deprecates it I’ll consider switching to Linux. I have a Nvida card I got a long time ago, and I’d prefer to keep using it if possible. I haven’t looked into upgrading yet but when I do I’ve got to shell out no matter what brand I pick.
Depending on the card and your use case the open source drivers might be good enough, although more modern NVIDIA cards are clock locked to the proprietary driver. Nevertheless it’s almost a guarantee that NVIDIA will do something before this kernel goes live for any major distro.
In short NVIDIA has been a crappy company in Linux support unfortunately until very recently they were the least worse option, but now with all of the other manufacturers open sourcing their drivers and not locking their GPUs NVIDIA is less and less appealing so the kernel developers can start to push back against their bullshit.
So you want the company that licensed the patents to the Linux kernel for open source use to have to sue Nvidia for wrongly using their code? You want the company to have to spend a bunch of money suing Nvidia and possibly lose which would open the flood gates to more closed source code leeching off the Linux kernel?
Yeah that’s going to make them want to keep licensing their IP to the Linux Foundation (which they’re probably doing for free).
Or the maintainers can just submit a fairly simple patch to ensure that the kernel and the patents are being respected. Do you really think the first approach is the way to go?
But why is it a problem if they call on parts of the kernal they shouldn’t? is it just a privacy concern, does it also impact performance? i don’t understand
If they want to use that code legally they should make their code GPL but i doubt there proprietary code gets automatically overrules. I wish it did.
I do wonder what would happen if someone would hack and leak Nvidia’s code under the defense that they thought Nvidia to be operating legally therefor assuming there code is GPL, I presume Nvidia would need to officially confess their crime as a legal defense that they never ment to open source their own code.
Linksys was part of Cisco. They had veryy deep pockets, but the FSF & SFC prevailed regardless.
I doubt the FSF or SFC will go after Nvidia, this has been a long standing issue and I haven’t heard about any lawsuits being brought because of it, even before Nvidia had more money than God.
There are lots of problems here. First, if you have to “hack” something to get the code, then it likely invalidates your own defense that you thought you were allowed to release it. Second, even if you can prove that nVidia knows that they should have to GPL their code, you still have no legal right to hack something to get it. If the hacking is illegal, then it’s illegal, even if it’s done to enable an otherwise legal activity.
I don’t see how the copyright mechanism works here. The GPL has rules about linking to GPL code, enforced by the notion that the linked binary is a protected derivative work. Going and finding out where in memory some functions are and jumping to them is not going to create a derivative work.
The Linux devs just have a rule about who they want to call these symbols and are trying to enforce it themselves.
I don’t know if there has been a specific case surrounding a shim like Nvidia is using, but since it is in the license it should fall under a simple copyright violation.
Which they technically didn't. I'm sure Nvidia has a legal team that vetted their solution, they certainly have the money for it. At this point the "protection" against the proprietary driver is just anti-consumer.
And I’m sure Nvidia’s legal team knows that Linux is not going to take them to court for this because it isn’t worth it. Nvidia absolutely did violate the GPL, but they have the funds to avoid any legal trouble, hence why Linux goes this other router. I don’t see how this is anti-consumer, it will not significantly effect the consumer. Nvidia will simply have to update their driver like they did when these protections were first implemented.
It is copyright infringement. Nvidia (and everyone writing kernel modules) has to choose between:
using the GPL-covered parts of the kernel interface and sharing their own source code under the GPL (a free software license)
not using the GPL-covered parts of the kernel interface
Remember that the kernel is maintained by volunteers and by engineers funded by/working for many companies, including Nvidia’s direct competitors, and Nvidia is worth billions of dollars. Nvidia is incredibly obnoxious to infringe on the kernel’s copyright. To me it is 100% the appropriate response to show them zero tolerance for their copyright infringement.
The GPL-only symbols restriction is there for the benefit of proprietary developers. It ensures that their work doesn’t become a “derivative work” of the kernel’s internals, by sticking to using only the published and documented interfaces. Using published APIs doesn’t make your work a legally derivative work of the system behind those APIs (i.e. the kernel).
If your code needs to mess around in the kernel internals, it is very likely a derivative work of the kernel; which means you need the permission of the kernel authors if you want to publish that code legally.
The only terms under which the kernel authors grant that permission are the terms of the GPL.
By circumventing the GPL-only symbols restriction, Nvidia is demonstrating that their driver code needs to mess with kernel internals, not just the published APIs. And that means that it probably is a derivative work of the kernel. Which, in turn, means that those drivers must be published under the GPL in order to avoid violating the kernel copyrights.
Basically: Linus drew a line in the sand and said “As long as you don’t step over this line, you’re not pirating the kernel by releasing proprietary drivers.” And Nvidia stepped over that line.
Because the license for the patents that the Linux kernel is utilizing says that the code utilizing those patents must be open source. So therefore Nvidia is accessing those parts of the kernel illegally and against the license the Linux Foundation has. The Linux Foundation could lose the rights to use those patents if they’re not respecting the license.
Agree with your analysis, just pointing out that Phoronix forums have always been like this, or at least the tendency is to insult each other. Their culture is more toxic than any other Linux forums I’ve seen, maybe besides /g/.
Just a perspective on why people would support NVIDIA here:
They don’t believe in copyright law so they don’t mind whoever infringe on them. Especially since here it would make the proprietary driver work better.
They do care about copyright law but think having a working driver outweighs respecting them.
Not my opinion here just saying that for some people usability trumps any other aspects.
Also, some of us are using Nvidia because we rely on software that doesn’t work on AMD. I really enjoy using Linux, but if it’s going to make my life difficult I’ll go back to using Windows with WSL.
I agree Nvidia should resolve the licensing issues, but man GPL zealots get a such a raging hard-on for anything Nvidia related it’s funny to watch.
Them becoming raging zealots is kind of the only realistic way to defend the GPL though. If they don’t, it’s just going to get treated like toilet paper. I’d much rather have the angry hate mob than to be disrespected by big companies who can otherwise just get away with whatever they want.
And you can simply get it from rpm fusion on fedora, and I’d guess something similar on manjaro. It’s just gone from the official fedora repositories for liability reasons. rpm fusion as a defacto standard for desktops/laptops was enabled there before that for what, like 99% of the installs?
I have a 6800 XT, is there something I have to enable somewhere? I could’ve sworn it was missing because h264/265 had licensing weirdness going on but idk
Why do you think that? Companies can open source their drivers at will, in fact at this point NVIDIA is the only major player in GPU market who hasn’t done this, what do you think makes this particular hardware so special that needs a closed source driver when every other competitor doesn’t? In fact what could possibly be the reason for a driver to need to be closed source?
It’s not going to effect you. No distro is going to ship a kernel that doesn’t work with the Nvidia driver, besides maybe some rolling ones, in which case you can just use the LTS kernel. This is drama between Nvidia and the rest of the kernel maintainers, and Nvidia will update their driver to deal with it, as they have done in the past.
Shitting on people who care about FOSS because they don’t want to see massive companies get away with blatant copyright infringement is crazy.
3D rendering software using iRay. I’ve started trying to learn Blender, but I’ve still got thousands spent on assets and hardware which means I’m not going to run out tomorrow and pickup a new card. It all works fine under Wine, but the amount of Nvidia hate on here is just tiring.
So you use iRay as the rendering engine for Blender? And (I’m assuming a lot here) iRay doesn’t use CUDA, OpenCL etc, but straight talks to the GPU via graphics drivers, thus having hardware depency for nvidia GPU?
They don’t believe in copyright law so they don’t mind whoever infringe on them. Especially since here it would make the proprietary driver work better.
I don’t believe in copyright law, but I especially don’t believe in partially enforced copyright law. Nvidia doesn’t get to use copyright to protect their proprietary code while infringing on the copyright of FOSS.
I did not “support” Red Hat but I was pretty vocally in opposition to most of the reaction to it. I found the willful inaccuracy and even flagrant dishonestly from the “community” close to disgusting at times. So, you may be including people like me in your comment.
In this case, it seems very straight-forward that NVIDIA is in the wrong. Not just ethically but legally as well.
My own read is that some of the people slamming Red Hat are defending NVIDIA now. Coming away from that experience, I the over-arching principle that many adhere to most is simply whatever is best for them. Red Hat was wrong because people felt entitled to something. The kernel devs are wrong ( and NVIDIA right ) because people feel entitled to something.
These textbooks are trash and written by morons. When I was in college one of the required books said very clearly that sleep and hibernate are exactly the same thing. It said that both suspended to RAM and hibernate was just some lower power version of sleep. It was even a question on an exam that I got wrong for some reason. I argued with the professor about it and proved to him thats not the case by taking one of the lab computers, hibernating it, physically taking the ram out and swapping it with another computer and resuming into the same state on power on. He said “Well thats what it says in the textbook so I have to mark it wrong”
It really highlights that there are probably a lot of other inaccuracies that I didn’t notice. This is the standard of education nowadays.
He said “Well thats what it says in the textbook so I have to mark it wrong”
The mark of a great teacher. It’s nice however that he had the patience to wait for your experiment (or maybe he was expecting it to fail miserably?): no prof of mine would have went along with something like that (not to mention, I’m pretty sure we couldn’t take apart the lab PCs at our leisure).
Perhaps not great, but effective. This attitude is exactly how working in the corporate world works. Reality and being right are rarely, if ever, the important thing. Following the rules, doing what you’re told, and sitting the fuck down and shutting the fuck up? That’s what this teacher was teaching their students.
They’re not testing you on what you know, they’re testing on did you study the course material. I had the same problem when trying to pass my written motorcycle test when I moved to California after riding in Canada for years.
It wasn’t the rules/signs portion of the test. They litereally had questions like:
Which is more dangerous when riding beside a row of parked cars?
A) A car pulling out.
B) Someone opening a car door.
C) A child running into the street from between two parked cars.
It’s not an opinion question, personally I’d rather hit the car and the door over the child, but they want to know the answer that the study material gave.
Oh yes, I remember the paper test in California and it was really stupid. Things like “what should you do in foggy weather?” And the correct answer was “stay at home and don’t drive”.
Their whole booklet was a joke, instead of clear rules it was a mix up of actual rules, advice and trivia with no meaningful organization.
What a bullshit question. If they don’t want people to drive in fog they should make it illegal. Otherwise, they should just acknowledge that people are going to do it and not coerce them to lie on a test
That’s messed up. When this kind of thing happened when I was in school the instructor would mark both answers as correct since the book did state it. I highly appreciated that.
most CS “textbooks” are a scam these days I’m general. a huge red flag when I scan resumes now is actually if they have a textbook published without some sort of advanced degree or qualification to write a textbook. I get resumes of people a year out of college, work a junior position, and have a “Advanced JavaScript” or “JavaScript the not boring way” or “Complete guide to typescript” or some other quirky textbook name. if you actually click into any of these books, they’re complete nonsense written by somebody who just copied another textbook from another idiot who knew nothing. all these people are over confident resume padders. in practice they don’t know shit and didn’t legitimately write a lick of the book. I’ve had some of these applicants claim their books are used by professors too.
Linux is #1 run by corporate interests like Red Hat (who controls the entire Linux ecosystem, see systemd etc.) in the exact same way as Microsoft. Linux being open source doesn’t mean it isn’t a corporate project by cumulative billion value companies. It’s not free software. It is what’s called “embrace extend extinguish”.
In short, you can only defend Linux over Windows once Linux stops accepting patches from Microsoft.
If you don’t like Microsoft’s contributions to Linux, you can fork it and remove them. If you don’t like Microsoft’s contributions to Windows, you have to use something else.
It’s not just Microsoft tho. Redhat, oracle, facebook, Google, intel, AMD, they all contribute to linux. Removing their contribution would effectively make the kernel unusable
Everyone is getting free stuff; that’s the point. If you want companies to not use free stuff to make money then either linux is worse, or companies need to po away.
So what’s the problem with that? We get contributions for free to make newer hardware working, they improve already existing stuff, they solve bugs and everyone take advantage from that.
Hardware manufactures (Intel, AMD, etc) SHOULD be contributing to Linux. How could they EEE if they aren’t directly competing? The better compatibility they have with Linux, the more server CPUs they can sell. That’s their motivation, and it’s aligned with the OSS community.
Microsoft also uses Linux. They have both Windows Subsystem for Linux, and they also use it in house I’m certain. Linux is technically competition for MS, but not really. They aren’t trying to sell Windows to the people choosing Linux. To assume malice when there’s perfectly reasonable reasons for them to be contributing is likely wrong.
Red hat may be a contributor to the kernel but development is open source. See the difference between American mega corp with closed source software vs red hat contributing to the Linux kernel?
My network firewall blocks thousands of Microsoft tracking attempts per hour in my home network. My linux machine has zero packets blocked. How is this the same?
I guess you claim it’s the same because you don’t understand the difference, or we are talking about something else being the same, like both have desktop environments…
One is hostile against the user privacy and the other is not. They are very different. Systemd is a boot system and it’s great. It doesn’t call home.
I agree that Linux is the product of corporate investment and corporate priorities.
I also agree that it is “embrace and extend”. Not everybody loves the extension. The Internet is chalk full of moaning about systemd, pukseaudio, and wayland for example.
There is a lot less moaning about how great Linux gaming is now or that GNOME is pretty great now ( I don’t use it ), or that networking is super fast, or that HDR is being worked on. So, not all corporate investment is unpopular.
I guess that is why there has been so little extinguishing. Or the opposite of it. Corporate interests that invest in Linux tend to end up extinguishing their other offerings over time. Check out Microsoft in the cloud even. How much of Azure is Linux vs Windows.
Meanwhile, I can use systems that use the bits I like and replace the bits I don’t. I am loving Chimera Linux right now. No systemd in that. My main work machines use EndeavourOS which does use it but there are certainly lots of other high quality choices. Lots of other choices that are thriving ( not being extinguished ). Most of them benefit from the embracing and extending.
Microsoft has not been able to use EEE in Linux. I think they have learned there is way more money in not doing so actually.
“if you can’t parse tabs as whitespace, you should not be parsing the kernel Kconfig files.” ~ Linus Torvalds
This is what we got after people sent him into PC training. The OG Linus would say something like “if you’re a piece of s* that can’t get over your a** to parse tabs as whitespace you should be ashamed to walk on this planet let alone parsing the kernel Kconfig files. What a f* waste of space.”
Yours is too, its posting a silly link at the bottom which makes you look like you’re a Facebook mom in 2003.
Dear Mark Zuckerberg
With this statement, I give notice to Facebook it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents. The content of this profile is private and confidential information. The violation of privacy can be punished by law (UCC 1-308- 1 1 308-103 and the Rome Statute. NOTE: Facebook is now a public entity. All members must post a note like this. If you prefer, you can copy and paste this version. If you do not publish a statement at least once it will be tacitly allowing the use of your photos, as well as the information contained in the profile status updates. FACEBOOK DOES NOT HAVE MY PERMISSION TO SHARE PHOTOS OR MESSAGES.
Mocking people who point out it’s pointless is toxic, abusive, and deeply revealing. You think AI harvesters give a shit what you’ve told them not to harvest?
No-no-no. “Whoever can’t handle tabs as whitespaces should heat their IQ, it is below freezing right now”. Or classic “should be retroactively aborted”.
Yes, but people find this interesting because historically, Microsoft was actively trying to destroy Linux (look up Halloween documents) and even said that Linux is cancer.
A lot changed after Satya Nadella took the helm. The modern .NET platform is really quite nice, and MS does a lot of FOSS open source work.
Obviously it’s good to be sceptical, they’re a large corporation and all they want is money, they’re not our friends. They’re just not as draconian as they were in the 90s and the 00s.
While you’re correct, that’s funny because as a developer using a framework like dotNET, MIT gives YOU more freedom. At least for anything statically linked where the GPL code would end up as part of your binary and force you to GPL your own code I believe.
At least for anything statically linked where the GPL code would end up as part of your binary and force you to GPL your own code I believe.
Anything more lax is fine, so you could also release your code under MIT license if you use GPL modules. Yes, it does force you to release your code but after all it’s a protection for the user. Furthermore, GPL does not mean your software has to be free of charge, you can still sell it as long as you attach the source code for the end user.
I find the distinction that dynamically linking GPL is fine but statically linking it is not to be so ridiculous. That’s obviously just an implementation detail. The only conceivable difference other than the pointless “technuchalley your program contains GPL code now as part of the file” is that you have to do dynamic linking, which is slightly slower. How does the fact that your work is dynamically linked vs statically linked make any difference to the people writing GPL libraries??
I think that’s for LGPL. For GLP any form of linking requires the code to be licensed under GPL, too. The dynamic linking except isn’t that bad of you think about it. It gives you the freedom to update or replace the library at any time. For security critical libs (TLS, GPG, …) that’s a big plus.
After years of debate about licenses for my own software (that only I use…), my philosophy has been boiled down to this: MIT for libraries. GPL for programs.
This way, other developers can freely use your library, and your program remains free.
That’s competely sensible if you ask me. Though there’s also nothing wrong with MITing your programs if you want to. By making the source available, you’ve already done plenty for the users.
The way I like to think of it is that non-copyleft licences are like giving everyone freedom by saying there are no laws - suddenly, you can do anything, and the government can’t stop you! However, other people can also do anything and the government can’t stop them, either, and that includes using a big net to catch other people and make them their slaves. The people caught in the nets aren’t going to feel very free anymore, and it’s not unreasonable to think that a lot of people will end up caught in nets.
Copyleft licences are like saying there are no laws except you’re not allowed to do anything that would restrict someone else’s freedom. In theory, that’s only going to inconvenience you if you were going to do something bad, and leaves most people much freer.
The idea is basically that you shouldn’t be able to restrict anyone else’s freedom to modify the software they use, and if you’re going to, you don’t get to base your software on things made by people who didn’t.
Huh? FSF counts the MIT license as free, though they call it the Expat license they list it as both Free and GPL compatible: www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat It is also listed as an opensource licence by the OSI.
There is no world in which crossing one of those terms out to replace it with the other is valid and not disinformation.
“Free Software” is defined by GNU. “Open Source” is defined by the Open Source Initiative. Those are the only valid definitions of those terms of art.
They may differ in tone and emphasis, but they are compatible: every piece of code that can validly be described as “Free Software” can also be described as “Open Source,” and vice-versa. The notion that there exists code which is “Open Source” but not “Free Software” is false, and anyone pretending that there is such a distinction (e.g. Microsoft’s past attempt at promoting “shared source”) is either misled himself or trying to mislead.
I’m not trying to accuse you of anything, but I just want to make sure we’re all clear on that point.
Publishing source code is not sufficient to make something “Open Source.” Your company’s thing was better described as “proprietary with source code available.”
I was skeptical when Microsoft bought GitHub but since then, they have fully reversed course and even made a formal apology on their historical stance on Linux.
They’ve even made several additions to the kernel, mostly to support WSL but still.
The rumor is that Microsoft is working on their own distribution.
I mostly agree that what they are doing now is good for FOSS, but I don’t believe that they switched to the good side. Microsoft may support FOSS because they now profit from it, but you shouldn’t forget that they are still spying on their customers and doing other unethical stuff. As any big company, what they want is money and you shouldn’t believe that they are your friends or they want your good. (I’m not saying you think that, but many people idealize companies and forget that all they want is money)
Nah, my father is one of those who thinks everything is a virus, especially emails. And so he installs all kind of “clean your PC from viruses”-software …
I’m sure Canonical’s neverending death march towards Snap, along with the OS running outdated packages, is why Valve no longer uses Ubuntu for SteamOS development. The greatest April Fools was Ubuntu dropping Snaps because so many people were saying how they could go back to using Ubuntu again…then they noticed it was a joke and the sadness set in.
Why do people hate snap over flatpak? I feel like I’ve read a thread or two about it, but I haven’t seen an answer that was particularly satisfying (almost definitely for a lack of trying on my part, to be clear).
Worse performance, particularly in terms of app startup times
Snaps are mounted as separate filesystems, so it can make things look cluttered in your file explorer or when you’re listing stuff with lsblk
Canonical often forces users to use Snaps even when users have explicitly tried to install with apt. e.g. you run sudo apt install firefox and it installs a Snap
It hasn’t gained traction with other distros like Flatpak has, and Canonical’s insistence on backing the “wrong” standard means Linux will continue to be more fragmented than it would be if they also went along with what has become the de facto standard
There are however benefits of snaps. It works for better for terminal programs, and Canonical can even package system stuff like the kernel as a snap - as you can imagine, this might be a very powerful tool when it comes to an immutable version of Ubuntu.
Snaps just act strange. They update in weird ways, it’s always automatic and it’s confusing how to keep something in a version that won’t auto update. It’s been a bad experience for me.
Flatpak allows other repositories besides the official one, therefore having the ability to be decentralised, Snap doesn’t
Canonical (the company behind Snap and Ubuntu) is hated for some past decisions they made with Ubuntu
and more
(The only thing I really prefer Snap over Flatpak is that you need the whole package name in Flatpak (like com.valvesoftware.Steam for Steam) whilst you can simply use “steam” in snap but that’s due to decentralisation vs centralisation I guess and overall a minor problem for me)
I haven’t been really keeping up with this RHEL drama, so I’m probably going to regret making this comment. But about this bug merge request in particular, you have to remember that RHEL’s main target audience is paying enterprise customers. It’s the “E” right there in RHEL. So stability is a high priority for their developers, since if they accidentally introduce a bug to their code, then they’ll have a lot of unhappy paying customers.
The next comment that was cropped out of that screenshot basically explains exactly that. While the Red Hat developers probably appreciate the bug fix, the reality is that the bug was listed as non-critical, and the Red Hat teams didn’t have the capacity to adequately regression test and QA the merge request. But the patch was successfully merged into Fedora, so it will eventually end up in RHEL through that path, which is exactly what the Fedora path is for.
The blowup about this particulat bug doesn’t seem justified to me. Red Hat obviously can’t fix and regression test every single bug that’s listed in their bug tracker. So why arbitrarily focus on this one medium priority bug? if it were listed as a critical bug, then yes, the blowup would be justified.
But it is also another stab in the community, they took centos that was a community project for them, then transformed this project that was downstream to upstream, then called all other downstream distros a negative net worth cause they don’t engage in the process of RHEL, then blocked the acess to this distros to the downstream, then reject the work of this ppl they called net negative without a decent process.
What actually red hat wants?
Centos now is only a beta branch? Ppl who wants derive from centos should be fixing everything downstream and duplicate work cause centos now is just an internal beta from red hat? If yes, why they took the project from the community? I’m not a rpm based distros user but I totally understand why ppl are pissed.
I’m making no comment on CentOS being absorbed and repurposed by Red Hat. I’m just saying it makes sense why Red Hat would rather have this fix in Fedora than CentOS Stream.
I’m making no comments about you making or no comments on centOS being repurposed. I’m just saying that this blown-up is probably caused by a mixture of miscommunication between RHEL and a community that feels like being tossed aside, I just said that because you said that you felt unjustified.
I’m getting downvoted on my comment about not making a comment on CentOS, so now I feel obligated to reply to this.
I don’t know, dude. I don’t really care about the miscommunication. I was just focusing solely on the merits of the merge request’s code changes.
For the miscommunication, it seems like a two way street to me. That was GitLab, so the Red Hat dev was probably operating under the assumption that people there already understood everything about their testing process. But obviously that’s not the case, so Red Hat should create better boilerplate responses for these scenarios. But on the other side of the coin, whoever took this screenshot and posted it to reddit or wherever did so prematurely, imo. They should’ve asked around a bit to make sure it was a legitimate thing to blow up about before they sent a lynch mob to the merge request.
I’m getting downvoted because I’m not conceding that the miscommunication was a legitimate excuse for that blowup. And I’m going to continue to not concede that. I found this whole situation to be embarrassing, and I think instead of getting mad at the miscommunication, you should all be getting mad at the moron who took that screenshot and whipped up the mob frenzy to swarm that merge request, because ultimately Red Hat was 100% justified in not accepting that merge request, and it made you all look like morons.
It’s fine to get mad on social media, but if you’re contributing to GitLab or someplace else, then you need to slow your roll. There’s always a process involved when contributing to a project, and you have to learn that process in order to contribute effectively. You can’t blow up and whip up a social media frenzy at the slightest inconvenience.
Edit: Sorry, @angrymouse. I should also add that I’m not mad at you personally or anything, or calling you a moron. I’m more talking about the collective response to this situation. And I’m pretty bad at words, so I feel like I accidentally made it too angry.
CentOS Stream is midstream of RHEL and Fedora. That sounds like it’s like a cert type of environment for RHEL. The same logic would apply there. You don’t want to be introducing a bunch of new changes to code once it’s in the cert environment unless they’re critical.
In its blog post Red Hat specifically called out downstream distributions for not contributing anything to the development of RHEL and that they should be making fixes to CentOS Stream. Well, this is a fix for CentOS Stream and Red Hat still doesn’t care. They just don’t want community contributions.
CentOS Stream is the staging ground for RHEL. It isn’t a bleeding edge distro that can accept any merge request willy-nilly. For the reason why, reread my original comment about the nature of enterprise support.
Fedora is the distro that is more bleeding edge in the RHEL realm. This merge request was more suited for Fedora, and the fix was successfully applied to Fedora. So, I fail to see any irrational actions from Red Hat here.
Sounds to me like they messed up the communication between them and the devs. If they directed the PR submitter to Fedora, I think there wouldn’t be as much fuel to the fire.
Granted, all the chaos surrounding RHEL does make me a little worried for Fedora. Fedora is not a bad distro by any means, and I don’t want to have to not recommend it because of the drama.
The only thing Red Hat has power over Fedora is its name and infrastructure. Red Hat can’t decide for Fedora. Do they have Red Hat employees working for Fedora? Yes, they do, but the employees decide for Fedora, not for Red Hat. Besides, all the telemetry drama is being sorted out in the most open way possible over on Discourse (Fedora Discussion). It is still a 100% community distribution despite a lot of people saying “it is already decided” “Fedora is doomed” etc.
Why would they accept PR at all if they don’t have a robust testing process and approvals are dictated by customers needs?
The message as it is now to potential contributors is that their contribution in not welcome, unless it’s free labor that financially benefits only ibm.
Which is fair, but the message itself is a new PR issue for red hat
They do have a robust testing process, but their main focus at the CentOS Stream stage is more about preparing for the stable RHEL build than it is about adding a ton of new features and bug fixes. Testing takes time so it would be physically impossible for them to test everything if they didn’t have a limit on the type of contributions they accept. For bug fixes, their limit is that the bug has to be critical. For bugs lesser than that, the correct place to contribute those fixes is in Fedora.
That has been adequately explained in the merge request at this point, if you click in that link at the top of this thread amd read through it to get the latest info. The Red Hat devs have also made no indication that they’re not welcome to contributors. Anyone who’s saying that is blowing this merge request issue out of proportion.
I read it, and I read the messages from the devs. The communication issue I am trying to point is also highlighted in the comments: if the decision on merging a PR is uniquely dictated by financial benefits of IBM, ignoring the broader benefits of the community, the message is that red hat is looking for free labor and it is not really interested in anything else. Which is absolutely the case, as we all know, but writing it down after the recent events is another PR issue, as red hat justified controversial decisions on the lack of contributions from downstream.
The Italian dev tried to put it down as “we have to follow our service management processes that are messy, tedious and expensive” but he didn’t address the problems in the original message. The contributor himself felt like they asked his contribution just to reject it because of purely financial reasons without any additional details. It is a new PR incident
Fedora is where this sort of thing is supposed to go. That’s been Red Hat philosophy since forever. Patch as high upstream as you can. Sounds like this is a non issue.
The Apparently is already patch on fedora… Just reporting other comments in this thread. But why do they accept contribution to centos of they don’t want patches that are not economically beneficial to the company? It is a pretty bad message written as this
Agree on point of detail, but the “drama” is the reason for the fuss. Redhat’s communication, especially to the community that helped build and support it, has always been patchy, but over the past few years it’s been apalling. As others have pointed out, they’ve insulted a lot of us, specifically for not contributing upstream - so it’s not unexpected for them to be called on it when someone does.
I think the EL sphere as a whole (including RHEL and all up and downstreams) is getting drastically weakened directly because of Redhat’s poor decision making, and that’s a shame for all of us.
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