Bitrot

Bitrot , 4 days ago

What a laughably inaccurate hot take.

Xorg is not getting huge changes, but it is still maintained and will be until RHEL moves to Wayland, RHEL 9 maintenance support is until 2032. The latest stable Xorg release was April 12, 2024.

Mint is working on Wayland support, the current release has experimental support for demonstration. It has not been a priority as Wayland has been lacking in many features, but it is finally becoming fully feature complete.

The release based on 24.04 will likely be in the summer. The previous major release was just three months after the LTS. This is far faster than many other derivatives. The changes are also ported to Debian.

Linux Mint is very actively developed. Development updates are shared regularly.

Bitrot , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Ultimately you should use what you like. Even their beloved Fedora has spins for things like Budgie and Cinnamon that they are badmouthing (although Cinnamon runs best on Mint). The distributions and desktops are fine, even if that person has a preference for something else and thinks it is the best.

Zorin is also fine. My only criticism is they released Zorin 17 in December and it is based on the Ubuntu LTS from 2022 rather than the one that was just released. It means it has older packages and will the entire time until they release the next version, but the Ubuntu LTS from 2022 still has years of support. Older packages are not inherently a problem.

Ubuntu, Debian, and others all provide access to much newer kernels if it is desired (in many it has even become the default setting!). In Ubuntu and its derivatives this is called “HWE”, in Debian it is backports. Fedora does not want to use resources for back porting fixes into earlier kernels, so they routinely update the kernel. It’s a different philosophy and different resource management, nothing more.

Bitrot , 3 days ago

The rush to new things is exactly why Fedora works well for you, but there is no need to rush. What exists works fine and continue to work for the foreseeable future, and work is being done to continue working with new technologies in the future too, but there is no too late at this point. Rushing to implement new technologies is kind of Fedora’s big draw, but in exchange you have to do a complete system upgrade at least once a year and deal with any fallout if things break or don’t work the way you want them to (less an issue with atomic desktops). I appreciate that Fedora exists to do the incubation, and routinely deploy their changes (well documented in the FesCo approvals) onto Linux Mint.

Ubuntu base is optional. Debian base also works fine, though a little less polished on the Debian side. “Better desktop” is subjective. I think Gnome’s workflow is atrocious and KDE is extremely cluttered and buggy, but if people want to use them it’s fine.

Bitrot , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

They are using Linux as the hook in the headline, the attack on kernel.org was widely reported when it happened, over a decade ago, although maybe not so publicly dissected. There was even an arrest.

The same malware is still active in the wild and attacking other people, that’s the real point of the article.

Bitrot , 5 days ago

It is the Gnome Online Accounts version.

Bitrot , 5 days ago

Correct, it is one of multiple that are available, it just happens to be built into Gnome. It also syncs with Google Drive and some others.

Bitrot , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

I’ve been bit by this, it has been an issue for a long time. For a while it also affected Ubuntu but I don’t know if that’s still the case.

Rather than decrypting the existing luks partition like pretty much every other distro, the Debian installer will create a new one using that key. Additionally, the installer does not cache the information and apply it when you finalize partitioning, it will apply the encryption immediately and then allow you to partition on top of it. Instant data loss.

It is possible to reuse an existing luks partition, but you must unlock and mount it manually before partitioning in the installer. This isn’t something I’d expect anyone to know beforehand, since it’s different than everything else.

Edit: apparently a very long time https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=451535

Bitrot , 7 days ago

Apt can install a .deb and its dependencies in one go.

Bitrot , 7 days ago

gdebi, apt can also do this these days.

Bitrot , 8 days ago

This sort of story is what made me switch away from Google Fi and ultimately mostly degoogling. Privacy was a big part later on, but initially it was realizing that a YouTube comment or a file in my drive could get my cell service turned off.

Bitrot , 9 days ago

Fedora updates the kernel because maintaining backports is engineering-intensive, Ubuntu backports fixes into their kernels. I don’t think Fedora kernels affect Red Hat much at all, Red Hat does extensive back porting into a set version and their stable kernel often has hundreds of releases of the “same” kernel version.

Bitrot , 8 days ago

He is paid by Canonical.

Explains some of the hubris.

Bitrot , 8 days ago

Its also in testing.

Bitrot , 8 days ago

Pretty much no iso will tell you to use Ventoy, Ventoy directly boots isos. It is not writing a usb like most tools do.

Bitrot , 11 days ago

Galaxy Watch, the original Pixel Watch and the Apple Watch have no charging contacts. It’s really the way to go.

The contacts have been an issue forever, like I remember it messing up a Fitbit a decade ago. Really crazy that it’s still a problem.

Bitrot , 14 days ago

Wow there’s some memories I didn’t know I still had.

Bitrot , 14 days ago

But can it create that old GSM speaker buzz like my Blackberry did?

Bitrot , 15 days ago

It does work, but doesn’t always work as well as some third party clients. That’s also assumes everyone is using gnome.

Bitrot , 16 days ago

Before his Twitter addiction it was much easier to think of him as a rich genius like you see in comic books, mostly since nobody knew what he was thinking. He’s also managed a celebrity-like persona that someone like robot Mark Zuckerberg could never pull off. That and money will always get hangers on.

Bitrot , 16 days ago

With that kind of leadership we should be thankful he can’t run for president, or he’d end up voted in.

Bitrot , 18 days ago

That’s when Nintendo reaches out to CloudFlare instead.

Bitrot , 18 days ago

First attempt at the Server iso it wouldn’t boot, stuck in an endless wait for some snap services to start. I don’t use Ubuntu anyway and wouldn’t use Server before a .1, but it was not the best out of box experience.

Bitrot , 20 days ago

It is no longer true, but it was at one time (the key thing, it was never illegal to reinstall). It also wasn’t too uncommon for systems to have a sticker with the OEM key listed on it (then verified during activation), because without it you were SOL. Manufacturer recovery discs had their own way around it.

Nowadays the key is embedded in the firmware and applied automagically, even if you use a normal iso.

Bitrot , 22 days ago

Mint is built on Ubuntu LTS but removes some of the problematic bits, it has a recent Firefox and Chrome is of course available, Fletpak support is also integrated.

I’ve run Alma and RHEL as a desktop and it was fine, my main use case was “like Fedora but stable” (more than a year of support). However the repositories are very limited, even with EPEL and third parties, so it eventually irked me enough to switch away. Also no btrfs support without replacing the kernel and adding support from third party places.

Bitrot , 23 days ago

They should still be possible. It’s not clearing the BIOS though, it is clearing variables loaded into the BIOS. The OS needs to be able to write to them. A good one limits what an OS can write or rebuilds them, a bad one bricks.

Bitrot , 24 days ago

What makes no sense to you, exactly?

Users not having to remember a bunch of passwords makes a huge amount of sense to them. The support is already built into the devices they are using and it’s somehow, they don’t know or really care, more secure.

Bitrot , 23 days ago

The hardware keys are great but so far don’t have enough storage. For example, Yubikey as a second factor dynamically generated its responses, but now that it’s storing them it’s very limited to at most 25. It’s a known issue that will be solved though.

Bitrot , 23 days ago

Much of the complexity described here comes from the question “which password manager?”

Bitrot , 23 days ago

Passkeys are FIDO2. The issue is the tokens don’t have much storage for them. For passwordless vs use as a second factor, it has to store it instead of dynamically generating a response to a challenge. They are two features of the protocol.

https://www.yubico.com/blog/a-yubico-faq-about-passkeys/

Bitrot , 23 days ago

Are your non-discoverable credentials also locked on the key, or can someone who knows your handle and possesses your key access your accounts? Online usernames are not well protected, I’d rather my key lock out after a few failed attempts to access it.

Bitrot , 23 days ago

Hannah Montana Linux is no longer maintained unfortunately, so they wouldn’t put it on there anyway. You can upgrade it to the latest Ubuntu with some work, but you lose a lot of the theming in the process.

Someone should make a new one as a “snap-free Ubuntu alternative”.

Bitrot , 23 days ago

Back in the days of the Linux counter that’s essentially how it worked.

Bitrot , 26 days ago (edited 26 days ago)

The grouped window list applet seems to get confused when there are multiple instances of the applet. It will display windows that you create on that monitor on a separate workspace (new desktop) but not the ones you create on the other monitor.

The window list applet seems to work more like you would expect when the option is turned on, so maybe that’s a workaround. It doesn’t group windows though.

IMO this is a bug and not the expected behavior.

Edit: it seems like it is coded to act this way, but I still think it is bad behavior with the “all workspaces” option enabled. There is a workaround, but YMMV: https://electro-dan.co.uk/blog/34/linux-mint-cinnamon-multi-monitor-show-all-apps-on-every-panel

Edit 2: @jjsca in the Applets menu, Downloads tab, CobiWindowList works more like you would expect. It doesn’t show from every Workspace (virtual desktop) but will show from each monitor. The setting for both used to exist in the grouped window list but was apparently broken (from github issues).

Bitrot , 26 days ago

I hate snaps and how they pushed them on desktop users, but they’ve always been intended for servers, it’s one of the reasons they can ship things like unified kernel images. Ultimately they allow for a modular immutable system, potentially much more flexible than some others like Silverblue or Fedora Atomic stuff.

What they can do is pretty neat, but their “transitional” deb packages for normal users were ridiculous and should never have happened.

Bitrot , 26 days ago

Believe it or not, if you build something you can license it however you want. Canonical has long required outside contributors to sign agreements too, to allow just this sort of thing.

Bitrot , 27 days ago

The install cd is probably just running Debian installer, and way more lightweight.

“Use the install-cd media for older 64bit as well as 32bit machines.” - probably applies to such low memory.

Also you should probably use the 32-bit cd. 64-bit binaries use more memory, and realistically anyone building with an Athlon 64 (2003) or newer was probably also installing more memory than that.

Bitrot , 27 days ago

yay is an Arch package manager. Fedora doesn’t include this package due to patents. Arch does minimal customization so that’s probably part of it.

Bitrot , 28 days ago

At home it probably isn’t worth it. Servers where changes can break things or is qualified against a specific configuration, more worth it. Often whatever your distro is providing is fine, even things like Ubuntu and soon Mint will be using non-LTS kernels by default.

Bitrot , 28 days ago

Debian is legally part of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., which it also founded.

Bitrot , 28 days ago

Check out https://wiki.debian.org/USExportControl

Bitrot , 28 days ago

Eh, you’re right.

The legal identity of an SPI associated project is not changed through their association with SPI, nor does it become part of SPI

Bitrot , 28 days ago

Wouldn’t at the time. A lot of the restrictions on encryption algorithms themselves were loosened in the 90s after successful court cases ruling that source code was free speech.

Bitrot , 28 days ago

VirtIO drivers, but they wouldn’t affect file sharing over the network as OP is doing.

Bitrot , 28 days ago

FIDO2 has been around for a minute, it just got better branding and mainstream interest. Safe vs passwords is kind of silly, workflow for problem solving is a concern though (although not all that different than 2FA issues, they even use the same token in many cases).

Bitrot , 1 month ago

It’s a limitation of the VM, unless you take extra special steps to configure it to use UEFI.

Bitrot , 1 month ago

An EFI system partition on the SSD can be shared by multiple distributions. A single grub instance on that EFI system partition can boot multiple distributions. Ventoy is really not meant for what you’re trying to use it for.

Bitrot , 1 month ago

It’s slower, actually.

Are you really trying to argue over ways of locking down the phone?