Bitrot

Bitrot, 2 hours ago

Every community with that name needs to include a bit about FSN in its sidebar.

Bitrot, 1 hour ago (edited 1 hour ago)

Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise

That these were a thing is… wild.

Edit: maybe more fitting

Bitrot, 1 hour ago

Mess with the best, die like the rest.

Bitrot, 1 hour ago

I don’t think any of those really apply.

She didn’t have experience with it, but she was good with computers. When she realized what she was looking at, she made the famous exclamation. Not all that different than people posting stuff to Linux in the wild threads.

Fsn is what was up on the screen, so that’s what she used. Probably easier than figuring out how to get to the command line on an unfamiliar system.

Bitrot, 23 hours ago

Really great article, and thanks for posting the text of it.

Facebook is weird for me because it triggers my FOMO, but then if I use it all I see are a ton of random things with the most toxic people in the world living in the comments.

And similarly I just realized why my friends on instagram use stories and not posts, because for the most part stories is the only place I see content from people I know anymore (and again the FOMO).

I really relate to the sentence at the end, “there are people there but they don’t know why and most of what they are seeing is scammy or weird.”

Bitrot, 1 day ago

Clicking the potentially unsafe item lists the exact permissions.

It can access hardware devices, like your webcam or game controller. Likely --device=all in flatpak speak but I haven’t looked.

Bitrot, 1 day ago

Firefox on flathub is an official one, that’s not what this warning is.

Bitrot, 1 day ago

That is a clickable menu that explains exactly what the permissions are.

Bitrot, 4 days ago

The new one I’ve seen is that it was created by liberals to sow confusion and make Trump look bad. They just say it’s a lie.

Bitrot, 4 days ago

Assuming manifest v3, it shouldn’t break. However, some extensions will stop working. Vivaldi doesn’t have its own extension repository so they will be phased out there just like in Chrome.

Bitrot, 4 days ago

Firefox just pulled the browser out of it to focus on one thing, Thunderbird did the same with communications. Seamonkey still does it all.

Bitrot, 4 days ago

“Breaking userspace” is often considered a bug even if the code doing so is working as intended. Deleting user data because they bundle a config file deep in the directory tree for a completely different use case was not intended behavior even if one of them is defensive about the logic.

Bitrot, 6 days ago

I thought the same, surely some distribution messed up.

They didn’t. Systemd ships this file as /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/home.conf. That is a valid configuration directory, the lowest priority, and not just an example.

Basically it would only take effect in certain scenarios, and in most distributions it is doing nothing. Except when someone ran purge and it cleared files it had no hand in creating.

So yeah, this was actually a big issue.

Bitrot, 6 days ago

I thought surely some distribution had messed up by using this temporary files generator for /home, but that configuration is actually a file bundled with systemd and the purge would take effect even if the distribution was creating /home as part of the install (ignoring the tmpfiles config), which they pretty much all do. So yeah, any defense I had towards the dev is gone there.

Bitrot, 6 days ago

I think it was probably dropped to be more like other Linux distributions. The BSDs put a ton of stuff in rc.conf.

Bitrot, 5 days ago

He’s trying to be a little Poettering.

I always think it’s crazy when employees of companies with paying customers act like such jackasses in public.

Bitrot, 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

The flatpak packaging tutorial has you build a cli app, so anyone building one is likely aware.

The real issue is invoking the commands. If you install a snap of top, you run top and it opens. If you installed a flatpak it wouldn’t be added to your PATH and even if you added the exports directory to your PATH you would need to remember to run org.gnu.top. Nobody wants to run some random flatpak run command all the time or create aliases for everything, so “flatpak isn’t for cli” becomes the mantra.

In an ideal world a flatpak could register the cli commands it wants to present to the user, and some alternatives system could manage which flatpak gets which command if there were collisions.

Bitrot, 12 days ago

I’ve been a ThinkPad fan for a long time, but their new stuff bothers me. I picked up the HP DevOne which is essentially an Elitebook and I really like it. Very user serviceable and solid. The only think I don’t like is the glossy screen, and when playing around and configuring another model I think it was difficult to tell if it was matte or glossy through their marketing speak.

Bitrot, 12 days ago

Yes it can, but it’s up to your BIOS to be able to boot it. UEFI might work better, you still might need to manually add the boot entry to the efivars using efibootmgr. Many distributions also have documentation for a rescue boot and reinstalling the bootloader config.

Bitrot, 13 days ago

While I didn’t downvote, it’s a really low effort post and the OP could at least summarize some of the salient points. The title also sucks (of the video, but still).

I am kind of not a fan of posts that are just a 20 minute video.

Bitrot, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

She was very niche, then she was the opener on Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts tour starting in February (they have the same Producer). If you look her up on Google Trends, that’s when interest really took off and she started being seen everywhere, as well as continuing her own tour (she had been touring in the fall beforehand).

Her full album was out nearly six months before the Guts tour, her old label dropped her after the Pink Pony Club single. I think she just got in a good position, and has a great, fun sound that people like.

Bitrot, 16 days ago

Their numbers sound questionable, but if you weren’t pulling in KDE yours would be significantly lower too.

Bitrot, 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

It also happens when the hosts file is messed up and the system can’t resolve its own hostnames. Opensuse used to be pretty notorious for doing something odd to the hosts file by default that really only affected Firefox.

Edit: the increased security they’re trying around the browser might also be triggering that local resolution issue

Bitrot, 20 days ago

Psh, that’s just because you don’t use Gentoo.

Bitrot, 21 days ago

I appreciate the clear marking that something is unverified, but don’t think disabling by default is the right move. As others have mentioned, most of the software in the distribution is also unverified.

Bitrot, 21 days ago

I think most likely app developers who aren’t verified don’t care to be. Spotify isn’t rushing to build a flatpak.

Bitrot, 21 days ago

IMO most of the lore is in the physical novels and later games that go more into story. Myst and Riven sort of drop you into an existing universe without explaining much and then you can learn some through bits and pieces as you go.

Bitrot, 24 days ago

Correct, they are derivative distributions.

Bitrot, 25 days ago

The top comment is usually someone saying nothing should ever change and every feature is bloat and should be an extension.

Bitrot, 1 month ago

The Mozilla Foundation is doing that. They legally cannot focus on browser development. Donations to the Mozilla Foundation go to the Mozilla Foundation.

The Mozilla Corporation is making the changes. It has zero control over the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Corporation does not accept donations and is a for-profit company.

Bitrot, 1 month ago

Tweakability isn’t a weaker aspect of Mint. Cinnamon has fewer options than KDE, but more than many. The Xfce and Mate variants also offer a lot of options, with sane and usable defaults.

Anything with KDE will have customization options up the wazoo. The rest isn’t so different between distributions, especially if you aren’t trying to use the terminal much.

Bitrot, 1 month ago

id software is six months older than Linux, but Doom was released a couple of years later.

Bitrot, 1 month ago

Older Thinkpads are very well supported by pretty much everything, so it might be helpful to know more about your experience and what you’ve liked or not liked, and what you intend to run on it.

Linux Mint or Fedora aren’t bad options, Fedora will require a larger version upgrade at least yearly.

Bitrot, 1 month ago

I always thought the Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook was the book of fundamentals, will probably get the bundle just for the Kubernetes stuff though. Those BSD books are pretty useful too, in that world.

Bitrot, 1 month ago

That combination works in Brave to search the forum (prefixing !ddg or !d) I’m surprised it doesn’t in Searx.

Bitrot, 1 month ago

VanillaOS uses something similar with ABroot + OCI images, except for the flip flopping at every reboot.

Bitrot, 1 month ago

I like Insync. It synchronizes with Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox. It is not the only client out there but it works better than the other ones I’ve used.

Bitrot, 1 month ago

I’ve been through a few on regular Mint and the Debian edition and they have been very smooth.

Bitrot, 1 month 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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month 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, 1 month 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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month 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, 1 month ago

It is the Gnome Online Accounts version.

Bitrot, 1 month 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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month 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 bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=451535

Bitrot, 1 month ago

gdebi, apt can also do this these days.

Bitrot, 1 month 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.