I mean yeah like you can be a pedant about it but all in all its a statement that makes sense. Apps on both android and ios are very sandboxed, even if you go out of your way to install malware there’s very limited damage it can do, barring zerodays in the sandboxing itself.

Systemd and network manager are deliberately malicious I’m with you on that one but I feel like the new kernel-specific features like capabilities and namespaces are actually pretty neat. Like, they don’t even break backward compatibility. If you had a program that needs a special capability on linux and you wanted to port it to bsd, you could just make it a SUID executable. It’s not like capabilities offers a new API that programs use or something. Same with namespaces. I see a lot of people complaining about docker somehow being bloat or something, but, like, it’s still just linux on the inside of the container. Anything that can run in docker can run just as well outside of it. Worst-case scenario is that you have to change some environment variables from host.docker.internal to localhost. You’re not being forced to use it.

See, most people have no clue that “gimp” is a sex thing. They just see it as a funny-sounding acronym. In an actual work meeting, the people who do know wouldn’t say anything about it to avoid being seen as the weird ones.

Honestly I can’t imagine why anyone would use either of these when there are lightweight DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon that are not only easier on the system resources, but also more stable, customizeable, user-friendly and more pleasant to look at. I stopped taking gnome seriously ever since they came up with GTK3. They had a chance to fix it with GTK4 but instead they somehow made it even worse (as if client-side decorations wasn’t bad enough, now theyre doing clientside shadows? Seriously!?!?). KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who’s actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.

They need to be simple and carefully constructed

Yeah, that’s the difficult part. It’s always better to go with the principle of least privilege (which is Capabilities is trying to do) than to just cross your fingers and hope that there are not bugs in your code. And who exactly is going to police people to make sure that their programs are “simple and carefully constructed”? The article I linked is about a setuid-related vuln in goddamn Xorg which is anything but.

Huh, good point, I never stopped to consider what licenses are behind Alpine.

I agree with your point that pushover licenses should not be the way forward (I personally license all of my major projects with GPLv3 only), but I’ll still keep using alpine because I like it from a technical standpoint.

Partition management is the single most chaotic chore that you come across as a casual computer user, change my mind. Depending on the partition table and filesystem, each filesystem can have zero, one or two labels assigned to it. But there is no consensus about what to actually call these labels. I’ve seen “partlabel”, “label”, “partition label” and “name” with no obvious way to tell whether the tool is talking about the label stored in the partition table or the label stored in the filesystem.

So just use UUIDs to refer to partitions instead of labels, right? Wrong! Each partition has both a UUID and a PartUUID which are not the same. It’s simple once you are aware of that fact, but if you are not, it can lead to hours of confused troubleshooting. I learned this the hard way.

Yeah, of course! Kind of goes against the point of the meme but oh well.

Fun fact: you don’t even need a hard drive (or ssd or usb stick or any storage device) to run linux. You can just flash it directly into your firmware

As an X user I support this message.

This comic was posted in 2011 but still holds up today perfectly lol.

Still gathering up my courage to make the switch. The better security / isolation between apps is a huge feature for me. But porting all of my shitty xorg-specific scripts and hacks will be a pain.

At first I thought that it was a for-fun pet project, which is fair enough, but it has a dedicated website and a discord server… HUH???

So it’s like make but without incremental builds? Then how is it functionally different from a folder with a bunch of shell scripts in it?

Didn’t the wannacry payload (yes, that one) actually work through wine? I remember the running joke was “Heh, finally something works in wine”

Flatpak is such a cool tool, kind of sad seeing it be mainly used for barely usable bloatware like libadwaita and electron. So much unrealised potential

cool

thanks, I’ll take a look.

old response dropped

Yeah this is the way. Debian stable has outdated packages, debian testing has broken packages. Ubuntu is difficult for beginners because of snap. Linux mint is the perfect just-works debian-based beginner distro. Same for DE: Gnome is hard to use, KDE is bloated and unstable, and XFCE is too minimalist/diy/quirky for beginner users (you need to add a panel applet in order for the volume keys to work? Huh??). Cinnamon is the perfect middle ground between resource usage and features.

Make sure during installation that you create a 4 GB swap partition too

Or at least as large as your RAM if you want to be able to hibernate.