Re-installing an OS is easy

Hmmm, this is where our opinions diverge. It’s easy when things go right. UEFI and MBR changed that. And I’ve had a few linux installations fail for obscure reasons (mostly hardware support).

Installers also say “backup your data” but if you’re coming from windows, what do you do when your stuff is on onedrive? What if you know nothing about partitioning and the installer just wipes the entire disk clean even though you expected your D:/ with your backup to be kept?
Oh, an should you keep that windows recovery partition? What’s on there? How do you access the data to check?

There are a bunch of things to consider when installing to prevent data-loss and IMO they aren’t as straightforward as they seem.

Doing a regular system update or upgrading from one LTS release to another are comparable to oil-check and changing a tire. Installing an OS, IMO, not so much.

Anti Commercial-AI license

There’s just a lot of stuff going on and everybody can make an argument for knowing something:

• Maths is the most important tool to mankind
• It is imperative to understand your own brain because it makes a lot of decisions
• If you drive a car, you better know how it works
• Politics is crucial to our society and being an informed citizen is paramount

And so on. It’s all true, but you only have so many hours in a day, and everybody has a different life. You could live in the most affluent society and be dealing with stuff that has nothing to do with computers.

Also, who decides what’s “basic knowledge”? I know a lot about software, what I know about hardware is minimal. What’s minimal to me though might be advanced to another and vice versa.

We should be trying to be more empathetic. Recommending an advanced Linux OS to a newbie isn’t empathetic. Expecting a user to know how to install an OS isn’t empathetic.

Anti Commercial-AI license

No the issue is that we had a second eternal September when the iPhone dropped, and since then the computer literacy of the average boomer was allowed to become what we expect out of everyone.

That is true, iPhones have made people less literate, but it is because many many devs are just like other experts: proud of their ability to do stuff the minority can. We have very few tech-folk who are willing to make things usable for non-techies.

There is a huge “git gud” and RTFM crowd out there, and I for one am glad they get to stay in their niches or get called out for that elitism. Linux forums were (probably still are) the epitome of elitism with people saying insane stuff like “its people’s own fault for using windows” and in the same breath “I don’t want more linux users because it will destroy the experience”. Just a bunch of hipsters gatekeeping stuff with non-existent or shitty documentation, doing their darndest not to let people in for fear of losing the ability to proudly claim “I use linux”.

Look at the Arch crowd. They still haven’t grown out of their ridiculous propensity to scream “i use arch btw” or recommend it to newbies. Arch users smell ineptitude and will promptly call it out to ridicule it or start frothing at the mouth before letting loose their 4 favorite letters: RTFM.

It’s taking a minority of devs who care about UX and large corpos to bring linux to the masses. Without them, we’d still be hard-stuck in with technical troglodytes that have a terminal illness and can’t stop mentioning a recompile every 5 minutes.

Anti Commercial-AI license

I find it absolutely hilarious that people have to debloat windows, using some untrusted third party scripts running in the terminal, in order to make it usable.

I’d recommend just installing linux mint and not dealing with all the bloatware. However, if you’re still deadset on windows, maybe use a tool that many others use:

• https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools
• https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

Anti Commercial-AI license

Is it a crime to voluntarily join a DDoS attack? I remember 4chan using such a tool (ion canon or something?). Maybe that would be a way to contribute to the war?

Anti Commercial-AI license

Literally “it’s a feature, not a bug”. Absolutely hilarious that they don’t think this is an issue. I can only hope that other sourceforges don’t just copy this behavior “beCaUSe GiTHuB dOeS iTT!!!”.

Anti Commercial-AI license

I have to wonder if we’ll see an FTX-style inquiry in the coming months.

I wouldn’t hold my breath. Companies like that are so involved with governments that they probably are bullet-proof. Microsoft has had appalling security practices (money over everything) and IIRC hackers got access to virtually every Outlook account, and all that Microsoft did was issue a statement of “we’re sorry and take immediate action”. That placated politicians and they moved on.
Crowdstrike is most likely in the same boat.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Deploy an update on Friday they said. It’ll be fine, they said.

Anti Commercial-AI license

I never talked about security. I said trust.

Closed source can tell you something is encrypted but never encrypts it. Closed source can tell you it’s never sent to third parties for processing and do that the entire time. Closed source can make any other claim and you will have to trust them because you can’t verify it.

Open source is the first step of trust. Without that, I trust you much less. With it, I trust you a little more. Not completely. More. At least more than closed source.

Anti Commercial-AI license

I don’t think the code is even opensource. They thus don’t have my trust.

Anti Commercial-AI license

bufferoverflow vulnerability

Let me guess, it’s written in C?

Anti Commercial-AI license

It’s a keyboard shortcut, that calls a script which pastes the contents of a file into the clipboard and sends keystrokes to the OS to paste (Ctrl+P). I’d prefer if lemmy frontends gave the option of adding a signature, but alas… in the interim, this has to do. There’s no time for me to learn whichever framework they’re using to whip together a PR and have it rejected.

Anti Commercial-AI license

AMD side-channel attack coming soon 🎉

Anti Commercial-AI license

On June 6, 2024, this signal handler race condition was fixed by commit 81c1099 (“Add a facility to sshd(8) to penalise particular problematic client behaviours”), which moved the async-signal-unsafe code from sshd’s SIGALRM handler to sshd’s listener process, where it can be handled synchronously:

https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/commit/81c1099d22b81ebfd20a334ce986c4f753b0db29

Because this fix is part of a large commit (81c1099), on top of an even larger defense-in-depth commit (03e3de4, “Start the process of splitting sshd into separate binaries”), it might prove difficult to backport.

Oh shit, now squash on merge folks can claim “defense-in-depth”.

Always makes me think of this comic by geek and poke

Anti Commercial-AI license

Well done. That dev doesn’t have to put up with that shit. People still treat opensource devs like free labor, pressuring them as if they are entitled to a product. If an opensource project is important to you or your company, contribute in some way that doesn’t pressure the dev, otherwise stfu.

Anti Commercial-AI license

however it’s going to be a pain, there’s a LOT of X86_64 software out there that is hard to get running on ARM with decent performance

That was Mac when the M1 dropped, buy their problem is most of the stuff isn’t open source and one has to wait for the publisher to recompile on an ARM device. I expect a bunch of software to just be recompiled remotely or locally if you have such a distro (Gentoo, Arch, NixOS,…) and not even notice a difference.

A lot of stuff already has ARM builds because of the raspberry pi. Many docker images have ARM versions too.

This isn’t going to be the clusterfuck it was on Malus chips, except for maybe gaming because it’s in the same place. Asahi Linux is dealing with that right now too (donating can help).

Anti Commercial-AI license

C and C++ are way worse than mid. Had rust been invented at the same time, C and C++ would’ve disappeared in obscurity and only been taught at university to explain pointers.

They are nearly on the same level of bilge as COBOL.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Linux is going to have the first and probably on compliant vulkan implementation for Malus Silicon 😂

“Want to game on a Mac? Install Linux” Might just become reality this year.

Anti Commercial-AI license

And proton mail still isn’t on f-droid 😴 Their focus is all over the place.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Corsica represent!

Anti Commercial-AI license