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I’m shocked I didn’t get downvoted to shit myself.

It’s just that it was VERY clearly either sanctions or a NSL, since the Linux Foundation is in the US and the two things that result in a public entity like that making silent, un-explained changes are, well, sanctions and NSLs and you don’t say shit because your lawyer told you not to.

I don’t necessarily agree that tossing contributors off an open-source project is in the spirit of the OFAC list, but the problem almost certainly is that they’re employed by some giant tech company in Russia.

And, in Russia, like in the US, and Israel, and China, and anywhere else you care to mention, tech companies are almost always involved in military supply chains, since shit don’t work without computers at this point.

Which leads to a cycle of being unable to work with Weapons, Inc. and someone works for Weapons, Inc. so now that person can’t be worked with either and so your choices are… comply with the OFAC list, or take a stupid amount of legal risk up to and including angry people with guns showing up to talk to you.

We really don’t know the whole story and immediately jumping to “Imperialists bad!” is how certain chunks of Lemmy roll these days.

I think they’d be much happier if they all moved to North Korea and helped achieve the goal of Juche by becoming dirt farmers.

Which is exactly what anyone who wasn’t wanting to just snort some concentrated outrage knew was the case.

And you can argue as to if OFAC list should apply to things like this or not, but the problem is that the enforcement options for OFAC violations include ‘stomp you into the ground until you’re powder’, most people are just going to comply.

The same reason people who drive 20 miles a day have worries about range on an EV that’ll do 300, or why people espouse the freedom of Android but then use the default Google apps.

People like the option of choice, even if they’re not necessarily ever going to engage in making a different one.

If there are two options for a computer, one is “will run everything” and the other is “will only run Windows” a good portion of people are still going to pick the first, even though very few of them will ever do anything else, simply because people really really like having the option of choice.

As someone who has one: buy an Microsoft Surface with the Pen and keyboard and shit.

I’m using a… 3? 4? (6th gen intel, so it’s old AF) and it works perfectly. Touch, pen, removable keyboard, sleep, etc.

You have to install some specific drivers from the Suface Linux project to get some of that working, but it’s like a whole 10 minute deal.

Also, they’re cheap as shit at this point, so bonus?

At least a decade old, if not more than.

If you wanted to swap your vendor EFI image to something else, at this point it’s all going to be via a SPI programmer, and if you own one of the two boards that it supports, coreboot/openboot.

But, essentially, you can’t swap because there’s very little supported hardware, and thus are stuck with your vendor proprietary EFI.

What’s hilarious, I guess? is that the EFI setup is more or less it’s own OS that can then chainboot an OS which is how the mid90s workstations (Sun, SGI, HP, etc.) worked.

…I still have some OS/2 (or, rather, ArcaOS) systems running here.

Mostly for a very limited subset of things that never really migrated across to “modern” windows - I have a BBS running on there because 16 bit DOS apps on OS/2 was pretty much the best way to run them when it was 1994, and in 2024 it’s still the best way to deal with them.

competition in the x86 OS space back then

Oh yeah: there were a stuuuupid amount of OSes.

On the DOS side you had MS, IBM, and Digital Research.

You also had a bunch of commercial UNIXes: NextStep, Solaris, Xenix/SCO, etc. along with Linux and a variety of BSDs. There were also a ton of Sys4/5 implementations that were single-vendor specific so they could sell their hardware (which was x86 and not something more exotic) that have vanished to time because that business model only worked for a couple of years, if that.

There was of course two different Windows (NT, 9x), OS/2 which of course could also run (some) Windows apps, and a whole host of oddballs like QNX and BeOS and Plan9 or even CP/M86.

It was a lot less of a stodgy Linux-or-Windows monoculture, and I miss it.

Seconding that’s a not-how-things-were.

The lovely thing with legacy architectures (6502, 68k, x86, z80, etc.) that were in use during that time is that they were very very simple: all you needed to do was put executable code on a ROM at the correct memory address, and the system would boot it.

There wasn’t anything required other than making sure the code was where the CPU would go looking for it, and then it’d handle it from there.

Sure, booting an OS meant that you needed whatever booted the CPU to then chain into the OS bootloader and provide all the things the OS was expecting (BIOS functions, etc.) but the actual bootstrap from ‘off’ to ‘running code’ was literally just an EPROM burner away.

It’s a lot more complicated now, but users would, for the most part, not tolerate removing the ability to boot any OS they feel like, so there’s enough pressure that locked shit won’t migrate down to all consumer hardware.

Eh, someone who just discovered that there’s more to Linux than just desktop uses probably.

It comes as a shock that the world mostly runs on Linux to some people and they have to let us know that “HEY GUYS! Your phone uses Linux!”.

It’s cute.

Unity although it was mostly still Gnome with extra Compiz plugins

Don’t forget the added value of the Amazon ads!

No, not value for you, value for Canonical.

Hadn’t seen that project but that kind of feels like the way to go. I don’t care about having parts to keep something working when the laptop was $50 in the first place. If it breaks, into the trash it goes, and I’ll just buy another one.

Those are cool, and they’ve definitely nailed the aesthetic. Also looks like they’re working on a new revision which looks like a reasonable upgrade.

Not sure it’s the right choice for what I’m after (it’s kinda expensive and very performance limited for the cost), but uh, I’m going to keep an eye out because that’s a cool piece of kit.

“Debian is too far behind! Packages are too old!”

The best rule of thumb I’ve ever heard regarding Debian Stable is that if the kernel in stable’s default repo fully supports ALL your hardware, and the software in stable’s default repos fully support your workflows, it’s fine.

If those are NOT true, then you probably don’t want to use Stable, because you’ll either end up fighting it via manually compiled and installed software, or you’ll venture into so many 3rd party repos for updated packages that updating it later becomes problematic and prone to making the whole system catch fire and burn down.

You know, the older I get the more I respect the people who come out and say ‘I’m not going to learn that, and I don’t want to.’

It’s a LOT better than dealing with someone who half-asses and kinda wishy-washes around and says they’ll maybe do something but then doesn’t and well, wasn’t ever going to.

If you’re not interested and won’t, say so up front so you don’t waste your or my time trying to get you to do something.

Biebian is VASTLY superior to Hannah Montana Linux. You should consider switching.

You have your coworkers on an unmanaged machine with a foreign OS on the guest WiFi with custom networking.

Which, at any of my last few corporate jobs, would be grounds for termination, if not immediately throwing you out of the building and telling you if you come back we’re calling the cops.

You really don’t bypass controls in a corporate environment like this if you like working there.

(And yes, not EVERY job will react that way, but any that’s got any compliance requirements absolutely will.)

Yeah, and at that point your network should be enforcing client isolation too, which is also a mitigation for this specific issue in large, shared networks like a college campus, or office, or public Wi-Fi at wherever.

The FTC commissioner opened her Fruit Loops and a Zuckerbot fell out, probably.

It’s serious, but seems like a wonky attack vector for most.

Yeah, it’s super trivially exploited, BUT it requires you to do a series of dumb things or let an attacker have access to your LAN which is one of those you-have-bigger-problems moments anyways.

And then you have to use their added printer (though there’s an exploit path that may be usable to over-write the printer you already have configured, if the attacker knows what that might be) to print something before anything happens.

Dude who found it seems to have overhyped it just a little bit (while being a huge dick about it), but I could see how you might exploit this in certain circumstances.