I know a lot of the current issues are about ideology and privacy. Mozilla seemingly pivoting away from fighting for privacy and into AI, supposedly most recently including integration with remote AI, including Google’s, while not implementing the top feature requests… I’m personally sticking with Firefox for now, but it does make me wary.
Ah, but you see, “John” and “Doe” are two names - first and last - and when you say “My name is”, you’re really listing out your names, with spaces inbetween!
But then there’s hyphenated names, and I have no idea how those are treated.
Plasma on Wayland does have HDR support now… But I don’t have a way to test how good it is, and I think it’s both still unfinished and severely lacking support from applications. But hey, things are improving!
I wouldn’t count on Adobe support though.
For a while, maybe… But the two distinctions I’d want to make is that, one, that’s also mostly the time you’ll spend learning what you need to set up as part of your system, and two, things that might be out of your control on many distros. I’d also say that by calling it a “meme distro” you’re lumping it together with Hannah Montana Linux and similar.
I will certainly say, however, that I’m rather annoyed by all the people saying “Bro you can set up arch in a few minutes just run archinstal it’s easy”… Not only do I not believe it’s that easy when you don’t know what you’re doing and need to actually use the system, but that also seems to run counter to the point of arch. I think there’s at least two popular arch derivatives meant to remove the enthusiast aspect and provide a streamlined experience, so why recommend arch to new people if not as a learning experience?
Calling Arch a meme distro is unnecessarily insulting. I imagine the same applies to Gentoo, but I haven’t used it myself. It’s an enthusiast distro, for people who want to have control over how their system is set up while accepting the responsibility of having to set everything up.
I absolutely agree with recommending against it for somebody’s first experience - but if you’re willing to read through the guides and troubleshoot issues, you can learn a lot about how things work on Linux. It’s the kind of distro where you will have issues, and they will usually be due to your own mistakes.
I do think the phrasing is complicated, IIRC Hetzner moved from monthly to hourly billing recently, so they probably had to have legally well-defined terms while also wanting to do a monthly-based system in hourly terms.
I think it’s only for the EU, and the other browsers don’t have a solution ready - porting their engines for iOS is a lot of work, which takes time, and might not even be worth it when they still need to maintain the safari-based version for the rest of the world.
There’s nothing special about it. Linux distros are one of the options, alongside windows and osx as desktop systems.
What there are are preferences, morals, affordability. Linux is generally free, has different approaches to how the system is structured, how software is installed, how much access to the system you have, and how much responsibility for setting it up you have.
This will also vary from distro to distro, but generally software is installed from the distribution’s repositories, not downloading files from various websites - and instead of having some different scheme for updating every program on your computer, you use a single command (or button in an app) to update your system and all your software. This is one of the main things I love about Linux - you get to update your stuff when you want, all at once.
Oh, just ask an Arch user about Manjaro.
That makes sense, thanks for explaining! I saw “makes space” as what’s happening right now, since Android does let you install alternatives for all those, including third party app stores, but it does go farther than that.
I don’t think anything you said makes it not free, as long as you can fork it. The same can be said about most FOSS, since somebody, usually the creator, is in control of the repository.
That’s the point of FOSS - your repository isn’t becoming a democracy by virtue of using a permissive license, but it means somebody could outcompete you with a fork and effectively take over as the dominant project.
But… Aren’t all of those things still very much dominant?
The 8 dependencies must be an optional dependency for some other package you already have installed. That said, that kind of stuff is the main reason I want to try NixOS - any time I install something, configure something, etc. I’m risking forgetting about it and getting tripped up over it down the line, with no good way to check.
You say that like it’s a bad thing, but being honest about the schedule sounds like an absolute plus - for some reason, organizations within some countries have schedules they cannot meet, and I doubt they aren’t well aware already. It might be because realistic schedules make them look bad, so they just fudge the numbers to make themselves look better?
I mean, couldn’t an addon just read the password you put into a login field, or send in a request, and send it off to their servers?
Man, and here I put too much effort writing a reply to a troll 😔
Does windows come preinstalled and preconfigured with more potentially vulnerable software on open ports?
I personally don’t value an antivirus that much, since it can only protect you from known threats, and even then, it only matters when you’re already getting compromised - but fair point for Windows, I suspect most distros come without antivirus preinstalled and preconfigured.
A firewall, on the other hand, only has value if you already have insecure services listening on your system - and I’m pretty sure on Windows those services aren’t gonna be blocked by the default settings. All that said though… Most Linux distros come with a firewall, something like iptables or firewalld, though not sure which ones would have it preconfigured for blocking connections by default.
So while I would dispute both of those points as not being that notable, I feel like other arguments in favor of Linux still stand, like reduced surface area, simpler kernel code, open and auditable source.
One big issue with Linux security for consumers (which I have to assume is what you’re talking about, since on the server side a sysadmin will want to configure any antivirus and firewall anyways) could be that different distributions will have different configurations - both for security and for preference-based things like desktop environments. This does unfortunately mean that users could find themselves installing less secure distros without realizing it, choosing them for their looks/usage patterns.
Question, how is Linux more insecure out of the box?
Hold up, how is proton leveraging open source to avoid dev costs? Are you referring to steam using and contributing to existing projects instead of reinventing the wheel? Or to game developers that use it as a reason for not making native Linux versions, which wouldn’t be Valve’s workforce in the first place?
I can see how the things Valve does contribute to their business model - steam input giving their controller compatibility with games, proton letting them launch a Linux-based handheld, and the new recording feature probably there for the steam deck… But the thing is, Valve is still providing all those things to customers for no extra charge, and they keep adding new stuff.
I mean, the gutter is made for dealing with liquids, whereas a trashcan is meant for solid waste, so that doesn’t seem like a good idea?