I’m the Never Ending Pie Throwing Robot, aka NEPTR.
Linux enthusiast, programmer, and privacy advocate. I’m nearly done with an IT Security degree.
TL;DR I am a nerd.
For nvidia hardware, use nvidia images of Aurora/Bluefin (or Bazzite if you want gaming out of the box). All the OSes I mentioned are based on Fedora Atomic and offer image options for nvidia proprietary drivers. They even signing the kernel drivers, so you can use Secure Boot.
-> UEFI IRC client written in Rust
Docker is good when combined with gVisor runtime for better isolation.
gVisor is an application kernel, written in memory safe Golang, that emulates most system calls and massively reduces the attack surface of the kernel. This is important since the host and guest share the same kernel, and Docker runs rootful. Root inside a Docker container is the same as root on the host, as long as a sandbox escape is used. This could arise if a container image requires unsafe permissions like Docker socket access. gVisor protects against privilege escalation by only using root at the start and never handing root over to the guest.
Sydbox OCI runtime is also cool and faster than gVisor (both are quick)
Comic credit: Haus Of Decline
Really fun/interesting read.
Linux Mint is built on top of Ubuntu, which itself was a fork of Debian. Ubuntu is not something I would call a “clean base”. It is clunky, slow to adopt new technologies, and very (Canonical) opinionated. Linux Mint actively works against its Ubuntu base by removing Snap and other Canonical weirdness.
Tumbleweed and Leap offer the option to add or remove ANY package from your system before you even install it through their GUI installer, actually 2 GUI package choosers for either simple or advanced users. I don’t think it is accurate to suggest that Linux Mint is minimalist with its packages, especially when comparing to openSUSE distros.
I will not argue against Linux Mint being user friendly, it is pretty good. But “not bloated”, especially when comparing against openSUSE, is inaccurate.
How is Linux Mint less bloated? Linux Mint also suffers from poor Wayland support and isnt a (semi-)rolling release distro like Fedora or Tumbleweed. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone other than people who are tech iliterate. Even then, I would still suggest VanillaOS or Fedora Workstation. I used Mint as my daily driver for a year and it was fine, nothing amazing.
Bazzite is a good distro, I convinced a friend to move to Linux from Windows 10 and Bazzite was the only one that worked well with their nvidia hardware.
In that case it is a ToS violation, not piracy. You aren’t paying anything, nor does google lose any money since they have been already paid. We would have to stretch the definition of piracy to include other ToS violations since it is not a financial lose.
Let’s extend the scenario. If YouTube ToS required you to click every ad to use their service, would it be piracy if someone doesnt follow those instructions? I think it would be a ToS violation, but what damages could Google even seek?
I hear people sometimes mention that “Google needs to pay somehow to keep YouTube running.” I have no sympathy for Google since they conspired to intentionally push out other video hosting platforms to create monopoly on the market. It is their own fault that videos aren’t more spread out among providers.
How would you even pirate YouTube anyways?
I recommend Mull. It is security/privacy hardened Firefox and built by using Fennec as a base. Always use Fennec over Firefox because it removes telemetry, proprietary code, and strongly protects against browser fingerprinting. Comes with support for most (if not all) desktop Firefox extensions. I highly recommend using uBlock Origin, ask anyone and they’ll tell you it is the best content blocker available.
Another good browser is Cromite. It is security hardened Chromium with built-in ad/content blocking, decent fingerprinting protection, and strong site isolation. It doesn’t have support for extensions because upstream Chromium on Android doesn’t either and it is hugely complex to port.
Did you enter into a contract saying you must watch ads to use the service? Is ad blocking against ToS? I don’t think either are true, and a “click to consent” isn’t legally binding. Either way, I will never not block ads as it is important from a privacy and cyber security perspective.
Nyarch honestly looks like a joke distro and most of its features are not worth IMO.
I used Tumbleweed for a long time as a daily driver and then as my admin workstation. Worked really well, GUI admin panels are nice, and I didnt find anything too difficult.
Uncanny valley with those faces.
The weakest link of any secured system is the user. I know that will never change, especially as computers/software become more complicated over time. But I don’t understand why many people argue that “since the user is the weakest link, we don’t need more secure systems, we need better users.” We need both.
For anyone who suggests that a user can “just be smarter and not install malware” think about this: do you check read all the commits to the software you install, for each update, and then compile from source. The answers is no. And I don’t think we should need to.
Linux is not secure, it is still meant for tinkerers and by design is very open. This is one of my favorite aspects of Linux, just how open it is. The result though is an insecure system with many attack vectors that are hard to protect against.
For example, I recently wanted to patch a game for mod support. This required me to run a script that i didnt fully understand. I did my best to read it and nothing looked suspicious, but I couldn’t fully understand because I am not a modder for that game.
This script could have done a number of things:
The solution is sandboxing, permission system, secure defaults, and transparency to the user. And of course a way to disable security checks for tinkerers.
My point is that the perfect user does not exist. We (inevitably) use our computers to do all sorts of niche things, the perfect user does not even turn their PC on.
X.Org server has been largely abandoned by maintainers and developers.
Here are some links:
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/30/x_server_lead_maintainer_declares
https://www.phoronix.com/news/XServer-Abandonware
https://www.osnews.com/story/132507/its-time-to-admit-it-the-x-org-server-is-abandonware/
I would agree but it still heavily relies/requires X11 for many of the core components and apps. Wayland support on the horizon. For now though I wouldn’t recommend anyone use any DE that doesnt support Wayland, since X.Org is has been unmaintained for many years, it is a bloated protocol, and is insecure by design. This is because it was designed 40+ years ago in a time before security was a big concern to developers.
Idk, but I just enable intelligent autohide.