TCB13

TCB13, 3 days ago

I’m all for ARM and having thin laptops / tablets running full desktop Linux… 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. And some of those things can’t get ported.

Besides that the ARM ecosystem is a fucking mess of companies who don’t want to implement a generic UEFI thus you’ll never get generic support from OSes like there is on x86. I believe this this is the defining moment of ARM, when the CPU makers actually make UEFI a requirement and we no longer have to do the hacks and nonsenses we see on SBCs to get those CPUs running.

TCB13, 4 days ago

I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went.

I don’t get your surprise. With a decent laptop like the one you have everything will work properly. You can even load something more stable like Debian into that and it will work just fine on the first attempt. No changes required.

The issue with stuff “not working out of the box” is usually related to people using unbranded potatoes or very old hardware with modern distros.

TCB13, 5 days ago

And then there’s people using Cloudflare tunnels, Tailscale and others for self-hosting stuff… that also may have your keys or inject clients at some point…

But we’re about to get downvoted to hell for pointing this out because our community is self-hosters that pride themselves on sovereignty can’t deal with the cognitive dissonance of having their favorite corporate solutions unmasked for what they are - spyware on steroids.

TCB13, 4 days ago

They could steal your private keys, as could any program you install with root access

There you go.

and it’s open source.

Are you sure that what you download from tailscale.com/download is 100% open-source and the same thing that is published on their repos?

But it would comepletely destroy their business (…) I really dont think they have anything to gain by tricking everyone

Same goes for Cloudflare. Maybe Tailscale is secure and good people, or maybe they copy all keys to somewhere and covertly share them with govt agencies.

TCB13, 6 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Total e-waste and a power draw (almost constant 95W). Even a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B can beat it to oblivion:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/59448465-4373-46f6-a58a-dec35fc8774f.png

browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/6390478?base…

TCB13, 6 days ago

Total e-waste and a power draw. Even a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B can beat it to oblivion:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/59448465-4373-46f6-a58a-dec35fc8774f.png

browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/6390478?base…

TCB13, 6 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

You explanation sums it all up thanks.

A lot of drivers for hardware are actually not open source, just unreadable binaries that do …something. No one knows exactly how they work, so some people consider them a security risk.

While I do understand the security aspect of this here at the same time those people seem to be delusional. At some point there’s proprietary stuff in our computers, be it a driver, a BIOS or the code that runs on the various microcontrollers that run low level functions from the USB ports to simple power management.

The most “security paranoid” organizations in the world usually run a lot of stuff on Windows and HP hardware full of opaque and proprietary code and they consider it “safe enough”.

I may get that not free / license based stuff might raise concerns if you aren’t a mega corp. that can pay the fee either way, but… if a trackpad requires a free but closed-source binary driver why would a random guy on the internet consider that to be a risk?

TCB13, 6 days ago

Do you trust non-open drivers from Corporation X or Government Y in your eyes telling your brain what you do or don’t see?

I agree with your point, but I find it very unlikely to have cutting edge medical technology using open-source software - after all those pacemaker / brain implant companies want to protect their research (and profits) - and I’m not even sure if a FOSS solution for that would ever get approved by any legal body.

That’s the extreme, of course, but it isn’t any less scary than computers you trust with your credit card, bank account, etc information.

All those systems that process your financial transitions run on tons of proprietary software and the banks and credit card companies believe that software is secure enough.

Open source drivers means when corporation X goes under, your hardware still can work and isn’t automatically abandoned. It keeps more hardware out of landfills longer, with the ability to drastically reduce e-waste.

This is probably the most reasonable thing about having open-source drivers… however hardware is diverse and complex and so are drivers. The community might not be able to maintain such the driver for specific-version-x-hardware I have because it might not have access to all the design documentation of the hardware nor the time to reverse engineer it. It might not be worth keeping a driver around if it only serves a few people because everyone is mostly on a different revision of the hardware or some other detail like that.

To be fair Linux removed support for 386, 486, floppy drives, “Carillo Ranch”, and a bunch of other older hardware recently… at some point the few users that still have a piece of tech won’t care about it because they can just replace it by a new and better alternative for cheap.

TCB13, 6 days ago

Yeah, sure, but if the largest companies in the world trust the vendor that proprietary firmware why would I not trust it?

I agree with your POV, in theory yes, having stuff you can’t inspect it’s a risk, in practice there are a few more nuances to that. It’s not reasonable to want to have a 100% open-source computer from the software to use down to the AVRs/PICs that run low level functions.

TCB13, 5 days ago

Fair enough :)