It’s definitely not safer. It does not include microcode updates so it’s quite the opposite of secure. Technically you can load them at boot but why would you intentionally make security harder to achieve?
Not including microcode updates is also extremely dumb from the philosophical standpoint. Microcode is closed source firmware running “inside your CPU” so if you don’t include the updates, your CPU now runs on both vulnerable and proprietary firmware.
It exists because FSF. (watch Linus’s opinion on FSF) Unfortunately the FSF is full of obsessive people, who want politics to be an if-else problem. But that’s not how politics work, you always have to compromise somewhere. You cannot have hardware that uses open-source firmware, has schematics available, doesn’t use slave labor, is usable, is secure etc. You always have to choose between different evils.
But that’s not what the FSF does. They decided to draw a thick line through this blurry mess, so that these obsessive coders can have a digital high/low solution to this analog problem.
hm how do I continue…? It’s hard to explain because it does really make sense but I will try. So if some software runs on your computer and you can modify it from the OS, it has to be Open Source otherwise it’s not FSF big wholesum chungus certified. But if it runs on your PC and you cannot modify it from the OS, it can be closed source and still get the Chungus certification. What you end up with is that FSF recommends some old crap wifi cards running proprietary firmware because you cannot modify the firmware without external flashing. But it rules out new wifi cards that load the firmware during boot because the linux kernel cannot have proprietary software in it reeee. Obviously the latter situation is better for freedom because it’s at least easier to replace with Free firmware but they don’t care about that.
In other words Linux Libre exists only because of some stupid bureaucratic rule that actually harms Free Software instead of helping it.
Wait I haven’t told you about microcode updates! Microcode is proprietary software controlling your x86-64 CPU. Linux Libre does not include updates to this firmware even though the microcode is proprietary regardless. So with Linux Libre your CPU is controlled by code that is proprietary, broken and vulnerable to stuff like Spectre or Meltdown. This part is so stupid that it’s almost funny. (but it’s actually sad)
Not true. For example Libreboot currently supports 2 ARM laptops. The way I understand it is that Libreboot uses U-boot as an extra bootloader, kinda like you would run GRUB after UEFI. U-boot can also just work on it’s own and Coreboot ARM devices are rather the exception.
Sounds cool but I didn’t really get how it works from the README, or I guess didn’t get a proper example. They showed that you can automagically log into website but that can also just be done with a password manager.
Thanks, I missed the example. Tbh I think advertising “checking your email” sounds kinda stupid, people interested in this tool will probably use email clients and other software which is specifically designed for auto-email stuff.
Garuda advertises a different scheduler so I would think that would make difference. It’s also one of the things people recommend to improve gaming performance on Linux. Unfortunately as others have pointed out without 1% lows, there is nothing of value in this video. Saying that with respect to Nick. He should step up his game in this area. Average fps just doesn’t tell anything, especially on Linux which is even less consistent than Windows
PlayOnLinux takes care of it for you. Office 2013 supposedly works very well, Office 2016 can be sometimes buggy. For the 2016 version you need to get the 32 bit iso.
What benefit would it provide though? It’s a microkernel so you could just add non-free drivers in the userspace. Things like Playstation would choose BSD instead.
If your point is that it would need some kind of license that would prevent proprietary drivers, then I’m not really sure how would lawyers differentiate between drivers and straight up non-free apps running on it.
Sure but protect from what? Apple, Sony and Microsoft can just use BSD or any other proprietary kernel. Nobody will try to create the “new proprietary Linux” out of it because getting OS market share is hard even for an Open Source standard like Linux, let alone for some proprietary crap.
A potential issue is someone like Qualcom who makes their own proprietary fork which works on their hardware only. So instead of digging through the tens of thousand lines of code which Qualcom publishes for their out of tree Linux kernels, you can only reverse engineer. But again we are talking about a microkernel so most of these lines of code would be proprietary regardless. At least we save time of these crazy developers who try to bring out of tree stuff into mainline.
Comparisons with other kernels is imo relevant. Protecting software that has many alternatives from becoming proprietary is nice but not really important when the potential software vendor can just choose a different but equivalent project. It would not really matter if people interacted with this proprietary fork of RedoxOS or BSD, they would get screwed either way.
Note: the original comment was “GPL or bust”. imo GPL is nice but in this case it’s a minor thing
I am aware. I was just pointing out that Tivotization would be a weird reason for “a bust” when we are in a linux community and Linux itself does not prevent Tivotization.
Because you’re a stupid consoomer. You can build a 4 liter ITX desktop that’s cheaper, faster, more reliable and easier to repair than these stupid “desktop replacements”. Plus for the price difference you can buy a “thin and lite” laptop so that you won’t have to carry this monster around when you just need to reply to emails on the go.
edit: just to clarify I’m not saying you in particular are a stupid consoomer, just the person in the given example. People tend to get angry fast on the internet.
I think what they tried to achieve was to get rid of the “bit to bit” copypasted distributions which they at least made harder to make. So I suppose at least the cost to “steal the RHEL source” is higher.
btw I dislike that Free Software is also free (0.00 €) software. I feel like there should be some kind of chimera license which would first be proprietary with source available and after a certain time after purchase the code would be open source for the buyer. So you could actually sell it unlike Open Source Software which you can sell only once because the first person can just start giving away free copies. Sadly people in the open source realm tend to get pretty defensive when they see “proprietary”. Would cool if flathub at least implemented some kind of way to sell software even if Open Source, that would be a nice start.
A couple of months ago, I wiped Windows off my old laptop and installed Kubuntu instead. Now, I was thinking of dual booting Windows additionally for a certain game (definitely not League of Legends, for sure not) and will need to buy a new key. Am I fine getting a copy of Windows 10 despite Microsoft’s discontinuation, or...
If you get a windows 10 key, windows 11 gets included for free. But you should not need a new license if you already had it on your device. If you really need it, resellers on aukro.cz are your friend. I got a windows 10 pro key for about 3.5 € lol
What OP is asking is trivial to setup on linux though. Just setup autologin on your login manager which is probably a single checkbox.
Your issue is different because you want biometric login. LUKS encryption only supports passwords, keyfiles and hardware keys (they are kinda goofy though). So you have to use the login manager which supports biometrics. But if you want full disk encryption, you first need to decrypt the hard drive. This can be done by storing the decryption key in the TPM part of your processor. That obviously means that someone with electron microscope could steal your data if they stole your computer. But if you don’t care about that, it’s a solution. On MacOS and and Windows it works nicely but on linux not so much. Ubuntu has TMP based encryption but it’s currently experimental.
Alternative solution is to use Yubikey Bio (hardware key with fingerprint scanner) with LUKS but hardware keys are kinda goofy to setup.
Another is to not use Full disk encryption. You can just encrypt your home folder. Downside are that your cannot use hibernation and less robustness. For example once I accidentally typed my root password to the root shell and it therefore got written to /root/.bash_history which was not encrypted. (it’s probably best to symlink it to /dev/null)
Just thinking of ditching nextcloud and its just too much for my family use. All i needis carddav, caldav and file sync. Have a Debian VM running on Scale and was thinking of using Cloudron docker install. Is this the way others are installing on VMs?
My point was that it isn’t as trivial but I suppose it is as long as you don’t care about https and proper certificates. You can just copy their nginx/apache template if you don’t.
I cannot get sway to detect my tablet device on Void Linux installed on a Thinkpad X200 Tablet. Anyone knows how to fix it? I have both libwacom and xf86-input-wacom installed. It worked fine on Debian....
Thanks for your tips but I did not find anything. (probably skill issue) I tried different distros and it’s weird. Arch (endeavorOS live iso) does not work, debian does but antix does not, fedora works. So I’m going back to debian. Thank you either way.
Wait... why does Linux-libre (and #Freedo) exist?
Is Linux not free software itself? I thought propietary stuff was added downstream....
Schenker shows off a Linux laptop prototype with Snapdragon X Elite at Computex 2024 (liliputing.com)
Beachpatrol: A CLI tool to replace and automate your everyday web browser (Now with Firefox support) (github.com)
Comparing Linux gaming distros performance (tilvids.com)
Hey does anyone know how to get microsoft suite apps on linux?
I want to get word, excel, powerpoint, onedrive and copilot on ubuntu, anyone know how?
Upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X Elite (www.qualcomm.com)
Building a secure Operating System (Redox OS) with Rust (Interview) (www.youtube.com)
Very interesting and understandable explanations of low level architecture and filesystems, namespaces, userspace, kernel functions, drivers etc....
TUXEDO announce the desktop-replacement Stellaris 17 gen6 notebook (www.gamingonlinux.com)
What would an ENSH*TTIFIED Linux distro look like? [video] (tilvids.com)
Wanting to dual boot Windows with Kubuntu. Am I fine getting a Windows 10 key instead of 11?
A couple of months ago, I wiped Windows off my old laptop and installed Kubuntu instead. Now, I was thinking of dual booting Windows additionally for a certain game (definitely not League of Legends, for sure not) and will need to buy a new key. Am I fine getting a copy of Windows 10 despite Microsoft’s discontinuation, or...
Any way to autologin with LUKS encrypted boot drive?
Hello everyone!...
Is Radicale the way forward? (www.cloudron.io)
Just thinking of ditching nextcloud and its just too much for my family use. All i needis carddav, caldav and file sync. Have a Debian VM running on Scale and was thinking of using Cloudron docker install. Is this the way others are installing on VMs?
Thinkpad X200 Tablet stylus brokie on Void Linux
I cannot get sway to detect my tablet device on Void Linux installed on a Thinkpad X200 Tablet. Anyone knows how to fix it? I have both libwacom and xf86-input-wacom installed. It worked fine on Debian....