afaik none of the current options offer fedi support.
Forgejo is a Fork of Gitea made because Gitea is managed by a For-Profit company. Their code is almost identical, in fact Forgejo is a drop-in replacement for Gitea. Gitea and Forgejo are (iirc) both working on the same federation support but Forgejo seems to be further ahead since they announced that they’ll upstream the Federation code to Gitea.
from a couple random comments, it sounds like the migration to Codeberg is relatively nice – if you want to do the interim step of getting out of GitHub and worry about personal instance at some later point …
What does being federated mean in this case? Git is already distributed. Is it just for discovery, or do you mean for things like issues and discussions?
You’ll be able to (among other things) open a merge request from another instance. Gitlab and other source forges require you to create an account on each instance you want to contribute to.
There are plenty of reasons to get rid of Ubuntu, but this isn’t one of them.
Before Ubuntu Pro, packages in universe (and multiverse) were not receiving (security) updates at all, unless someone from the community stepped up and maintained the package. Now Canonical provides security updates for universe, for the first time since Ubuntu has been introduced, via Ubuntu Pro, which is free for up to five personal devices and paid for all other use cases.
Debian is actually not that different (anymore). If you read the release notes of Debian 12, you’ll notice that quite a few package groups are excluded from guaranteed security updates, just like packages in universe are in Ubuntu. Unlike Ubuntu, Debian doesn’t split its package repository by security support though.
In both Debian and Ubuntu, only the main repo gets official security updates for free. Ubuntu has a paid option for universe whereas Debian doesn’t have that option and relies on the package maintainer to provide any updates.
I’d still recommend Debian over Ubuntu though, for various reasons.
Package maintainers can be slow to update packages though. Debian have a separate security team that get patches out ASAP, and those packages go into a separate security repo. I imagine Ubuntu does the same. It’s that security team that only deals with “official” packages, meaning anything that’s not in contrib, non-free, or non-free-firmware.
What you’re paying extra for are timely security updates for community-maintained packages that aren’t an official part of the OS. Debian doesn’t provide that for free either. Debian doesnt provide it at all since they don’t have any paid options.
No. All the official packages in the main repo get security updates from the Debian security team.
Only the packages in contrib, non-free and non-free-firmware don’t have official security updates and rely on the package maintainers. These are not considered part of the Debian distro, and I don’t even have them enabled on my servers.
Out-of-the-box, Debian only enables the main repo, plus the non-free-firmware one if any of your devices require it (e.g. Nvidia graphics, Realtek Bluetooth, etc). You have to manually enable contrib and non-free, and by doing that, it’s assumed you know what you’re doing.
In the case of non-free and non-free-firmware, they can be closed source software (like the Nvidia drivers) or have a non-open-source license that doesn’t allow distributing modified versions. In those cases, the Debian team is unable to patch them even if they wanted to.
This has always been the case with Ubuntu. Ubuntu only ever supported its main repository with security updates. Now they offer (paid) support for the universe repository in addition, which is a bonus for Ubuntu users, as they now have a greater selection of packages with security updates.
If you don’t opt-in to use Ubuntu Pro, nothing changes and Ubuntu will be as secure (or insecure) as it has always been. If you disable universe and multiverse you have a Ubuntu system where all packages receive guaranteed security updates for free.
Please note: I still don’t recommend Ubuntu due to snapd not supporting third-party repositories, but that’s no reason not to get the facts right.
Debian has always been the better choice if you required security updates for the complete package repository.
Personally I have my doubts if Debian actually manages to reliably backport security updates for all its packages. Afterall Eclipse was stuck on version 3.8 for multiple Debian releases due to lack of a maintainer …
TLDR: Ubuntu Pro offers additional security patches to packages found in the universe repo. Universe is community maintained so Ubuntu is essentially stepping in to provide critical CVE patches to some popular software in this repo that the community has not addressed.
I suppose it depends on how you look at it but I don’t really see this as withholding patches. Software in this repo would otherwise be missing these patches and it’s a ton of work for Ubuntu to provide these patches themselves.
Now is they move glibc to universe and tell me to subscribe to get updates I’ll feel differently.
Debian includes ffmpeg, for example, in the main stable repo. Given Debian’s reputation, I would think they are including these security patches in a timely manner, though I’m not entirely sure how to compare specific patches to verify this.
Of course, everything changes when you are selling support contracts. Canonical and Red Hat are the big two for enterprise because they provide support.
When I was last running Ubuntu on desktop, I signed up for an account and enabled these extra security updates. Yeah, it’s “free”, but it requires jumping through hoops. Requiring an account to get patches is the kind of user-hostile design pattern I expect from Apple or Google, but not in the desktop Linux world.
Debian’s contrib repo, which is the equivalent of Ubuntu’s universe repo, doesn’t get security updates from the Debian security team, as it’s not considered an official part of Debian. Package maintianers have to provide security updates. www.debian.org/security/faq#contrib
The difference is that Ubuntu provide paid support for contrib packages, including patches. Debian doesn’t have any official paid support options.
Nobody else has this hybrid model. RHEL is a paid distro in general. Most others are just free entirely. They all patch CVEs when they can. Ubuntu doesn’t write all of their patches or anything.
No, they aren’t. You can switch to their Universe patches anytime, at your own risk. If you want Canonical to mitigate that risk for you, you pay. Simple, really.
In addition, we’re going to develop the tools that give people choices other than the big three.
This sentence at the very end makes me very curious. Is this a hint for a Thunderbird mail service or something similar?
On the one hand I would love to have a mail service offered by the Thunderbird team that would also fund Thunderbird development. On the other hand it’s probably not a good idea to split the development resources too thin.
Well, there are alternatives. There’s /e/ (murena.io now a days) and distroot, and you can use gnupg with others who also use gnupg, and with distroot you can use its own encryption as well. There’s tutanota and prrotonmail, which use their own encryption mechanisms but only work with the same providers and not with other providers…
I mean there are already several non big corps providers of email. Distroot also provides xmpp, nextcloud, and several other services, the same as /e/. I can’t tell I’d trust more TB than the alternatives, several of them are non profit. But there are options. It’s sad before smart phones, some big corps were already dominating the services, and after them, things got even worse. But there have been, and still are, options for refugees. That’s not the issue in my mind.
The big issue, is that those big corps do what they want, excluding those not using them. All of them, no exception, place received messages from /e/ to the spam, that if the email even reaches the final user, some times it gets discarded by the service without even getting to the end receiver. Several mail registrations for whatever account, banks, insurance, stores and so on, don’t even accept email addresses if not from the big corps. So the huge and toxic influence from big corps doesn’t get corrected by another non big corp service. It’s like with FLOSS alternatives, or more private alternatives in general, the issue is the power most users give to those big corps. Most users prefer those corps services, at times ignoring the non big corps are not less comfortable, but most of the time they don’t even care, even if told there are easy enough alternative they would still select big corps. Then with such power, big corps not only dominate, but also discriminate non big corps users…
I am aware, I am using an alternative service myself for several years now. My point was that having an email service that helps fund Thunderbird would be nice. Furthermore, more alternative that ethically align with my views are always good.
A lot of self-hosted FOSS people draw the line at hosting their own mail servers. Even if Mozilla created a new domain hosting server for handling, the big three could still reject the traffic like they do for people hosting outside the three now, under the guise of spam filtering.
I’d be ecstatic if they did something here, but I’m not really clear on what a solution would look like. On top of them spreading thin as you mentioned
Just curious what you are using. I have a domain as well, and occasionally consider setting up another email server for it. I also still have some old old accounts that are still linked to my domain email, but I just haven’t run an email server in years. Is it something turnkey that I don’t need to spend weeks configuring? In fact I might only turn it on long enough to receive emails so that I can change the accounts.
I am not happy with my provider, currently waiting for the email hosting to expire so that I can maintain just the domain there and eventually user zoho for hosting
I use Mailcow and it works well. Easy to configure, and it uses Docker so it’s self-contained and very easy to move to a new server if you ever need to do that.
I’m using an SMTP relay for outbound emails, though. I didn’t want to have to deal with IP reputation issues, especially with Microsoft/Hotmail. I’m hosting my server on a VPS, and spammers in the same subnet can result in the entire subnet getting blocklisted. Configuring a relay is easy in Mailcow’s UI, and can be configured per domain.
I edited the comment, I really meant hosting server, not domain.
Having a custom domain isn’t a big deal, it’s really where that domain is hosted that creates forwarding issues. Since the majority of email is handled by the ‘big three’, anything that’s hosted outside of that is often flagged as spam or is refused to be delivered. That’s allegedly because there are malicious senders also hosted on third party servers (and fair enough, there likely are), but this causes a bit of a potential monopoly that could easily be abused, and there’s obvious motivation to push people into a particular service for data collection.
Even if it doesn’t happen often, occasional failures can be a huge problem if you’re sending critical communication and it isn’t reaching target inboxes because of filtering. It’s enough of a headache that even most avid self-hosters tend to avoid it.
That is absolutely unreasonable, as the email files don’t actually tell you who the sender is beyond the domain from where it’s sent. The email protocol is SUPER unsafe and really really easy to spoof as someone from the big three
My understanding is that it’s a combination of correctly deploying authentication (DMARC, DKIM, and SPF) and the actual IP address of the server that can get you into trouble. If you incorrectly set up authentication, OR if a malicious sender spoofs you (likely because you didn’t set up auth correctly), it can get your IP blocklisted. And unless you’re monitoring if you’re blocklisted, you often don’t know that things aren’t getting delivered until someone tells you.
And then you’re still kind of at the whim of the big players, because they could change or update their authentication standards, and if you’re not on top of it you can find yourself in the same boat, even if you’re doing everything else right.
It’s not impossible, it’s just a headache. But if i’m being honest, i’m a bit of a novice so it could be easier to a more trained network administrator.
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