Even UTF-16 used by Windows isn’t fair because it needs twice as much space for hieroglyphs. Won’t someone think of the ancient Egyptians?
Seriously, now that most display systems can handle putting accents on letters instead of needing a code point just for á, a new universal encoding would be nice. Purge it of Unicode’s precomposed letters, duplicated Chinese characters, and duplicated-in-retrospect letters and you could fit another few alphabets into Plane 0.
But convincing tech companies to make webpages bigger seems difficult.
The gap between “nothing has been done for this task” and “multiple developers have written, reviewed, and discussed patches for this” is immense and positive.
These discussions took place several years ago if I remember correctly. The problem seems to be that cursor seems to want to refresh at a different rate than the content in screen and the people at gnome want the cursor to not feel choppy by being refreshed at the vrr determined refresh rate
I am also sure that it will land as well. As a gnome user I hope it lands sooner than later. I am just frustrated because the pursuit of perfection is keeping us from having a better experience now. It’s the calculator on iPad situation. Just because the perfect solution has not been found yet does not mean there should be no implemented solution at all.
The limited benchmarks I’ve seen put the new X Elite at slightly less efficient than the M2 Pro (let alone M3 Pro). It only gets marginally higher scores when operating at 3x the wattage.
Also, let’s not imagine even for a second that notoriously terrible ARM are going to make it easy to support this chip, especially not in the long term.
Sounds cool, however don’t forget this is under MatterMost Licensing:
A source available license gives access to source code, but places restrictions on its use. The Mattermost Source Available License allows free-of-charge and unrestricted use of the source code in development and testing environments, but requires a valid Mattermost Enterprise Edition License in a production environment.
I still have my HP Mini311, it has a 11.6" screen, 1366x768, discrete GPU, can decode 1080p in hardware and output on tv via HDMI. In 2009 it was a beast!
I changed the 2.4bg with a 2.4/5n wifi, upgraded to 3GB of ddr3 ram, SSD, overclocked to 2GHz, and installed MX Linux on it, works perfect.
Technologically, it’s the best DE out there, no contest. (Maybe with the exception of touchscreen integration)
But some design decisions grind my gears so hard I can’t use it.
I get irrationally angry when I see the bouncing cursor animation, or look at a list of my programs and half the names start with “K”.
It feels too sluggish, overloaded and Windows-y in its default configuration and getting rid of everything that nags me takes too long, when Gnome comes out of the box looking simple and stylish.
Nobara KDE user here. One of the reasons why I chose it is because it comes with many of the customisations that I’d normally do (such as using an optimized kernel). But in addition, I use:
Opal instead of LUKS
KDE configured with a more GNOME/macOS like layout (top panel+side dock)
GDM instead of SDDM, for fingerprint login
Fingerprint authentication for sudo
TLP instead of power-profiles-daemon for better power saving (AMD P-State EPP control, charging thresholds etc)
Opal drives are self-encrypting, so they’re done by the disk’s own controller transparently. The main advantage is that there’s almost no performance overhead because the encryption is fully hardware backed. The second advantage is that the encryption is transparent to the OS - so you could have a multi-boot OS setup (Windows and FreeBSD etc) all on the same encrypted drive, so there’s no need to bother with Bitlocker, Veracrypt etc to secure your other OSes. This also means you no longer have a the bootloader limitation of not being able to boot from an encrypted boot partition, like in the case of certain filesystems. And because your entire disk is encrypted (including the ESP), it’s more secure.
I still feel skeptical about using a chips controller for encryption. AFAIK there have been multiple problems in the past:
Errors in the implementation which weaken the encryption considerably
I think I even read about ways to extract the key from the hardware (TPM based encryption)
Do you provide a password and there are ‘hooks’ which the boot process uses for you to enter the password on boot?
I think it is nice to have full disk encryption, but usually we are speaking about evil-maid attacks (?), and IMHO it is mostly game over when an attacker has physical access to your device.
Yes, I do provide a password on boot, as you said, keys can be extracted from the hardware so that’s not secure, which is why I don’t use the TPM to store the keys.
There are no hooks necessary in the bootloader, as it’s the BIOS which prompts you for the password and unlocks the drive.
And yes, there have been implementation problems in the past, but that’s why the Opal 2.0 standard exists - don’t just buy any random self-encrypting drive, do your research on past vulnerabilities for that manufacturer, and check if there are any firmware updates for the drive (don’t just rely on LVFS).
Also, the common hardware attacks rely on either a SATA interface (to unplug the drive while it still has power) or older external ports vulnerable to DMA attacks such as PCMCIA or Thunderbolt 3.x or below; so those attacks only affects older laptops. Of course, someone could theoretically install a hardware keylogger or something, but this is also why you have chassis intrusion detection, and why you should secure and check any external ports and peripherals connected to your machine. Overall physical security is just as important these days.
But ultimately, as always, it comes down to your personal threat model and inconvenience tolerance levels. In my case, I think the measures I’ve taken are reasonably secure, but mostly, I’ve chosen Opal for performance and convenience reasons.
That being said…it’s kind of odd to me how swiftly Mozilla of all companies/orgs is to embrace a code forge hosted by Microsoft for their main software. Surreal, even.
linux
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.