Lots of tools ignore xdg, and issues asking to add support get bogged down in backwards compatibility problems. The best they achieve is to introduce yet another env variable to control where the config goes. It’s really annoying.
I have a bunch of TOOLX_CONFIG=“$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/toolx” stuff in my bashrc.
so, we got a racist slur, homophobic slur, anti feminism and a whole bunch of unironic uses of cuck and soy. you should really delete this, this is embarrassing
GNU wasn’t mistaken for Unix though, it was made as a piece-by-piece foss replacement for all the proprietary Unix tools. Everything about this meme is wrong!
Absolutely. Gnu was made to be specifically different from Unix which was becoming locked down by AT&T copyrights. Gnu wasn’t Unix, and therefore still isn’t.
Well, anything unpopular that doesn’t use any software (even low-level software) that is also commonly used in popular environments. For example, game consoles, embedded devices or car entertainment systems often use outdated versions of popular browser engines. So to hack these, you don’t need to be a highly skilled hacker, you just need to be able to try some older vulnerabilities.
And there are enough malicious websites that will just automatically check for these vulnerabilities. And then it’s enough to accidentally open one of these malicious websites and even though nobody wrote the hack specifically for your car, you might catch some malware regardless.
For example, when GNU/Linux was unpopular, there was no malware for it; when it became the world’s favourite server software or became a valuable target
I’ve been using Linux for almost 20 years, and AFAIK in all that time I’ve never encountered a Linux virus. OTOH when I run Windows, I hit a virus within the first six months.
Sounds like you have bad habits, I’ve had windows for years and no problems. Just scan with Defender after a download, occasional Malwarebytes scans to make sure, and you’re pretty safe.
Most viruses are written for windows but that doesn’t mean you’re just instantly safe. You can bet as Linux grows they’ll see far more.
Yeah last time I had a windows virus was because I got a bad Photoshop crack. But the virus was just a coin miner. Before that, I hadn’t had a virus in 13 years.
With how much Adobe infects a system, leaving multiple different traces behind even when uninstalled, I think it’s fair to say that Photoshop itself is almost a virus
Genuinely, how can you get rid of all that? How do you even find everything?
The Win10 iso that I definitely legitimately purchased has a ppApps folder that has Photoshop in it; I’ve always just assumed I would be able to delete it from there.
If you don’t have it portable-ized, though, Revo Uninstaller might help. (though I never used it for long enough for the trial to run out, so I don’t know how much it costs)
— When the Indian Amazon support guy sees you’re a junior on your first week and tells you to execute a script to install a software for a video call with him. And you do, but it needs sudo access, so you give it…
— You have sudo power here
Sadly, true story. I never told anyone. My neurons clicked a day after that and I removed everything from the computer. It was too late, they hacked some things but IT just laughed and recovered some backups. They never knew I was the virus all along.
I still don’t get why a toolchain that can be replaced but never was able to make a stable kernel of its own after twenty years should get top billing in the name of the OS. A lot of that stuff was left in the dust, its relevance to the system grows smaller each year while the Linux kernel is the only reason they were ever able to make a complete OS in the first place.
Hardly anyone uses GNU without Linux; way more people use Linux without GNU than with it.
Plus, the community at large has decided long ago that the name is just Linux… Does it matter that that’s the name of the kernel? No. Windows and MacOS aren’t named after their kernels, or their toolchains, or any other component.
Anyway, there wasn’t an OS until there was Linux to bring it all together.
Even now with more eyes on GNU, Herd still isn’t a serious kernel. BSD has more users and support than GNU Herd.
I thank the GNU community for making wonderful tools and making libre software possible, but it doesn’t exactly deserve top billing.
Linux without GNU can live, with BusyBox or Android. GNU without Linux would have never taken off. Though I’m curious if in another timeline without GNU, Linux might not have taken off, as GNU had all the tools but no kernel.
Well we have Linux as the kernel now, and with linux-libre and FreeBSD there’s no real need for another kernel. So no reason for anyone to invest in it. I do think Hurd is kind of interesting conceptually, and it’s at a point where you can actually run it now.
And yeah, without GNU, I’m not convinced Linus would’ve bothered with Linux. GNU was off the ground long before Linux was production ready.
Linus didn’t write Linux for GNU, though, he wrote it as a response to Minix which, if memory serves, was written by one of his professors and took a hard minimalist approach for teaching purposes and Linus wanted to make something actually practical.
Hell, it had to be adapted to work with GNU (or GNU adapted to work with Linux, I don’t remember which) so, if GNU’s absence meant Linus didn’t write his kernel, it would have been a very indirect result
The argument would be that on Linux, the majority of user-facing interactions are with GNU software, not the kernel.
Also, without GNU, Linux probably wouldn’t even exist, at last not in its current form. GNU was already a mature toolchain when Linus started working on Linux. So it’s all well and good to point out that Linux can get pulled out and combined with other toolchain, but you can say the same with GNU. It’s out there running with BSD and Darwin. And BSD might not have a ton of direct users, but it’s extremely important for servers.
You don’t need Linux to run a free operating system, which was the goal of GNU, it really doesn’t matter that Hurd was never completed. The goal was achieved so there hasn’t been much incentive to develop Hurd.
I personally don’t care what people call it, but I do think GNU deserves the recognition. Especially because some of their tools are extremely important, like gcc. Linux might not exist if gnu hadn’t provided a functional toolset for an operating system. Hell if it wasn’t for GNU, we might not have a free OS at all.
Without GNU, we’d probably be using variants of FreeBSD or similar, possibly even porting that toolchain to run on Linux kernel… I mean, their contribution was important, but so were a lot of other people and projects
Linus is the one who got a workable thing out in the public’s hands. He didn’t even want to name it Linux, but someone came up with that name and it stuck.
The GNU project did a lot of great things, but ultimately they weren’t able to get a full-fledged operating system out that people could use, so they lost the opportunity to name it. It really shouldn’t matter to them though. GNU is well known, its philosophies are critical to how the free software and open source communities work, it was basically a massive success in the way almost no other volunteer non-commercial projects ever are.
I don’t think tagging GNU in front of Linux is dumb, people wouldn’t care to figure out who they are and what its about if they didn’t do that. You have to give credit to both of them. I still would want GNU there, even if I don’t say it most of the time. I call it Linux mostly but sometimes I call it GNU plus Linux just to be accurate.
I use Windows and Mac but I would think that Mac is slightly better. Just because I got this privacy statement off them once where they said they will do as much processing locally as they can, rather than sending it off to the cloud to be processed. I just appreciate that they acknowledge that.
Also, Windows has just swapped to a new default email app that requires I sync my email with their own servers. They can fuck off with that.
In what way is macOS more closed than Windows? The kernel is open source, the app store and cloud stuff is entirely optional, and it runs most Unix-y stuff natively.
In the ability to legally and without hassle install it on random PCs.
The kernel is open source
The actual userland is proprietary in both cases. Opening Apple Terminal on macOS and using homebrew is as “open” as running Windows Terminal with WSL: Basically the things in the terminal are FOSS, the graphical surroundings of both systems aren’t.
Having used both, I don’t find WSL comparable to macOS’s native unix shell. Aside from the bloat of it, integration with the rest of the OS is troublesome on Windows, and WSL apps are second-class citizens. On macOS, there is no “rest of the OS” because the unix shell is fundamental. It’s not running in a virtual environment like WSL; it is the native environment.
the WSL 2 architecture uses virtualized networking components, which means that WSL 2 will behave similarly to a virtual machine – WSL 2 distributions will have a different IP address than the host machine (Windows OS).
As of right now WSL 2 does not include serial support, or USB device support
If you have no open file handles to Windows processes, the WSL VM will automatically be shut down. This means if you are using it as a web server, SSH into it to run your server and then exit, the VM could shut down because it is detecting that users are finished using it and will clean up its resources.
WSL is a great addition to Windows, but it’s still kind of a band-aid.
Having used both, I don’t find WSL comparable to macOS’s native unix shell.
I use Windows with openSUSE WSL, macOS with homebrew and “real” Linux.
Aside from the bloat of it
Which bloat? It’s just a regular terminal.
WSL 2 will behave similarly to a virtual machine
That’s not so much different from a sanboxed environment on native Linux where a Flatpak application can request file system access but not touch processes outside its sandbox. If anything, I prefer that I have all my regular openSUSE thingies (zypper, my own Build Service repository,…) available unmodified on Windows, whereas the macOS terminal (and I know that’s subjective) just feels off.
It’s a virtual environment that requires installation of an entire Linux system. The disk and memory usage is not comparable to a native Unix OS.
Everything uses some sort of “virtual environment” these days. It’s not bloat, it’s the norm. homebrew does not use native macOS libraries except the very low level stuff. It handles its own dependencies. “Regular” macOS applications usually bundle their dependencies inside the .app folder bundle. On Linux, Flatpak installs its own dependencies. Heck, for whatever reason the Bazzite maintainers decided that installing Steam within a Arch Linux distrobox container is somehow preferable to the alternatives and Steam on Linux in turn uses “virtual environments” because the various Steam Linux Runtimes are specialized Ubuntu and Debian environments and every version of Proton is its own “virtual environment” of Windows.
I’ve bought a notebook almost exactly 10 years ago for €629 that had a 1TB hard drive and that I’ve upgraded to 16 or 24GB RAM for relatively little money (IIRC around €100). Sure, if you look at the insane prices that Apple asks for even a pathetic 8GB RAM / 256 GB SSD entry level MacBook, you surely want to avoid “bloat” but for many people in the regular x86 PC world a few “virtual environments” here and there don’t make a difference and aren’t considered bloat at all. If anything, for WSL users being able to run most unmodified Linux binaries is a benefit over relying on crappy ports of GTK to macOS and such because those ports of Linux software to macOS integrates so well…
I disagree with the characterization of Homebrew as a “virtual environment”. It installs binaries and libraries in its own directory and by default adds those directories to your PATH. This makes them first-class entities on macOS. Unlike with WSL, there is no secondary kernel and no hypervisor. Everything runs natively within the macOS environment. There’s no bridge, no virtualizer, not even sandboxing with Homebrew or MacPorts. Homebrew and MacPorts do not install “Linux” software; they install Mac software.
As a real-world example, I can install newer versions of standard tools like openssl and kerberos5 via MacPorts or Homebrew, and native Mac apps that rely on those pick them up seamlessly. I don’t think that is realistic with WSL, if even possible.
I haven’t re-evaluated a lot of development stuff since the release of WSL2, so perhaps things are smoother now, but in WSL1 I found there to be a big disconnect between e.g. a Windows-native installation of Spyder and a WSL-based Python environment. If there is a way to set that up, rather than installing Spyder within WSL and wrestling with X11 to run it as a second-class GUI, I’d love to hear it.
From what I have gathered online, it seems like most people believe that macOS is (slightly) more private than Windows. macOSshow you detailed characterization of the telemetry, and you can turn most of it it off; whereas you cannot turn off basic telemetry in Windows.
I cannot verify this claim, since I never owned an apple product.
That being said, if I have to use a closed-source OS, I would probably choice window, since I am more familiar with it and it is (slightly) more open than macOS.
You can shut down all telemetry in Windows Pro/Enterprise, I believe. You probably could with regular, too, especially if you’re blocking all Microsoft domains via DNS, firewall, or other methods.
and you can turn most of it it off; whereas you cannot turn off basic telemetry in Windows.
If only most telemetry can be turned off on macOS, it retains some basic telemetry that cannot be turned off. How is that better than basic telemetry on Windows?
I am a pretty heavy “Fediverse user” (Mastodon + Lemmy/Kbin) and my feeds have VERY little Linux talk. There is an incredibly diverse set of folks on the ‘verse but admittedly discoverability is hard. If the only people in your circle are Linux nerds then that’s all that might be boosted into your timeline. Put some effort into finding other folks and unfollow some of the Linux-only voices :-).
How do you curate your mastodon feed? How do you find interesting people to follow? I haven’t created a mastodon account yet because I honestly not sure how to do this.
Thanks! Some of the tips are certainly not obvious to people not familiar with mastodon like me (follow a lot of people first to discover stuff they boosted then prune it later, follow people that boosts a lot).
I think a good and easy way to discover new people is to follow hashtags.
I follow couple local pets work-related hobby and urbanism hastags, and I was able to discover new conversation and new people in these space quite quickly.
I think it’s mostly people viewing the “All”/“Community” feeds. Which I feel like you have to do in general as the niche communities haven’t really gotten to a self sustaining point where you can check your “Home” feed and not run out of stuff to doom scroll.
Not to mention that if you happened to mention certain things in communities that are tangentially related (Windows/Nintendo/Apple) then it usually starts another off topic discussion on linux/piracy/whatever.
Honestly the linux stuff doesn’t bother me as much as every topic seemingly turning into a critique of capitalism.
I do have a long term goal of learning C and making an actually good sixel patch, but that’s for ST. Like sure Wayland gets rid of the screen tearing I occasionally get on my old Intel GPU in my laptop, but why would I spend so much time porting patches when X11 when that’s my only gripe with it.
At 10: This crypto nerd also seems to be using a lot of proprietary software as well as an Invidia GPU. Dave, have you got more information?
-Yes I do actually. Additionally, This Linux noob appears to be using a Chinese smartphone! People like this are certainly a disgrace to the Linux community.
Well, we have a Pink Ubuntu (Hannah Montana Linux), a Red/Black Ubuntu (Satanic Edition), a Salmon Pink Ubuntu (Uwuntu), a White/Gray Ubuntu (Elementary OS), a Blue Ubuntu (Zorin OS), a Yellow/Black Ubuntu (Linux Lite) and an Teal Ubuntu (POP! OS). And I think that KDE Neon could be Purple Ubuntu, but I’m not sure.
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