If you’re feeling even more paranoid, go with something even more obscure like Plan 9 from Bell Labs. It’s Unix-like but differs so much from it that a Unix or Linux type malware would do nothing to it.
It’s a good question what I really want. I’m very satisfied with my current system (NixOS) but in the end it’s still Linux and stuff like the 9P filesystem just intrigues me. So it’s not like I’d need to switch or anything. But a playground to apply the concepts to some problems would be nice. Maybe I’ll try 9front some day and see what I can do with it
Indeed. A fun little project but unfortunately it doesn’t seem ready for any sort of daily use. Driver support (a crucial component) is probably pretty scarce. Their web browsers too are hit-or-miss, with one in particular (Links) that crashes when performing a during Google search.
Still, there are few alternatives that differ substantially from the original ancestral Unix that are available and more should be developed. GNU/Hurd and the BSD’s are the only ones I know of.
Still needs waaay more effort just to do (some) simple stuff a normal person might just expect to work.
Just installed Mint on a laptop to replace W10. Went really smoothly, and was quite impressed.
Thought I’d try a bit of emulation with Yuzu. Wanted to use a Switch pro controller. Plug and play? Nope. Tried Xbox one controller instead. Neat. Works. I can live with that.
But then thought I’d try a bit of Xbox game stream. No controller works with browser. Try obvious things to fix.
Looked for answers and they’re all like, someone going: oh, you just need to clone the controllerwaffelen driver from git, then just compile the installer using the command sudo apt get- monkeyshyte wtf -make then run the installer from the folder using cmake- getfuckednoob.
I don’t know what any of this is. Tried following instructions.
And, frankly, I cannot be fucked to spend four hours finding out / troubleshooting for something I would have thought was fairly coomon.
It’s not a deal breaker, it’s just another bit of faff and fuckaboutiness that puts me off. And, I suspect would others even less tech minded.
I agree, and that 80% was surprisingly pleasant and smooth experience, compared to my last stab at Linux, about 10 years ago. At least this time I didn’t git any driver issues.
But, that last 20% can be kind of a big deal if you need anything from within in…
I’d like to have the time to learn how to use Linux properly, but between a full time job (unrelated to an OS), young family, and other commitments it’s just not a priority.
I had a play out of interest, and it’s pretty good, but still not 100% usable “out of the box” for me. And how to do that remaining 20% is completely out of many Linux-naive users experience (using the terminal / command line). 20 clicks is easier, as all I’m doing is confirming yes or no on something, that I’m usually given enough information and context to be able to evaluate.
And I suspect that’s true of many many others. Which was the point of my original reply (which I’d hoped to be more humorous than insulting to people, but c’est la vie…).
To try and put it in another context:
It’s really nice to be offered a lift somewhere I need to get to, but if I get kicked out the car and have to walk the remaining 20% of the way, then next time maybe I’ll just get the bus/train/taxi. It might cost more, but at least I know I won’t have to worry if I’ll get there or not.
Also, as a new user, I didn’t know why I was seeing multiple versions of the same packages to install (flatpak etc). Googling to see which is best leads to the inevitable answer of “It depends”, which a new user might not be able to answer…
(I’m not so much speaking to you directly, and I know this is a meme post, but I’m more thinking about the handful of people in the community who seem to always reply along the lines of “people should switch to Linux, because [reason here]. And, yes, people need to learn how to x”, without demonstrating any understanding of nuance around other people’s competing priorities / skills / abilities.)
I understand your frustration, and I’ll try to provide a solution that’s as straightforward as possible. While Linux offers a lot of customization and power, it can sometimes require more technical effort for specific tasks like controller setup.
Checking Compatibility: First, let’s ensure your Xbox controller is compatible with Linux Mint. Most Xbox controllers should work well, but it’s good to verify.
Configuration: Linux Mint typically uses the XInput system for game controllers. Sometimes, extra configuration is needed to get controllers working smoothly.
Reboot: It’s a simple step, but sometimes restarting your computer can help resolve hardware recognition issues.
Updates: Make sure your system and packages are up to date. Open a terminal and run:
Install “xboxdrv”: If the built-in driver isn’t working as expected, you can try installing the “xboxdrv” package, which can provide better controller compatibility. Run:
This command should help with controller recognition.
CMake and Driver Compilation (if needed): If the previous steps don’t resolve the issue and you’re instructed to compile a controller driver using CMake, follow these additional steps:
Cloning the Repository: Use the git command to clone the controller driver repository from Git. Replace `` with the actual URL of the repository:
Installation: After successfully building the software, you may need to install it. This can usually be done with the following command:
<span style="color:#323232;">sudo make install
</span>
Browser Game Stream: If you’re using a web browser for Xbox game streaming, ensure you’re using a browser that fully supports it. Google Chrome is a good choice for this.
Test: Finally, test your controller in a web-based game streaming service like Xbox Cloud Gaming to see if it works as expected.
If these steps don’t resolve the issue, please provide more details about your system, controller model, and any error messages you encounter during the process. I’ll do my best to assist you further.
Yeah people will download a patched windows iso, go through an extremely complicated install process to have everything the way they want, flip a few bits in windows with some shady ass tool and give up updates instead of just using linux.
Gaming performance on Linux is excellent, I’m getting stable 60FPS on single player games on my old 1050 equipped laptop from 2016 that weren’t even playable on the old Windows install.
Anticheat however is a different story, and CoD DMZ/Zombies is where I spend most of my gaming time so it’s difficult to just give up a Windows install.
Doing all that takes about 2 hours. The shady ass tool is also unnecessary since you can manually change the registry entries. Once it’s done I can install anything by double clicking the exe and it runs 99.9% of the time.
Linux meanwhile only takes half an hour to setup and update (if we are talking about a beginner friendly one like mint cinnamon), but you will use a lot more hours trying to get everything to run. There rarely are good drivers for peripherals, to get even slightly more then the most barebone functions of my logitech gear I have to run a shady github project someone slapped together 3 years ago. The adaptive clock on my laptop doesn’t work, I loose about 2 hours of battery life and the touch pad stops working after a few hours.
I dualboot a win10 ltsc version and mint. By now most stuff runs fine on Linux, but it has taken me 10 times the effort to get to that state compared to windows. And even now I occasionally have to fiddle with wine cause it decides that this specific programm isn’t to its liking. And that’s ignoring the issue it was to run anything with anticheat. That requires a VM with GPU passtrough to even remotely work.
In my experience everything already had drivers installed on linux. I think with the logitech stuff you mean the stupid configuration ui that would perfectly work on linux but they choose to not port it(you can still use it with wine for example). All my keyboards have qmk so that works on linux. A github project is much less shady because you can check the source code. Idk whats wrong with your trackpad. Battery life is hit or miss on linux, i get more hours on linux currently but only after installing some stuff. On ubuntu or mint the battery life should be good out of the box. Anticheat is basically anti-linux so ofc it wont work. For me backwards compatibility is better on linux than windows. When i try to run old software on windows it never works. Software support is pretty good nowadays but some professional stuff wont work. If you do that you should go mac lol.
That’s only an issue if you torrent your stuff in which case linux wont save you. A windows virus/cryptominer/keylogger/etc. won’t natively work on Linux, but it will work if used with wine.
With increasing amounts of people, organizations, and governments adopting Linux, we’re no longer as safe as we used to be. Unfortunately, we might have to get virus/malware scanners now like Windows users.
OSS is a double edged sword. It’s great, but the people looking for flaws that are exploitable are more often bad actors than good. At least that’s been my experience working in cyber security. Many CVEs that are responsibly disclosed are found to be actively exploited already.
Probably years of usage by intelligence agencies and criminals until someone notices. (with no possible way to know for anyone that there even is a exploit). And even then it might take months for them to fix it.
Exploit found in oss: Depending on the usage of the software several people are looking for security holes and they usually get fixed ASAP. Of course it is possible that there’s an exploit nobody finds and a criminal uses, but it is not more likely because he can read the code. If your code must be secret to be secure your code is anything but secure
Also there is no incentive for companies to fix an exploit quickly. They will only release the fix with some scheduled update anyway or else people might notice that there was something worth fixing and that's bad for your stock price.
There are a lot more ways to sneak malware into a system. Especially if some apps aren’t being maintained anymore. Linux is definitely safer, but you shouldn’t let your guard down
especially if you’re a developer. There are a lot of shenanigans going on with malware npm packages that prey on easy typos. I imagine it’s the same with other library installers for other languages too
Possibly, but Firefox & Chrome based browsers have the same built-in isolation and other security measures as on Windows. Plus you can use Ublock Origins to get rid of malvertisements. If you really wanted, you can also isolate the browser entirely with something like firejail.
Hardend forks like LibreWolf are good too.
Oh, and Wayland also isolates clients from each other too.
I don’t think it’s that big of a threat as long as you keep some level of common sense.
Oh, and Wayland also isolates clients from each other too.
One of the biggest reasons I might want to say goodbye to xfce sooner than later.
I can’t make use of most of Waylands’ features and improvements, but this kind of isolation is very much worth it anyway.
Okay, what happens if your repo doesn’t have a specific software you are looking for? A trusted repo is good, but it won’t have everything you might want. This is especially true for new software or less popular software.
I don’t think that’s the correct path. There is a scanner already, called ClamAV, which works well enough.
Virus scanners don’t fix the problem though. Android does it better: security by isolation and verification of system components.
The most important part in malware protection is whoever sits in front of the screen. Systems like Android have so many safeguards in place, the only way to get a virus is the user forcing it through themselves, pretty much.
I’m surprised it hasn’t seen wider workplace adoption.
A call centre I used to work in once scrapped all our Microsoft Office licences and installed OpenOffice on everyone’s workstations to cut costs. It was bad for the MI staff because they relied on Excel functionality that OO Calc simply didn’t have, but the vast majority of staff could get by on OpenOffice.
My only real criticisms of how they handled this was not giving people any notice, and making us use a shitty webmail app that only booted in Internet Explorer and would sign you out after a minute of inactivity to access our work emails. They could have easily installed and configured Mozilla Thunderbird to give us some quality of life that Outlook once afforded us.
Also this happened a few years after Oracle got their hands on OO, so not using LibreOffice was also questionable.
But still. Think about the shitloads of money you’d save by using Linux in the office.
There’s already a ton of such exploits. Most servers use Linux and many exploits of corporations this had to go through Linux (though many exploits aren’t related to the OS at all – eg, SQL injection is OS independent). I expect it’s more common, though, that attacks on Linux systems are either meant to target servers or were personalized attacks that you’re not gonna accidentally download.
On that vein, I also kinda suspect that many people who use Linux may be bigger targets for their employer than their personal PC. Which is actually scary, cause personalized attacks are far harder to defend against. I expect the average Linux user is technically savvy. Not a lot of money in try to do a standard, broad attack on such types (I think most attacks on personal computers are broad attempts that mostly depend on a small fraction of technologically incompetent people falling for simple schemes). But a personalized attack that happens to infiltrate a fortune 500 company? Now that’s worth a lot of money. Using Linux won’t protect you against those kinda attacks.
Honestly by the time I decide to retire an old machine, it’s because I’ve developed so much animosity towards it that I’m much more likely to have an attitude of “good riddance” than “farewell old friend”.
FreeBSD unless I’m doing something that’s need a fairly secure system, in which case OpenBSD disconnected from the Internet with my private mirror for security patches.
Back in the day, I was very interested in (the now extinct) PC-BSD, but it really didn't like the unusual HDD setup I had (Third IDE channel maybe? The details are fuzzy now.)
Never got to the stage of trying gaming on it, but I think I might have been planning to dual boot?
Anyway, it must have been a while ago because that was my previous PC, which I donated to a relative the better part of a decade ago.
So, given that it was a FreeBSD, I guess that's what I'd be looking into, but I can't say I know enough right now.
Yeah it literally pops a screen sized warning when anything tries to run as admin. Linux is very vulnerable as well. Hackers are just really good at what they do.
Installing 25 year old binaries on Linux is rather interesting - relevant for stuff like some of the old Loki ports. Problem is mostly that they’ve been written with kernel 2.2 in mind, which does have different behaviour for quite a few things - you generally can find old libc versions compatible with the binary, but those libc versions don’t necessarily play nice with the kernel.
There are some compatibility flags which made things work last time I checked - but not sure if that’s the case, and it definitely won’t work forever, given that 32bit x86 support is likely to be dropped eventually.
It's funny, the only Linux software I've ever used that was only shipped as binaries was Loki games. Also, the only software that broke after binary compatibility went south. There used to be a giant tarball of old libraries and jiggerypokery that enabled the Loki games to sorta kinda work.
I was kind of sad to see that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri didn't run too well, but then I tried to play the GOG version on x64 Windows 11 and there are occasional weird issues. So, eh.
There’s a lot of enterprise stuff that only ships as binaries. I had some fun in the late 00s trying to find the most recent distribution still shipping packages for egcs as that was the only compiler supported by the Lotus Domino SDK.
(For the younger ones here: There was some disagreement about gcc development, which resulted in the egcs fork. It got merged back into mainline gcc by he late 90s already, though)
At the time when the Loki ports happened it was a great thing - before that you pretty much had doom and quake available. Nowadays things are better with steam, but it’s quite likely that we’ll see some stuff break there in a few years as well, at least for older games.
Just yesterday I updated an 8bitdo controller’s firmware. I just keep a laptop with windows around for this sort of nonsense. And no, it’s one of the older ones that do not work with the android app, not that using the app is any better.
linuxmemes
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.