I can’t see that being a reasonable approach for them to take, tbh. One option with TPM is that your system logs in automatically to the desktop, in which case they can just turn it on and use it normally. The other is that it requires a password at some point during startup, to which they could just use a (hardware) keylogger.
Wow, I worded that poorly. I meant that a lot of software not in the repos (usually proprietary apps) provide a .deb download tailered for Ubuntu rather than base Debian.
I’ve heard that before, but there are two main problems that stick out to me:
A lot of the marketing for TPM (at least when I was setting up bitlocker on Windows) suggests that it’s used to support decrypting drives without a password on boot. But that doesn’t seem to offer any protection from the devices being stolen. The bootloader may be safe but it’s not actually verifying that I’m the one booting the device.
I can’t think of a situation where someone would be able to actually modify the bootloader without also having full access to the files and secrets. Especially in a single-boot environment where every time the system is running, the device is decrypted.
I’m not saying that it’s all just a scam or anything like that, but it really feels like I’m missing something important and obvious.
I’ve actually been getting into NixOS recently; interested in replacing an old server I’ve had for like 10 years with something I can just build from a bunch of config files.
Can confirm it is confusing and I have no idea how anything works. :D
In my searches, I’ve come across nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/ , which I’ve gone through a few chapters of - seems good so far.
I don’t know what exact situation could have happened here but I imagine a copy could have also copied the metadata into a new file. So it creates a new file as the destination (setting the birth date), then as part of copying the file it copied the access and modify times.
Now that they’re working on it, I’m interested in seeing how well Wayland in Cinnamon works. Hopefully it can fix some tearing and stuttering issues in my mixed refresh rate multimonitor setup.
Will also be interesting to see how the landscape with Windows goes, especially considering I’m picking up traces of discontent in their ranks. I think Valve’s actions will probably cause them to sit up and pay attention.
Recently switched to using Flatpaks instead of random .debs for a number of apps on my system. /var/lib/flatpak takes up 7GiB, which honestly isn’t that much (even though it’s like quarter of the OS size), given that’s the software I use most of the time.
Was skeptical at first about Flatpaks, but SteamOS showed me that is great at just giving OS developers access to a fully populated app store with minimal work.
Honestly, nowadays I’d say “ability to install flatpaks” should be the criteria on which we decide whether an OS is really “linux” or not (that is, SteamOS is, but Android isn’t).
Edit: Okay. I said something stupid here, my bad. What I was trying to get at is the distinction between Android, etc. and “Desktop” Linuxes like traditional distros, Chromebooks and the Steam Deck. Even though it technically runs Linux, it’s hard to argue that developers for Android are really writing apps that work on “Linux”. Wheras if someone releases a Flatpak version of their app because they think the Steam deck is cool, it works on other distros “for free”.