Linux and open source in general completely blow apart capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement. Open source ecosystem primarily run by volunteers has produces some of the most interesting and innovative technologies that we’ve seen. The reality is that people make interesting things because they’re curious and they enjoy making stuff. Pretty much nobody makes anything interesting with profit being the primary motive.
It wouldn’t necessarily collapse (it wasn’t exactly suffering before FOSS stuff “hit the shelves”, so to speak) but the gatekeeping that comes with it would certainly cause a tremendous amount of stagnation
Half the user-facing internet broke for a few hours when one guy withdrew a shitty one-liner piece of JavaScript (the whole leftpad thing) because someone somewhere added it as a dependency to a dependency to a dependency until it was pulled into an enormous frontend library. The internet relies more on random open source contributions than a lot of people are aware of.
I do too. To be clear, I did NOT mean that we could go without it today. What I meant was that if we didn’t have it to start with, things would’ve likely still developed albeit much more slowly.
I’ll also preface this by saying I definitely slightly misread everything before and so my reply was kinda crappy
What I meant was that if we didn’t have it to start with, things would’ve likely still developed albeit much more slowly.
I dont think we will ever know, but Im not sure I agree. I dont know what the landscape would look like without relying on open source and patent theft. A lot of the stuff would probably not be financially viable.
The innovation argument is shaky at best many of the corporations innovations are brought or copied really. Is a story that became pretty common in the latest decades one guy come with a good idea some other mofo takes it and profits with it.
That's why it's important to use hard copyleft licenses like the GPLv3 instead of merely open-source MIT or BSD licenses wherever possible when you publish software.
Indeed, the corps did a whole campaign lobbying for permissive licenses precisely so they could plunder open source work. Hard copyleft should be used for any serious project.
What’s more is that corporate driven research is necessarily biased towards whatever is profitable which is often at odds with what’s socially useful. For example, it’s more profitable to research drugs that help maintain disease and can be sold over a long time than drugs that cure it. Profit motive here ends up being completely at odds with what’s beneficial for people who get sick.
And of course, any research that doesn’t have a clear path towards monetization isn’t going to be pursued. This is precisely why pretty much all fundamental research comes out of the public sector.
capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement
I don’t know who is arguing this because it’s incredibly stupid. The greatest scientific minds of history, the mathematicians, the physicists, the inventors, were not capitalists, they’re people with passion for their work.
If we move to a society that guarantees basic human needs and good education, we’re only going to have more scientists and engineers that progress technology even faster.
Capitalists argue this because it gives them the appearance of a moral high ground.
Eshittification shows how untrue this - capitalism by its very nature will always devolve into worse and worse offerings because it's reliant on squeezing out ever more profit.
Capitalism will only ever puh out the bare minimum of technological advancement. And keeping people in indentured labour (aka employees) to the capitalist system so that they either have no time to come up with innovations themselves or they own the intellectual property of any indentured workers means that the overwhelming majority of innovation is monopolised by capitalism too. Which also contributes to the appearance of pushing advancement.
This is so wrong. It’s not volunteers writing this code it is people employed by companies who are paid to write this code. You do know people have to eat.
Open source has existed long before companies started getting involved with it. Meanwhile, people having to eat has nothing to do with the argument being made which is that capitalism and profit motive are not required for creativity and technological progress.
This is true to some extent, but the best, most successful open source software is nowadays to a large extent made by for-profit businesses developing it for their own use but sharing it with the world.
There is a strong correlation between “is this kind of software mainly used by businesses vs. individuals” and “does this kind of software tend to be open source”. Hardly anyone uses proprietary version control or web server software anymore. But (other extreme) in the area of video games, nearly all of them are still proprietary and probably will be for a long time. Software such as web browsers or office suites sits somewhere in between, both kinds exist there.
Biggest and most popular projects are attractive to companies as well as individuals for the same reasons. However, the original point was that companies are not needed for open source to exist or for innovation to happen.
A lot of high tech development comes with a greed motive, e.g. IPO, or getting bought out by a large company seeking to enter the space, e.g. Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus.
And conversely, a lot of open source software are copies of commercially successful products, albeit they only become widely adopted after the originals have entered the enshittified phase of their life.
Is there a Lemmy without Reddit? Is there a Mastodon without Twitter? Is there LibreOffice without Microsoft Office and decades of commercial word processors and spreadsheets before that? Or OpenOffice becoming enshittified for that matter? Is there qBittorrent without uTorrent enshittified? Is there postgreSQL without IBM’s DB2?
The exception that I can see is social media and networked services that require active network and server resources, like Facebook YouTube, or even Dropbox and Evernote.
Okay, The WELL is still around and is arguably the granddaddy of all online services, and has avoided enshittification, but it isn’t really open source.
The idea that these things wouldn’t exist without commercial analogs is silly. You do realize that things like BBS boards and IRC existed long before commercial social media platforms right? In fact, we might’ve seen things like social media evolve in completely different directions if not for commercial platforms setting standards based on attracting clicks, and monetizing users.
all the for profit things we use are worse because they are for profit.
most of the time a site or service UI is made worse it’s because AB testing found the worse UI wastes user’s time and the metrics read that as engagement.
Exactly, most of the bloat on commercial sites isn’t there for the benefit of the user, but rather in order to monetize them. It’s ads, trackers, metrics, and all the other garbage that you don’t actually want.
Which is…still not an OS. It’s a distribution. Specifically, it’s a fork of Ubuntu. To reiterate what the OP was saying, they’re catering to the Windows audience, who understand the concept of a “new Windows version,” but who wouldn’t understand the concept of a distribution.
It’s actually not even a distro, according to their own description at least
Is it a distro?
Not quite, it’s a package archive with the latest KDE software on top of a stable base. While we have installable images, unlike full Linux distributions we’re only interested in KDE software.
They probably feel like the name distribution means more than just slapping a DE on it and basically a PPA. Then again, haven’t stopped loads of distros from doing that hah.
Could be another way to discourage people using it as a beginner distro or something.
What exactly is an OS to you? All distros are operating systems because they ship all the tools and utilities need for the system to function (on top of a package manager).
The fact that the KDE devs didn’t write that code themselves doesn’t disqualify it from being an OS.
An OS is the interface layer between hardware and software. It’s the first code that runs after the boot loader, and it exposes an API for syscalls that allow user processes to allocate typically restricted resources, while also tracking and maintaining those allocated resources, doing process scheduling, and a bunch of other critical tasks.
All distros are operating systems because they ship all the tools and utilities need for the system to function
All distros contain operating systems (or, more accurately, kernels), or, rather, are built on top of them. A distribution is a collection of curated software, along with an init system and, for linux, package manager, and, frequently, a particular desktop environment. These pieces of software are, on some level, superfluous. You can have an OS without them. They don’t comprise the OS as a distinct conceptual layer of a computer system, of which there is the hardware, operating system, application, and user layers. The operating system is just Linux - because that is the interface layer between the hardware and software.
Saying “all distros are operating systems” is like saying “all cars are engines.” It’s just wrong. And I don’t care what wikipedia has to say about it.
Neon is more of a testbed than a proper distro (they don’t actually even use that word).
Is this “the KDE distro”?
Nope. KDE believes it is important to work with many distributions, as each brings unique value and expertise for their respective users. This is one project out of hundreds from KDE.
Not quite, it’s a package archive with the latest KDE software on top of a stable base. While we have installable images, unlike full Linux distributions we’re only interested in KDE software.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux is in fact KDE/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, KDE plus Linux.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Windows, is in fact, Adware/NT, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Adware plus NT.
Haha (but in all seriousness, his lack of understanding of the issue was embarrassing, even if he did apologise afterwards; it’s like Ballmer: everyone remembers him saying “Linux is a cancer”, yet nobody remembers him apologising, when he saw Satya Nadella found a way to make money off Linux, rather than look for ways to tear it down as competition). In both cases these men saw that a change in their stance would allow them to achieve their goals (of promoting free software, and making money, respectively) much more easily).
So here you can see me behaving like the average Linux user, hating on Microsoft and being elitist about my distro, and I’m done ranting about M$.
hmm, looks like my link still works… clicking on any of those words should take them to the answer, which is a bit too involved for me to summarize :). if for some reason your client isn’t reading it, here’s the naked link:
Appimages for in-dev programs usually have an auto-updater that runs when you run the program, too, which is accetapble by my factual and perfect standards. It would be nice if someone put together an appimage store to manage these, I guess.
Enough with the fan wars. Let’s be perfectly honest for once. Windows, Linux, MacOS - they all suck. Sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in different ways. But they all suck.
Windows users - I get you, you use it because it sorta works 40%, of the time and sucks in the way you understand.
Linux users - I get you, you know all of the arcane incantations you need to quickly install, update, and troubleshoot your os in a terminal window. It works - once you apply your custom bash script that applies every change you need to get everything exactly how you like it. But again, it sucks in the way you understand.
MacOS users - well I don’t really get you. You know what you’ve done.
We deserve better than this, guys. We deserve an os that just works, is easy to use, easy to configure, doesn’t require an IT degree to use, and that we can recommend to our grandma without a second thought.
Personally, I love that there are so many choices. And, while I don’t like Apple products, I’m glad the choice exists, so that people who do like them (like you) are able to enjoy them.
Macbooks just make really nice ssh terminals for accessing your Linux dev environment. Though these days there are decent options for Linux terminals with a similar form factor, they just don’t tend to be much cheaper.
Originally but afaik they rewrote basically the whole OS over the years and nothing of the original BSD remains. That’s what I heard but I never verified.
It’s barely recognizable if you look at it as BSD. People like to say that ChromeOS is not “acktually” Linux, but MacOS is waaayyyyy further from BSD than ChromeOS is to Linux.
Okay, this quote from the Wikipedia page made me laugh.
TempleOS received mostly “sympathetic” reviews. Tech journalist David Cassel opined that “programming websites tried to find the necessary patience and understanding to accommodate Davis”.
@eochaid@OsrsNeedsF2P yeah… I’m sorry but that’s like saying all screwdrivers suck. If you don’t take the time to learn how to use a tool you will always have a negative experience using said tool. You are never going to find an advanced technology that’s been dumbed down to the point where you can’t break it.
Except that there’s a ton of actual competition in the screwdriver market that has forced innovation and improved screwdriver functionality that it is essentially “solved”.
Even cheap screwdrivers are easy to use and will do the job, they just might break after a few years. Expensive screwdrivers add extra features and are built to a higher quality. You can absolutely look up reviews and find “the best” screwdriver.
You also don’t need to learn to use a screwdriver. They’re all built to be self explanatory. If they have advanced features that need explaining, they’ll include a manual that explains each feature at a high school reading level because that’s their target market.
Also, there is no locked in loyalty to screwdriver brands. If a brand releases a shit driver, they’ll get roasted. If a new contender puts out a screwdriver that’s better than the rest, tradespeople will flock to it.
I would love it for OSes to be treated like screwdrivers are.
Probably an unpopular opinion on here, but the OS I recommend for grandparents and parents is ChromeOS. It’s so locked down that it’s almost indestructible, and they almost never need any specialized software that you’d use Windows/MacOS for. If you’re savvy enough you can also use Linux on it in a container, which is how I prefer to use it for day to day stuff (in my case, data related workflows).
Yep. I’m in IT, so every time my parents’ computer “does something weird,” I get a call. Bought them Chromebooks a few Christmases ago and the calls have all but stopped.
Lol Linux is easier than Windows, you don’t need to know any troubleshooting secrets or bash. Even the installation is easier
How many people do you know with Android phones that know bash?
Terminal isn’t any more necessary on Linux than Windows but the commands are simpler
The downside of Linux is that it’s free, that means they can’t afford to pay manufacturers to include their OS at the same scale as Microsoft. Thus Windows will have more users and be a more profitable ecosystem to target software for
Equating Android and desktop linux isnt very accurate. Terminal on android is very limited compared to linux. Many common softwares are still installed with commands and occasionally need maintenance and most are done via commands.
Recently helped a few setup ubuntu as dual boot. Installation isnt always smooth and most accompanying software stores are buggy or dont have many commonly used softwares.
Been using Ubuntu on my desktop for a couple of years, following a couple years use of WSL (so I’m very comfortable using the terminal etc)
Off the top of my head, some of the stuff I ran into almost immediately:
the package manager has been essentially unusable - the home page will work okay, but trying to view or install any applications through it, it just hangs forever. So I just go and use apt-get, but that’s not what I’d call ‘easier’ or ‘just works’
Firefox windows regularly break - the contents of the page still work fine but I can’t resize or move the window, have to close it and open a new one. This happens multiple times a day
only way I could get the discord app installed was with a .deb (since the package manager didn’t work), so as soon as it’s out of date I just get a message saying “you need to update”. So I have to use it in the browser
speaking of discord - I like to use push to talk. Guess what, push to talk is impossible with Wayland. Supposedly this is a feature, not a bug
also couldn’t get vnc working to remote home while travelling, due to Wayland. Maybe if I persisted with troubleshooting I could have got it to work, but it took me 30s on windows.
installed zoom - it won’t launch from the gui, I have to launch it from the terminal. Also, ‘join this meeting’ web links don’t work, I have to copy paste them into the app
There’s plenty more quirks I run into all the time but thats just shit I run into with a clean install and very typical hardware.
I love interacting with Linux through the terminal - I hate interacting with it through a gui. That’s not my definition of easier lol
The OS I direct the technologically-illiterate to when I don’t plan on supporting it myself is invariably iOS. Boomers don’t need anything more anyway.
When I worked as a IT Tech at a University years ago we had a lot of MacOS users who believed they could just pick it up and use it like their iPhone. It was absurd how well their marketing worked because those users either forced themselves to learn it or dropped it and went back to Windows.
I know a lot of iOS users who have iPads and iPhones but still have windows PCs because they don’t have to worry about compatibility issues.
I’m one of those guys, IOS phone with windows PC. There really isn’t much out there that is as convenient as IOS, but theres no way I would use a Mac, as compatibility issues and more expensive hardware will ultimately hurt functionality.
It sucks in the way you understand and know because nothing else even exists. No one is interested in having to cater to their walled garden unless there’s money to be made. Meanwhile both Linux and Windows have many open source projects and hobbyists working on things. So you might get a mac driver for something you buy but most of the time macos is an afterthought at best in many hobby projects. Also lol mac gaming is a joke. Even Linux is getting better support now than macos in that regard since the Steamdeck.
I haven’t used macOS in years, so now it might actually be the golden pie in the sky “it just works” OS that Apple’s fans have always pretended it was. But Apple’s condescending “we know what’s best for you” attitude that they take into iOS (and nearly everything else they do) puts me off from giving them a second chance.
Yeah it was just a joke because I love to piss off the MacOS guys. But its like a brotherly teasing. Like, I love you guys, but I gotta rib you, you know.
I think Apple’s biggest sin is that everything works as long as all of your hardware, software, and co-workers have an apple emblazoned on their back. But the moment you have to work with anything or anyone that doesnt use Apple, you have problems. And Apple seems to encourage this because it gets their users to dread working with Windows or Linux users.
The sad thing is that I like a lot of their software. But using their OS is like having Steve Jobs standing over your shoulder and smacking you on the head when you try to shift outside of their intended workflow. I keep running into situations where Windows and Linux would let me go left or right (after finding a hidden and misnamed switch or running a well researched and crafted bash command), and MacOS just put a roadblock on the left because fuck you we said no.
I know that my ideal of a perfect OS is unrealistic. MacOS is more stable because it’s more rigid. Windows and Linux prove that the more flexible you are, the harder it is to use. But settling for one option and looking down at everyone who chose different isn’t going to help. We should all keep criticising our chosen option and root for others that are criticising their own. Because it seems like Apple, Microsoft, and the Open Source community are all in a rut, safely ignoring basic fucking usage issues because of an implicit assumption that their user base isn’t going anywhere.
I live in a mixed OS household. My wife and I both use windows and Apple machines for various purposes (my wife’s work requires both, my mac is just for dabbling) and I have some linux boxes for streaming or storage or whatever. And while that gives me the benefits of all three, I also have to deal with the problems of all three. And its a lot, guys. Not to mention they all refuse to work together.
It depends. It could also be a better idea to introduce a sort of “IT driver’s license” for everyone to have basic understanding/skills to use their devices. Sure, modern software stacks are ridiculously complex and no one understands every detail down to each machine code/assembly instruction, so there’s always a big amount of abstraction or simplification needed, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to request that someone with literal zero knowledge whatsoever should be able to perfectly use an OS or device. That’s also not even possible. I see it with my mother, she started from zero knowledge but she had to learn some basics to be able to do the few things she needs to do. Of course she uses Linux. No prior Windows knowledge means a much easier start with Linux of course. She wouldn’t have been able to use Windows either with zero knowledge. So this is a point that some forget: even Windows users need knowledge to be able to use Windows, and they probably already earned that knowledge in much earlier years. This Windows knowledge also works against you building up Linux (or even OS X) knowledge because Windows works quite differently from a Unix-like OS. This is not irrelevant: a Windows user who spent like 30 years in Windows has a much harder time learning Linux, than someone who didn’t have that. But, again, not really the fault of Linux that you indoctrinated yourself with Windows-only MS product specific knowledge over the last decades. This is probably the biggest problem there is, because almost everyone on the planet has already acquired some amount of Windows knowledge in the past. This works against you when trying to switch. Windows knowledge is mostly Windows-specific. When learning about IT, you should make sure that you learn things in a preferably OS agnostic way. Which is also the reason why schools etc. should never teach “using MS products”. They should always teach fundamentals, irrelevant of what you use afterwards. And those fundamentals should of course not be taught using commercial products, but rather open source software.
Then there are some fantasies which MS and Apple could establish in the broader population which aren’t true, for example that CLI/terminal usage is archaic and has no place on modern desktops anymore. CLI usage will always remain as a fast alternative to a lot of tasks which are hard or even impossible to do via GUI. Even MS has realized this and introduced Powershell, a new terminal, and winget, for example. As well as WSL (which was originally and still mostly is being used to have access to powerful Linux-based CLI utilities). Yet still a lot of people seem to think that CLI is obsolete or that it’s “hard”. Sure, if you do some scripting or complex one-liners, it can be too hard for someone without strong IT knowledge. But most commands are really basic and easy to understand. Even my mother is able to use basic commandline utilities, and she even prefers it sometimes over clicking around in the GUI. To claim that this is impossible or too hard to learn for a Windows user is, I don’t know. At least untrue. Probably even an insult to your own intelligence. And the main reason why most Linux users suggest doing things via commandline is that this is an almost distro- and desktop-independent way of doing things.
Also, not a big fan of the “fan” label here. Regardless of whether or not you like Linux (I like Linux as an OS more than Windows, because I think the Unix-way is better, but it’s also about so much more), I see a neutral, free/libre open source (FLOSS) operating system as the base for our digital lives as a necessity, and so I see Windows or OS X as intrinsically worse. I don’t see it as a kind of war between different products on equal footing. One product denies you any rights and control (and in more recent times, also extracts even more value and data from you than just the price you paid for the license to use it), and one that gives you full rights and control (and pretty much never extracts any more from you). It’s not OK that we use our devices for so many things in life nowadays, that all aspects of your life are being done via digital means nowadays, and yet the most popular operating systems are still 100% proprietary black boxes fully controlled by big US companies. This needs to change, and it should have happened a long time ago already. And Linux is simply the most mature and most well supported FLOSS operating system out of all of them. I actually wouldn’t care if it would be FreeBSD or OpenBSD or whatever instead, but I see Linux as being the most mature, well-supported and mainstream-viable option here. I only care that it’s not a damn black box I don’t have any real control over.
We need (almost) everyone on such open technologies like Linux, because the future (or even present) for Windows users looks like this: no control, no privacy (plus AI being trained on your work/data as well), big vulnerability when (not if) MS gets hacked (and they’re a huge, juicy target, and we already saw them being compromised twice in the last couple of years), pricey subscription to MS’ services which continues to get pricier once you’re successfully vendor-locked-in (once all your servers, desktops and data is in MS’ cloud, you won’t be able to easily leave their services anymore, so they are free to increase prices until it hurts you). Even if you happen to like the offering MS gives you, does that really seem like “the future” of computing to you? To me, that’s backwards. Or mainframe history repeating itself. Moving into proprietary clouds with vendor-lock-in only really benefits the cloud provider, which is why they want all users to join the “party”.
I’m not a big fan of Stallman in general, but his fundamental propositions e.g. that FLOSS software is intrinsically better than proprietary black boxes, is true. I wonder how long we still need as a society, to arrive at that realization. I assumed that the Snowden revelations as well as the desaster that Windows 10 was for privacy, would have already started a change in thinking about such things. But that probably wasn’t enough (strangely). I’m not sure what else would need to happen, but I guess something like first MS shoving all their users into their cloud, and then MS being hacked (again) but this time with malicious auto-updates being pushed to all MS software users as well, impacting tons of businesses. Then, maybe, people will start thinking whether this was such a great idea to begin with to play along with what MS envisioned as the “grand future”. Unfortunately I see parallels with the human behavior concerning climate change here as well. It’s like we have to first destroy our climate and suffer the consequences, before we realize it’s a bad idea and we should do it differently RIGHT NOW. We are just incredibly short-sighted and we only learn AFTER disasters, which were even announced long before. It’s tragic.
And for those people who know or think they could start using Linux but still use Windows because it’s more “aesthetically pleasing” or whatever else irrelevant aspect they make up to “justify” still staying on that sinking MS ship in 2023, please reconsider your priorities.
This is a pointless argument even saying that everyone sucks, linux runs worse on the desktop because it doesn’t get even 1/10th the investment from consumer hardware manufacturers compared to windows or mac to make it compatible. nevertheless linux is undoubtedly less difficult and more efficient to integrate than windows, for example the steam deck is done very well but it could be done better since KDE, wayland and arch do not have the same number of employees as microsoft.
God I wish that were true but there are a LOT of people (well, conservatives) who are vehemently against wider society allowing cross dressing or medical transition. It’s not 90% :(
I have come to think that when profits are at odds with health, happiness, the good of society and humanity, then either a non profit foundation needs to be running it or it needs to be in the hands of the government—but a much less corrupt one. And I believe oligopolies need to be broken up and anti trust laws greatly expanded and enforced. Then we can deal with the oligopoly / plutocracy. We set a maximum wage (including all earnings) and tax 100% above that. Penalties for regulatory breaches include jail time. For corporations. With corporations reigned in, oligopolies and oligarchies crumbled, we can prevent regulatory capture and corruption. Campaign finance is abolished and it is paid for out of public funds. We abolish first past the post voting in favor of scientifically determined better alternatives to ensure voters actually have a variety of choices.
Idk wtf that makes me except maybe a ranting lunatic lol
I don’t think it’s that controversial unless you’re hardcore conservative. Realistically he just laid out the view of most of the Libertarian party. Nothing he said denotes woke or communist except for the part or him claiming to be one. I’d like to see the full context, because that woke communist comment probably wasn’t directed at Linus’ views
I personally think communism especially Marxism sounds really good on paper. The problem is that just about every time it has been attempted things didn’t really seem to work like they are supposed to.
Its like every state that attempts communism just ends up being a perpetual Vanguard state, and it ends up being authoritarian and terrible.
I really think there are several good ideas in Marx theories, but the actual implementation of those theories needs some work to figure out how they should be incorporated without being corrupted and overtaken by tyrants.
You’re right. Communism is like the greatest social form a society can possibly achieve. The Problem is, that humans are dumb and will always try to get the best out of it for themselves so the concept of communism is ruined by those people. It maybe is practicable in small “society’s” (your family as example) but fails in big societies like states.
Capitalism didn’t appear over night. It took several attempts and iterations to get it anywhere near what it is today. Most modern theories on the implementation of Marxism focus less on centralized government authority and more on democracy in the work place, and eliminating 3rd party shareholders’ control. Much of the struggle with implementation of this, is that the existing financial structures aren’t set up to handle this type of thing well.
People would read the second message, type the yes prompt, break their system. But still claim that it was linux’s fault, and that the OS doesn’t work.
Message two can also be caused by packages (or rather, package creators) with delusions of grandeur that only think that the system will stop working without them, so they rig things to threaten to uninstall the system.
Or else someone has created too heavy a dependency on something that ought to be removable, but isn't thanks to malice or incompetence (or both).
We still mock Microsoft for putting too heavy a dependency (or at least removal FUD) on whatever web browser they bundle with their OSes (first IE, now Edge), and here we might have a package creator trying the same damn thing.
Honestly I once did this to my desktop environment because I saw a huge list of packages and ignored it because I thought they were packages that could be upgraded, not that it was going to uninstall my fucking desktop lol
That’s the state of computing in 2023: a browser disguised as a native app running 15 layers of Javascript is used as a friggin terminal. And nobody bats an eyelids, as if the utter insanity of it made any sense.
And the installer is 117M compressed. That’s MEGABYTES… For a terminal!
I don’t understand why desktop JS apps don’t use React Native at least. It’s still JavaScript but doesn’t use a browser, and renders to native UI widgets. Far lighter than Electron.
The disadvantage with React Native is that you still have to maintain a UI for each platform because it maps to native widgets while a web UI works the same on every platform.
Business/application logic can be 80-90% of an app’s code, and all of it can be reused across platforms. The actual UI rendering is just a small part of it.
In the UI code, some of it does have to differ across platforms but it’s mostly the lower level components like buttons, text fields, etc. Some product UI code built on top of those abstractions can be reused across platforms.
Sure, but it’s still more work than a web UI, and using a web UI is a lot more flexible. For example, say you want to render a chart or some other visualization. It’s trivial to do with a web UI, but can be a tricky problem with native widgets, especially if you want to keep the UX consistent across platforms. I agree that using React Native can work fine in a lot of cases, but I can also understand the appeal of using the web UI stack. Another aspect is likely familiarity, people use the tools they know, and if somebody is already comfortable with a particular ecosystem they’re likely to leverage it.
Well with react native you still have to deal with the native problem which a developer doesn’t want to deal with, you know… You could… But if they really cared about making the app efficient and well they would have had a different decision making process… People nowadays don’t really just the right tool for the job, they just have a tool and try to turn it in a universal hammer and solve everything with it
Exactly, your program using the minimum of RAM allows more for other programs to run and gives more memory for the OS to cache literally anything that isnt their web app, likely the filesystem, and that is a much better use of the RAM then letting electron or some such eat it all.
I mean, at least for Linux, I was under the impression that the disk cache only stores programs that have already been loaded once, since there’s not much point loading something from disk to cache if you never actually load it later.
I swear. I quit using iTerm and moved to Kitty because it was too inefficient and was eating up my battery on the go. There are so many apps that are just diguised browsers that eat too much memory and processing power and they make needing a powerful machine a requirement if you want to have multiple apps open. It’s getting to a ridiculous point and it’s inconvenient.
I’ve been using Alacritty for the last 4 years, it’s kinda the opposite of this nonsense. It’s written in Rust, it’s super light weight, highly optimised, and uses hardware acceleration to render the terminal. It’s top of the chart for every terminal performance benchmark conceived.
However, that lightness and fastness comes at a cost. There are some basic features they just won’t add because they’re outside the scope of the project. Eg, tabs (“just use a tiling wm and do your own tabs in the wm”) or a scrollbar (“just use a shell with a scrolling screen buffer like Tmux”), or different coloured backgrounds for each opened window (“why would anyone ever want to do that?”).
My holy grail terminal would be something like Alacritty, written in Rust, blisteringly fast and light weight, but with tabs, scrollbar, bookmarks, etc.
I find myself falling back to using Konsole a lot these days, it’s got all the features I want, is fast enough, and already installed on every system I use Plasma on.
Me too. I just ran time tree across my home directory a few times. Native console (ie C-A-F3) - 54 seconds, Konsole - eight seconds.
Waveterm is still installing (Arch AUR). The fan has a Gentooesque sound to it as a suspiciously complicated thing gets built. Oh God … electon … terminal shaking … golang … fans whining … lap melting … the Old Ones are stirring.
The deps for this thing are many. " I watched Firefox builds on Gentoo glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate". OK, its now arrived and my laptop case is making ping noises as it cools.
It takes 10 seconds or so to start up. Look pretty. Accept license agreement (wtf). Now what? Hmm lets try typing in that box. OK. time tree. Go back to Lemmy to type the last two paras of this comment, get bored and uninstall waveterm.
You nailed it. Too bloated (300 MB, wtf), too slow, incompatible with zsh and fish, no tiling, too few keyboard shortcuts, and way, WAY too much wasted screen space.
I’ve been a KDE lover since 2.0 or so. I recall compiling it from a tarball for a laugh and it mostly working, which was quite a surprise. I think I had Slackware installed at the time on my desktop and KDE 1.x on it.
Anyway, 23 or so years later … I’m looking forward to 6. Things have changed a bit 8)
Dolphin, Konsole, Okular, Skanpage are so nice and I wouldn’t be able to live without them. They feel so polished and solid, and somehow manage to have all the features I want without feeling cluttered
Ooh, don’t mind if I do. Luckily I happen to have a tame VMware cluster and rather a lot of laptops (“mwaaa, mwaaa, won’t run Windows 11”) to play with.
One of my employees has actually expressed an interest in Linux as a daily driver, which has only taken 23 years. I’m looking for my corp standard distro and I don’t think Gentoo or Arch are going to do the job. I’m leaning towards Fedora at the moment but there’s no rush, I only get one chance to bring the kids into the light, despite being the MD 8)
If it should be corporation stuff with central accounts and all I think GNOME is really good. Fedora GNOME could for sure be an option and I would recommend Silverblue from ublue.it in that case, as it has all the drivers and codecs
Wow, just had a look at the Wezterm GitHub page, read the features and the docs. I think you’re right, it does look like it will replace Alacritty for me.
For anyone else wondering about the differences between Alacritty and wezterm, or still on the fence, read this thread, particularly the comment from wez: github.com/wez/wezterm/discussions/1769
+1 on this, I switched to Wezterm on my windows work machine to get most of the features missing from alacrity without having to go through the hoops to get a tmux like experience on windows.
I used to do Windows -> Alacrity -> WSL2 -> Tmux then launch my Windows powershell core session inside that terminal.
I never understand the whole thing around “fast” terminals. How can a terminal be “slow”? Surely the terminal you’re using has no effect on the programs you’re calling, so what’s being measured here?
I get what you mean, it is an interesting question to explore.
For me, it think it appeals to my obsessive engineer-brain, I am hooked on chasing efficiency.
Eg, if one tool uses 10MB ram and takes 1second to complete a task, and another tool takes 50MB ram and 5 seconds to complete the same task, then clearly I want to use the more efficient one. The other must be wasting resources, right?
When it comes to real life software and real tasks, it is a lot more complicated than that, there are hundreds of variables to take into account and compare. But if one tool stands out among the others, optimising to achieve the best number (fastest time, lowest power draw, lowest ram use, etc) in each comparable variable, then I absolutely must use that one, it would be irresponsible not to, right?
Throw hardware acceleration into the mix, and it takes the situation to a new level. Why make my poor CPU render the text on the screen 60 times per second, when I can get the GPU to do it? It’s just sitting there doing nothing, and it’s better at the job anyway, and as a bonus you get even lower CPU utilisation and lower ram usage.
However, as I described in my previous post, chasing these numbers can come at the cost of usability. That’s the case with Alacritty, and why I will be switching to wezterm.
I am using Konsole currently, as it works best in KDE. Should I switch to Alacritty? I like to have one window and the rest in tabs, its pretty great. I guess alacritty doesnt have that right? What all does fit in the config? Konsole has tabs with special descriptors using path, host, program etc. You can change the color scheme, its pretty nice.
The only stupid part is bundling a whole browser for a webpage. HTML5 as an executable format is fantastic - all the bullshit Java promised, except people actually use it. But for some godforsaken reason, everybody ships a platform-specific… portable OS… with every single program.
Electron and whatnot have turned “Java but good” into “Docker but awful.”
Well, there are virus as any kind of device that runs any logic, the thing here is that is harder to get hacked than with this kind of tools that Windows uses.
So yeah, I don’t need many apps that my Mac has and could be used to hack me with 0 click interaction or with valid Windows certified programs. Still, the “no virus” is not the only reason, updating a Linux system is just a few seconds and your work could have their own repository mirrored and monitored.
In other comment you said something along the lines of “just hire an expert”. They charge way more by the hour.
Maintaining a distro for this very reason will never look ‘cheaper’ for executives. Trust me. They rather pay you to see stuff that has CLEAR and FAST deliverables, that’s what they do what they do, make/save money; take shortcuts.
Well, I think they are expensive because they are actually experts, not like random IT hired personal that (in my case) couldn’t even understand how OAuth works.
“no virus” is because it’s literal extracted from the text, not my words. I explain then what I understand with saying “no virus”, as any device can have virus, JavaScript runs on Linux, Windows and Apple. It’s common sense. No need explanation.
I know about this issue, I have read about it already. No one uses this unless noobs watching YouTube tutorials.
Cannot be compared to the vulnerabilities I pasted (0 click exploit). Any system can be hacked, Linux is the most used OS and still have fewer viruses issues as others, but it still has as any system has.
I said distro instead OS, Linux is the most used OS, many people behind working in secure the Linux environment. The example of this exploit also exists on Mac and Windows for years, and it will always happen.
An admin user will know what they are doing, and I doubt they will install a package from an external source downloaded randomly on internet, for the non-admin users, without sudo they can’t install/infect that malware on your Linux.
I said distro instead OS, Linux is the most used OS,
Wrong, Linux totals 3% of the desktop market which is what’s being discussed in the original post.
many people behind working in secure the Linux environment.
Many people work on securing Windows so your point is…?
The example of this exploit also exists on Mac and Windows for years, and it will always happen.
Whataboutism.
An admin user will know what they are doing, and I doubt they will install a package from an external source downloaded randomly on internet, for the non-admin users, without sudo they can’t install/infect that malware on your Linux.
Wrong. This is so wrong. The most common and effective attacks start with phishing people who think they know better. A user downloading a zip or rar file is enough, they don’t need to be an admin or have sudo rights.
Seriously just stop talking about a topic you have zero knowledge on. I suggest you do a SANS course if you’re actually interested in learning.
WTF, you look like having a bad day, because of my lack of English knowledge doesn’t give you freedom to insult me.
EDIT: I think you are just insulting me, but if Linux is the most used OS means the support should be awesome… worldwide support… while this malware could happen on Linux but also on Apple and of course on Windows, there will be always malware… so at least let’s make one really good as it is right now Linux (with support for old computers, means it’s not forcing users to keep upgrading their hardware), and that’s the reason it is the most used, fits everywhere. Windows only have the monopoly and Apple the “think different” thing (and they give special focus for designers and is Unix, sadly docker is still virtualized).
The linux kernel is not completely secure by default, neither is any specific distribution. No internet connected device could possibly be “set and forget”. Security can not be taken lightly
When it comes to workplaces, you can expect people to deliberately craft a virus and/or try that break into your system specifically. A lot of the world runs on linux, a lot of hackers try to break in to this world.
For personal use it may be true enough to be fine in practice, but it’s a very dangerous thing to believe for a professional setting with probably expensive equipment and valuable data.
Yeah. I know that. But that’s in theory. And it’s more hacking, not a virus.
If that’s really true, it’s surely possible to find an example of a virus that did it’s thing (spread) and do a bit of damage somewhere. And not just say hypothetically it’s true.
I know Linux can be hacked, because I had a webserver hacked. And i see all the logs and the hundreds of login attempts per second and automatic exploits in my logfiles. I have a good idea why most of the Linux boxes get hacked. And all I’ve ever seen were not updated server software resulting in rootkits. 0% is viruses in my experience. Rest is proper issues and maybe the bad guys have been quicker than you. But it’s mostly targeted and rare. And nothing compared to the stuff the windows guys had to deal with during the last year and switch off things until it had been patched properly. We mainly do our updates. And every few years there is a major screwup and you type in a few commands in the terminal to hotfix something. But that’s mainly it. And you can’t make it about any hypothetical issue. While there are supply chain attacks for example, my mom who is using Linux to write her letters and print forms is unlikely to need to learn about that. I told her she doesn’t need antivirus and viruses and trojans are more an academic thing with Linux. She doesn’t need to worry. I also talked about targeted attacks and being a valuable target. But that’s besides the point here. Hence my question and me wanting to stay on point.
Please just prove me wrong. I’m serious. All I could find are some harmless viruses from 2003 that didn’t even spread enough to have reliable numbers. Ransomware that affected ‘tens of users’. And you got the easy position. I advocate for Linux on the desktop. And it’s impossible to prove something is secure. I always have to go into detail, explain viruses, architecture, package managers etc to get my point across. You got the easy position. All you need is to find one counterexample.
And arguments are always the same. I do the whole talk and then say you don’t need antivirus because in real-life there are no viruses. And people ask me ‘but what if tomorrow there is one’. And sure. Nobody believes me when I say I’ve had a quick glance into the future with my crystal ball. But what kind of argument is that? What if I’m struck by lightning on the way home tomorrow if I take the bus instead of the car? I guess I’ll just die then. Many people have been under the influence of ‘windows-truths’ for too long and can’t imagine another world. Some people didn’t listen to the first part of my talk. And some just want the computer to work and a simple answer. I get all of that. But it doesn’t make something true or false.
[Edit: Sorry, had to post this again. I deleted the previous comment by accident instead of editing it what I was trying to do… And Lemmy doesn’t seem to federate deletions that quickly. I’m still learning things here…]
I’ve read that list. There’s not a single name that rings a bell. Which one of those had any consequences in real life and is more than an academic study?
(And besides that: Sure. It’s funny to make every program output your name. But it’s pretty harmless and not on the same level with viruses that do proper damage to a computer infrastructure. I wouldn’t lump all that together. That’s not right, either. And misleading.)
I don’t understand. You made the claim Linux viruses exist. Why is it now my job to disprove their existence?
It’s like with God, Vishnu, Thor, … You claim existence, you show me.
If there are that many experts around. Why can’t they do more than link a Wikipedia article that doesn’t (yet) contain the information I’ve specifically asked for? Shouldn’t they know at least something themselves? At least know 1 name from the worst offender? Why does the other half of experts not know the distinction between virus and other forms of malware? And that it makes a difference here?
I see that people disagree with me. But I seriously doubt that there is a single expert around.
I swear I’m not trolling. If you’re an expert, just give me the name. I’ll even try to look it up myself and if it’s a virus and spread across a few hundred computers around the world and maybe more than 2 or 3 companies and I can find maybe a newspaper article that says it did some harm, I promise I’ll accept that and change my opinion. At least tell me you’ve learned in uni that Linux viruses definitely exist in the wild, but no studies have been done because of X or Y. And we have no numbers. I would think that’s very curious because there are so many linux servers out there, but I’d at least have something to work with. (And don’t take things out of context.)
A virus is a specific type of malware but for the general public is broadly synonymous with malware. Ask the average user, and the commenter in the OP screenshot, what the difference is without looking it up and they can’t tell you.
A virus doesn’t need to be spread broadly for it to be concerning, impactful or dangerous. Often these attacks are very carefully targeted at the victims.
A vulnerability is generally exploited by a virus to inject code by either modifying memory or files the target program relies on. One such vulnerability was
With this vulnerability it was possible to modify any file on a Linux device, meaning viruses would be simple to implement and deploy. Many android devices are still vulnerable.
To think that all possible vulnerabilities have been fixed, or are known to linux developers, would be extremely naive.
Furthermore a virus is often targeting a specific application and while OS level controls restrict the avenues of attack it doesn’t prevent flaws being introduced by developers.
You’ve already been given a list of viruses for Linux, if you’re genuinely so concerned with defining them by impact you can look them up. You have the information needed to do this yourself, and it is not my responsibility to educate you, though I do seek to counter misinformation where possible.
Well, the first article pretty much says what I’m saying. In theory there can be viruses. In the real world they have pretty much no effect. They are more a curiosity than something that really exists and has had consequences. It even says you’re installing antivirus because of the windows clients, not because there were linux viruses.
The second article also is about a security vulnerability and talking about potential consequences. Not a virus that uses this as means to infect people. Not actual consequences.
We’re going in circles. I’m sorry.
And a virus and a vulnerability in some software (or kernel) that can you get hacked are two entirely different things:
They affect different parts of your infrastructure. It is unlikely that someone executes random binaries on your webserver. It is very likely that someone wants to listen to Spotify while editing 150 excel spreadsheeds. So it’s likely your employers execute stuff on their workstations. Also you wouldn’t install a browser in an AWS cloud instance to look at lewd websites. You’re going to use Chrome on your workstation. Viruses affect other and distinct parts of your infrastructure.
You protect for them by different means. Antivirus helps with viruses. For targeted attacks on your webserver, you have firewalls, filter requests, keep your software updated. And don’t do silly stuff. I’ll admit rootkit detection is kind of similar to antivirus. There is some overlap, for example you should also keep Chrome updated on your employers workstation. But updates won’t help you against a virus editing a file on the network share to replicate. You do vastly different things to protect against the different security threats that your company faces.
All the threats have different consequences. Some things just try to wreack havock in your company. Some things you’ll barely notice but hackers are stealing information. Some things try to extort you. Either by blackmailing you to pay to get your data back, or so it doesn’t get leaked. The next few workdays after that happened will be very different, depending on which of those possibilities happened.
So while talking about cybersecurity. Why would I lump all that together and strip the words of their meaning? And in this case on top: One thing is something that actually happened. The other things are just words about something hypethetical. I’m aware you have to protect against potential threats. Nonetheless both things are something different.
Regarding your advice: Yes. I’ve looked it up. I found no viruses that had any significant real-world impact. Hence me insisting on it. I said in my first comment I want to see impact. Not an academic study. Because context matters. We’re talking about someone advertising Linux to an undetermined group of people. These people are concerned with implications for them. If they need to worry. Not if in theory anything can happen. That doesn’t help you choose between two options. And we’re talking about ‘simple truths’. They’re kinda always false. But people want to hear them. They want it condensed into one sentence. Because they own a company that manufactures car tires and they don’t want to get a 20 minute lecture about computer attack vectors. They want to hear if they need to worry about their Linux server. Is it safe or not, do I need to pay someone to install Sophos? And be done with it.
You’re twisting my words so they lose meaning. And change the context. And then posting articles about something related but not the thing.
Please read my first few comments. I’ve talked about it and that’s not what I said. I have found no viruses conforming to what I’ve clarified in my very first comment. I’ve also explained why it’s important to differentiate. I have found things alike. But never the thing. If you twist my words enough and change the context, it would almost seem like I’m contradicting myself, yes. But you’re the one twisting things around until you’re right.
And why are you just now talking about that? Nearly every single comment of me starts right with a sentence that clarifies what I mean?
For the record: I’m not the one changing the meaning of the word. I use it like in the definition. You’re the one extending the meaning arbitrarily.
I think I’ll just wait and see if some expert comes along and gives me my single example. If that doesn’t happen I’m going to stick to my opinion: They exist in theory, but not in practice. And vulnerabilities and rootkits exist, but a vulnerability isn’t automatically called a virus because those are different things.
To end with some more friendly words: I’m pretty sure some people are confusing the words ‘malware’ and ‘virus’. Malware is the umbrella term. I’ve already admitted there is malware. For example the Mirai worm i think had affected hundreds of thousands of IoT devices (speaking of fire and forget embedded linux). And I’ve seen wordpress plugins with vulnerabilities and actual rootkits on webservers myself, as I told earlier. But I’ve also said in this context the distinction matters.
linux
Top