renzev

joined 8 months ago
[–] renzev@lemmy.world 0 points 18 hours ago

I like your comment a lot because you can substitute a lot of different things for "snap" and it still ends up sounding like a very reasonable opinion

I feel like I would be more okay with leaded gasoline if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with anarcho-capitalism if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with PFAS-coated cookware if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with single-use plastic bags if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with cryptocurrencies if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with generative AI if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

I feel like I would be more okay with eating highly processed meat if it didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago

You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'

But speaking seriously, I think he tried it for a while and didn't like it either... not sure why specifically tho, I'll ask him

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

It's not a miniscule gripe tho. Snap is still broken for many users, and relying on it for something as critical as a web browser is asking for trouble. Experimental technologies like snap should be opt-in for users who are willing to deal with the issues they create. Do they really expect a novice to see firefox's filepicker not behaving correctly, and think "Aha, an XDG desktop portal issue! Let me drop everything I'm doing and go troubleshoot that" ? Ubuntu is meant to be linux for normies, they don't have the time or the knowledge to deal with snap.

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Next step is probably a VM…

Boy, you're gonna love QubesOS

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

One of my friends spent like a month distrohopping just to find a debian-based distro that fits these two criteria:

  • First-class support for KDE

  • Isn't broken all the time

Ubuntu fails both. KDE Neon excels on the first one, but fails harder than ubuntu on the second one. Kubuntu as well. Debian has horridly outdated packages, and he refuses to use nix/flatpak. Tuxedo OS is obscure and broken. Mint is great, but installing KDE takes some effort.

He finally settled on Ubuntu Server with the native KDE package. Still has to do some weird incantations to banish snap tho.

How did things get this bad?

 

It's impressive how duckduckgo manages to be so much better than bing despite being a frontend for bing

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Do these things correlate that much tho? Not to toot my own horn, but I am fairly tech-proficient and have terrible typing skills. My technique is somewhere in between hunt-and-peck and touch-typing, despite regular typing lessons in elementary school. I imagine a lot of other people are like this, and vice-versa as well.

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

yes, it's that.

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

The trick is to give up and just shuttle files from computer to printer via usb stick

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can lock your password database with a key file (this is a standard feature in keepassxc) and transfer the key file once between devices via sneakernet (microsd or usb drive). That way even if someone intercepts your database file, AND knows your password, it is still virtually impossible to crack. Should be a good enough solution, unless you are quantum-tier paranoid

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Marginally better than using discord itself as your password manager (also a true story!)

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you're on Linux and you like minimalism, pass is also a great option

[–] renzev@lemmy.world 28 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I mean he's not wrong about paper being more secure than password manager (provided you have good physical security and trust the people you live with)

 

I've just been playing around with https://browserleaks.com/fonts . It seems no web browser provides adequate protection for this method of fingerprinting -- in both brave and librewolf the tool detects rather unique fonts that I have installed on my system, such as "IBM Plex" and "UD Digi Kyokasho" -- almost certainly a unique fingerprint. Tor browser does slightly better as it does not divulge these "weird" fonts. However, it still reveals that the google Noto fonts are installed, which is by far not universal -- on a different machine, where no Noto fonts are installed, the tool does not report them.

For extra context: I've tested under Linux with native tor browser and flatpak'd Brave and Librewolf.

What can we do to protect ourselves from this method of fingerprinting? And why are all of these privacy-focused browsers vulnerable to it? Is work being done to mitigate this?

 

Context: LaTeX is a typesetting system. When compiling a document, a lot of really in-depth debugging information is printed, which can be borderline incomprehensible to anyone but LaTeX experts. It can also be a visual hindrance when looking for important information like errors.

 
 

Context for newbies: Linux refers to network adapters (wifi cards, ethernet cards, etc.) by so called "interfaces". For the longest time, the interface names were assigned based on the type of device and the order in which the system discovered it. So, eth0, eth1, wlan0, and wwan0 are all possible interface names. This, however, can be an issue: "the order in which the system discovered it" is not deterministic, which means hardware can switch interface names across reboots. This can be a real issue for things like servers that rely on interface names staying the same.

The solution to this issue is to assign custom names based on MAC address. The MAC address is hardcoded into the network adaptor, and will not change. (There are other ways to do this as well, such as setting udev rules).

Redhat, however, found this solution too simple and instead devised their own scheme for assigning network interface names. It fails at solving the problem it was created to solve while making it much harder to type and remember interface names.

To disable predictable interface naming and switch back to the old scheme, add net.ifnames=0 and biosdevname=0 to your boot paramets.

The template for this meme is called "stop doing math".

 

Firefox on Debian stable is so old that websites yell at you to upgrade to a newer browser. And last time I tried installing Debian testing (or was it debian unstable?), the installer shat itself trying to make the bootloader. After I got it to boot, apt refused to work because of a missing symlink to busybox. Why on earth do they even need busybox if the base install already comes with full gnu coreutils? I remember Debian as the distro that Just Wroks(TM), when did it all go so wrong? Is anyone else here having similar issues, or am I doing something wrong?

 

Context:

Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as "cuck licenses") like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.

Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There's nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.

Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that's suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it's protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn't seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

 

Credit for the answer used in the right panel: https://serverfault.com/a/841150

 
 

I recently wanted to run tegaki, and my experience is pretty much summed up by the meme. I consider myself fairly tech-savvy, but I just couldn't figure out how to compile it. So I just gave up, downloaded the .exe and put it into a fresh wine prefix. After installing CJK fonts, everything ran fine. Now I'm trying to get gpaint to work. ~~My distro recently dropped support for gtk+2 (which I am fairly pissed about, since it's the last good version of GTK+), so I have to set that up manually as well.~~ [[[ EDIT: gtk2 is alive and well. I was just being and idiot and searching for gtk2, when the package is actually called gtk+2. ]]] I installed all of the dependencies that ./configure told me to, but I still kept getting obscure errors when running make.

So, here's my question: what tools make the process of running abandonware easier? Docker containers? Also, what can I use to package abandonware in order to make it easy for other people to run? Flatpak? Appimages? Any advice is appreciated!

Also, inb4 "just find a modern alternative". That would be a reasonable solution. I don't want reasonable solutions!

 
 

Does anybody know why dbus exists? I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with a usecase for dbus that isn't already covered by Unix sockets.

You want to remotely control a daemon? Use sockets. You want the daemon to respond to the client? Sockets. Want to exchange information in json? plaintext? binary data? Sockets can do it. Want to restrict access to a socket? Go ahead, change the socket's permissions. Want to prevent unauthorized programs from pretending to be someone they're not? Change the permissions of the directory containing the socket. Want network transparency? That's why we have abstract sockets.

Plenty of well-established software uses sockets. Music player daemon uses sockets. BSPWM uses sockets. Tmux uses sockets. Pipewire uses sockets. Dhcpcd uses sockets. Heck, dbus itself relies on sockets!

For developers, using sockets is easy. I once wrote a program that interfaced with BSPWM, and it was a breeze. Dbus, on the other hand, not so much. I tried writing a Python script that would contact Network Manager and check the WiFi signal strength. Right off the bat I'm using some obscure undocumented package for interfacing with dbus. What is an introspection? What is a proxy object? What is an interface? Why do I need 60 lines of (Python!) code for a seemingly trivial operation?

So why do some developers decide to use dbus when they could just use unix sockets and save a lot of hassle for themselves and others?

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