Glorified network janitor. Perpetual blueteam botherer. Friendly neighborhood cyberman. Constantly regressing toward the mean. Slowly regarding silent things.

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • What else am I missing?

    Large scale manufacturers pre-installing Linux? Readily available multi-language support for home users? Coherent UI regardless of computer and distro underneath. Billions on lobbying money spent on politicians for favorable policy crafting? Billions spent on marketing campaigns to actually sell the idea to the masses who simply don’t care any of your points (or any technical reasons, privacy or anything else that might be top of mind of the current Linux userbase).

    I’d say Linux has a good chance of capturing 5-6% of the market in the coming years if lucky (I believe we’re somewhere around 4% at the moment), unless one of the big tech monopolies decides to start throwing money into it (Like Google did with Android)









  • A symlink is a file that contains a shortcut (text string that is automatically interpreted and followed by the operating system) reference to another file or directory in the system. It’s more or less like Windows shortcut.

    If a symlink is deleted, its target remains unaffected. If the target is deleted, symlink still continues to point to non-existing file/directory. Symlinks can point to files or directories regardless of volume/partition (hardlinks can’t).

    Different programs treat symlinks differently. Majority of software just treats them transparently and acts like they’re operating on a “real” file or directory. Sometimes this has unexpected results when they try to determine what the previous or current directory is.

    There’s also software that needs to be “symlink aware” (like shells) and identify and manipulate them directly.

    You can upload a symlink to Dropbox/Gdrive etc and it’ll appear as a normal file (probably just very small filesize), but it loses the ability to act like a shortcut, this is sometimes annoying if you use a cloud service for backups as it can create filename conflicts and you need to make sure it’s preserved as “symlink” when restored. Most backup software is “symlink aware”.




  • Kinda tired of the constant flow of endless “analysis” of xz at this point.
    There’s no real good solution to “upstream gets owned by evil nation state maintainer” - especially when they run it in multi-year op.

    It simply doesn’t matter what downstream does if the upstream build systems get owned without anyone noticing. We’re fucked.

    Debian’s build chroots were running Sid - so they stopped it all. They analyzed and there was some work done with reproducible builds (which is a good idea for distro maintainers). Pushing out security updates when you don’t trust your build system is silly. Yeah, fast security updates are nice, but it took multiple days to reverse the exploit, this wasn’t easy.

    Bottom line, don’t run bleeding edge distros in prod.

    We got very lucky with xz. We might not be as lucky with the next one (or the ones in the past).






  • 0xtero@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.mlthinking of trying linux,
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    4 months ago

    Just go ahead and try. You don’t really need our permission to do that. Most distros support “live install” direct from the installation media, without making changes to your system. If you don’t like it, reboot and you’re back to whatever you had before

    Have fun!

    And to answer your double negation questions, yes and yes.