Only the headline asserts “built-in backdoors”, the actual link… not so much.

A reasonable reading of the proposal, assuming it came into effect, is that ISPs, banks, telcos etc would be asked to retain certain records for a number of months or years in a harmonised way. Law enforcement agencies would be required to ask for it in the exact same way they ask for records right now and all the rules concerning GDPR etc would still apply.

Open source tech has zero to do with it, it’s a matter of policy.

Data retention != mass surveilance. Data retention != built-in backdoors. Even the link summary spells out exactly what the purpose of the proposal is (criminal proceedings) and the intended objective (data retention standards).

So people most familiar with a system have an affinity to it? Colour me shocked. I expect Windows users would want to return to Windows for their own reasons.

Depends what you mean by bloat. It has a very large repo, but it compiles into little commands with least privilege execution. A lot of those commands are specifically there so someone doesn’t have to pull in other repos with a larger attack surface. e.g. there is a time sync daemon to replace having to pull in ntp which is a lot more complex and fraught and the one thing most desktops need of NTP which is to set the clock.

Why do you still exist? I try understanding what the purpose of your reply could be? Screenrecords do not work. For plenty of people. Google it. Yet you feel entitled to share you smalldick energy wisdom of “proper way”. That is exactly the vibe of the shit ppl. You do not help Wayland or x11 or anything, you just fap into your own mouth because nobody can ever love you like that. Go get help.

Wow, someone needs to grow up. You laid into Wayland when screen recording doesn’t even go through Wayland. The app asks the WM to screen record via DBus. A more constructive response would have been “thanks I didn’t know that”, or perhaps “oh it’s a driver issue”, or “it’s an issue with that WM/ffmpeg/pipewire or whatever”, or anything else likely to be the underlying cause. But it’s not Wayland. Have you got that? Not Wayland. There is no need to be sore and immature about it.

Screen records do work providing the app asks for a screen cast in the proper way (which BTW is not via Wayland but through a message to a DBus service). The service and the desktop then ask permission from the user if necessary. X11 didn’t give a damn about protecting the contents of your screen and any app whether it was beneficial or malicious could do it with impunity. So you should see this as a major security improvement - you can screen record but only if permission is granted.

Yes it’s been stable for some time with a couple of caveats - you need a decent graphics driver and not be using apps with edge cases.

Here is a simple example of an edge case and it’s not hard to find people blaming Wayland even though with some thought this was a security issue - apps like Zoom, Discord, MS Teams want to do screen sharing which is easy in X11 because it has non existent security - just steal the screen bitmap. That’s a problem.

Wayland (the protocol) provides no means for one app to grab the screen, or other apps. This is by design for security. Instead the app must be a good citizen and send a “i want to screen cast” message to the xdg-desktop-portal (a service provider implemented by GNOME, KDE etc.), the desktop asks for user consent and then the app gets a video stream. So it’s a lot more secure but it requires the app and the WM do things properly.

Desktops and apps have matured and these issues are thankfully going away. I think the biggest hurdle left is proper graphics drivers, especially the problem of getting NVidia drivers working.

I think Wayland just attracts trolls in the same way as systemd does.

I’m glad Wayland is maturing and taking over. Even most of the X11 devs hated X11 which tells you something.

I used to visit once or twice a year. I don’t have any plans any time soon to go back.

GTK 3 support just in time for GTK 4 & 5

Sometimes when I’ve torrenting from a public wifi I’ll get a malicious .scr file - but since I torrent from an Android phone it can’t do anything to me.

I’ve been using it on and off since 1994. I still have a slackware dist on CD with the 1.1 kernel. I think Linux is great although I still prefer to use Windows, and Linux via WSL which is my optimal set up these days.

That’s more or less it. Linux Torvalds hates the different package managers and dependencies in different dists and versions of dists. He claims it’s virtually impossible to ship products that just run on some random dist and cites his own sideproject which is a sea diving app where he builds binaries for Mac OSX and Windows but can’t for Linux. He also praises Valve for using containers.

In theory it means slightly larger binaries, but the flipside it means Steam for Linux runs on a lot more dists, and so do the games and it’s far easier to test they actually run.

Ubuntu. There are mixes of it but out of the box Ubuntu is about as straightforward a dist to install as possible and it is well supported.

That said “new laptop” and Linux are not always a match made in heaven. You might try it from a boot stick and confirm that things like the GPU, touch screen, touchpad, fingerprint reader, USB C / Lightning all work properly.

And downloading updates is a good thing. Means that the fresh installation isn’t vulnerable to something that was fixed between when the USB / DVD was pressed and the time the person installed it.

Linux has made leaps and bounds with usability and ease of installation but it’s no better than any other modern OS - which is a good thing. Installing Windows from a USB stick is not difficult - the simple path is literally, pick a language, select your wifi, choose who is logging in, click install and go grab a coffee. About the only difficulty if you can call it one is that some installs will ask for a serial number because it’s a commercial product.

Also, the number of questions & buttons during installation is one thing but the certainty of a functioning system is another. Linux is better at supporting old hardware, Windows is better at supporting new hardware. Choose accordingly if that matters.

I don’t even know what this graph is even supposed to mean. Bitch about Windows all you like but the installation process is typically very simple.

I know tar zxf and xjf off by heart. I probably do 100x as many extracts as creates. Tar is a stupidly antiquated command though.

Concerning logs:

1. You can still log to text if you want by configuration (e.g. forward stuff to syslog) and you can use any tools you like to read those files you want. So if you like text logs you can get them. You can even invoke journalctl to output logs on an ad hoc / scheduled basis in a variety of text formats and delimited fields.
2. Binary allows structured logging (i.e. each log message is comprised of fields in a record), indexing and searching options that makes searches & queries faster. Just like in a database. e.g. if you want to search by date range, or a particular user then it’s easy and fast.
3. Binary also allows the log to be signed & immutable to prevent tampering, allow auditing, intrusion detection etc… e.g. if someone broke into a system they could not delete records without it being obvious.
4. You can also use splunk with systemd.

So people object to systemd writing binary logs and yet they can get text, or throw it into splunk or do whatever they like. The purpose of the binary is make security, auditing and forensics better than it is for text.

As for scripts, the point I’m making is systemd didn’t supplant sysvinit, it supplanted upstart. Upstart recognized that writing massive scripts to start/stop/restart a process was stupid and chose an event driven model for running stuff in a more declarative way. Basically upstart used a job system that was triggered by an event, e.g. the runlevel changes, so execute a job that might be to kick off a process. Systemd chose a dependency based model for starting stuff. It seems like dists preferred the latter and moved over to it. Solaris has smf which serves a similar purpose as systemd.

So systemd is declarative - you describe a unit in a .service file - the process to start, the user id to run it with, what other units it depends on etc. and allow the system to figure out how to launch it and take care of other issues. It means stuff happens in the right order and in parallel if it can be. It’s fairly simple to write a unit file as opposed to a script. But if you needed to invoke a script you could do that too - write a unit file that invokes the script. You could even take a pre-existing init script and write a .service file that kicks it off.