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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • For a while, maybe… But the two distinctions I’d want to make is that, one, that’s also mostly the time you’ll spend learning what you need to set up as part of your system, and two, things that might be out of your control on many distros. I’d also say that by calling it a “meme distro” you’re lumping it together with Hannah Montana Linux and similar.

    I will certainly say, however, that I’m rather annoyed by all the people saying “Bro you can set up arch in a few minutes just run archinstal it’s easy”… Not only do I not believe it’s that easy when you don’t know what you’re doing and need to actually use the system, but that also seems to run counter to the point of arch. I think there’s at least two popular arch derivatives meant to remove the enthusiast aspect and provide a streamlined experience, so why recommend arch to new people if not as a learning experience?


  • Calling Arch a meme distro is unnecessarily insulting. I imagine the same applies to Gentoo, but I haven’t used it myself. It’s an enthusiast distro, for people who want to have control over how their system is set up while accepting the responsibility of having to set everything up.

    I absolutely agree with recommending against it for somebody’s first experience - but if you’re willing to read through the guides and troubleshoot issues, you can learn a lot about how things work on Linux. It’s the kind of distro where you will have issues, and they will usually be due to your own mistakes.




  • There’s nothing special about it. Linux distros are one of the options, alongside windows and osx as desktop systems.

    What there are are preferences, morals, affordability. Linux is generally free, has different approaches to how the system is structured, how software is installed, how much access to the system you have, and how much responsibility for setting it up you have.

    This will also vary from distro to distro, but generally software is installed from the distribution’s repositories, not downloading files from various websites - and instead of having some different scheme for updating every program on your computer, you use a single command (or button in an app) to update your system and all your software. This is one of the main things I love about Linux - you get to update your stuff when you want, all at once.







  • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.detolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldIT Department's Plan
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    4 months ago

    Does windows come preinstalled and preconfigured with more potentially vulnerable software on open ports?

    I personally don’t value an antivirus that much, since it can only protect you from known threats, and even then, it only matters when you’re already getting compromised - but fair point for Windows, I suspect most distros come without antivirus preinstalled and preconfigured.

    A firewall, on the other hand, only has value if you already have insecure services listening on your system - and I’m pretty sure on Windows those services aren’t gonna be blocked by the default settings. All that said though… Most Linux distros come with a firewall, something like iptables or firewalld, though not sure which ones would have it preconfigured for blocking connections by default.

    So while I would dispute both of those points as not being that notable, I feel like other arguments in favor of Linux still stand, like reduced surface area, simpler kernel code, open and auditable source.

    One big issue with Linux security for consumers (which I have to assume is what you’re talking about, since on the server side a sysadmin will want to configure any antivirus and firewall anyways) could be that different distributions will have different configurations - both for security and for preference-based things like desktop environments. This does unfortunately mean that users could find themselves installing less secure distros without realizing it, choosing them for their looks/usage patterns.



  • Hold up, how is proton leveraging open source to avoid dev costs? Are you referring to steam using and contributing to existing projects instead of reinventing the wheel? Or to game developers that use it as a reason for not making native Linux versions, which wouldn’t be Valve’s workforce in the first place?

    I can see how the things Valve does contribute to their business model - steam input giving their controller compatibility with games, proton letting them launch a Linux-based handheld, and the new recording feature probably there for the steam deck… But the thing is, Valve is still providing all those things to customers for no extra charge, and they keep adding new stuff.


  • I think you’re actually agreeing with me here. I was disputing the claim that software should be made available in “a native package format”, and my counterpoint is that devs shouldn’t be packaging things for distros, and instead providing source code with build instructions, alongside whatever builds they can comfortably provide - primarily flatpak and appimage, in my example.

    I don’t use flatpak, and I prefer to use packages with my distro’s package manager, but I definitely can’t expect every package to be available in that format. Flatpak and appimage, to my knowledge, are designed to be distro-agnostic and easily distributed by the software developer, so they’re probably the best options - flatpak better for long-term use, appimage usable for quickly trying out software or one-off utilities.

    As for tar.gz, these days software tends to be made available on GitHub and similar platforms, where you can fetch the source from git by commit, and releases also have autogenerated source downloads. Makefiles/automake isn’t a reasonable expectation these days, with a plethora of languages and build toolchains, but good, clear instructions are definitely something to include.



  • Sure, you can probably clone it - I’m not 100% sure, but I think laws protect that as long as it’s private use.

    You can also fork it on GitHub, that’s something you agree to in the GitHub ToS - though I think you’re not allowed to push any modifications if the license doesn’t allow it?

    Straight up taking the content from GitHub, uploading it to your own servers, and letting people grab a copy from there? That’s redistribution, and is something that needs to be permitted by the license. It doesn’t matter if it’s git or something else, in the end that’s just a way to host potentially copyrighted material.

    Though if you have some reference on why this is not the case, I’d love to see it - but I’m not gonna take a claim that “that’s very much a part of most git flows”.