Soot [any]

If you’re just doing normal sheet, you should ideally basically not even notice SELinux. And in that sense it’s good.

If you’re doing any dev or running any server software or some kind of freaky setup, my advice is disable it. At least all you have to do is turn a true into a false.

In a lot of distros at least, you can just reinstall in place, which has the same effect. But a different place for /home does feel a potentially more reliable method.

Linux permissions are obvious, straightforward, and very easy to change - They rule.

SELinux permissions are impossible to see, seemingly pointlessly more complex, and I don’t know how to check them or change them i.e. They drool.

As a power user who is constantly changing system stuff, installing weird stuff, running weird servers, disabling SELinux is like, step 2 of installing Linux for me (and honestly, even if you’re not a power user, I can assure you at least ONE issue you’ve faced was actually caused by SELinux under the hood). I have wasted whole days working out just that SELinux is causing my fucking issue, and then days more on how to fix the permissions, and then days more doing those again when those permissions RESET as it is wont to do and days more trying to make my needed changes permanent. And let’s not even get started on how to transplant an SELinux permissions structure from one disk to another. So instead of a week’s worth of frustrating work every year, I can spend one minute disabling SELinux.

Its implementation feels contradictory to the most basic principles of understandable and workable systems. It’s like the NSA wanted to make software that was the diametric opposite of the Zen of Python. It’s ugly, it’s implicit, it’s complicated, nested, dense, unreadable, full of special cases, and silent errors, it constantly guesses in the face of ambiguity (which is why I have to constantly correct it).

Basically, I have wasted too much of my life faffing with an opaque and ludicrously complex permissions layer that seems to be there solely as a ‘just in case’ my already existing permissions aren’t good enough.

I end up very concerned by this kind of thing. Big money in the Linux space very frequently (though not always) creates more closed, proprietary Linuxes, rather than expanding and improving the open-source wider ecosystem.

TL;DR: Random generation machine randomly does shit of absolutely no meaning, use, or importance (other than supposedly giving the $100 it had to charities and a cryptobro). The story is only interesting in how extremely, thoroughly, uninteresting and unremarkable it was. 340 ‘sessions’ over two months and the AI donated the crypto it was told it had, and just outputted a bunch of completely meaningless, borderline unreadable pieces of text, from blogs to news summaries.

The blog writer (and the article is also very clearly heavily AI-generated) shows amazement at the most banal nothingness such as when the AI for some days didn’t do a thing, then for some days it DID do a thing

Honestly everything about this experiment only reinforces the ‘advanced Markov Chain’ accusations - https://www.letairun.com/

I’m actually further convinced that the only value we’ve ever found in AI output is that which humans editorialised or, in the best case, cherry picked.

Zed offers unprecedented design possibilities. Imagine a design with three dimensions – weight, width and skew – that allows you to select a style at any point along these axes. This allows you to work with 558 defined fonts, or any interval between them. Then imagine adding another dimension that enables you to round any letter or symbol as you wish. The possibilities multiply.

So this “font” is actually a spectrum of like 1,000,000 fonts? Doesn’t that make it pretty meaningless to begin with?

Zed Text was directly compared with – and outperformed – Helvetica in terms of speed of reading

empirically proven to significantly improve reading acuity for visually impaired readers

This “empirical proof” is extremely flawed and should not be used for claims like this. They tested one “kind” of Helvetica and five variations of Zed Text. 24 patients of two doctors over an unspecified time period (presumably a few hours?). At a set distance on one screen in a single environment. It only tested ‘immediate’ recognition. Wasn’t double or even single-blind. The test is only random strings, not recognisable words.

They make no explanation as to how they came up with their ‘signficant difference’ bar other than that it only just fits the gap between Helvetica and the best performing variation of various Zed adjustments. The fact they failed to document and disclose their experimental and statistical methods leaves me to suspect incompetence / cherry picking / malicious p-hacking.

If they sat down and said “maybe there’s an effect here? An actual study should be carried out”, then I’d perhaps agree.

But the fact they make this very flawed experiment, fail to correctly document it, including even the most basic necessary statistics and then plaster what is bordering on medical factual claims all over their site makes me seriously distrust all the motives and statements here.

Homosexual activity is illegal in Uganda. If they pass a law saying your OS should track that, is it moral for developers to enable compliance with it? Or do developers have a moral duty to at least not go out of their way to enable that bullshit, even if they risk a gajillion dollar fine?

By implementing a mechanism that enables this law, it becomes exponentially easier for lawmakers to then make it mandatory (as many already have/are openly planning to).

Yeah, the problem is the lawmakers. But I don’t have enough money to control the lawmakers. The creators of free software should not actively helping oppressive measures.

The PR is explicitly for the purpose of complying with age verification laws. Damn fuckin’ right I’m angry about it.

Is it cool if we start implementing tools to track users’ race and sexual orientation for the explicit purpose of complying with some country’s laws about those too? Or is it maybe the job of free software to defy oppressive systems?

Don’t forget my shitty country in the process of trying to implement this too

Is this comment a joke? That or you’re very naive about the problems these things did cause.

As someone who deals on rare occasion with Linux PCs, both TPMs and Secure Boot have been a fucking PITA that have done nothing but help solidify the Microsoft/Apple/Google grip.

I know nobody asked for this - I live in the UK. Feels like we basically agree, but your solution is “why don’t the countries making stupid-ass laws implement it in a way that doesn’t bother me”, which like yeah sure, but just isn’t going to happen in any universe. Nobody will bother to fork stuff, countries will just continue to try overreach and make peoples’ lives hell until they comply.

Region-blocking is the lowest-effort, but actually achievable response, that protects devs from legal attacks, while giving the offending regions a strong incentive to undo these laws. As soon as it starts hitting profits, the capitalist class will get it reversed, no question.

MariaDB is already cooler, obviously.

Very weird though that both it and MySQL are owned by private equity.

In my mind, region-blocking is actually probably the best solution for this in every case.

Cut off every legitimate operation in these regions (including my own) from using your genuinely useful software. Software isn’t compromised, saves on unnecessary work and law compliance. Then everyone with a VPN flourishes anyway. And then maybe it hurts profits so much that lawmakers actually decide to reverse course. Wins all around.

Fair enough about persistence, I can see why one might want it, but I genuinely haven’t even thought about it in 10 years of use, and the overhead of one-click on occasion is pretty small. I probably click it less than once a month. So I can see why it’s not implemented.

Interestingly it does persist other things like list sort order, so you’d have thought they’d offer the option. One wonders if they wouldn’t happily accept a PR to add such a thing?

What is an android-style application launcher. You mean like as a default ‘Open With’ dialog? That feels like a niche want, but I mean fair enough to want it. Something like Junction not do it for you? Then just have file types you want to do that open via that instead.

Either way, it would be cool if Nautilus was extensible like GNOME shell. I don’t deny this. I’m largely just confused by OPs claims.

Very true, and this is a good argument for the importance of diversity in everything Linux.

The fact that there are distros not using it at least means there’s room to fuck off to those if this gets out of hand.

I’m a bit confused. I use Nautilus/GNOME Files, and I quite honestly can’t think of anything it’s missing that I want. Can you be more specific about this missing basic functionality? Or is it just non-Nautilus file managers?

If anything, I’m frustrated that Windows File Manager doesn’t have all the features I use on Nautilus. Here’s eight that just come to mind off the top of my head.

• Fully customisable quick link menu,
• Easy permission management,
• One-click drive mount/eject,
• inbuilt 7z, xz, tar, gz etc. support,
• Operation tracking (eg extraction, compression, copying) all inbuilt into the same window with a nice progress chart
• “open in terminal” option on right-click (I know windows 10 will do this with… some combination of buttons)
• One-click to swap between the views I want
• Actually functional search

I assumed it was a foreign thing, but no, it was actually made in America.

Kimball and Mattis formed the acronym GIMP by adding the letter G to “-IMP”

I’d done it, I’d smuggled in one of those RISC-whatever boxes. The hardware that doesn’t require a live-scan of your irises and your digital ID to interface. This baby can visit websites without even scanning your brainwaves. I don’t know what country it came from - You’re not allowed to know about foreign countries before you’re 40, the computer blocks them, it’s something about preventing “unauthorised gooning”.

Just as I sat down, I heard it - the info-chopper, they knew. I grabbed my illegal CPU just as the door was bust open, “INFORMATION PROTECTION OFFICER, CLOSE YOUR EYES AND TELL ME YOUR BIRTHDATE!” You see you’re only allowed to hear certain parts of our rights depending on your details, it’s to protect you from dangerous information. Even seeing his face might evoke corrupted thoughts, but I didn’t care anymore.

I quickly, but pointedly, looked over, and saw him, cool leather jacket, gun, one of those brain-interceptor helmet things, like a hockey helmet made of cushions and diodes. “NO” I cried, “I WANT TO PLAY SNAKE WITHOUT PROVIDING MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER!”.

With that war cry, I cheesed it, spurred on by the sky-high promise of reading a ‘potentially offensive’ Wikipedia article, in private.

Why would anyone on Linux, having free choice of all Linux OSes, choose one that actively compromises your privacy?

This is why Linux should never be a corporate, paid-for ecosystem. The nerds that keep all this shit running for free will not be interested in maintaining spyware OS.