A Slint fanboy from Berlin.

  • 2 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As a user I definitely want flatpaks and use them over distribution packages whereever possible. First I can sandbox the flatpak, but not the native package. Why would my browser need to be able to read my ssh keys?

    Secondly I just have seen too many distro packagers sabotaging packages in the most braindead ways possible. Debian removing almost all the random data during key generation because some static analysis tool did not like the code. To this day there are servers using one of the 32k keys debian could produce during that time (they are of course all brute forced by now). Fedora removing Codecs from a video encoder, dependencies that upstream knows are broken and listsmas such in its documentation being used anyway. Random patches being applied, or versions years out of date getting shipped…






  • Not only that: It protects your data. The Unix security model is unfortunately stuck in the 1970s: It protects users from each other. That is a wonderful property, but in todays world you also need to protect the users from the applications they are running: Anything running as your user has access to all your data. And on most computer systems the interesting data is the one the users out there: Cryptogrqphic keys, login information, financial information, … . Typically users are much more upset to loose their data than about some virus infecting the OS files, those are trivial to fix.

    Running anything as anlther user stops that application from having access to most of your data.



  • Any of the many immutable distros (vanilla os, fedora silverblue, bluefin, aeon, endless os, pure os, …) will all obviously work.

    Most of your customizations will live in your home directory anyway, so the details of the host OS do not matter too much. As long as it comes with the UI you like, you will be mostly fine. And yku said you like gnome, that installs many apps from flathub anyway and they work just fine from there.

    For development work you just set up a distrobox/toolbox container and are ready to go with everything you need. I much prefer that over working on the “real system” as I can have different environments for different projects and do not have to polute my system with all kinds of dependencies that are useless to the functionality of my system.

    NixOS is ofmcourse also an option and is quasi-immutable, but it is also much more complicated to manage.






  • When I last checked (and that is a long time ago!) it ran everywhere, but did only sandbox the application on ubuntu – while the website claimed cross distribution and secure.

    That burned all the trust I had into snaps, I have not looked at them again. Flatpaks work great for me, there is no need to switch to a wannabe walled garden which may or may not work as advertised.


  • That depends a lot on how you define “correct C”.

    It is harder to write rust code than C code that the compiler will accept. It is IMHO easier to write rust code than to write correct C code, in the sense it only uses well defined constructs defined in the C standard.

    The difference is that the rust compiler is much stricter, so you need to know a lot about details in the memory model, etc. to get your code past the compiler. In C you need the same knowledge to debug the program later.


  • That depends on how you decide which bucket something gets thrown into.

    The C++ community values things like the RAII and other features that developers can use to prevent classes of bugs. When that is you yard-stick, then C and C++ are not in one bucket.

    These papers are about memory safety guarantees and not much else. C and C++ are firmly in the same bucket according to this metric. So they get grouped together in these papers.





  • It is all about whos freedom you care for: GPL protects the freedom of end users, MIT and other permissive licenses focus on the freedoms of developers instead.

    GPL defines freedoms end users of software have. It has to limit the freedoms of developers between the GPL project and the end user so that those developers can not strip out any of the freedoms the GPL wants end users to have. The hope is to build a better society by enabling everybody to understand the machines they own.

    MIT and other permissive license care for the freedoms of people using the project directly, granting freedoms to those users only. Those people are free to forward the same rights to their own users or to remove them as they see fit. Thatbis way simpler for developers to work with: Basically do whatever you want.

    Guess which option is more popular with developers and the companies that employ many of those developers?