I’m not recommending it, I’m describing why saying it adds no security is silly.

The keys being compromised on some motherboards doesn’t mean the whole concept is suddenly inert for every single user

If everyone has a copy of my passwords and authenticator keys, that wouldn’t suddenly make 2 factor auth a compromised idea.

Hell, even if you are one of those people running a machine with the compromised keys, it’s still going to block malware that was written before the keys were leaked unless malware authors have also figured out time travel.

Well boot sector viruses used to be all the rage in the 90s, they’re entirely impossible under secure boot

Malware rootkits were a pretty big problem about a decade ago, I understand the techniques those mostly used are more or less impossible under secure boot now too

Then we could go into all the government and adjacent industry use cases where state-sponsored targeted attacks are a real concern. Measures like filling USB ports with super glue and desoldering microphones on company laptops is not unheard of in those circles, so blocking unknown bootloaders from executing is an absolute no brainer.

Saying it provides no security is just not true. Your front door isn’t only secure if someone has failed to break in

You don’t have to

If you only need it for 90 days before it expires, Microsoft will give you the VM for free (and if you’re particularly industrious, you might write a script that then installs a load of your shit for you to run after you fire up a fresh one)

If you don’t care about potentially breaking the law you can run it forever with a couple of scripts you can find on GitHub

If you don’t want to break the law but also don’t want to pay full price you can get a dubious but working key from sites like G2A and cdkeys

If that’s still too sketchy there’s the OEM licenses (honestly not worth it since they can only activate on a single machine ever)

Or finally you might feel sorry for Microsoft for some strange reason and want to go full retail price.

Basically the same experience with all options for a lot of cases, they’re just happy to have users it seems

It technically does add security in that it prevents a load of attack vectors that would dodge most anti malware tools (i.e. the ones before the anti malware tool can start)

But you’re right in that the execution of the idea is unnecessarily painful for Linux

The software isn’t really the hard thing about these companies, the customer and provider UIs are nothing special and they achieve their scale using fairly industry standard event driven tools and cloud compute. They all talk a lot at industry conferences, so it’s no secret really.

Ensuring a restaurant will make the food for an order, ensuring a delivery person shows up to collect it, ensuring that food makes it to its destination in the same condition it left the restaurant, ensuring everyone gets paid at the end.

Preventing any of that from going wrong and handling it when it does is where the value of these companies lies.

Who is going to step in if a restaurant starts ignoring orders, or a driver starts eating the food, or a customer does a fraudulent chargeback?

Then there’s the money issue: where does the money go when people pay? Who owns the merchant bank account? Does every driver need a merchant bank account? How is tax accounting handled?

You can’t use cash for this system as both the driver and restaurant need to be paid (and TBF, whoever is paying for hosting the back end servers), and the driver won’t necessarily go back to that restaurant

Genuinely surprised to see this exists, SOLIDWORKS seems to always be in the same “hard no” category as Adobe software in every one of these kinds of threads I’ve seen over the years. This is literally the first time I’ve ever seen a response with a potential solution.

I wonder how well it works (Just out of curiosity, I don’t do CAD myself)

If it is a computer, it is compatible

You may just need some extra bits in addition to the base ISO

IIRC the Broadcom website has the latest Linux drivers on there if the kernel doesn’t support it out of the box, so grab a copy of those and put them on a USB.

As others have said, you could get a live distro to test it out before you install

By all means try it out, it might have been something down to the drivers for my audio interface (focusrite scarlett) at the time

If you have better luck than I did, I’d love to know!

Can’t comment on everything, but given you mentioned audio production: a couple of years ago I tried to get ASIO working from within a VM on a Linux host OS and wasn’t having a whole lot of luck.

I think I read somewhere that someone had come up with a special ASIO driver to send the audio directly into the host Linux OS audio subsystem, but I’ve not tried that or measured latency yet.

For anyone that doesn’t somehow already know, SOS is pretty simple to learn

It’s just three threes of dots dashes dots.

. . . - - - . . .

Sentences finish with a full stop (or period if you’re American), so you can remember it’s the dots last (and therefore first)

Hopefully you never need to use it, but better to know it and not need it than the alternative

I guess it depends how legally I want to go about it—there’s always someone that will pay for the exploit details

Omg his company sells one of those meeting notes bots

I’d bet everything I own that they leak sensitive information from some company within the next couple of months.

This product will 100% have more security holes than a sieve

… I’m starting to think I need to take up freelance pentesting

I assume this is coming at some point, tbh

I personally reckon they’re working on something YAbridge-esque to allow people to bring their VSTs to the push in standalone mode. If they can actually nail that, it’s an absolute no brainer to then release a full Linux version of the DAW and finally allow people like me to make the switch

Every time I’ve tried to run Ableton on Linux over the years (most recently about Christmas last year), it’s the VST support that lets me down. I’ve got hundreds of VSTs I’ve used in various projects over the past couple of decades and I can’t switch unless I know they all work properly—projects not loading or sounding different is unacceptable. I need to be able to open anything I’ve worked on over the years and be able to get right into the creativity without tinkering, as that is what I already have today.

Until that day, I’ve got to begrudgingly keep windows around.

You would not want to do this for latency reasons

Proton for ARM is not (currently) a thing, if that’s a factor

I’m in the same boat as you, with decades of projects I want to be able to open.

However, OP mentioned Reaper, which has a native Linux version! So as long as they’re not using a load of VSTs, and the ones they do play nicely with Linux, it could work out for them

The only way is to give it a go and find out though

That thumbnail lol

No. 5 was a fun mental image

Cheers for the response, I appreciate it!

I’m curious about the plugins as obviously I’m not gonna be familiar with the notepad++ plugin ecosystem now—what’s special about the ones you listed?

Assuming edit EOL is just changing the line termination characters, all editors have that don’t they? Or does this not do what I think?

Intrigued about VSCode being slow for text manipulation too—I remember this being a big reason I dropped notepad++ for sublime and IMO VSCode and sublime more or less have parity on that front, particularly with vim bindings

I just don’t get the love for notepad++

I started using it as my main back in 2006ish, I then switched to sublime text about 2011, then about 5-6 years ago to VSCode. All the time using vim for any in-terminal quick edits.

Notepad++ is easily my least favourite editor of the lot, by several miles, it just seems so rigid and clunky without even going into how it’s windows only. Every editor I’ve used since has been a huge improvement over the one prior IMO