ai is the new stack overflow which is the new copying someone else’s work which is the new reading the manual

You know it’s bad when Linux YouTubers are arguing against Linux ports because Proton is just so much more functional for Linux gamers.

Yeah I loved my tiny netbook. They’re sorta eaten up by tablets now though. GPD’s stuff counts as netbook form factor right?

Every worker moved is another worker more likely to use Linux at home. In my experience you’re most likely to use the computers you work with (school or otherwise) and exposure to Linux is going to demystify it in ways social media cannot.

Most exciting is probably the IT management side. I wonder how many distros are hardened for end users who do general office work - where people are more likely to tinker and mess about either for fun or to optimise things.

Brave marketing has gone crazy to convince people it’s less dodgy than Firefox. Come on!

I’m curious, how well has Musl been for software compatibility? How did you resolve any that came up?

bring back calling sysadmins “webmasters” sounds way more mystical and ethereal

My scepticism is that this should’ve been done within the coreutils project, or at least very closely affiliated. This isn’t an area of the linux technical stack that we should tolerate being made distro-specific, especially when the licensing is controlled by a single organisation that famously picks and chooses its interpretation of “FOSS” to suit its profit margins.

On a purely technical level, GNU coreutils should very seriously consider moving to rust if only to counter alternatives before it’s too late. While these utilities work well in C (and usually stay secure thanks to the Unix philosophy limiting the project scope), FOSS projects are continuing to struggle with finding new contributors as younger devs are more likely to use modern systems languages like Go and Rust. Not to mention that any project using Rust as a marketing tool will appeal to anyone rightfully concerned about hardening their system.

fedora has been this for myself. maybe tweaking every now and then to fix whatever edge cases I’ve run into but it’s the least painful distro I’ve used so far

Not quite the same but you might like the Linux from Nothing series, building out a Linux install from first principles.

Obviously lots of linux youtubers have done videos on linux from scratch too but the step by step nature is pretty enjoyable to watch.

Do they not provide an md5sum? I’ve never seen anyone check an app’s integrity issuing public keys

Hector and others were really bad losses for the Rust kernel devs but Lina? That’s catastrophic. She was a figurehead in getting apple silicon working so well on Linux that even Linus moved his development machine to an M1 Macbook.

Linus has royally fucked it with how long he sat on the side of this. Im so sorry to Lina and others who have been burned by this community.

True, any software can be vulnerable to attack.

but the difference is a technical team of software developers can mitigate an attack and patch it. This guy has no tech support than the AI that sold him the faulty code that likely assumed he did the proper hardening of his environment (which he did not).

Openly admitting you programmed anything with AI only is admitting you haven’t done the basic steps to protecting yourself or your customers.

AI is yet another technology that enables morons to think they can cut out the middleman of programming staff, only to very quickly realise that we’re more than just monkeys with typewriters.

all of them if you’re willing to compile it from source, or commit to running some of the kernel on pen and paper

Short answer: Yep, cheat softwares regularly do this too, but it’s costly and prone to being immediately patched, and it’s potentially illegal.

Anticheat systems are designed around this since a cheat client would try to do exactly that. One way for example is for the anticheat to provide a cryptographic key to the game which it uses to prove to a multiplayer server that the anticheat is functioning and untampered with. Even if you bypass anticheat locally, you still have to prove that the game client is legitimate to the server. This does happen! But kernel anticheats are much harder to access and tamper with, and in our case of using WINE are unlikely to even work from the outset.

So okay, let’s hypothetically bypass anticheat locally. We modify the game to tell the server it’s legit, and it works! A few days later the game gets patched, and suddenly our bypass is defunct. For cheat sellers this part of the cost of business but for people just trying to game on Linux there’s little money in it, and if there is it won’t ever be spent on circumventing anticheat (which also falls under some legal grey areas if not outright illegal depending on your country).

Given enough time and resources we could probably find some novel way to crack anticheat on a game as such as it becomes playable on Linux. But it’s so much easier to use that effort somewhere else or just use a Windows VM that is guaranteed to work even if slightly slower.

There’s also the challenge of getting developers to retroactively fix AC support for games that are still popular but not otherwise maintained. Though this is usually an issue with kernel level stuff that can’t easily be fixed on Proton’s end on a case by case basis.

GTAV? I thought there would be more fanfare considering how much coverage the removal of Linux support got

WINE Is Not an Emulator (that’s what the acronym actually stands for).

At a program level, WINE creates a dummy Windows directory structure, slaps files where an exe expects them, and executes the program.

EXEs (well, all programs) will use system calls to request resources (ie. files, access to hardware like GPUs, data from other processes) which Windows maps to certain areas of memory and has its own protocols for how to handle requests. Linux has its own protocols and methods that are incompatible, hence why Windows and Linux apps can’t run natively together.

Then the magic happens: WINE maps these requests to Linux requests so that the running program is none the wiser. It asks for GPU resources like a Windows app would, then gets those resources back just like a Windows app would expect. There are thousands of edge cases, hundreds of system calls, and a bunch else that complicates things but that’s how WINE (and Proton) works.

The reason this fucks up Kernel-level anticheat is that it isn’t trying to communicate via these established channels. They usually operate with full resources outside of the jurisdiction of your OS, and scan your memory bit-by-bit rather than asking the OS politely via system calls for info on other processes.

With WINE, whilst a typical application will not notice the differences they’re designed to not throw a fit if your underlying OS is configured differently, a kernel anticheat will not even recognise the system as a valid OS even if it was able to run in the first place.

The solution here is systems like EasyAC that give up the benefits of being able to analyse processes at the kernel level in favour of portability. Another potential solution (though unlikely imo) is a cross-platform kernel anticheat protocol, that all major operating systems agree to implement, similar to how operating systems will implement the TCP/IP protocol to communicate across networks regardless of underlying OS.

Now the reason "WINE"s acronym is particularly important is that if it DID emulate windows, as in what most virtual machine providers do, then anticheat would be running in an environment mapped out like a real Windows install - because it is. This is how many Linux gamers prefer to run certain titles, and something that should always be functional. It is much more annoying to maintain, However - balance how much you really wanna play the latest COD with your willingness to debug GPU passthrough shit.

log off chud