Hmm…

Dune? Nope

Westwood: Double Nope

Cowboy Bebop: Not even close

Dark Tower: negative inspiration actually

I’m sensing a pattern here. Sand + sci-fi equals a lithium prescription.

This 1000%. Since basically High School I’ve been on Ubuntu for the machines I need to work, because at the end of the day it usually does. Some of the people I meet see that I use a Chromebook with the containers enabled and have similar reactions. “How can you use that it’s not even real Linux?”, as if it isn’t literally a Linux kernel. The Steam Deck is popular because you don’t need to know Linux to use it, and Ubuntu is popular because you don’t need to know a lot of Linux to use it.

I have a lot of love for OpenSuse. Back in my teenage years, I used it and Ubuntu a lot. zypper is the best package manager, and YaST made configuration easier since I didn’t know config files yet.

I’m guessing he is referring to the fact we aren’t going to see tailored updates like the Steam Deck has gotten over the years. Updates that improve performance and the experience. It’s windows so beyond device drivers and their terrible ArmorCrate software there isn’t much room to grow better. It’s not a bad device though, it just misses the point.

Windows moment 🤗

It’s rather complicated. In the “in-between” times, firearms were considered a coward’s weapon, making the user a “sniper” and thus less honorable than those who used more traditional arms. This faded with time however, as most ideas do.

At an old company I joined they had rolled them out to all employees. Six months before me getting onboard they had already given up, but we still had to support the ones out in the field. Fun fact about Surfaces, despite it being MS hardware running an MS operating system, the Windows 10 and 11 base system does not have drivers for the keyboard or mouse. You have to use a special image for the Surface devices. That meant maintaining two custom WIM images for deployment and keeping them in sync. We scrapped the remaining Surfaces and gave people the choice of Macs or ThinkPads instead. You can guess which was more popular among the office folk.

I used to have a black XBox sitting beneath the TV gathering dust. I think it is a One by the shape. As for the new ones I have no idea off the top of my head which is the best. I’ve seen some on sale in places, but the impulse buy isn’t there because I have no idea what I would be getting. I don’t own a PlayStation, but if I wanted one I know that 5 is the newest, and you can get the small slim one or the big Pro one.

Don’t give them ideas 😂

If Canonical and RedHat weren’t backing different horses (Snap vs Flatpak), I could see the app containerization system coming under systemD as well fairly soon. The Cosmic DE project uses functionality from systemD to overlay changes onto the system that are reversible, so that alpha versions of Cosmic can be tested without permanently changing the base system. Imagine apps shipping on whatever container runtime, and dynamically overlaying system-level changes as needed for things that tap into the host system via systemd-sysext.

A lot (and I mean a lot) of criticism can be leveled at systemD. One of the upsides of it becoming popular is the standardization of much of things from the developers’ perspective. It’s easier to target multiple distros when you can rely on systemD’s single implementation of the feature. Over the next decade, I forsee systemD eating more and more of the userspace, until you are only left with managing the differences between DEs and which display server they are using. We’re already headed towards immutable base systems with apps shipping with their own dependencies, which we reduce the differences between distros even further.

“hello system” is pretty nice to look at, and has some Mac-isms I find helpful. FreeBSD has a new release recently, so maybe Nomad or GhostBSD could be worth trying. You’ll find FreeBSD is a lot more “consistent” compared to Linux, but be prepared for random hardware to not work.

Laughs in RHCSA exam.

Honestly it isn’t. Support for anything front-end related is way more sparse compared to Linux.

Man I wish FreeBSD hadn’t fallen to the wayside. It’s really cohesive and feels put together in a way not Linux distro ever has.

Incredible how OEMs keep fumbling this. Just give me a Steam Deck with prosumer performance and decent battery. Accomplish that how you want. Slap SteamOS on it then let me buy it. No, I don’t want to figure out Armor Crate or MSI launcher or whatever. I just want to play games without having to babysit the thing.

Good. Stop locking game content behind increasingly high paywalls. It used to be when you paid $60 for a game you got something that could stand on its own. Now if you aren’t getting the GOTY you’re getting half a product.

Valve can go into the negative selling Decks, something that their competitors can’t reasonably do because they will get money from Steam store sales made on the Deck. I for one went from buying 3-4 games a year to like a dozen because it’s been so convenient.

One man’s “investments” are another man’s “unfair competition”. The U.S. does the same thing with steel to prop up domestic steel companies. Try to import steel from Vietnam and they tax the hell out of it.

Haha Mint was my first distro! I wiped Windows 7 and installed Mint, then quickly learned that a tarball is in fact more work than an exe. Good times and a great learning experience! Back then it was the only thing not slow, ugly, or wildly unfamiliar.

I admire your gusto! I think it’s doable, and you can definitely pull it off if you want to. To replace MD5 and implement signatures you need to do the following, as a high level overview:

Extend dpkg to know what SHA2 is, and reliably detect it. (maybe measure hash length or specifying a new version using the control file?)

dpkg must also know what a signature is. More on that below.

Providing automatic/mandatory signing will require code to handle PKI as well as a place to store the signing information. I would do it by signing the two archives found within Deb packages, then placing information about the signing in the top-level of the package. Existing tools need to be able to ignore or handle whatever you implement as a rule of thumb.

Note that this is just my approach and maybe you can do better.

I also recommended looking into https://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2001/03/msg00024.html. This is the thread I mentioned earlier, in which package signatures were discussed and ultimately turned down. Maybe the easiest approach is to re-implement what the contributor was trying to do back then, but with modern code and standards? If you want more resources, including my presentation on the topic to HackCFL and CitrusSec, let me know. I am here for whatever technical assistance or industry contacts I can provide. The white paper might be done in a month, minus peer review. I’m very busy and so is he. Good luck in any case!