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?

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.

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.

The UK is pretty bad for tenants rights but they do force landlords to putting deposits into special accounts that have legal protections for the tenant, and if said landlord tries to avoid it you can usually easily win back a multiple value of your deposit with little the landlord can do.

Landlords regularly take the piss with claiming exorbitant amounts for “damages” which is harder to contest, and many of us just accept a few deductions even knowing they will just pocket it.