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even after all these years gnome and KD are still the main desktop environments for lint plenty of others are available now and some of them are just as advanced and just as good but the big ones they're still gnome and KDE and both these desktops have their very vocal supporters and detractors because they both have very different philosophies and that's good choice is good but it also means that newcomers and generally Linux users might not really know which one they should dedicate any time to learning and which one they should really use depending on their preferences the goal is absolutely not to tell you that one is better than the other it's just to give you all the facts so you can start using or move to something that really works for you and you can also start listening to the segue to our sponsor if you have ever read an article online and wondered who EX exactly was behind that website if they had a specific bias or agenda then boy do I have a good service for you it is ground news click the link in the description or scan the QR code that should appear somewhere on screen to follow along while I tell you how things work to explain let's take a look at this story on Google's carbon emissions Rising due to their focus on AI with ground news I can be up to speed on this story in seconds with their summaries and and a bias comparison showing me what the left what the center and what the right are focusing their reporting on for this specific story this is based on more than 90 articles here that ground news found covering this exact Story coming from across the world and across the political Spectrum for example there's this article from The Inquirer ground news shows me their reporting is somewhat credible it leans politically left and they are based in the Philippines I can either read their coverage or keep scrolling for a different perspective on this story or I can look at the visual breakdowns on the right for quick data on all the new sources covering this I really think ground news is a fantastic service for you to improve your understanding of various issues and various stories and also to understand what's your Echo chamber and to try and Escape it so click the link in the description or scan the QR code on screen to go to the ground News website and get 40% off the same Vantage plan that I use to get all my news Okay so back to our desktops and let's start with the design philosophies behind each one because they sort of condition everything else KY goes for simple by default powerful when needed as in the default layout of your desktop is very simple the defaults are really sane and abs T to only show the most used features but when you dig a bit deeper you have tons of extra features options and settings to really make things your own or to just do everything without needing a lot of third- party applications to fill in the gaps and KD absolutely succeeds at this anyone who ever used windows can get started using KDE and will not feel lost but when you start wanting to change a few options here and there you might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of settings pages and the sheer number of settings on each of these pages gnome on the other hand goes for super accessible and simple meaning they make conscious choices to not include a lot of options and to not clutter the interface the goal is to give you a very simple legible and easy to understand interface and to let third-party apps give you more advanced features that might not be in their default applications gnome also succeeds at this but the fact that they weigh every single option and its long-term cost in terms of Maintenance and stability and design means that some people feel that they're either too slow in implementing new features or that they're dumping down their desktop or that it's just too limiting for their use in the end KD will very likely be much more familiar with virtually everyone because let's be honest everyone at some point used Windows as their default operating system gnome does away with all of this and thus will be a bit harder to get to grips with at first but once you get the workflow it might just click and you just have one single key press on your keyboard to access the single view that lets you do everything it's also very efficient now from these design principles you can easily infer what the views of each desktop are in terms of customization KDE can be turned into anything and gnome is on the surface at least a lot more rigid just in terms of looks KD lets you apply themes for everything out of the box you can change the icons the look of the buttons the colors of every part of every window the accent color of the desktop the shape of your title bars the entire layout of the desktop everything can be tweaked if you want to KDE even has built-in stores to let you install Community made layouts themes icons widgets and everything in between these can have some security concerns of course but the focus is clearly on letting you make whatever the hell you want gnome on the other hand is often viewed as inflexible and limited and that's not necessarily the case either by default yes gnome does not give you the options to change the layout or the look you need a third party app to handle any of this gnome doesn't have accent colors yet either they will get them in their next release gome 47 which at the time I'm recording this is still 2 and 1/2 months away but with the gnome tweaks app and the extension manager app you get a lot of possibilities you can you can change the theme of your desktop and the apps you can change the cursors the icons the button Styles the colors extension manager lets you install extensions that can turn gnome into something else auntu creates their desktop based on gnome with extensions zorinos does the same the current version of popos before they start using their future Cosmic desktop also does it extensions can let you have a Windows like layout a global menu a system tray anything really the main difference here is that KD officially has the built-in mechanisms to tweak things to theme things and they want to expose all of these features to the user gnome doesn't really want you to do that and extensions and themes are in sort of a gray area you can use them you can do them but they're not necessarily officially supported by the gnome project meaning that extensions can break when you update your version of gnome and themes are definitely not something that gnome supports so you will definitely encounter some problem visually in certain apps that just won't work well with the theme you picked granted that can also happen on KDE but on KD this is an official feature of the desktop so KD obviously wins in terms of customization you can completely tailor Gloom to your needs but there's no telling if this customization will last your next death through upgrade but what about support for more modern features and future proofing of these desktops the Linux desktop as as a whole is moving away from the older X11 display server because its architecture is stuck in the past and too hard to evolve no one wants to deal with it so every major project is moving towards whand which has some limitations but enables a lot of stuff like HDR variable refresh rate better fractional scaling and the like and on this front let's be honest KD has the edge overnow both desktops have very solid whm support they just gained explicit sync support meaning users of Nvidia gpus should have a really good experience now provided they use the latest drivers and the latest gnome or KDE but after that KD just has made a lot more progress on all of this stuff HDR is officially supported on KD you have a toggle that is available in the display settings provided your display supported which mine doesn't there's still some work to be done to make sure color accuracy is solid but this work is already underway with the ability to load your own ICC color profile or to use the one your display might provide KD supports having both SDR and HDR content side by side and it can let you run full screen HDR content as well notably games and movies gnome only has an experimental command line to toggle HDR and right now it is not fully baked they have plans to improve it in Gnome 47 by letting you play SDR and and HDR content side by side but chances are it won't be a stable feature that people can just turn on in the regular settings same goes for variable refresh rate the feature that lets your display change its refresh rate to accommodate the content playing on screen something that can make gaming way smoother and also lets you save bettery life on laptops KD Has It by default built in and stable you can turn it on in the display settings gnome only has experimental support for it right now that you do need to enable manually with a command line or through a utility called decom and on the fractional scaling front plasma supports it better than gnome as well plasma has it natively and in a stable version in the settings where gnome still considers their implementation experimental and you need to enable it manually through dcon as well again gome 47 should finish this implementation but at the time I'm recording this it has not been made into stable option in the end the state of things is that KD has a sizable lead on variable refresh rate on hdr on fractional scaling and on color management over gnome gnome is probably going to catch up with gnome 47 and gnome 48 but whether these things will be made stable and a default option you can simply toggle is really uncertain if you don't need any of these features if your Hardware doesn't support it then both desktops are basically on par they have really good whand support and if you cannot or don't want to run whand they have really good X11 support as well but if your Hardware has these features and you want to take advantage of this you currently need to use KD over gnome now on the topic of applications gnome has the upper hand gnome by making a very clear and well-defined development platform for developers ensured that basically most people developed apps using gnomes guidelines the end result is that virtually every time you hear about a new app it is designed to integrate with gnome and not with KD now KD also has plenty of available applications and they're generally more powerful with more features but they're also generally much older and have very busy and not upto-date user interfaces things are changing a bit with a newer framework called kirigami that lets developers build simpler KD apps we have good examples of this like Mark note or mercuro but in the the end gnome just has a more vibrant app ecosystem with a lot of utilities that do one task well and some more advanced apps like planify which is an excellent project management app or Gaff for a uml modeling and diagram tool and of course you can run gnome apps inside of KDE or KD apps inside of gnome but they just will not look right they won't use your usual conventions they will just not look integrated if that's an important thing for you if you like your desktops to be coherent then you need to use gnome over KD now as per stability and bugs this will really depend on the distribution you use how well they package these desktops for you and even on your Hardware KD often has the image of being buggier than gnome because it had a relatively long period of time where they had a weird release cycle they pushed One release full of new features but which was also very buggy and then they pushed one polish release which fixed most of the bugs but not all of them KD since it has a lot of features also has a lot more potential compatibility problems between these features that can create bugs it's a fact with software the more you do the more features you have the more points of failure you have and the buggier your thing will be you have more components so you have more potential bugs it's also very difficult to use the number of open bugs as a judge for each desktop because obviously bugs are first reported against specific components of that desktop and also a pure number wouldn't really mean anything because some bugs might be very old and were just never closed some bugs might be very basic non-important non impactful stuff and some might be desktop breaking so it's hard to judge what I have found in use is that both desktops feel very similar now in terms of stability I virtually never encounter a big desktop breaking bug in KD or in G chances are gnome might be a bit more stable and have a little bit less bugs than what KD has but also it really depends if you use the vanilla KD desktop compared to a super customized gnome with 20 extensions maybe your gnome will be buggier and if you use a completely tailored and tweaked KD with every option turned on chances are you will have more bugs and you will be less stable as a platform than just vanilla gnome without extensions it will depend on your experience and Hardware so this one is hard to judge I will still say that gnome feels a bit more polished if only because they have less options to test so in the end what do you choose I think the most important decision factor is which philosophy do you prefer gnome offers a more polished more unified and more coherent experience at the expense of most conventions people will be used to and at the expense of customization you can Bridge these gaps with extend iions and themes but they're basically a hack and they might not be as easy to apply as on KD and they might make your desktop very unstable or buggy KD is basically a giant box of Lego or a toolbox they use this toolbox to build a simple default state but basically KD is a collection of things you can use to build the exact experience you want that looks like you want it to and behaves in your own very specific way the consequence of this is that gnome has a better selection of available applications because it's more of a fixed platform to Target something developers tend to enjoy and gnome might thus be a bit more stable but on the other hand KD implements more modern features faster because work gnome can sometimes overthink a features design or implementation not really starting the work or pushing it until they have sorted all the issues they could Envision KD tends to just go for the feature and to push it to users and then they start refining its implementation so they just move faster on a lot of stuff so personally I use KDE these days and I'm very satisfied with it it is probably what I would recommend for any new Linux beginner coming from the windows world because it will just be more familiar and if something doesn't work exactly like they want it to they can change it but I also use gnome for the longest time before I move to KD and I absolutely love the attention to detail the cohesion the look and feel the app ecosystem they're both fantastic choices you decide it's not a clearcut choice there is no one desktop is much better than anything else and everyone who tells you otherwise is just wrong just like it would be wrong to not talk about our sponsor tuxedo computers they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box which is a sizable advantage over buying something from a manufacturer that only supports Windows because because you know that the hardware has been tested with Linux and Tuxedo actually submits patches Upstream to fix the potential compatibility problems that they encounter they have a giant range of computers that should cover every need and every price point I have plenty of reviews for their Hardware on my channel and they're really really solid they're all I use these days for running this channel it's one of their laptops for gaming it's one of their desktops they're all super customizable you can't go wrong with them so click the link in the description below if you need a new PC you want to run Linux on it and you want to support a company that actually contributes to Linux go with tuxedo computers they're really good okay so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and if you really enjoyed the channel there are plenty of links in the description to support it and gain some extra perks so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] he |
even after all these years gnome and KD are still the main desktop environments for lint plenty of others are available now and some of them are just as advanced and just as good but the big ones they're still gnome and KDE and both these desktops have their very vocal supporters and detractors because they both have very different philosophies and that's good choice is good but it also means that newcomers and generally Linux users might not really know which one they should dedicate any time to learning and which one they should really use depending on their preferences the goal is absolutely not to tell you that one is better than the other it's just to give you all the facts so you can start using or move to something that really works for you and you can also start listening to the segue to our sponsor if you have ever read an article online and wondered who EX exactly was behind that website if they had a specific bias or agenda then boy do I have a good service for you it is ground news click the link in the description or scan the QR code that should appear somewhere on screen to follow along while I tell you how things work to explain let's take a look at this story on Google's carbon emissions Rising due to their focus on AI with ground news I can be up to speed on this story in seconds with their summaries and and a bias comparison showing me what the left what the center and what the right are focusing their reporting on for this specific story this is based on more than 90 articles here that ground news found covering this exact Story coming from across the world and across the political Spectrum for example there's this article from The Inquirer ground news shows me their reporting is somewhat credible it leans politically left and they are based in the Philippines I can either read their coverage or keep scrolling for a different perspective on this story or I can look at the visual breakdowns on the right for quick data on all the new sources covering this I really think ground news is a fantastic service for you to improve your understanding of various issues and various stories and also to understand what's your Echo chamber and to try and Escape it so click the link in the description or scan the QR code on screen to go to the ground News website and get 40% off the same Vantage plan that I use to get all my news Okay so back to our desktops and let's start with the design philosophies behind each one because they sort of condition everything else KY goes for simple by default powerful when needed as in the default layout of your desktop is very simple the defaults are really sane and abs T to only show the most used features but when you dig a bit deeper you have tons of extra features options and settings to really make things your own or to just do everything without needing a lot of third- party applications to fill in the gaps and KD absolutely succeeds at this anyone who ever used windows can get started using KDE and will not feel lost but when you start wanting to change a few options here and there you might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of settings pages and the sheer number of settings on each of these pages gnome on the other hand goes for super accessible and simple meaning they make conscious choices to not include a lot of options and to not clutter the interface the goal is to give you a very simple legible and easy to understand interface and to let third-party apps give you more advanced features that might not be in their default applications gnome also succeeds at this but the fact that they weigh every single option and its long-term cost in terms of Maintenance and stability and design means that some people feel that they're either too slow in implementing new features or that they're dumping down their desktop or that it's just too limiting for their use in the end KD will very likely be much more familiar with virtually everyone because let's be honest everyone at some point used Windows as their default operating system gnome does away with all of this and thus will be a bit harder to get to grips with at first but once you get the workflow it might just click and you just have one single key press on your keyboard to access the single view that lets you do everything it's also very efficient now from these design principles you can easily infer what the views of each desktop are in terms of customization KDE can be turned into anything and gnome is on the surface at least a lot more rigid just in terms of looks KD lets you apply themes for everything out of the box you can change the icons the look of the buttons the colors of every part of every window the accent color of the desktop the shape of your title bars the entire layout of the desktop everything can be tweaked if you want to KDE even has built-in stores to let you install Community made layouts themes icons widgets and everything in between these can have some security concerns of course but the focus is clearly on letting you make whatever the hell you want gnome on the other hand is often viewed as inflexible and limited and that's not necessarily the case either by default yes gnome does not give you the options to change the layout or the look you need a third party app to handle any of this gnome doesn't have accent colors yet either they will get them in their next release gome 47 which at the time I'm recording this is still 2 and 1/2 months away but with the gnome tweaks app and the extension manager app you get a lot of possibilities you can you can change the theme of your desktop and the apps you can change the cursors the icons the button Styles the colors extension manager lets you install extensions that can turn gnome into something else auntu creates their desktop based on gnome with extensions zorinos does the same the current version of popos before they start using their future Cosmic desktop also does it extensions can let you have a Windows like layout a global menu a system tray anything really the main difference here is that KD officially has the built-in mechanisms to tweak things to theme things and they want to expose all of these features to the user gnome doesn't really want you to do that and extensions and themes are in sort of a gray area you can use them you can do them but they're not necessarily officially supported by the gnome project meaning that extensions can break when you update your version of gnome and themes are definitely not something that gnome supports so you will definitely encounter some problem visually in certain apps that just won't work well with the theme you picked granted that can also happen on KDE but on KD this is an official feature of the desktop so KD obviously wins in terms of customization you can completely tailor Gloom to your needs but there's no telling if this customization will last your next death through upgrade but what about support for more modern features and future proofing of these desktops the Linux desktop as as a whole is moving away from the older X11 display server because its architecture is stuck in the past and too hard to evolve no one wants to deal with it so every major project is moving towards whand which has some limitations but enables a lot of stuff like HDR variable refresh rate better fractional scaling and the like and on this front let's be honest KD has the edge overnow both desktops have very solid whm support they just gained explicit sync support meaning users of Nvidia gpus should have a really good experience now provided they use the latest drivers and the latest gnome or KDE but after that KD just has made a lot more progress on all of this stuff HDR is officially supported on KD you have a toggle that is available in the display settings provided your display supported which mine doesn't there's still some work to be done to make sure color accuracy is solid but this work is already underway with the ability to load your own ICC color profile or to use the one your display might provide KD supports having both SDR and HDR content side by side and it can let you run full screen HDR content as well notably games and movies gnome only has an experimental command line to toggle HDR and right now it is not fully baked they have plans to improve it in Gnome 47 by letting you play SDR and and HDR content side by side but chances are it won't be a stable feature that people can just turn on in the regular settings same goes for variable refresh rate the feature that lets your display change its refresh rate to accommodate the content playing on screen something that can make gaming way smoother and also lets you save bettery life on laptops KD Has It by default built in and stable you can turn it on in the display settings gnome only has experimental support for it right now that you do need to enable manually with a command line or through a utility called decom and on the fractional scaling front plasma supports it better than gnome as well plasma has it natively and in a stable version in the settings where gnome still considers their implementation experimental and you need to enable it manually through dcon as well again gome 47 should finish this implementation but at the time I'm recording this it has not been made into stable option in the end the state of things is that KD has a sizable lead on variable refresh rate on hdr on fractional scaling and on color management over gnome gnome is probably going to catch up with gnome 47 and gnome 48 but whether these things will be made stable and a default option you can simply toggle is really uncertain if you don't need any of these features if your Hardware doesn't support it then both desktops are basically on par they have really good whand support and if you cannot or don't want to run whand they have really good X11 support as well but if your Hardware has these features and you want to take advantage of this you currently need to use KD over gnome now on the topic of applications gnome has the upper hand gnome by making a very clear and well-defined development platform for developers ensured that basically most people developed apps using gnomes guidelines the end result is that virtually every time you hear about a new app it is designed to integrate with gnome and not with KD now KD also has plenty of available applications and they're generally more powerful with more features but they're also generally much older and have very busy and not upto-date user interfaces things are changing a bit with a newer framework called kirigami that lets developers build simpler KD apps we have good examples of this like Mark note or mercuro but in the the end gnome just has a more vibrant app ecosystem with a lot of utilities that do one task well and some more advanced apps like planify which is an excellent project management app or Gaff for a uml modeling and diagram tool and of course you can run gnome apps inside of KDE or KD apps inside of gnome but they just will not look right they won't use your usual conventions they will just not look integrated if that's an important thing for you if you like your desktops to be coherent then you need to use gnome over KD now as per stability and bugs this will really depend on the distribution you use how well they package these desktops for you and even on your Hardware KD often has the image of being buggier than gnome because it had a relatively long period of time where they had a weird release cycle they pushed One release full of new features but which was also very buggy and then they pushed one polish release which fixed most of the bugs but not all of them KD since it has a lot of features also has a lot more potential compatibility problems between these features that can create bugs it's a fact with software the more you do the more features you have the more points of failure you have and the buggier your thing will be you have more components so you have more potential bugs it's also very difficult to use the number of open bugs as a judge for each desktop because obviously bugs are first reported against specific components of that desktop and also a pure number wouldn't really mean anything because some bugs might be very old and were just never closed some bugs might be very basic non-important non impactful stuff and some might be desktop breaking so it's hard to judge what I have found in use is that both desktops feel very similar now in terms of stability I virtually never encounter a big desktop breaking bug in KD or in G chances are gnome might be a bit more stable and have a little bit less bugs than what KD has but also it really depends if you use the vanilla KD desktop compared to a super customized gnome with 20 extensions maybe your gnome will be buggier and if you use a completely tailored and tweaked KD with every option turned on chances are you will have more bugs and you will be less stable as a platform than just vanilla gnome without extensions it will depend on your experience and Hardware so this one is hard to judge I will still say that gnome feels a bit more polished if only because they have less options to test so in the end what do you choose I think the most important decision factor is which philosophy do you prefer gnome offers a more polished more unified and more coherent experience at the expense of most conventions people will be used to and at the expense of customization you can Bridge these gaps with extend iions and themes but they're basically a hack and they might not be as easy to apply as on KD and they might make your desktop very unstable or buggy KD is basically a giant box of Lego or a toolbox they use this toolbox to build a simple default state but basically KD is a collection of things you can use to build the exact experience you want that looks like you want it to and behaves in your own very specific way the consequence of this is that gnome has a better selection of available applications because it's more of a fixed platform to Target something developers tend to enjoy and gnome might thus be a bit more stable but on the other hand KD implements more modern features faster because work gnome can sometimes overthink a features design or implementation not really starting the work or pushing it until they have sorted all the issues they could Envision KD tends to just go for the feature and to push it to users and then they start refining its implementation so they just move faster on a lot of stuff so personally I use KDE these days and I'm very satisfied with it it is probably what I would recommend for any new Linux beginner coming from the windows world because it will just be more familiar and if something doesn't work exactly like they want it to they can change it but I also use gnome for the longest time before I move to KD and I absolutely love the attention to detail the cohesion the look and feel the app ecosystem they're both fantastic choices you decide it's not a clearcut choice there is no one desktop is much better than anything else and everyone who tells you otherwise is just wrong just like it would be wrong to not talk about our sponsor tuxedo computers they make laptops and desktops that ship with Linux out of the box which is a sizable advantage over buying something from a manufacturer that only supports Windows because because you know that the hardware has been tested with Linux and Tuxedo actually submits patches Upstream to fix the potential compatibility problems that they encounter they have a giant range of computers that should cover every need and every price point I have plenty of reviews for their Hardware on my channel and they're really really solid they're all I use these days for running this channel it's one of their laptops for gaming it's one of their desktops they're all super customizable you can't go wrong with them so click the link in the description below if you need a new PC you want to run Linux on it and you want to support a company that actually contributes to Linux go with tuxedo computers they're really good okay so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and if you really enjoyed the channel there are plenty of links in the description to support it and gain some extra perks so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] he |
means 22's beta phase is coming to an end and since they don't give any heads up for when they release a stable version I'm making a guess and I'm assuming it will be out by the time I'm publishing this video if I don't have a fixed release date I have to take a guess so when you watch this either M22 is not released yet but it should release like at most in a week or it is already out at any rate it was ready enough for me to actually take a real good good look at what it brings and it is a fantastic release I just have one little concern on how much workload the mint team is shouldering and I also just have this one segue to our sponsor this video is sponsored by proton you probably know them they developed a suite of private and encrypted tools for your email online storage calendar contacts passwords and VPN speaking of which did you know you can double up on your privacy by connecting to the door Network through your VPN T will let you balce your traffic across multiple encrypted servers meaning the websites that you visit will only see the IP address of the last tour server your request went through but the weak spot in tour is the entry note the first tour server you will connect to because they can see your IP address and that's where the VPN comes into play connecting to tour through a VPN will hide your real IP address from the tour Network and all also will prevent your internet service provider from knowing you're using tour protonvpn has baked in support for using tour over a VPN network with a choice of VPN servers that are part of the tour Network for the occasions where you really want to make sure no one knows where you're located and what websites you are visiting as always you can click the link in the description below to get started with proton and to discover all the options and all the services that they offer okay so back to Linux mint the first big thing will be in mint's software manager their focus is still on Deb packages mostly As for example they're now maintaining a Deb package for Thunderbird because auntu which is still the base for mint moved to a snap package for this application and mint doesn't want snaps at all and you might ask doesn't Thunderbird support an official flatback app and doesn't mean ship with flatback and flathub enabled and the answer to both is yes but they still decided that they would maintain a dab package anyway and add that to their burden this is going to be a recurring theme and we'll discuss this at the end of the video so stick around it's going to get interesting so on top of this relatively benine thing the software install app itself now loads much faster with the main window appearing almost instantly according to minc Dev and I can confirm that in my testing it's been really speedy this is thanks to improved multi-threading support you will also get a new preferences page in this app and the homepage gained a new Banner slideshow like every app store out there the big change is how mint will handle flat packs coming from flathub from now on mint comes with flat pack support enabled and flathub turned on meaning you do have access to a lot of software straight from their developers and yes I'm saying straight from the app developers because by default unverified flatbacks will not appear in mint's software manager these are apps that are packaged by third party individuals not by their original developers you do get an option to show these again in the store with a warning telling you that it's not really secure because anyone could be behind this package and you don't know what they put in it even if you decide to show these flat packs again you will not see any user reviews or ratings with the little stars because this would I suppose make them look legit and just like every other verified package this in my opinion is what we call in France a FSE bunny day or fake good idea it's an idea that seems good on the surface but is actually detrimental because what will happen is everyone will turn on unverified flat packs because these contain applications that people really want to install Google Chrome steam Spotify VLC and a lot more and once they do that they do not have the reviews and the ratings to make sure that these third part body applications could actually be safe or are well packaged the only way people could have known if these apps were problematic is with the ratings and the comments and you removed those a better design decision would probably have been to always have a warning popup when you try to install an unverified flatback app so every single install you are reminded that the app is unverified but at least you can check on the user reviews and the ratings to see if someone else has noticed something we and the app is still up for some reason now the second change to Mint 22 is the update to their cinnamon desktop environment namely cinnamon 6.2 and it's a very very small update when using the workspace switcher you can now middle click a workspace to close it the experimental whan session gains support for the Clutter pulit agent meaning the whan session should be able to display authentication prompts to run admin stuff and the user avatars are now used in these authentication windows and in various user applets when you add various rightclick menu items to the file manager you will now be able to reorder these elements and add separators and group things by submenus and you can tweak the labels and the icons of these menu entries that's a level of customization even KDE doesn't dare give their own users so that's something on the topic of applets there are improvements on how the VPN status is reported with a padlock appearing on the network icon when your VPN is active as per settings you can now search the key bindings cinnamon spices now support specific keybinds as well and the Corner Bar applet that appears by default at the bottom right of the cinnamon panel will now let you bind an action to a click when you also hold the shift key so yeah the cinnamon desktop shell itself hasn't really changed all that much I'm guessing a lot of developer effort is mostly focused on bringing that whan session to a solid state because if I remember correctly they want to make that the default for the next major mint version because yes Wayland will be the default on mint at some point the Wayland will be the default everywhere the Wayland will come for you now all of this doesn't mean that apps haven't changed there are a lot of changes on that front the main one is that mint is now sticking to older versions of a lot of default apps that are made by G so the phone viewer has been entirely removed from min's default install it's still available in the repost though the video player the calculator the scanning app the dis usage analyzer the system monitor the calendar and the archive manager were all reverted to their older gtk3 versions because they had all moved to gtk4 from the previous major Min version to this new one and they had moved to Liber V this means mint would not be able to apply their usual themes to these application and the problem is a bit more complex than Min developers saying I want predy colors so you're as the users are getting inferior older versions of apps mint doesn't really downgrade features for Aesthetics in general the rationale here is that mint likes to offer a cohesive desktop much like what gnome is doing and what KDE is doing with one set of guidelines for the user interface and one theme the problem is mint was using a lot of gnome apps which first started losing their menu bars in favor of header bars a while back meaning the user interface guidelines in mint got a bit muddied and second it meant that these apps were using the lib advita Library which hardcodes the advita theme itself mint could still change this theme because there are ways to do so but it's not very sustainable and it would basically lock users to one single theme mint would be building half of their cinnamon experience on a base they have zero control over and actually losing features this is why system 76 moved away from gnome to develop Cosmic this is why mint created cinnamon in the first place to move away from gnome just as well so it's totally fine that they want to do this and mint is also trying to do this in an intelligent fashion they noticed that xfce mate and others also wanted to use gtk apps but not gnome apps they wanted a closer to gnome 2 era kind of design and so Mint app ly reached out to these other desktops to see if they could all collaborate on this set of applications like they said they don't want to make mint apps they want to make Linux apps they will also very likely Fork all these gtk3 versions of apps in the future to be able to reach these goals and this is where I'm really worried about the workload even with the help of xfc and mate those are still very very small teams the min's team isn't huge either so three small teams might just not have the strength to maintain all of these applications especially since Min developers already maintain their own desktop environment they already tweak the obuntu base quite a bit they have a Debian based version as well they maintain their own D packages and they already have their own set of X apps that they work on that might be a lot of work for one single team even with the help of two other smaller desktops and that's what I discussed in the last part of this video so stick around to get my views on that now other applications that mint will now Ship by default include a new online accounts app that replaces the older online account settings panel which also moved to Liber V and as such could not be included in mint anymore so they built their own the good news is that it also brings this online accounts feature to the mate and xfce versions of mint which did not have that previously mint 22 also ships with a matrix client by default now to replace the discontinued hex chat app mint moved to Matrix for their chats instead of IRC and so they had to Shipe an app that uses this protocol the app is actually just a rapper to run element which is a web app they initially plan to have a new IRC client but after testing Matrix they decided they liked it better and they moved to that instead which I think is a good idea IRC is a good protocol it was awesome in the '90s but now people really are just used to Discord slack and teams and stuff like that and Matrix will be much much closer to that experience so it's probably for the best also element is shipped as a web app not an electron app so yeah it's not as bad as it could have been apart from that the sticky notes app can now be invoked from the command line you can also configure where new sticky notes will appear on screen the text editor can now duplicate the text you've selected by pressing Control Plus shift plus d time shift will display a confirmation dialogue when you trying to delete a snapshot game file formats have better thumbnail generation and there are a few other smaller minor changes okay so to finish this look at mint 22 let's see what's under the hood first mint 22 is based on obuntu 24.4 LTS meaning it will get security updates until 2029 this package base is also going to stay the same for mint until 2026 as always mint will ship minor updates but won't move to a newer Ubuntu base in turn this means mint 22 moved to pipe wire as the default because that's what Ubuntu uses now it also means mint comes with the kernel 6.8 and they will add the usual Hardware enablement stack to it so mint will keep supporting newer Hardware by default this 6.8 kernel is not an LTS though and has a very short support window so I would be surprised if they didn't move to something newer at some point to conclude Min 20 to is a mandatory update if you use mint whether you're a beginner an advanced User it's more of what mint users tend to use mint for and what mint user is like so there's no reason not to update to this one now I completely understand why they would want to move to their own Suite of apps because if your core experience depends on theming and guidelines that aren't head orar Centric then you cannot keep relying on gnome apps what gnome is doing is entirely fine and normal they're building their own platform for their own desktop they're not building gnome to be a base for every other desktop out there now for mints to keep control over their Linux Mint experience they need to have their own apps so forking gtk3 versions of these apps is a good plan what worries me is how they are going to handle all this extra work Min developers already have to uproot everything that is snap related from obuntu and so they have to maintain extra Debian packages they also have to maintain and develop the entire cinnamon desktop with a big whan transition that they've given themselves 2 years to finish they also have to maintain their own Suite of X apps and a separate spin with xfce and another spin with matate and now they will have seven more core apps to maintain and update themselves where previously they relied on updates from the people who developed the gnome versions of these apps this is a lot of extra work and even if they manag to Embark xfce and mat developers to build these apps for all three desktops both these other desktops have really small teams that barely manage to update their own stuff the pace of updates to mate and xfc is glacial and I'm not saying that everything needs to have an update every month or that these updates aren't cool but the more you shoulder in terms of development the more people you need and I'm afraid that with all of this extra work maybe some other areas of Linux Mint will start lagging behind I do hope they succeed in this endeavor because it would be really really cool to have this older view of the Linux ecosystem which is I'm making an app for Linux I don't care which desktop it's supposed to run it's going to look relatively fine on any desktop because it's using a toolkit that KD can theme that gnome can theme that mint can theme that xfc mate anything else can theme so it's going to look relatively at home it's how things work were in The Gnome 2 days and it was cool but I do wish mint all the best in their Endeavors I really do hope they can succeed it would be nice to have this second way of building another entirely different ecosystem and if someone can do it I think it's meant and if someone can make a solid Linux computer it's our sponsor tuxedo computers they make laptops desktops and computers in any form factor that run Linux out of the box the hardware has actually been tested to run well with Linux and they actually do contribute patches Upstream to make sure everything runs smoothly they have a wide range that will cover most price points and most use cases all of their devices have a solid choice of customizations from the internals and the components to your custom keyboard layout to your own logo engraved on the lid I only use tuxedo computers these days I run this entire channel on one of their laptops including editing all these videos and I do all my gaming on one of their desktops so if you need a new computer you want to run Linux on it and you want to support a company that contributes to Linux click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they're really really good okay so thanks for watching the video If you enjoyed it there are all the usual YouTube buttons click them all leave a comment to make sure that the algorithm is pleased with whatever we're doing here and if you really enjoy the channel there are links in the description to support it and to get a few nice perks so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] |
means 22's beta phase is coming to an end and since they don't give any heads up for when they release a stable version I'm making a guess and I'm assuming it will be out by the time I'm publishing this video if I don't have a fixed release date I have to take a guess so when you watch this either M22 is not released yet but it should release like at most in a week or it is already out at any rate it was ready enough for me to actually take a real good good look at what it brings and it is a fantastic release I just have one little concern on how much workload the mint team is shouldering and I also just have this one segue to our sponsor this video is sponsored by proton you probably know them they developed a suite of private and encrypted tools for your email online storage calendar contacts passwords and VPN speaking of which did you know you can double up on your privacy by connecting to the door Network through your VPN T will let you balce your traffic across multiple encrypted servers meaning the websites that you visit will only see the IP address of the last tour server your request went through but the weak spot in tour is the entry note the first tour server you will connect to because they can see your IP address and that's where the VPN comes into play connecting to tour through a VPN will hide your real IP address from the tour Network and all also will prevent your internet service provider from knowing you're using tour protonvpn has baked in support for using tour over a VPN network with a choice of VPN servers that are part of the tour Network for the occasions where you really want to make sure no one knows where you're located and what websites you are visiting as always you can click the link in the description below to get started with proton and to discover all the options and all the services that they offer okay so back to Linux mint the first big thing will be in mint's software manager their focus is still on Deb packages mostly As for example they're now maintaining a Deb package for Thunderbird because auntu which is still the base for mint moved to a snap package for this application and mint doesn't want snaps at all and you might ask doesn't Thunderbird support an official flatback app and doesn't mean ship with flatback and flathub enabled and the answer to both is yes but they still decided that they would maintain a dab package anyway and add that to their burden this is going to be a recurring theme and we'll discuss this at the end of the video so stick around it's going to get interesting so on top of this relatively benine thing the software install app itself now loads much faster with the main window appearing almost instantly according to minc Dev and I can confirm that in my testing it's been really speedy this is thanks to improved multi-threading support you will also get a new preferences page in this app and the homepage gained a new Banner slideshow like every app store out there the big change is how mint will handle flat packs coming from flathub from now on mint comes with flat pack support enabled and flathub turned on meaning you do have access to a lot of software straight from their developers and yes I'm saying straight from the app developers because by default unverified flatbacks will not appear in mint's software manager these are apps that are packaged by third party individuals not by their original developers you do get an option to show these again in the store with a warning telling you that it's not really secure because anyone could be behind this package and you don't know what they put in it even if you decide to show these flat packs again you will not see any user reviews or ratings with the little stars because this would I suppose make them look legit and just like every other verified package this in my opinion is what we call in France a FSE bunny day or fake good idea it's an idea that seems good on the surface but is actually detrimental because what will happen is everyone will turn on unverified flat packs because these contain applications that people really want to install Google Chrome steam Spotify VLC and a lot more and once they do that they do not have the reviews and the ratings to make sure that these third part body applications could actually be safe or are well packaged the only way people could have known if these apps were problematic is with the ratings and the comments and you removed those a better design decision would probably have been to always have a warning popup when you try to install an unverified flatback app so every single install you are reminded that the app is unverified but at least you can check on the user reviews and the ratings to see if someone else has noticed something we and the app is still up for some reason now the second change to Mint 22 is the update to their cinnamon desktop environment namely cinnamon 6.2 and it's a very very small update when using the workspace switcher you can now middle click a workspace to close it the experimental whan session gains support for the Clutter pulit agent meaning the whan session should be able to display authentication prompts to run admin stuff and the user avatars are now used in these authentication windows and in various user applets when you add various rightclick menu items to the file manager you will now be able to reorder these elements and add separators and group things by submenus and you can tweak the labels and the icons of these menu entries that's a level of customization even KDE doesn't dare give their own users so that's something on the topic of applets there are improvements on how the VPN status is reported with a padlock appearing on the network icon when your VPN is active as per settings you can now search the key bindings cinnamon spices now support specific keybinds as well and the Corner Bar applet that appears by default at the bottom right of the cinnamon panel will now let you bind an action to a click when you also hold the shift key so yeah the cinnamon desktop shell itself hasn't really changed all that much I'm guessing a lot of developer effort is mostly focused on bringing that whan session to a solid state because if I remember correctly they want to make that the default for the next major mint version because yes Wayland will be the default on mint at some point the Wayland will be the default everywhere the Wayland will come for you now all of this doesn't mean that apps haven't changed there are a lot of changes on that front the main one is that mint is now sticking to older versions of a lot of default apps that are made by G so the phone viewer has been entirely removed from min's default install it's still available in the repost though the video player the calculator the scanning app the dis usage analyzer the system monitor the calendar and the archive manager were all reverted to their older gtk3 versions because they had all moved to gtk4 from the previous major Min version to this new one and they had moved to Liber V this means mint would not be able to apply their usual themes to these application and the problem is a bit more complex than Min developers saying I want predy colors so you're as the users are getting inferior older versions of apps mint doesn't really downgrade features for Aesthetics in general the rationale here is that mint likes to offer a cohesive desktop much like what gnome is doing and what KDE is doing with one set of guidelines for the user interface and one theme the problem is mint was using a lot of gnome apps which first started losing their menu bars in favor of header bars a while back meaning the user interface guidelines in mint got a bit muddied and second it meant that these apps were using the lib advita Library which hardcodes the advita theme itself mint could still change this theme because there are ways to do so but it's not very sustainable and it would basically lock users to one single theme mint would be building half of their cinnamon experience on a base they have zero control over and actually losing features this is why system 76 moved away from gnome to develop Cosmic this is why mint created cinnamon in the first place to move away from gnome just as well so it's totally fine that they want to do this and mint is also trying to do this in an intelligent fashion they noticed that xfce mate and others also wanted to use gtk apps but not gnome apps they wanted a closer to gnome 2 era kind of design and so Mint app ly reached out to these other desktops to see if they could all collaborate on this set of applications like they said they don't want to make mint apps they want to make Linux apps they will also very likely Fork all these gtk3 versions of apps in the future to be able to reach these goals and this is where I'm really worried about the workload even with the help of xfc and mate those are still very very small teams the min's team isn't huge either so three small teams might just not have the strength to maintain all of these applications especially since Min developers already maintain their own desktop environment they already tweak the obuntu base quite a bit they have a Debian based version as well they maintain their own D packages and they already have their own set of X apps that they work on that might be a lot of work for one single team even with the help of two other smaller desktops and that's what I discussed in the last part of this video so stick around to get my views on that now other applications that mint will now Ship by default include a new online accounts app that replaces the older online account settings panel which also moved to Liber V and as such could not be included in mint anymore so they built their own the good news is that it also brings this online accounts feature to the mate and xfce versions of mint which did not have that previously mint 22 also ships with a matrix client by default now to replace the discontinued hex chat app mint moved to Matrix for their chats instead of IRC and so they had to Shipe an app that uses this protocol the app is actually just a rapper to run element which is a web app they initially plan to have a new IRC client but after testing Matrix they decided they liked it better and they moved to that instead which I think is a good idea IRC is a good protocol it was awesome in the '90s but now people really are just used to Discord slack and teams and stuff like that and Matrix will be much much closer to that experience so it's probably for the best also element is shipped as a web app not an electron app so yeah it's not as bad as it could have been apart from that the sticky notes app can now be invoked from the command line you can also configure where new sticky notes will appear on screen the text editor can now duplicate the text you've selected by pressing Control Plus shift plus d time shift will display a confirmation dialogue when you trying to delete a snapshot game file formats have better thumbnail generation and there are a few other smaller minor changes okay so to finish this look at mint 22 let's see what's under the hood first mint 22 is based on obuntu 24.4 LTS meaning it will get security updates until 2029 this package base is also going to stay the same for mint until 2026 as always mint will ship minor updates but won't move to a newer Ubuntu base in turn this means mint 22 moved to pipe wire as the default because that's what Ubuntu uses now it also means mint comes with the kernel 6.8 and they will add the usual Hardware enablement stack to it so mint will keep supporting newer Hardware by default this 6.8 kernel is not an LTS though and has a very short support window so I would be surprised if they didn't move to something newer at some point to conclude Min 20 to is a mandatory update if you use mint whether you're a beginner an advanced User it's more of what mint users tend to use mint for and what mint user is like so there's no reason not to update to this one now I completely understand why they would want to move to their own Suite of apps because if your core experience depends on theming and guidelines that aren't head orar Centric then you cannot keep relying on gnome apps what gnome is doing is entirely fine and normal they're building their own platform for their own desktop they're not building gnome to be a base for every other desktop out there now for mints to keep control over their Linux Mint experience they need to have their own apps so forking gtk3 versions of these apps is a good plan what worries me is how they are going to handle all this extra work Min developers already have to uproot everything that is snap related from obuntu and so they have to maintain extra Debian packages they also have to maintain and develop the entire cinnamon desktop with a big whan transition that they've given themselves 2 years to finish they also have to maintain their own Suite of X apps and a separate spin with xfce and another spin with matate and now they will have seven more core apps to maintain and update themselves where previously they relied on updates from the people who developed the gnome versions of these apps this is a lot of extra work and even if they manag to Embark xfce and mat developers to build these apps for all three desktops both these other desktops have really small teams that barely manage to update their own stuff the pace of updates to mate and xfc is glacial and I'm not saying that everything needs to have an update every month or that these updates aren't cool but the more you shoulder in terms of development the more people you need and I'm afraid that with all of this extra work maybe some other areas of Linux Mint will start lagging behind I do hope they succeed in this endeavor because it would be really really cool to have this older view of the Linux ecosystem which is I'm making an app for Linux I don't care which desktop it's supposed to run it's going to look relatively fine on any desktop because it's using a toolkit that KD can theme that gnome can theme that mint can theme that xfc mate anything else can theme so it's going to look relatively at home it's how things work were in The Gnome 2 days and it was cool but I do wish mint all the best in their Endeavors I really do hope they can succeed it would be nice to have this second way of building another entirely different ecosystem and if someone can do it I think it's meant and if someone can make a solid Linux computer it's our sponsor tuxedo computers they make laptops desktops and computers in any form factor that run Linux out of the box the hardware has actually been tested to run well with Linux and they actually do contribute patches Upstream to make sure everything runs smoothly they have a wide range that will cover most price points and most use cases all of their devices have a solid choice of customizations from the internals and the components to your custom keyboard layout to your own logo engraved on the lid I only use tuxedo computers these days I run this entire channel on one of their laptops including editing all these videos and I do all my gaming on one of their desktops so if you need a new computer you want to run Linux on it and you want to support a company that contributes to Linux click the link in the description below and get yourself something from tuxedo they're really really good okay so thanks for watching the video If you enjoyed it there are all the usual YouTube buttons click them all leave a comment to make sure that the algorithm is pleased with whatever we're doing here and if you really enjoy the channel there are links in the description to support it and to get a few nice perks so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] |
hey everyone this is Nick and welcome to the Linux and open source news show this week we've got one major piece of news which is the major outage that started yesterday and made Millions probably of Windows PCS blue screen of death without really letting them recover very easily and that was all due to a third party program that also actually runs on Linux but didn't crash Linux boxes for some reason who knows what that could be we also have soua asking the open Souza Community Dro to Rebrand change their name and change their logo to be well not as close to sua as they currently are and we have a lot of other Linux and open- Source news and we also have this segue to our sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace your all-in-one platform to create publish and manage your own website Squarespace has really easy tools to make sure anyone can end up with a NIC looking well optimized website no matter if you know how to code or not Squarespace has what they call their blueprint system which lets you pick from a variety of templates that are pre-built and will suit any type of website and they even have the SEO tools you need to make sure your website doesn't end up in the last page of Google search results to go further Squarespace has their own design engine to create your own Pages you can just drag and drop elements where you want them and you can change the colors the fonts and just tweak the template however you want and then you can add some extra features like creating your own online shop with a complete payment system you can design your own logo from Squarespace book your own domain name so click the link in the description below to give Squarespace a shot and you'll even get 10% off your first domain or website purchase so as you probably know there was a giant it outage on Friday causing Banks TV broadcasters Airlines train operators hospitals and basically every type of company or business or organization that uses computers to just stop working for a while the Swiss cyber security office blamed the crowd strike for the issue and it was then confirmed that the issue came from that crowd strike being a cyber security firm that provides a product called Falcon sensor which itself provides realtime monitoring and protection from cyber attacks and this thing seems used by a lot of major companies to try and protect their software and their servers the issue seems linked to a misconfiguration or a faulty update In Crowd strike which basically made Windows crash on a blue screen of death and it just could not reboot easily or at all after that it basically cost what I can only assume is billions of dollars worth of economic cost more than a thousand flights were cancelled by various Airlines payment systems were down for hours some hospitals couldn't work at all even the freaking Paris Olympics Games seemed affected now there was also an outage for Microsoft 365 but we later learned that this wasn't specifically due to crowd strike they had their own problems just as well other affected Parties By The Crowd strike problem included Visa Amazon the 911.gov website that handles emergencies in the US and more now fortunately a fix was found a few hours after the issue was first reported you could just delete a file from the crowd strike directory in system 32 drivers on Windows and it just stopped windows from crashing all the time the problem is you had to actually have access to the drive and if you were already in the blue screen of death configuration chances are you could not do that without using some kind of live USB Microsoft also said rebooting a PC 15 times would fix the problem uh which apparently it did for some people crowd strike couldn't push an update remotely to fix the problem every system had to be manually fixed which means hours were lost simply to make PCS bootable and the real issue here is that there is one single system crowd strike in this instance which is deployed by 60% of Fortune 500 companies by eight out of the 10 Financial firms and eight out of the 10 top tech companies it is a single point of failure that most major companies have in common and that's always a bad thing and it is important to remember that crowd strik tool works on Linux and Mac OS but Linux and Mac OS systems just did not crash with that update it's entirely a Windows related problem due to a problem with that software and this raises two major problems the first one is that one single system being deployed on so many computers that has access to that lower level operating system to the point where a faulty update will actually crash the entire OS that's unacceptable no program should have that level of access to any operating system second how badly does your OS have to be designed if a thirdparty app can publish an update with one file and this makes your entire OS unbootable where are the fail safes the deactivation the safe modes the recovery partitions whatever this is just unacceptable I'm not saying it could never happen on Linux or Mac OS I'm saying it didn't now Souza the company behind soua Enterprise Linux apparently asked the open Souza Community to stop using the Souza brand name for their Community Dro now apparently they have asked very calmly very nicely there are no threats no deadlines they just said hey you know what we would be more at ease if you could just stop using the Souza branding because it really links this community effort with our Enterprise drro and we're not sure that's how we want things to go there are still implications to this demand because obviously if the open Souza Community doesn't comply or drags their feet chances are Souza as a company might withdraw a lot of the support that they currently offer to open Souza including infrastructure and a lot of developer time in the end what soua wants is for open Souza to stop using the chameleon and the Souza name which is reason able Fedora isn't called open rail for example or open red hat having a different brand is acceptable in my opinion it's probably more of a let's not let our potential customers think that open soua is just free soua enterprise Linux kind of thing this is also compounded by some worries about the governance of open Souza which apparently isn't super proactive the board doesn't really meet often enough to address the issues a drro faces on a daily basis it is apparently not structured well enough to handle this kind of stuff now reading through the discussions on open Souza's mailing list it does look like a lot of prominent open soua community members are in agreement with this demand basically the idea is hey you know what maybe let's not make so much drama about this and let's comply with what the community providing us with so many resources is asking of us it's kind of a good Common Sense practice thing and they are within their every right to demand that of course some people will paint this as corpo bad harasses Linux Community but this is well within Souza's perview to ask it's their branding and it's their resources that they're lending or giving to open Souza to help it grow so I don't think there's any drama really around this it's just a nice polite ask from a company to its Community effort and it it looks like it might just be followed now Solus the drro that Rose relatively Rec recently from its ashes decided that they would do away with app armor and snaps app armor being canonical solution to add security profiles to various apps and programs it's basically SE Linux that a lot of other disr use but for obuntu Solus developers decided to stop applying the app armor patch sets to anything other than their current LTS kernels because apparently it's just too much work and this in turn means snaps will be dropped in solos as well because snaps heavily depend on app armor to run with solid sandboxing and confinement and if you don't have up armor on your drro snaps run with partial confinement which is not as safe as snaps advertise themselves to be now the plan for Solus is to stop supporting snaps entirely in the future with users encourag to move to Flat packs instead and it's not an ideological choice either it is mostly because it is a lot less maintenance for the solo steam the app armor patch set seems pretty gigantic with 60 individual patches that have to be applied to every single update of the Linux kernel which might be very easy for canonical and their developers but it's probably way harder to do for a community effort that doesn't have that much Manpower it also means that without these patch sets solos can generate their ISO images on their own infrastructure which apparently wasn't possible previously so in early 2025 solos will no longer support snaps and will encourage people to move to either the native soless packages or two flat packs it's not a giant drro with a giant user base so it's not like oh Snaps are dead but it is an indication that slowly but surely most distributions are siding with flat packs or with their own packages and snaps is slowly being just limited to auntu gnome 47 has its first First Alpha out now it's pointed to be a big release with support for accent colors in the gnome shell and liit V apps meaning that all your applications from most other toolkits will at least share a color it can also now be compiled with whand only although this will depend on what your dis decides to go with Fedora will ship gnome by default without X11 but probably most other disos will retain the X11 session in the install Gom 47 also adds support for VR headsets on Wayland with the DRM lease protocol it supports Hardware cursors even with KMS drivers it implemented the xdg dialogue protocol to handle how apps display modal Windows the shell has been slightly revamped to better work on smaller or bigger display sizes and gome software should have better performance thanks to asynchronous loading gnome 47 also supports persistent remote login sessions you can also Force the remote computer to not go into hibernate when you're logged into it remotely gnome calls is now ported to gtk4 web has a few UI improvements and gnome tracker the thing that indexes all your files and Powers gnome searches has apparently been replaced with new modules that perform better you can already try the alpha using the gnomos iso it's not a Dr for daily use it's just for testing but it looks like it is going to be a pretty major release obviously I'll cover it in a dedicated video I think it's on the 18th of September that it's supposed to come out and this is just the tip of the iceberg I'm pretty sure feature freeze is right before the beta stage so we might see even more stuff Landing in gome 47 before it has its stable release which is pretty big now the Linux kernel 6.10 was released over the weekend it adds a new system call called M seal that can prevent changes to specific parts of the memory which should help with improving security for certain applications the first that really supports that and basically the only one right now is Google Chrome but there are plans to expand that to other applications there's a new profiling subsystem as well to let developers better identify potential memory leaks the Linux kernel now also adds encrypted interactions with the TPM chips most recent computers have so this thing can be used reliably and more securely networking performance should also be improved as well as Hardware support with improved sound drivers for some Asus and Lenovo thinkpads Microsoft Surface Pro devices should now support fan profile switching and thermal sensors as well there's more arm support as well for specific laptops improved camera performance and quality for Intel ipu and MPI cameras and we also have the usual pstate driver improvements for Intel and AMD CPUs which should give better performance and better battery life for most people there are also plenty of gaming Hardware improvements for controllers for handhelds there's better risk 5 support and better rust support in the Linux Colonels code base as well basically it is the usual big release with tons of improvements for virtually everyone now depending on your dis R you might get the update immediately you might already have it or you might never get it if you use the dis that stays to fix colal versions third party Repose exist for that but use them at your own risk and let's finish this with the gaming news first we've got a big update to pcsx 2 the Playstation 2 emulator first it should look much better because they have ditched the WX widgets toolkit in favor of cute which is a good choice sdl2 is now integrated as well and this will let users configure controllers much more easily even with autoc controller mapping plugins have been removed from the emulator for now but they have added a library of preconfigured game fixes you can also save per game configurations as well and they added support for retro achievements and who doesn't love throwing 50 chickens in the air and hitting them with a grenade all at once that's always the kind of stuff you really want to do in a game especially in an older retro PS2 game now I'm joking if you like achievements that's fine I don't understand you but that's fine and wine 9 13 was also released this week continuing the big rewrite of the command. exe engine which might be very useful for certain install processes and for various post install scripts that certain Windows apps use for people who want to actually use the Windows command line on Linux I don't know why but you can and they've also improved return codes for that so the commands will actually tell you if they succeed or not wine also supports odbc Drive drivers for Windows which is a driver used by a lot of systems that need to access databases there were also 22 bugs fixed in this release including for Photoshop CC 2024 Victoria 2 Guild Wars 2 The Witcher 3 Assassin's Creed Revelations and more and it kind of surprised me to see Photoshop CC 2024 on this list because I was under the assumption that photoshop just did not run at all under why but the buck report said that the app closes down and crashes after a little while meaning that the app actually runs which is very surprising so I'll have to dig deeper on that because my understanding was you cannot run any of the Creative Cloud Suite with wine right now what you can run though is Linux on one of our sponsors computers tuxedo computers makes computers that run with Linux pre-installed they're based in Germany but they ship to a lot of countries in the world and all their computers have Hardware specifically picked because it works really well with Linux and if in their testing they encountered any problem with the hardware they actually submit patches upstream and they have packages in various repos so you can install those fixes that haven't been upstreamed yet onto a lot of popular distributions they have a wide range of devices that will cover every need and every price point with plenty of customization options and honestly they're all I use these days I run the channel on one of their laptops I do all my game gaming on one of their desktops they're just really really good and I haven't felt the need to even look at a computer that comes with Windows in the past 5 years so if you need a new computer you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support a company that actually contributes to Linux click the link in the description below and check out tuxedo computers they're really really good okay so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to leave a comment and if you really really enjoy the channel there are plenty of links in the description as well to do just that so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] |
and to thing that my friends always ask me if there's enough to talk about in the Linux and open source World well yeah because this week we've got Fedora dropping X11 out of the default install for Fedora 41 we've got the big part of a lawsuit against GitHub co-pilot being dismissed by a judge in California and we also have some more news about Cosmic we've got gnome losing the gnome foundation's director Holly million who leaves after less than a year and a bunch of other things including this segue to our sponsor this video is sponsored by proton you probably know about them they make an all-in-one Suite of privacy Focus tools for your email online storage calendars contacts VPN and passwords everything is end to endend and zero access encrypted and it is designed to make sure that your data stays yours and proton just launched a brand new tool for that entire online suite and that's proton docs if you've ever used Google Docs you will be right at home here it is your fully encrypted collaborative online word processor you can edit a document with other people in real time you can gather feedback thanks to comments and discussions you can share these documents securely with full access control and the best thing is it's part of your proton account even a free account and it's accessible straight from Proton Drive as always you can just click the link in the description below to get started with proton create your account and start moving your life towards a more privacy respectful solution so after gnome announced that they could now be built without X11 dependencies it was inevitable Fedora 41 will ship with Wayland only the install media will not contain X11 support for Gnome meaning the default install will be whand only for now X11 support remains in the repost you will still be able to install it if you are experiencing issues with whand these issues should be lessened significantly because well you now have explicit sync support in Gnome and the latest NVIDIA drivers but there could be some compatibility problems here and there for various applications so people who need X11 can still get it and of course people who are upgrading from Fedora 40 will keep their XL session installed it will not be removed in the process obviously at some point this won't be possible in Fedora anymore it will be completely impossible to use X11 but you probably have two or three versions still uh before that happens personally I am all for this deprecation process Fedora has always been the place to do this kind of stuff and the more people use whan by default the more bug reports are going to flow in and the better whan we'll get with more users and more more things being fixed and of course you will always have plenty of other distributions who keep supporting X11 for probably a decade so yeah it's not really harming anyone's experience here now on The Gnome side of things it looks like holy Millions tenure as the executive director of The Gnome Foundation won't have been a very long one totaling 10 months the foundation announced that she would leave with Richard leow becoming interim director for the time being Holly will leave on the 31st of July and she says she's really proud of what she's been able to accomplish which for such a short time seems to be quite a lot she made sure that the foundation has a nice plan for the future she made sure that the books are Balan that the foundation is not hemorrhaging cash anymore and she found a bunch of potential funding Avenues as well she will apparently leave to pursue a PhD in Psychology and running her own private practice and judging from the foundation's communicate there doesn't seem to be a further reason than that the new director Richard L hour apparently has a lot of experience in open source as a contributor and at a few more leadership positions as well the foundation will start looking for a permanent executive director and they will announce their choice after guadec and I am 100% certain that some people in the Linux or open source Community will spend that as some kind of drama as it was inevitable she wasn't qualified but from where I stand holly leaves the gnome foundation in a better place than what she found it on so I think she did a good job and hopefully the G Foundation manages to find a new director that can keep writing the ship for maybe a bit longer this time now we also have some news about Cosmic they apparently only have 20 issues to resolve before the alpha is out so it is pretty damn close they have a few more features to share as well notably styling inactive windows with specific colors so it is more obvious what is currently in focus and what isn't they also have a settings page to configure keyboard shortcuts something plenty of people will be very happy about and they added an ALT tab or super tab window switching feature as well display mirroring is Now supported the panel now has an overflow section when there are too many applications or applets in there they fixed a lot of bugs related to gaming and a few performance issues as well and their compositor is now multi-threaded so it should perform better with multi monitor setups and when using High refresh rates and they also apparently have a bunch of thirdparty contributions lending in Cosmic which bodess well for the future of this desktop if there are already people contributing improving it and creating thirdparty applications even before Cosmic is out I think it's a good sign I will start toying with Cosmic before the alpha is out just to like maybe prepare the video I'm going to make about it of course it won't be a full review because it is an alpha they are going to be bugs I will only judge the features that are available and how well I think they measure up compared to other desktops now speaking of desktops gnom 47 has a lot of stuff coming on top of accent colors and a bunch of things I already discussed in previous episodes first the default font will very likely be replaced by inter gnome has been using the contel font for about 14 years although some dros already replaced it like obuntu for example the issue is counter L is unmaintained which for a font is more problematic than you'd think because it means potential problems in different languages can be reported and they just won't be fixed inter on the other hand is maintained and already used in elementaryos and other projects it's also completely open source so that nice and also it's the font I've been using in Gnome and KDE for I think the past four years it's pretty nice so the change is undergoing testing and it might not be voted on in the end if issues arise they are also experimenting with the font size they should use with inter gnome 47 will also have some HDR related improvements they already have an experimental HDR property that lets you test a few modes but as far as I know this hasn't really evolved since gnome 44 in Gnome 47 they have merged a 7-month old merge request which lets mutter The Gnome compositor just display HDR and SDR content side by side on top of that they have completed the implementation of Nautilus as the file Chooser the implementation of the global keyboard shortcuts feature is moving along nicely with a first draft implementation for lib portal the notification portal spec is being implemented as we speak with a first merge request close to completion and there's a proposal to have a common interface for platform libraries like advita or Granite from Elementary OS so any desktop could plug into gtk with their own widget library that is a pretty big set of changes for Gnome 47 and also a pretty big set of changes lined up for the future versions as well this is not going to be like gnome 45 or 46 where there were just very minor features this one is going to be big and of course I'll cover it in a video I think it will be in September when it releases now we have some news in the ongoing lawsuits against AI tools at least in the US GitHub and Microsoft had been sued over GitHub co-pilot and its use of Open Source Code to train the assistant a judge in San Francisco dismissed part of this class action lawsuit because the plaintiffs Apparently failed to establish that Microsoft unjustly enriched themselves by by using their code and thus these developers are not eligible for damages on that specific basis but there's another part that will be allowed to proceed the claim that GitHub co-pilot breaches The open- Source licenses of the code it used which might in the end be the more important part this can now go to court meaning that there is a chance that AI tools might have to follow attribution and Licensing rights even for just using material to train the AI this could potentially result in all the codes generated by these tools to be made open source under a license or another or maybe people who use codes generated using copilot would have to include in their project a link to an insanely long list of acknowledgements to mention everyone whose code copilot used to train itself none of this would be very practical though and I for one I'm really glad that this part of the lawsuit wasn't just dismissed out of hand because we need to know if an AI using publicly available material has the right to do so to train itself or if it has to follow and respect all the licenses attached to this content this is a very important part of whether AI can keep existing as it is or needs to start paying people for their content so I hope this goes to court I hope this is a ruling in favor of creators and not AI developers but we'll see I don't know I don't make the rules now as the EU forced Apple to open an iOS to third party stores it looks like they're not going down without a fight epic games have been trying to put their App Store on iOS for a while now but it looks like apple found some weird ways to reject the app the latest being because the install button on the epic games store was too similar to the one from the Apple store which well how many ways are there to create a flat colored button with the install text written on it really apart from changing the color now the inapp purchases button was also apparently too similar fortunately after epic complained publicly Apple decided to let the store pass anyway probably because they're already Under Fire from the EU for the various limitations and terms of services for the apps that want to escape the App Store with a fee structure that is completely insane they probably decided it wasn't worth fighting something that was going to happen anyway and then Tim Sweeney the CEO of game said that Apple told them that this approval of their epic store was only temporary and that they would still have to change these buttons in their next update and if you've watched the channel for a while you know I'm not a big fan of epic games because while they profess being on the side of the customer they apply restrictions to customer Choice by signing exclusivity deals which is exactly the kind of stuff that they say is bad when it comes from other actors so they're pretty hypocritical about all of this but Apple really needs to stop with this kind of trying to grasp at the last draws of their control it doesn't work they've lost this battle unless epic games absolutely copies the entire design of an app listing of the app store which yes would be misleading and would not be a good thing it's an install button let people make an install button that looks like what your platform professes and your platform guidelines you've lost the battle Apple stop it it's done okay let's finish this with the gaming news first dxvk got a new update version 2.4 and it now brings in support for directex 8 this means that this translation layer now handles DirectX 8 9 10 and 11 games with directex 12 games being handled by vkd3d or vkd3d proton the net benefit is that you're Now using Vulcan to render these games instead of using the usual wine d3d back end which as far as I know used open GL and had way worse compatibility and performance the xvk now includes the ability to automatically cap A Game's fps to the refresh rate of your display to make sure that things are rendered smoothly and they also improved dxvk native which is a port of dxvk that lets developers use it without using wine so they can Port the games to Linux more easily without having to rewrite for example the DirectX rendering backend they just have to compile the executable for Linux and they can keep using the direct text back end because dxvk will translate it properly there are also some improvements to memory usage Improvement to AMD GPU support and some game specific fixes notably for Guild Wars 2 prototype Star Citizen and more so basically it's much better performance for older DirectX 8 titles but it's also better performance for relatively recent games because most games released today still kind of have a DirectX 11 back end because not every GP supports directx12 fully even now we also have a new version of bottles the app that lets you automatically create prefixes for wine and running Windows programs on Linux in this version they added support for the latest version of dxvk that I just talked about they also improve performance of the entire app through better handling of the virtual C driv that bottles creates for each program and you will also get an option to skip the check some verification process if you want to install things faster at the expense of security menu entries for programs installed with bottles should also only appear when the executable is actually available which should help with cleaning up when you're removing programs to avoid having leftover launchers that will clutter your menu and don't have anything to launch and valve is also refining their game recording feature in the latest Steam beta the clip editing feature has been improved to make it easier to play something back to add markers to the timeline and to decide where the clip begins and where it ends you will also be able to save a specific frame of a clip as a steam screenshot and you will now get a warning if game recording was turned off to prioritize broadcasting the minimum background recording time has also been increased to 15 minutes this feature is apparently still not Hardware accelerated when using an Nvidia GPU which probably makes the solution less appealing than using OBS for NVIDIA users but it is shaping up nicely for everyone else if you had given me this feature 3 years ago back when I tried running a Linux gaming channel I would have been very very happy now granted this channel is now dead and no one ever really watched it but I would have loved having access to that kind of stuff back in the day just like you love having access to devices from our sponsor tuxedo computers they make devices that run with Linux out of the box from laptops to workstations to gaming stuff to small Foam Factory computers they have everything all the devices have plenty of options for the hardware for the keyboard layout for the logo on the lid of your computer and they ship to most countries in the world all their stuff obviously is highly compatible with Linux because that's kind of the point and while you can pick from a selection of popular dis Ros you can also just install any dis you like and they even have repost to include certain patchers that might not have been accepted Upstream just yet I only use tuxedo computers these days I run this channel on one of their laptops I do all my gaming on one of their desktops they're really really good so click the link in the description below if you want to know what they have to offer and if you want to give them a shot okay so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and if you really enjoy the channel you can get plenty of perks by supporting it starting at €1 a month and all the links are in the description just as well so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] |
app packaging is a heated topic on Linux these days on one side you generally have the Defenders of flat packs snaps and app images and on the other side you've got the Defenders of the good old Dro packages and I already talked at length about the advantages and drawbacks of these formats but there are still a bunch of preconceived notions floating around on how secure these packaging formats are on verified applications on the sandbox itself on dependencies and other things so I thought I would do a little bit of myth busting on these topics pointing out the real facts behind all of these different formats and I also thought I'd let you know about our sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace your allinone platform to create publish and manage your own website Squarespace has really easy tools to make sure anyone can end up with a NIC looking well optimized website no matter if you know how to code or not Squarespace has what they call their blueprint system which lets you pick from a variety of templates that are pre-built and will suit any type of website and they even have the SEO tools you need to make sure your website doesn't end up in the last page of Google search results to go further Squarespace has their own design engine to create your own Pages you can just drag and drop elements where you want them and you can change the colors the fonts and just tweak the template however you want and then you can add some extra features like creating your own online shop with a complete payment system you can design your own logo from Squarespace book your own domain name so click the link in the description below to give Squarespace a shot and you'll even get 10% off your first domain or website purchase okay so let's get the big topic out of the way first app verification how safe it is and how it works we've seen verified apps pop up on flathub and on the snap store for a while now this is a great addition it let you know that the package you're downloading and installing comes straight from the developer of this app and it hasn't been packaged by a random third party you don't know it is an implicit guarantee that this thing is as the developer intended no feature has been arbitrarily removed or added by someone else you're getting the experience the app developer wants you to have it's also great for the developers because it means that they control the experience and they have an easier time repres producing bugs and fixing them what app verification isn't is a guarantee that the application itself is safe or secure and that it has no vulnerabilities the way app verification works on flathub for example is that the developer either links their GitHub or gitlab repo to the app listing on flathub or they had a little text snippet on their official website that flathub can check if the website is legit and is the right one for the app or if the code repo matches the app then then there you go the app is verified but it doesn't mean the code that is in the package is safe if the repo has been hacked if there's a back door in the application if the app itself is malicious then the package you're downloading also contains that malicious code we've seen things like this with the XZ library for instance where a maintainer had infiltrated the project by contributing normal code and slowly added a back door to the library no one suspected a thing and you could have had a verified version of this library at some point with the back door inside app verification doesn't mean the app itself is safe and secure it just means that it comes directly from the developers you still need to trust those app developers to have built something that is safe and won't hack your system Linux Mint for example seems a bit confused by this or at least didn't convey properly how this works they recently announced that they would hide unverified flatbacks by default stating that they are a big security durability but the wording around this lets people believe that verified flat packs are safe which isn't necessarily the case where app verification really matters is when you want to get the app as intended by the developers you know it's the developer packaging it a recent example is the maintainer for keypass XC on Debian who decided all on their own that some features were not needed and removed web browser integration for the password manager with a verified app on flathub you don't have these problems but it doesn't mean that the app to installing is 100% safe and if you're thinking ha I use native drro packages so I don't care about all of this well we have a little myth busting to do as well the general view of drro packages is that they can be safer because there is a trusted maintainer that will create the package and thus can detect any unwanted change back door or problem and will prevent you from getting uninfected or buggy version of the package this is really not the case though maintainers can do this and sometimes do but there are a lot of cases where all of these things slip through undetected the XZ Library again is the perfect example every single drr that packaged and ship XZ let this back door slide in undetected of course maintainers cannot be expected to conduct Security reviews of the entire code base of each project but this is what some people seemingly believe about drro packages that the maintainer is an extra buffer that will make sure no weird code or infected stuff will make it onto your system this is not the case it doesn't happen in most cases if you look at log forj if you look at the recent SSH vulnerability if you look at the XZ back door and basically every cve ever discovered it points to the fact that maintainers do not do code reviews on most packages they built this is not what is expected of a package maintainer their job is to make sure the program being packaged integrates with the drro is plugged into the right places calls the right dependencies and that the thing runs properly it is not to conduct a security audit of the code a lot of maintainers aren't even developers and could not conduct these audits in the first place this is a common misconception distro maintainers very rarely inhance the security of an application or Library simply by doing the packaging for that program if an official flat pack has been infected by malicious code chances are the native dis package will have the exact same problem even if there is a maintainer building that package another big misconception is around the sandbox for flat packs and snaps a Sandbox basically just means that the app you're running has a system of permissions that limits what the app can do and how it can interact with the system it can be more secure than not having a Sandbox but it doesn't mean it is always more secure a flat pack package for example might have all permissions turned on meaning the app has access to the entire drive your home directory the internet all executables configs basically everything your user has access to this would be the default state of something you install through your repo packages you install the package with admin Privileges and then you run it as your user and the app has all the same rights as your user meaning it can download things on your system run these downloaded things modify and delete files and everything else of course for drro packages you have security profiles provided by app armor or SE Linux and things like that now a flatback and a snap can have some of these permissions enabled or disabled and depending on that this application this package will be more or less safe to run on your system that's why you can check on the permissions of each flatback before installing it and you can enable or disable these permissions you need to be able to see and control what the app can or can't do as far as I know snaps don't have a graphical way of changing these permissions but correct me in the comments if something like that exists another example of the sandbox not doing anything to protect the user is with the recent scam crypto apps on the Snap Store these were sandboxed applications they just scammed you through a web view a website basically they didn't need access to anything other than the internet connection so the sandbox here didn't mean the app was safe and that's why we probably always will need humans to check these submissions onto flathub or the snap store that's where distro's repost might have had an advantage because a human maintainer would have had to package the scam app and there's no way they would have done this after using it for like 2 seconds so here for example drro repos will very likely have less intentionally malicious applications another common misconception around packages is how dependencies work you will often read that drro packages use the system dependencies and thus use less disk space but also are more secure because you know that the library the app relies upon is updated by your drro compared to a flat pack to a snap or to an app image where the developer might have bundled a dependency on their own and never really bothered to update that version in theory this is true flat packs snaps and app Images can and sometimes do come especially in the case of app images with pre-bundled libraries that aren't shipped as part of a shared runtime and sometimes these bundled libraries can be left unmaintained and unupdated by the app developer that's true but when you dig a bit deeper it's not as clear cut as in the Dr packages aren't necessarily better first you can check which versions of dependencies your flat pack comes with a flat pack is open you can see how it is built there's generally a manifest file that lists all the bundled dependencies bundling things this way is also not really a recommended practice flatback recommends you use run times which are shared libraries between flatbacks they save space and they are updated independently of the application so chances are they're more up to date and safer second Dro packages aren't always up to date either just because it's a shared Library doesn't mean it has all the latest security fixes plenty of dros stick to a fixed version of a library they will update that version if it doesn't break the system or the other packages but if it does break things then they will instead backport security fixes to the current version this is manual work they take Patches from newer versions and try to retrofit them to the older version that they ship and this isn't always possible sometimes the patch simply cannot fit on the older code base or it is just too time consuming to rewrite things around the fix that will not affect most people it also means the maintainer needs to know how to code and how to potentially apply a patch and recompile things in their package which is not always the case not all maintainers are developers and not all of them have the time to do all of this back porting work so sometimes when the Upstream library or app just doesn't provide these security fixes for older versions you're just not getting them in distributions that have fixed package versions this example will be clear Mariah DB got a security update in 2021 in November Arch and artics updated things the same day because they generally tend to always move to the latest version Debian took 3 months to apply this update and Alpine Linux took four same goes for fixed Linux kernel versions when your drro is locked to a specific kernel version it's been factually proven that this version becomes more and more buggy and more and more vulnerable over time maintainers simply do not apply every fix and do not backport everything for example the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 kernel has more than 4500 bugs open that have fixes in later kernel releases those fixed package versions in the repos aren't here to be safer they're here to offer a stable base for your entire system to run everything has been tested in accordance with this stable base this can and sometimes is less safe than getting the direct Upstream version of a new library and a new application it is also potentially more stable flat packs snaps and app Images can and do have old bundled versions of libraries that aren't updated but your repos also often do have the exact same thing so I hope this provided some context and some facts about how packages are made how safe they can be and various problems we have with all of our packaging efforts no matter if they are drro packages a containerized format or something else it is important to remember that in the vast majority of cases drro maintainers and packagers are volunteers indiv indviduals they might not know how to code and it is not their job to conduct security audits to verify that the code they ship is actually safe their job is to make a package and push it to the repos and ensure that this package doesn't break everything on your system thiso packages are not necessarily safer than a third-party flat pack or an official flat pack or an official snap these formats come straight from the ABD but it also doesn't mean they are 100% safe whether they're sandb or not ultimately it is always your responsibility as the user to check that what you install is safe enough and that you're comfortable using it whether it means looking at the source code if you're capable of that or looking at the permissions disabling enabling what you want looking at who built the packages it is your responsibility and this would also be true on iOS Android Windows or Mac OS none of their distribution methods are any safer than anything we do and you often hear applications being hacked or malicious apps going through these stores it's not a Linux specific problem we just have more packaging formats that have more different problems and issues so hopefully this dispelled a few misconceptions around packaging formats security the sandbox and everything else and hopefully you'll listen to this segue to our sponsor it's tuxedo computers if you're looking for a new pc whether it's a laptop a desktop a small foam factor noock or whatever else and you want to use use Linux on it and you want to support a company that actively contributes to Linux click the link in the description below and give tuxedo computers a shot I only use their devices these days they have a wide range that will cover every price point and every need they are based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and me personally I run my entire channel on one of their laptops which you can all open repair and upgrade and I do all my gaming on one of their small form factor piec they're really really solid devices so click the link in the description below if you want a new Linux PC so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and if you really enjoy the channel there are also some links in the description to support me financially and you'll get a bunch of BS in the process so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] |
and to thing that my friends always ask me if there's enough to talk about in the Linux and open source World well yeah because this week we've got Fedora dropping X11 out of the default install for Fedora 41 we've got the big part of a lawsuit against GitHub co-pilot being dismissed by a judge in California and we also have some more news about Cosmic we've got gnome losing the gnome foundation's director Holly million who leaves after less than a year and a bunch of other things including this segue to our sponsor this video is sponsored by proton you probably know about them they make an all-in-one Suite of privacy Focus tools for your email online storage calendars contacts VPN and passwords everything is end to endend and zero access encrypted and it is designed to make sure that your data stays yours and proton just launched a brand new tool for that entire online suite and that's proton docs if you've ever used Google Docs you will be right at home here it is your fully encrypted collaborative online word processor you can edit a document with other people in real time you can gather feedback thanks to comments and discussions you can share these documents securely with full access control and the best thing is it's part of your proton account even a free account and it's accessible straight from Proton Drive as always you can just click the link in the description below to get started with proton create your account and start moving your life towards a more privacy respectful solution so after gnome announced that they could now be built without X11 dependencies it was inevitable Fedora 41 will ship with Wayland only the install media will not contain X11 support for Gnome meaning the default install will be whand only for now X11 support remains in the repost you will still be able to install it if you are experiencing issues with whand these issues should be lessened significantly because well you now have explicit sync support in Gnome and the latest NVIDIA drivers but there could be some compatibility problems here and there for various applications so people who need X11 can still get it and of course people who are upgrading from Fedora 40 will keep their XL session installed it will not be removed in the process obviously at some point this won't be possible in Fedora anymore it will be completely impossible to use X11 but you probably have two or three versions still uh before that happens personally I am all for this deprecation process Fedora has always been the place to do this kind of stuff and the more people use whan by default the more bug reports are going to flow in and the better whan we'll get with more users and more more things being fixed and of course you will always have plenty of other distributions who keep supporting X11 for probably a decade so yeah it's not really harming anyone's experience here now on The Gnome side of things it looks like holy Millions tenure as the executive director of The Gnome Foundation won't have been a very long one totaling 10 months the foundation announced that she would leave with Richard leow becoming interim director for the time being Holly will leave on the 31st of July and she says she's really proud of what she's been able to accomplish which for such a short time seems to be quite a lot she made sure that the foundation has a nice plan for the future she made sure that the books are Balan that the foundation is not hemorrhaging cash anymore and she found a bunch of potential funding Avenues as well she will apparently leave to pursue a PhD in Psychology and running her own private practice and judging from the foundation's communicate there doesn't seem to be a further reason than that the new director Richard L hour apparently has a lot of experience in open source as a contributor and at a few more leadership positions as well the foundation will start looking for a permanent executive director and they will announce their choice after guadec and I am 100% certain that some people in the Linux or open source Community will spend that as some kind of drama as it was inevitable she wasn't qualified but from where I stand holly leaves the gnome foundation in a better place than what she found it on so I think she did a good job and hopefully the G Foundation manages to find a new director that can keep writing the ship for maybe a bit longer this time now we also have some news about Cosmic they apparently only have 20 issues to resolve before the alpha is out so it is pretty damn close they have a few more features to share as well notably styling inactive windows with specific colors so it is more obvious what is currently in focus and what isn't they also have a settings page to configure keyboard shortcuts something plenty of people will be very happy about and they added an ALT tab or super tab window switching feature as well display mirroring is Now supported the panel now has an overflow section when there are too many applications or applets in there they fixed a lot of bugs related to gaming and a few performance issues as well and their compositor is now multi-threaded so it should perform better with multi monitor setups and when using High refresh rates and they also apparently have a bunch of thirdparty contributions lending in Cosmic which bodess well for the future of this desktop if there are already people contributing improving it and creating thirdparty applications even before Cosmic is out I think it's a good sign I will start toying with Cosmic before the alpha is out just to like maybe prepare the video I'm going to make about it of course it won't be a full review because it is an alpha they are going to be bugs I will only judge the features that are available and how well I think they measure up compared to other desktops now speaking of desktops gnom 47 has a lot of stuff coming on top of accent colors and a bunch of things I already discussed in previous episodes first the default font will very likely be replaced by inter gnome has been using the contel font for about 14 years although some dros already replaced it like obuntu for example the issue is counter L is unmaintained which for a font is more problematic than you'd think because it means potential problems in different languages can be reported and they just won't be fixed inter on the other hand is maintained and already used in elementaryos and other projects it's also completely open source so that nice and also it's the font I've been using in Gnome and KDE for I think the past four years it's pretty nice so the change is undergoing testing and it might not be voted on in the end if issues arise they are also experimenting with the font size they should use with inter gnome 47 will also have some HDR related improvements they already have an experimental HDR property that lets you test a few modes but as far as I know this hasn't really evolved since gnome 44 in Gnome 47 they have merged a 7-month old merge request which lets mutter The Gnome compositor just display HDR and SDR content side by side on top of that they have completed the implementation of Nautilus as the file Chooser the implementation of the global keyboard shortcuts feature is moving along nicely with a first draft implementation for lib portal the notification portal spec is being implemented as we speak with a first merge request close to completion and there's a proposal to have a common interface for platform libraries like advita or Granite from Elementary OS so any desktop could plug into gtk with their own widget library that is a pretty big set of changes for Gnome 47 and also a pretty big set of changes lined up for the future versions as well this is not going to be like gnome 45 or 46 where there were just very minor features this one is going to be big and of course I'll cover it in a video I think it will be in September when it releases now we have some news in the ongoing lawsuits against AI tools at least in the US GitHub and Microsoft had been sued over GitHub co-pilot and its use of Open Source Code to train the assistant a judge in San Francisco dismissed part of this class action lawsuit because the plaintiffs Apparently failed to establish that Microsoft unjustly enriched themselves by by using their code and thus these developers are not eligible for damages on that specific basis but there's another part that will be allowed to proceed the claim that GitHub co-pilot breaches The open- Source licenses of the code it used which might in the end be the more important part this can now go to court meaning that there is a chance that AI tools might have to follow attribution and Licensing rights even for just using material to train the AI this could potentially result in all the codes generated by these tools to be made open source under a license or another or maybe people who use codes generated using copilot would have to include in their project a link to an insanely long list of acknowledgements to mention everyone whose code copilot used to train itself none of this would be very practical though and I for one I'm really glad that this part of the lawsuit wasn't just dismissed out of hand because we need to know if an AI using publicly available material has the right to do so to train itself or if it has to follow and respect all the licenses attached to this content this is a very important part of whether AI can keep existing as it is or needs to start paying people for their content so I hope this goes to court I hope this is a ruling in favor of creators and not AI developers but we'll see I don't know I don't make the rules now as the EU forced Apple to open an iOS to third party stores it looks like they're not going down without a fight epic games have been trying to put their App Store on iOS for a while now but it looks like apple found some weird ways to reject the app the latest being because the install button on the epic games store was too similar to the one from the Apple store which well how many ways are there to create a flat colored button with the install text written on it really apart from changing the color now the inapp purchases button was also apparently too similar fortunately after epic complained publicly Apple decided to let the store pass anyway probably because they're already Under Fire from the EU for the various limitations and terms of services for the apps that want to escape the App Store with a fee structure that is completely insane they probably decided it wasn't worth fighting something that was going to happen anyway and then Tim Sweeney the CEO of game said that Apple told them that this approval of their epic store was only temporary and that they would still have to change these buttons in their next update and if you've watched the channel for a while you know I'm not a big fan of epic games because while they profess being on the side of the customer they apply restrictions to customer Choice by signing exclusivity deals which is exactly the kind of stuff that they say is bad when it comes from other actors so they're pretty hypocritical about all of this but Apple really needs to stop with this kind of trying to grasp at the last draws of their control it doesn't work they've lost this battle unless epic games absolutely copies the entire design of an app listing of the app store which yes would be misleading and would not be a good thing it's an install button let people make an install button that looks like what your platform professes and your platform guidelines you've lost the battle Apple stop it it's done okay let's finish this with the gaming news first dxvk got a new update version 2.4 and it now brings in support for directex 8 this means that this translation layer now handles DirectX 8 9 10 and 11 games with directex 12 games being handled by vkd3d or vkd3d proton the net benefit is that you're Now using Vulcan to render these games instead of using the usual wine d3d back end which as far as I know used open GL and had way worse compatibility and performance the xvk now includes the ability to automatically cap A Game's fps to the refresh rate of your display to make sure that things are rendered smoothly and they also improved dxvk native which is a port of dxvk that lets developers use it without using wine so they can Port the games to Linux more easily without having to rewrite for example the DirectX rendering backend they just have to compile the executable for Linux and they can keep using the direct text back end because dxvk will translate it properly there are also some improvements to memory usage Improvement to AMD GPU support and some game specific fixes notably for Guild Wars 2 prototype Star Citizen and more so basically it's much better performance for older DirectX 8 titles but it's also better performance for relatively recent games because most games released today still kind of have a DirectX 11 back end because not every GP supports directx12 fully even now we also have a new version of bottles the app that lets you automatically create prefixes for wine and running Windows programs on Linux in this version they added support for the latest version of dxvk that I just talked about they also improve performance of the entire app through better handling of the virtual C driv that bottles creates for each program and you will also get an option to skip the check some verification process if you want to install things faster at the expense of security menu entries for programs installed with bottles should also only appear when the executable is actually available which should help with cleaning up when you're removing programs to avoid having leftover launchers that will clutter your menu and don't have anything to launch and valve is also refining their game recording feature in the latest Steam beta the clip editing feature has been improved to make it easier to play something back to add markers to the timeline and to decide where the clip begins and where it ends you will also be able to save a specific frame of a clip as a steam screenshot and you will now get a warning if game recording was turned off to prioritize broadcasting the minimum background recording time has also been increased to 15 minutes this feature is apparently still not Hardware accelerated when using an Nvidia GPU which probably makes the solution less appealing than using OBS for NVIDIA users but it is shaping up nicely for everyone else if you had given me this feature 3 years ago back when I tried running a Linux gaming channel I would have been very very happy now granted this channel is now dead and no one ever really watched it but I would have loved having access to that kind of stuff back in the day just like you love having access to devices from our sponsor tuxedo computers they make devices that run with Linux out of the box from laptops to workstations to gaming stuff to small Foam Factory computers they have everything all the devices have plenty of options for the hardware for the keyboard layout for the logo on the lid of your computer and they ship to most countries in the world all their stuff obviously is highly compatible with Linux because that's kind of the point and while you can pick from a selection of popular dis Ros you can also just install any dis you like and they even have repost to include certain patchers that might not have been accepted Upstream just yet I only use tuxedo computers these days I run this channel on one of their laptops I do all my gaming on one of their desktops they're really really good so click the link in the description below if you want to know what they have to offer and if you want to give them a shot okay so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and if you really enjoy the channel you can get 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hey everyone this is Nick and welcome to the Linux and open source news show this week we've got one major piece of news which is the major outage that started yesterday and made Millions probably of Windows PCS blue screen of death without really letting them recover very easily and that was all due to a third party program that also actually runs on Linux but didn't crash Linux boxes for some reason who knows what that could be we also have soua asking the open Souza Community Dro to Rebrand change their name and change their logo to be well not as close to sua as they currently are and we have a lot of other Linux and open- Source news and we also have this segue to our sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace your all-in-one platform to create publish and manage your own website Squarespace has really easy tools to make sure anyone can end up with a NIC looking well optimized website no matter if you know how to code or not Squarespace has what they call their blueprint system which lets you pick from a variety of templates that are pre-built and will suit any type of website and they even have the SEO tools you need to make sure your website doesn't end up in the last page of Google search results to go further Squarespace has their own design engine to create your own Pages you can just drag and drop elements where you want them and you can change the colors the fonts and just tweak the template however you want and then you can add some extra features like creating your own online shop with a complete payment system you can design your own logo from Squarespace book your own domain name so click the link in the description below to give Squarespace a shot and you'll even get 10% off your first domain or website purchase so as you probably know there was a giant it outage on Friday causing Banks TV broadcasters Airlines train operators hospitals and basically every type of company or business or organization that uses computers to just stop working for a while the Swiss cyber security office blamed the crowd strike for the issue and it was then confirmed that the issue came from that crowd strike being a cyber security firm that provides a product called Falcon sensor which itself provides realtime monitoring and protection from cyber attacks and this thing seems used by a lot of major companies to try and protect their software and their servers the issue seems linked to a misconfiguration or a faulty update In Crowd strike which basically made Windows crash on a blue screen of death and it just could not reboot easily or at all after that it basically cost what I can only assume is billions of dollars worth of economic cost more than a thousand flights were cancelled by various Airlines payment systems were down for hours some hospitals couldn't work at all even the freaking Paris Olympics Games seemed affected now there was also an outage for Microsoft 365 but we later learned that this wasn't specifically due to crowd strike they had their own problems just as well other affected Parties By The Crowd strike problem included Visa Amazon the 911.gov website that handles emergencies in the US and more now fortunately a fix was found a few hours after the issue was first reported you could just delete a file from the crowd strike directory in system 32 drivers on Windows and it just stopped windows from crashing all the time the problem is you had to actually have access to the drive and if you were already in the blue screen of death configuration chances are you could not do that without using some kind of live USB Microsoft also said rebooting a PC 15 times would fix the problem uh which apparently it did for some people crowd strike couldn't push an update remotely to fix the problem every system had to be manually fixed which means hours were lost simply to make PCS bootable and the real issue here is that there is one single system crowd strike in this instance which is deployed by 60% of Fortune 500 companies by eight out of the 10 Financial firms and eight out of the 10 top tech companies it is a single point of failure that most major companies have in common and that's always a bad thing and it is important to remember that crowd strik tool works on Linux and Mac OS but Linux and Mac OS systems just did not crash with that update it's entirely a Windows related problem due to a problem with that software and this raises two major problems the first one is that one single system being deployed on so many computers that has access to that lower level operating system to the point where a faulty update will actually crash the entire OS that's unacceptable no program should have that level of access to any operating system second how badly does your OS have to be designed if a thirdparty app can publish an update with one file and this makes your entire OS unbootable where are the fail safes the deactivation the safe modes the recovery partitions whatever this is just unacceptable I'm not saying it could never happen on Linux or Mac OS I'm saying it didn't now Souza the company behind soua Enterprise Linux apparently asked the open Souza Community to stop using the Souza brand name for their Community Dro now apparently they have asked very calmly very nicely there are no threats no deadlines they just said hey you know what we would be more at ease if you could just stop using the Souza branding because it really links this community effort with our Enterprise drro and we're not sure that's how we want things to go there are still implications to this demand because obviously if the open Souza Community doesn't comply or drags their feet chances are Souza as a company might withdraw a lot of the support that they currently offer to open Souza including infrastructure and a lot of developer time in the end what soua wants is for open Souza to stop using the chameleon and the Souza name which is reason able Fedora isn't called open rail for example or open red hat having a different brand is acceptable in my opinion it's probably more of a let's not let our potential customers think that open soua is just free soua enterprise Linux kind of thing this is also compounded by some worries about the governance of open Souza which apparently isn't super proactive the board doesn't really meet often enough to address the issues a drro faces on a daily basis it is apparently not structured well enough to handle this kind of stuff now reading through the discussions on open Souza's mailing list it does look like a lot of prominent open soua community members are in agreement with this demand basically the idea is hey you know what maybe let's not make so much drama about this and let's comply with what the community providing us with so many resources is asking of us it's kind of a good Common Sense practice thing and they are within their every right to demand that of course some people will paint this as corpo bad harasses Linux Community but this is well within Souza's perview to ask it's their branding and it's their resources that they're lending or giving to open Souza to help it grow so I don't think there's any drama really around this it's just a nice polite ask from a company to its Community effort and it it looks like it might just be followed now Solus the drro that Rose relatively Rec recently from its ashes decided that they would do away with app armor and snaps app armor being canonical solution to add security profiles to various apps and programs it's basically SE Linux that a lot of other disr use but for obuntu Solus developers decided to stop applying the app armor patch sets to anything other than their current LTS kernels because apparently it's just too much work and this in turn means snaps will be dropped in solos as well because snaps heavily depend on app armor to run with solid sandboxing and confinement and if you don't have up armor on your drro snaps run with partial confinement which is not as safe as snaps advertise themselves to be now the plan for Solus is to stop supporting snaps entirely in the future with users encourag to move to Flat packs instead and it's not an ideological choice either it is mostly because it is a lot less maintenance for the solo steam the app armor patch set seems pretty gigantic with 60 individual patches that have to be applied to every single update of the Linux kernel which might be very easy for canonical and their developers but it's probably way harder to do for a community effort that doesn't have that much Manpower it also means that without these patch sets solos can generate their ISO images on their own infrastructure which apparently wasn't possible previously so in early 2025 solos will no longer support snaps and will encourage people to move to either the native soless packages or two flat packs it's not a giant drro with a giant user base so it's not like oh Snaps are dead but it is an indication that slowly but surely most distributions are siding with flat packs or with their own packages and snaps is slowly being just limited to auntu gnome 47 has its first First Alpha out now it's pointed to be a big release with support for accent colors in the gnome shell and liit V apps meaning that all your applications from most other toolkits will at least share a color it can also now be compiled with whand only although this will depend on what your dis decides to go with Fedora will ship gnome by default without X11 but probably most other disos will retain the X11 session in the install Gom 47 also adds support for VR headsets on Wayland with the DRM lease protocol it supports Hardware cursors even with KMS drivers it implemented the xdg dialogue protocol to handle how apps display modal Windows the shell has been slightly revamped to better work on smaller or bigger display sizes and gome software should have better performance thanks to asynchronous loading gnome 47 also supports persistent remote login sessions you can also Force the remote computer to not go into hibernate when you're logged into it remotely gnome calls is now ported to gtk4 web has a few UI improvements and gnome tracker the thing that indexes all your files and Powers gnome searches has apparently been replaced with new modules that perform better you can already try the alpha using the gnomos iso it's not a Dr for daily use it's just for testing but it looks like it is going to be a pretty major release obviously I'll cover it in a dedicated video I think it's on the 18th of September that it's supposed to come out and this is just the tip of the iceberg I'm pretty sure feature freeze is right before the beta stage so we might see even more stuff Landing in gome 47 before it has its stable release which is pretty big now the Linux kernel 6.10 was released over the weekend it adds a new system call called M seal that can prevent changes to specific parts of the memory which should help with improving security for certain applications the first that really supports that and basically the only one right now is Google Chrome but there are plans to expand that to other applications there's a new profiling subsystem as well to let developers better identify potential memory leaks the Linux kernel now also adds encrypted interactions with the TPM chips most recent computers have so this thing can be used reliably and more securely networking performance should also be improved as well as Hardware support with improved sound drivers for some Asus and Lenovo thinkpads Microsoft Surface Pro devices should now support fan profile switching and thermal sensors as well there's more arm support as well for specific laptops improved camera performance and quality for Intel ipu and MPI cameras and we also have the usual pstate driver improvements for Intel and AMD CPUs which should give better performance and better battery life for most people there are also plenty of gaming Hardware improvements for controllers for handhelds there's better risk 5 support and better rust support in the Linux Colonels code base as well basically it is the usual big release with tons of improvements for virtually everyone now depending on your dis R you might get the update immediately you might already have it or you might never get it if you use the dis that stays to fix colal versions third party Repose exist for that but use them at your own risk and let's finish this with the gaming news first we've got a big update to pcsx 2 the Playstation 2 emulator first it should look much better because they have ditched the WX widgets toolkit in favor of cute which is a good choice sdl2 is now integrated as well and this will let users configure controllers much more easily even with autoc controller mapping plugins have been removed from the emulator for now but they have added a library of preconfigured game fixes you can also save per game configurations as well and they added support for retro achievements and who doesn't love throwing 50 chickens in the air and hitting them with a grenade all at once that's always the kind of stuff you really want to do in a game especially in an older retro PS2 game now I'm joking if you like achievements that's fine I don't understand you but that's fine and wine 9 13 was also released this week continuing the big rewrite of the command. exe engine which might be very useful for certain install processes and for various post install scripts that certain Windows apps use for people who want to actually use the Windows command line on Linux I don't know why but you can and they've also improved return codes for that so the commands will actually tell you if they succeed or not wine also supports odbc Drive drivers for Windows which is a driver used by a lot of systems that need to access databases there were also 22 bugs fixed in this release including for Photoshop CC 2024 Victoria 2 Guild Wars 2 The Witcher 3 Assassin's Creed Revelations and more and it kind of surprised me to see Photoshop CC 2024 on this list because I was under the assumption that photoshop just did not run at all under why but the buck report said that the app closes down and crashes after a little while meaning that the app actually runs which is very surprising so I'll have to dig deeper on that because my understanding was you cannot run any of the Creative Cloud Suite with wine right now what you can run though is Linux on one of our sponsors computers tuxedo computers makes computers that run with Linux pre-installed they're based in Germany but they ship to a lot of countries in the world and all their computers have Hardware specifically picked because it works really well with Linux and if in their testing they encountered any problem with the hardware they actually submit patches upstream and they have packages in various repos so you can install those fixes that haven't been upstreamed yet onto a lot of popular distributions they have a wide range of devices that will cover every need and every price point with plenty of customization options and honestly they're all I use these days I run the channel on one of their laptops I do all my game gaming on one of their desktops they're just really really good and I haven't felt the need to even look at a computer that comes with Windows in the past 5 years so if you need a new computer you plan to run Linux on it and you want to support a company that actually contributes to Linux click the link in the description below and check out tuxedo computers they're really really good okay so thanks for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to leave a comment and if you really really enjoy the channel there are plenty of links in the description as well to do just that so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music] |
app packaging is a heated topic on Linux these days on one side you generally have the Defenders of flat packs snaps and app images and on the other side you've got the Defenders of the good old Dro packages and I already talked at length about the advantages and drawbacks of these formats but there are still a bunch of preconceived notions floating around on how secure these packaging formats are on verified applications on the sandbox itself on dependencies and other things so I thought I would do a little bit of myth busting on these topics pointing out the real facts behind all of these different formats and I also thought I'd let you know about our sponsor this video is sponsored by Squarespace your allinone platform to create publish and manage your own website Squarespace has really easy tools to make sure anyone can end up with a NIC looking well optimized website no matter if you know how to code or not Squarespace has what they call their blueprint system which lets you pick from a variety of templates that are pre-built and will suit any type of website and they even have the SEO tools you need to make sure your website doesn't end up in the last page of Google search results to go further Squarespace has their own design engine to create your own Pages you can just drag and drop elements where you want them and you can change the colors the fonts and just tweak the template however you want and then you can add some extra features like creating your own online shop with a complete payment system you can design your own logo from Squarespace book your own domain name so click the link in the description below to give Squarespace a shot and you'll even get 10% off your first domain or website purchase okay so let's get the big topic out of the way first app verification how safe it is and how it works we've seen verified apps pop up on flathub and on the snap store for a while now this is a great addition it let you know that the package you're downloading and installing comes straight from the developer of this app and it hasn't been packaged by a random third party you don't know it is an implicit guarantee that this thing is as the developer intended no feature has been arbitrarily removed or added by someone else you're getting the experience the app developer wants you to have it's also great for the developers because it means that they control the experience and they have an easier time repres producing bugs and fixing them what app verification isn't is a guarantee that the application itself is safe or secure and that it has no vulnerabilities the way app verification works on flathub for example is that the developer either links their GitHub or gitlab repo to the app listing on flathub or they had a little text snippet on their official website that flathub can check if the website is legit and is the right one for the app or if the code repo matches the app then then there you go the app is verified but it doesn't mean the code that is in the package is safe if the repo has been hacked if there's a back door in the application if the app itself is malicious then the package you're downloading also contains that malicious code we've seen things like this with the XZ library for instance where a maintainer had infiltrated the project by contributing normal code and slowly added a back door to the library no one suspected a thing and you could have had a verified version of this library at some point with the back door inside app verification doesn't mean the app itself is safe and secure it just means that it comes directly from the developers you still need to trust those app developers to have built something that is safe and won't hack your system Linux Mint for example seems a bit confused by this or at least didn't convey properly how this works they recently announced that they would hide unverified flatbacks by default stating that they are a big security durability but the wording around this lets people believe that verified flat packs are safe which isn't necessarily the case where app verification really matters is when you want to get the app as intended by the developers you know it's the developer packaging it a recent example is the maintainer for keypass XC on Debian who decided all on their own that some features were not needed and removed web browser integration for the password manager with a verified app on flathub you don't have these problems but it doesn't mean that the app to installing is 100% safe and if you're thinking ha I use native drro packages so I don't care about all of this well we have a little myth busting to do as well the general view of drro packages is that they can be safer because there is a trusted maintainer that will create the package and thus can detect any unwanted change back door or problem and will prevent you from getting uninfected or buggy version of the package this is really not the case though maintainers can do this and sometimes do but there are a lot of cases where all of these things slip through undetected the XZ Library again is the perfect example every single drr that packaged and ship XZ let this back door slide in undetected of course maintainers cannot be expected to conduct Security reviews of the entire code base of each project but this is what some people seemingly believe about drro packages that the maintainer is an extra buffer that will make sure no weird code or infected stuff will make it onto your system this is not the case it doesn't happen in most cases if you look at log forj if you look at the recent SSH vulnerability if you look at the XZ back door and basically every cve ever discovered it points to the fact that maintainers do not do code reviews on most packages they built this is not what is expected of a package maintainer their job is to make sure the program being packaged integrates with the drro is plugged into the right places calls the right dependencies and that the thing runs properly it is not to conduct a security audit of the code a lot of maintainers aren't even developers and could not conduct these audits in the first place this is a common misconception distro maintainers very rarely inhance the security of an application or Library simply by doing the packaging for that program if an official flat pack has been infected by malicious code chances are the native dis package will have the exact same problem even if there is a maintainer building that package another big misconception is around the sandbox for flat packs and snaps a Sandbox basically just means that the app you're running has a system of permissions that limits what the app can do and how it can interact with the system it can be more secure than not having a Sandbox but it doesn't mean it is always more secure a flat pack package for example might have all permissions turned on meaning the app has access to the entire drive your home directory the internet all executables configs basically everything your user has access to this would be the default state of something you install through your repo packages you install the package with admin Privileges and then you run it as your user and the app has all the same rights as your user meaning it can download things on your system run these downloaded things modify and delete files and everything else of course for drro packages you have security profiles provided by app armor or SE Linux and things like that now a flatback and a snap can have some of these permissions enabled or disabled and depending on that this application this package will be more or less safe to run on your system that's why you can check on the permissions of each flatback before installing it and you can enable or disable these permissions you need to be able to see and control what the app can or can't do as far as I know snaps don't have a graphical way of changing these permissions but correct me in the comments if something like that exists another example of the sandbox not doing anything to protect the user is with the recent scam crypto apps on the Snap Store these were sandboxed applications they just scammed you through a web view a website basically they didn't need access to anything other than the internet connection so the sandbox here didn't mean the app was safe and that's why we probably always will need humans to check these submissions onto flathub or the snap store that's where distro's repost might have had an advantage because a human maintainer would have had to package the scam app and there's no way they would have done this after using it for like 2 seconds so here for example drro repos will very likely have less intentionally malicious applications another common misconception around packages is how dependencies work you will often read that drro packages use the system dependencies and thus use less disk space but also are more secure because you know that the library the app relies upon is updated by your drro compared to a flat pack to a snap or to an app image where the developer might have bundled a dependency on their own and never really bothered to update that version in theory this is true flat packs snaps and app Images can and sometimes do come especially in the case of app images with pre-bundled libraries that aren't shipped as part of a shared runtime and sometimes these bundled libraries can be left unmaintained and unupdated by the app developer that's true but when you dig a bit deeper it's not as clear cut as in the Dr packages aren't necessarily better first you can check which versions of dependencies your flat pack comes with a flat pack is open you can see how it is built there's generally a manifest file that lists all the bundled dependencies bundling things this way is also not really a recommended practice flatback recommends you use run times which are shared libraries between flatbacks they save space and they are updated independently of the application so chances are they're more up to date and safer second Dro packages aren't always up to date either just because it's a shared Library doesn't mean it has all the latest security fixes plenty of dros stick to a fixed version of a library they will update that version if it doesn't break the system or the other packages but if it does break things then they will instead backport security fixes to the current version this is manual work they take Patches from newer versions and try to retrofit them to the older version that they ship and this isn't always possible sometimes the patch simply cannot fit on the older code base or it is just too time consuming to rewrite things around the fix that will not affect most people it also means the maintainer needs to know how to code and how to potentially apply a patch and recompile things in their package which is not always the case not all maintainers are developers and not all of them have the time to do all of this back porting work so sometimes when the Upstream library or app just doesn't provide these security fixes for older versions you're just not getting them in distributions that have fixed package versions this example will be clear Mariah DB got a security update in 2021 in November Arch and artics updated things the same day because they generally tend to always move to the latest version Debian took 3 months to apply this update and Alpine Linux took four same goes for fixed Linux kernel versions when your drro is locked to a specific kernel version it's been factually proven that this version becomes more and more buggy and more and more vulnerable over time maintainers simply do not apply every fix and do not backport everything for example the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 kernel has more than 4500 bugs open that have fixes in later kernel releases those fixed package versions in the repos aren't here to be safer they're here to offer a stable base for your entire system to run everything has been tested in accordance with this stable base this can and sometimes is less safe than getting the direct Upstream version of a new library and a new application it is also potentially more stable flat packs snaps and app Images can and do have old bundled versions of libraries that aren't updated but your repos also often do have the exact same thing so I hope this provided some context and some facts about how packages are made how safe they can be and various problems we have with all of our packaging efforts no matter if they are drro packages a containerized format or something else it is important to remember that in the vast majority of cases drro maintainers and packagers are volunteers indiv indviduals they might not know how to code and it is not their job to conduct security audits to verify that the code they ship is actually safe their job is to make a package and push it to the repos and ensure that this package doesn't break everything on your system thiso packages are not necessarily safer than a third-party flat pack or an official flat pack or an official snap these formats come straight from the ABD but it also doesn't mean they are 100% safe whether they're sandb or not ultimately it is always your responsibility as the user to check that what you install is safe enough and that you're comfortable using it whether it means looking at the source code if you're capable of that or looking at the permissions disabling enabling what you want looking at who built the packages it is your responsibility and this would also be true on iOS Android Windows or Mac OS none of their distribution methods are any safer than anything we do and you often hear applications being hacked or malicious apps going through these stores it's not a Linux specific problem we just have more packaging formats that have more different problems and issues so hopefully this dispelled a few misconceptions around packaging formats security the sandbox and everything else and hopefully you'll listen to this segue to our sponsor it's tuxedo computers if you're looking for a new pc whether it's a laptop a desktop a small foam factor noock or whatever else and you want to use use Linux on it and you want to support a company that actively contributes to Linux click the link in the description below and give tuxedo computers a shot I only use their devices these days they have a wide range that will cover every price point and every need they are based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world and me personally I run my entire channel on one of their laptops which you can all open repair and upgrade and I do all my gaming on one of their small form factor piec they're really really solid devices so click the link in the description below if you want a new Linux PC so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications and if you really enjoy the channel there are also some links in the description to support me financially and you'll get a bunch of BS in the process so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] |
hey everyone and today we're not going to be extremely positive for once because as much as I love open source and I very rarely come across a project I actively dislike our world is not all Roses and Rainbows and some stuff need to be talked about and I cannot stress this enough any of the issues I will raise here about any of these projects and entities are not attacks against those projects or entities they're just fairly well documented problems that some people might have an issue with and some people might not it also doesn't mean I endorse anything I didn't mention in this video other projects have other problems and you can let me know about them in the comments I will address them in a later video so now let's get started I'll try to be as objective as possible but of course bias might show its head at some point just like our sponsor will obviously show its head as well this video is sponsored by Squarespace and you probably have heard about them by now but if you haven't just know that they're your all-in-one solution to build your own website however complex or simple you want it to be you can completely customize the website to look and feel and have the features that you want you have a big selection of templates and then you can rearrange them by just dragging and dropping blocks into place you can change the general colors you can add new pages and you have a big library of modules like a complete online shop with online payment or a members only area a video gallery you can even pick your own domain name and book it from Squarespace and they even have a module to design your own logo so if you need a website but you don't really know how to get started or you don't have the time or the technical skills just head over to squarespace.com theel Linux experiment or click the link in the description below and you'll get 10% off your first purchase so let's begin with Modzilla yeah I told you it was going to be a bit controversial Modzilla has undeniably been a very important player in the F World they built Firefox which is still my browser of choice to this day and which allowed the web to move past Internet Explorer by grabbing all its market share and letting web devs make better things they also make Thunderbird my email client of choice and they contribute to and support a lot of other projects but Mozilla as an institution has a bunch of problems that you need to be aware of and they you can decide if there are actual issues for you or not one thing that is often leveled against Modzilla is that they allegedly argued for internet censorship in an Infamous post they said we needed more than deplatforming as a bunch of people were being kicked off popular social media sites for saying things that went against the terms of service back when some of these platforms actually had terms of service and moderation teams mozilla's post admittedly came out a bit bit wrong as they asked for tools to amplify facts over disinformation which obviously LED some people to say that they were trying to decide what was right or what was wrong and they also basically validated the deplatforming of people by saying we need to go further and let's be honest in plenty of cases what is factual truth and what is not true is very very welln and not subject to any discussion but in some cases it's more subjective now whether you want to believe that Mozilla wants to censor the web Ministry of Truth style or you just believe this post was misinterpreted I leave that up to you Mozilla has also some other sticking points notably their over Reliance on Google for funding which some could assume has an impact on the steps they take to counter privacy invasive things that Google might push there's also the fact that their executives are paid quite a lot of money for a nonprofit that is bleeding users market share at least in the browser space their CEO received $6.9 million in 2022 which was a solid 2 million more than 2021 while Firefox lost 30 million users they also fired about 250 people over the same period and here again whether you think paying these rates for a CEO is the only way to attract someone with the skills to ride the ship or whether you think this is just too much money to be paid for any kind of job it's up to you to decide I know where I stand on this one now another project that you're probably very aware of is snap a bunto solution for containerized apps the main criticism leveled against snaps is its proprietary centralized store while the snap packaging format and the snap demon that runs in the background to handle all of these apps are both open source the store back end isn't and the actual Snap Store is a closed Source thing it doesn't mean you could not run your own snap store though or that you even need one you can install individual snap packages manually not from any form of online repo and you can definitely host your own snap repo and use it and let other people use it as well or you can run a proxy for the snap store but in reality the only real Snap Store that exists is the one canals run and this store is not open source they said they have zero interest in open sourcing it because they had already done a lot of work to open- Source their Launchpad platform and basically no one used it after that anyway so they just don't see the point now whether that's enough of an issue for you to not use snaps is yours to decide if you like the concept of snaps but you want a fully open source solution I guess flat packs exist another app distribution format is app images and they're relatively popular and they also have the advantage of being portable in most cases theoretically you can copy any app image to a USB drive paste that onto another computer and they should run fine unless they were badly created and they rely on external dependencies that your system might not have but all app Images do rely on a specific Library which is lib fuse short for file system in user space the issue here is that app Images rely on lib fuse 2 which is deprecated and Obsolete and has been for a long while its last version was in 2019 meaning it's been left for 5 years without any security updates at all and generally basing your entire project on a 5-year-old unmaintained library is not a good choice the end result is that for example on open 2 by default you cannot run app Images because liuse 2 is not pre-installed because it is obsolete you can still install it from the repost it's an easy fix but there's a reason why it's not pre-installed other potential concerns about the app image project is the fact that they're generally compared with snaps and flatbacks but at the difference of both of these they're not sandboxed at all by default meaning you're just running un executable blindly and in the case of app Images most of them are made by third-party individuals not the original developers flat packs and snaps are also often times made by third party individuals but these are sandboxed although here again you could have older permissions turn turned on then the app could have access to the entire system but what you can do with flat packs and snaps is check on these permissions before you install and change those permissions afterwards with app Images you can't if it runs it runs on your system it has all the permissions of your user they have also been some pretty harsh comments and sort of harassment from one of app Images lead against apps that refuse to invest time to support the app image format a major example is OBS this developer had proposed some changes to make it easier to package OBS as an app image the OBS devs refused this work because they had a lot of concerns with that work and identified a bunch of bucks the app image Dev instead of fixing the work then proceeded to run about OBS being funded by red hat and thus favoring flatback this was the conclusion of what OBS devs defined as years of harassment and they banned the app image Dev from their GitHub and if you read the entire conversation that I left in the link you will see that the OBS devs really aren't to blame here they even left the door open to anyone else picking up the work and packaging the thing as an app image now also if you don't have a problem with these potential issues with app images and you love them keep using them that's fine there are ways to go around those problems as well and just because I pointed out some issues with snaps and app Images doesn't mean that flat packs and thiso packages don't have problems they both have problems as well they're just not of the ethical or security pretty kind of variety another project that has seen a fair few criticisms over the years is Manjaro while some of these issues like the lack of stability mainly come from people using manaro like it was arched by stuffing their system full of Aur packages when Manjaro devs clearly do not recommend this some other problems were more concerning manjaru has been known to package unstable versions of applications that weren't published as stable they added unreleased Patches from git which led to these apps being crashy and buggy and app developers getting bug reports that they couldn't do anything about this is what led a bunch of developers to write the don't ship it letter asking drro maintainers and packagers to stop shipping their apps in a modified State because they the app developers are the ones paying the price after that manaro also has a pretty bad track record with security failing to renew their certificates time and again which feels insane because it's extremely easy to automate or at the very least to set reminders for that it seems minor but it did prevent people from updating the repos or installing software and the fix that was proposed at the time was to change your computer's time and date to a date in the past and this probably took as much time to write as it would have taken them to renew the certificate now add to that the fact that manaro partnered with a proprietary ofice suite and shipped it as the default before backing down after some backlash or the company behind Manjaro firing their CFO when he refused to approve an expense for a new laptop or their tool pamac basically dsing the Aur by making too many requests and you have a few issues that definitely tarnished the distro's reputation and I am not aware of relatively recent problems along those lines with Manjaro if you like using Manjaro keep using it it's not a wrong choice these are just problems that have affected its reputation and they might explain why you see so much manjaru criticism online now another problematic issue we see more and more often is open- source project switching licenses to restrict what people can do and open source projects been taken over entirely by companies a recent example is Red Hats taking on some license agreements to get access to the source code of red hat Enterprise Linux meaning that if you redistribute the source code you get access to as a customer you won't be able to be a red hat customer anymore this could be perceived as adding restrictions on source code distribution which is forbidden by the GPL the license that a lot of red hat source code uses another example is canonical taking ownership of the lxd project a project that they had started but then gave to the Linux containers project and then grabbed back again presumably because they now saw value in it when they maybe didn't previously they also removed maintainers on that project that didn't work for canonical but had been contributing to the project for a while yet another example is redus moving to a source available license to try and stop giant Cloud providers like AWS from making money off of redders but this also limited other users rights in the process the license change also potentially breaks the BSD license used for some contributions and some people are argu in that these contributions should thus be removed this all prompted many Forks including valky from the Linux Foundation the same story happened previously with Hashi Corp and their terraform tool this license changes basically take away your rights to create a fork of the current version of the tool and to redistribute that fork which is fine for preventing those giant freeloaders that can be big cloud companies from just using your project making millions off of it and never giving back anything but it also restricts normal users rights which kind of sucks this is all very muddy and whether you think it's an issue is up to you and finally we have hyperland and this one I kept for last because it really depends on your views on free speech on what is harassment toxicity or the relationship between an individual's opinions and their project basically what some people have against hyperland is mostly against their lead developer and founder not against the project itself self he's been characterized as toxic and the general Community is often perceived as expressing hateful views in the form of what they would call jokes pretty bad stuff like endorsement of eugenics calls for hate related violence or transphobia for example they've been seen editing someone's pronouns to who SL cares like seriously why would you do this if you don't care and if you think no one cares then just leave the pronouns they can't hurt you now when a code of conduct was pitched to the hyperland project it was shut down and the Project's founder went on a few podcasts to explain away the toxicity his argument was basically I don't have time for this I'm writing code and anyone is free to say what they want the founder of hyperland was recently banned from the freedesktop.org community for their problematic Behavior which went against the fd's code of conduct hyperland founder then basically doxed the FDO member who banned him now do with this as you will if you use hyperland you can absolutely keep using it and decide not to interact with the community or maybe you've never encountered any weird Behavior but if you're like me you're probably having a hard time dissociating the person writing the thing from the thing itself and so you're probably not going to use that thing but also I regularly criticize Google and I still make videos on YouTube so I'm probably a hypocrite here anyway that's it for today's video I tried to be as objective as possible make up your own mind about those issues this is not an attack on these projects or entities and just because I did not mention another project doesn't mean it doesn't have any problems just let me know what other problems you've encountered on other projects and I maybe might make a video about them some will find security concerns in flat pack or system D or won't like a specific dist attitude we all have our biases and things we pay attention to just like I really pay attention to this segue to our sponsor if you're looking for a new computer and you're planning to run Linux on it and you want to support a company that actually contributes to Linux click the link in the description below and check out tuxedo computers they make laptops desktops and small Foam Factory computers that run with Linux out of the box they actually contribute fixes patches and drivers upstream and if these haven't been accepted yet you have repos to add all those patches onto the drro that you're using they have a big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point there's a lot of customization options available all the devices are very repairable and upgradeable and honestly I only use tuxedo computers these days my channel runs on one of their laptops my gaming needs are serviced by one of their desktops I don't use any other computer so if you're interested click the link in the description below they really solid so thanks everyone for watching the video you know what to do if you liked it there are plenty of YouTube buttons underneath the video to tell me how you liked it and to let the algorithm recommend it to more people and if you really enjoy the channel there are also ways to support it in the description and to get a bunch of perks so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye |
hey everyone and today we're not going to be extremely positive for once because as much as I love open source and I very rarely come across a project I actively dislike our world is not all Roses and Rainbows and some stuff need to be talked about and I cannot stress this enough any of the issues I will raise here about any of these projects and entities are not attacks against those projects or entities they're just fairly well documented problems that some people might have an issue with and some people might not it also doesn't mean I endorse anything I didn't mention in this video other projects have other problems and you can let me know about them in the comments I will address them in a later video so now let's get started I'll try to be as objective as possible but of course bias might show its head at some point just like our sponsor will obviously show its head as well this video is sponsored by Squarespace and you probably have heard about them by now but if you haven't just know that they're your all-in-one solution to build your own website however complex or simple you want it to be you can completely customize the website to look and feel and have the features that you want you have a big selection of templates and then you can rearrange them by just dragging and dropping blocks into place you can change the general colors you can add new pages and you have a big library of modules like a complete online shop with online payment or a members only area a video gallery you can even pick your own domain name and book it from Squarespace and they even have a module to design your own logo so if you need a website but you don't really know how to get started or you don't have the time or the technical skills just head over to squarespace.com theel Linux experiment or click the link in the description below and you'll get 10% off your first purchase so let's begin with Modzilla yeah I told you it was going to be a bit controversial Modzilla has undeniably been a very important player in the F World they built Firefox which is still my browser of choice to this day and which allowed the web to move past Internet Explorer by grabbing all its market share and letting web devs make better things they also make Thunderbird my email client of choice and they contribute to and support a lot of other projects but Mozilla as an institution has a bunch of problems that you need to be aware of and they you can decide if there are actual issues for you or not one thing that is often leveled against Modzilla is that they allegedly argued for internet censorship in an Infamous post they said we needed more than deplatforming as a bunch of people were being kicked off popular social media sites for saying things that went against the terms of service back when some of these platforms actually had terms of service and moderation teams mozilla's post admittedly came out a bit bit wrong as they asked for tools to amplify facts over disinformation which obviously LED some people to say that they were trying to decide what was right or what was wrong and they also basically validated the deplatforming of people by saying we need to go further and let's be honest in plenty of cases what is factual truth and what is not true is very very welln and not subject to any discussion but in some cases it's more subjective now whether you want to believe that Mozilla wants to censor the web Ministry of Truth style or you just believe this post was misinterpreted I leave that up to you Mozilla has also some other sticking points notably their over Reliance on Google for funding which some could assume has an impact on the steps they take to counter privacy invasive things that Google might push there's also the fact that their executives are paid quite a lot of money for a nonprofit that is bleeding users market share at least in the browser space their CEO received $6.9 million in 2022 which was a solid 2 million more than 2021 while Firefox lost 30 million users they also fired about 250 people over the same period and here again whether you think paying these rates for a CEO is the only way to attract someone with the skills to ride the ship or whether you think this is just too much money to be paid for any kind of job it's up to you to decide I know where I stand on this one now another project that you're probably very aware of is snap a bunto solution for containerized apps the main criticism leveled against snaps is its proprietary centralized store while the snap packaging format and the snap demon that runs in the background to handle all of these apps are both open source the store back end isn't and the actual Snap Store is a closed Source thing it doesn't mean you could not run your own snap store though or that you even need one you can install individual snap packages manually not from any form of online repo and you can definitely host your own snap repo and use it and let other people use it as well or you can run a proxy for the snap store but in reality the only real Snap Store that exists is the one canals run and this store is not open source they said they have zero interest in open sourcing it because they had already done a lot of work to open- Source their Launchpad platform and basically no one used it after that anyway so they just don't see the point now whether that's enough of an issue for you to not use snaps is yours to decide if you like the concept of snaps but you want a fully open source solution I guess flat packs exist another app distribution format is app images and they're relatively popular and they also have the advantage of being portable in most cases theoretically you can copy any app image to a USB drive paste that onto another computer and they should run fine unless they were badly created and they rely on external dependencies that your system might not have but all app Images do rely on a specific Library which is lib fuse short for file system in user space the issue here is that app Images rely on lib fuse 2 which is deprecated and Obsolete and has been for a long while its last version was in 2019 meaning it's been left for 5 years without any security updates at all and generally basing your entire project on a 5-year-old unmaintained library is not a good choice the end result is that for example on open 2 by default you cannot run app Images because liuse 2 is not pre-installed because it is obsolete you can still install it from the repost it's an easy fix but there's a reason why it's not pre-installed other potential concerns about the app image project is the fact that they're generally compared with snaps and flatbacks but at the difference of both of these they're not sandboxed at all by default meaning you're just running un executable blindly and in the case of app Images most of them are made by third-party individuals not the original developers flat packs and snaps are also often times made by third party individuals but these are sandboxed although here again you could have older permissions turn turned on then the app could have access to the entire system but what you can do with flat packs and snaps is check on these permissions before you install and change those permissions afterwards with app Images you can't if it runs it runs on your system it has all the permissions of your user they have also been some pretty harsh comments and sort of harassment from one of app Images lead against apps that refuse to invest time to support the app image format a major example is OBS this developer had proposed some changes to make it easier to package OBS as an app image the OBS devs refused this work because they had a lot of concerns with that work and identified a bunch of bucks the app image Dev instead of fixing the work then proceeded to run about OBS being funded by red hat and thus favoring flatback this was the conclusion of what OBS devs defined as years of harassment and they banned the app image Dev from their GitHub and if you read the entire conversation that I left in the link you will see that the OBS devs really aren't to blame here they even left the door open to anyone else picking up the work and packaging the thing as an app image now also if you don't have a problem with these potential issues with app images and you love them keep using them that's fine there are ways to go around those problems as well and just because I pointed out some issues with snaps and app Images doesn't mean that flat packs and thiso packages don't have problems they both have problems as well they're just not of the ethical or security pretty kind of variety another project that has seen a fair few criticisms over the years is Manjaro while some of these issues like the lack of stability mainly come from people using manaro like it was arched by stuffing their system full of Aur packages when Manjaro devs clearly do not recommend this some other problems were more concerning manjaru has been known to package unstable versions of applications that weren't published as stable they added unreleased Patches from git which led to these apps being crashy and buggy and app developers getting bug reports that they couldn't do anything about this is what led a bunch of developers to write the don't ship it letter asking drro maintainers and packagers to stop shipping their apps in a modified State because they the app developers are the ones paying the price after that manaro also has a pretty bad track record with security failing to renew their certificates time and again which feels insane because it's extremely easy to automate or at the very least to set reminders for that it seems minor but it did prevent people from updating the repos or installing software and the fix that was proposed at the time was to change your computer's time and date to a date in the past and this probably took as much time to write as it would have taken them to renew the certificate now add to that the fact that manaro partnered with a proprietary ofice suite and shipped it as the default before backing down after some backlash or the company behind Manjaro firing their CFO when he refused to approve an expense for a new laptop or their tool pamac basically dsing the Aur by making too many requests and you have a few issues that definitely tarnished the distro's reputation and I am not aware of relatively recent problems along those lines with Manjaro if you like using Manjaro keep using it it's not a wrong choice these are just problems that have affected its reputation and they might explain why you see so much manjaru criticism online now another problematic issue we see more and more often is open- source project switching licenses to restrict what people can do and open source projects been taken over entirely by companies a recent example is Red Hats taking on some license agreements to get access to the source code of red hat Enterprise Linux meaning that if you redistribute the source code you get access to as a customer you won't be able to be a red hat customer anymore this could be perceived as adding restrictions on source code distribution which is forbidden by the GPL the license that a lot of red hat source code uses another example is canonical taking ownership of the lxd project a project that they had started but then gave to the Linux containers project and then grabbed back again presumably because they now saw value in it when they maybe didn't previously they also removed maintainers on that project that didn't work for canonical but had been contributing to the project for a while yet another example is redus moving to a source available license to try and stop giant Cloud providers like AWS from making money off of redders but this also limited other users rights in the process the license change also potentially breaks the BSD license used for some contributions and some people are argu in that these contributions should thus be removed this all prompted many Forks including valky from the Linux Foundation the same story happened previously with Hashi Corp and their terraform tool this license changes basically take away your rights to create a fork of the current version of the tool and to redistribute that fork which is fine for preventing those giant freeloaders that can be big cloud companies from just using your project making millions off of it and never giving back anything but it also restricts normal users rights which kind of sucks this is all very muddy and whether you think it's an issue is up to you and finally we have hyperland and this one I kept for last because it really depends on your views on free speech on what is harassment toxicity or the relationship between an individual's opinions and their project basically what some people have against hyperland is mostly against their lead developer and founder not against the project itself self he's been characterized as toxic and the general Community is often perceived as expressing hateful views in the form of what they would call jokes pretty bad stuff like endorsement of eugenics calls for hate related violence or transphobia for example they've been seen editing someone's pronouns to who SL cares like seriously why would you do this if you don't care and if you think no one cares then just leave the pronouns they can't hurt you now when a code of conduct was pitched to the hyperland project it was shut down and the Project's founder went on a few podcasts to explain away the toxicity his argument was basically I don't have time for this I'm writing code and anyone is free to say what they want the founder of hyperland was recently banned from the freedesktop.org community for their problematic Behavior which went against the fd's code of conduct hyperland founder then basically doxed the FDO member who banned him now do with this as you will if you use hyperland you can absolutely keep using it and decide not to interact with the community or maybe you've never encountered any weird Behavior but if you're like me you're probably having a hard time dissociating the person writing the thing from the thing itself and so you're probably not going to use that thing but also I regularly criticize Google and I still make videos on YouTube so I'm probably a hypocrite here anyway that's it for today's video I tried to be as objective as possible make up your own mind about those issues this is not an attack on these projects or entities and just because I did not mention another project doesn't mean it doesn't have any problems just let me know what other problems you've encountered on other projects and I maybe might make a video about them some will find security concerns in flat pack or system D or won't like a specific dist attitude we all have our biases and things we pay attention to just like I really pay attention to this segue to our sponsor if you're looking for a new computer and you're planning to run Linux on it and you want to support a company that actually contributes to Linux click the link in the description below and check out tuxedo computers they make laptops desktops and small Foam Factory computers that run with Linux out of the box they actually contribute fixes patches and drivers upstream and if these haven't been accepted yet you have repos to add all those patches onto the drro that you're using they have a big range of devices that should cover every need and every price point there's a lot of customization options available all the devices are very repairable and upgradeable and honestly I only use tuxedo computers these days my channel runs on one of their laptops my gaming needs are serviced by one of their desktops I don't use any other computer so if you're interested click the link in the description below they really solid so thanks everyone for watching the video you know what to do if you liked it there are plenty of YouTube buttons underneath the video to tell me how you liked it and to let the algorithm recommend it to more people and if you really enjoy the channel there are also ways to support it in the description and to get a bunch of perks so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye |
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LLM-OpenWEB-data -- https://huggingface.co/datasets/YihyunML/LLM-OpenWEB-data --
This repository contains a collection of data sourced from the internet for training Large Language Models (LLMs). The data is stored in plaintext format within .txt files, making it easily accessible and usable for training and research purposes.
Usage This data is intended for use in training and testing LLMs. You can use the data as-is or preprocess it to suit your specific needs.
License The data in this repository is sourced from the internet and is intended for research and educational purposes only. Please ensure you comply with any applicable licenses and terms of use when utilizing this data.
Contributions Contributions to this repository are welcome! If you have additional data you'd like to share, please submit a pull request.
Acknowledgments Thanks to the many sources that have made this data available. We appreciate your contributions to the advancement of LLM research!
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