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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I hate them (seriously).

    It’s basically a second distro inside your distro (try du -chs /var/lib/flatpak/) and if something breaks (eg. last year mesa with my graphics card) it isn’t easy to identify were the problem is (because all libs update at the same time), plus you can’t just try a newer (or older) version of some lib as you would in your distro.

    Moreover, you can’t flatpak CLI tools (also servers and OS components, but I guess the ubuntu folks are the only ones who care about those).




  • There’s AsteroidOS but I couldn’t find any of the supported watches (all quite old IIRC) at a reasonable price.

    Gadgetbridge with some proprietary watch is fine privacy-wise (I had an Amazfit GTR3 pro, I needed to register an account with the Zapp app and use it once, but then uninstalled it once I got the required password and used Gadgetbridge exclusively).

    Bangle and the Pine Watch are low-res and IMHO quite ugly compared to alternatives from big brands.


  • My bad for causing confusion: when I wrote “trusted signature” I should have said “trusted public key”.

    The signatures in an apt repo need to be verified with some public key (you can think of signatures as hashes encrypted with some private key).

    For the software you install from your distro’s “official” repo, that key came with the .iso back when you installed your system with (it may have been updated afterwards, but that’s beyond the point here).

    When you install from third-party repos, you have to manually trust the key (IIRC in Ubuntu it’s something like curl <some-url> | sudo apt-key add -?). So, this key must be pre-shared (you usually get it from the dev’s website) and trusted.



  • Installing a .deb is what I was thinking about.

    Even a signed tarball is better than curl|sh.

    If you have a pre-shared trusted signature to check against (like with your distro’s repos), yes. But… that’s obviously not the case since we are talking installing software from the developer’s website.

    Whatever cryptografic signature you can get from the same potentially compromised website you get the software from would be worth as much as the usual md5/sha checksums (ie. it would only check against transmission errors).





  • I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.

    It’s not that complicated… people use it because everyone has an account there and so your project gets more visibility (and your profile too, for those who plan to flex it when they look for the next job) and more contributions. Even a lot of projects that aren’t on github have some sort of mirror there for visibility.

    Suppose you wanna contribute to gnu grep (or whatever)… do you happen to know off the top of your head where the source repo and bug tracker are? And do you know what’s the procedure to submit your patch?

    If you are a company doing closed source, I agree that I don’t see why you would choose github over the myriad alternatives (including the self hosted ones).

    Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools

    That’s a great way to spend your resources developing yet-another-source-forge-thingie instead of whatever your actual project/product is supposed to be :)



  • Note that even most “permissive” licenses are by definition conditional

    You do realize the whole discussion is about what terms to use for differentiating between GPL-like “restrictive” licenses and BSD-like “permissive” ones? Saying that both are “conditional” really doesn’t help anyone.

    (also “by definition” the license’s grants may be “conditional”, not the license itself - it’s not as if it looses validity under some condition)