Solar Bear

Okay, then continue not caring as the people who do take care of things. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.

Nvidia shipping proprietary code is what makes it worse for people who actually use Linux. They should open source their driver.

They don’t believe in copyright law so they don’t mind whoever infringe on them. Especially since here it would make the proprietary driver work better.

I don’t believe in copyright law, but I especially don’t believe in partially enforced copyright law. Nvidia doesn’t get to use copyright to protect their proprietary code while infringing on the copyright of FOSS.

I use Portainer a lot and have no issues with it. There’s very little you can’t do without Portainer though, it’s just a convenient web frontend to access Docker tools. It’s helpful if you manage a lot of stuff or multiple hosts. I also use it at work to expose basic management to members of my team who aren’t Linux or Docker savvy.

Inter for GUI, Iosevka for terminal. Dejavu is my fallback option for some systems.

It is true that corporations need to change, but when that happens it means you also will have to change. So why wait? Change now. Use less overall, and look for better alternatives for what you still use.

We don’t have time to spin up enough infrastructure to match current production with renewable energy. Consumption must come down until then, and only scale up once the new infrastructure can handle it.

But one thing I always thought should be obligatory was that during installation of such programs, only the resources absent from the system would be added to the installation/system and any other resource bundled would be automatically discarded, thus saving disk space and avoiding redundant libraries present on the system.

Do flatpaks have such working structure?

It’s possible, but rarely allowed because that would produce instability. Linux programs are built to rely on a specific version of a library. Depending on how much actually changes, you can sometimes get away with using a different version than the one it expects, but the more it changes the riskier it gets.

One of the major goals of flatpaks was to create a way for developers to ship one build that was guaranteed to run the same regardless of distro or environment. The isolation is very much the point. It does use more storage space, but in most cases it’s not enough to matter. When storage space is at a premium, yeah, you generally want to avoid containers. They trade space for stability.

Pretty much everything in the Linux space is converging on this concept. Desktop is moving to immutability with flatpak apps. The server space has been entirely taken over by containers. Even Valve has shipped a separate Linux runtime for as long as they’ve officially supported it, and they’re progressing on deeper containerization. You can direct it to run against your native packages instead of the runtime, but it’s rarely a good idea.

The point is that it gives developers a single target that they can all rely on, instead of having to account for 20 distros with multiple still-supported versions each. And believe me, these efforts have made Linux so much easier as a user as well. It used to be that lots developers only targeted Ubuntu. Trying to get anything to run on another system was off like pulling teeth. Now, you can almost always expect to find a flatpak instead which runs on any distro.

What does known-good mean?

Known-good meaning a tested and working configuration approved by the developers/maintainers.

What if a security vulnerability is found in one of the dependencies. With an old-style distribution there is a security team that monitors security reports and they will provide a fixed package.

Flatpak is just another model of distribution. There isn’t really anything that needs to change here. The bugs are fixed upstream and they get pushed via the method of distribution, which is Flathub in this case.

The security team in a given distribution is charged with getting upstream fixes backported and shipped. There’s no need for this role because they’re just shipped directly in most cases.

With flatpaks it’s not clear to me if those developers will monitor each dependency for security vulnerabilities and how they will handle that.

The developers are usually the ones doing the fixes in the first place.

Will users even be informed about a security issue, will a fix be backported or will it only be available in the latest version?

Well, fixes don’t normally need to be backported because flatpaks are usually fresh. They’re just built normally in most cases.

For notifications, you’d have to follow the relevant projects directly.

Every government is authoritarian by its very nature. The government derives authority from having monopoly on legalized violence.

For goodness’ sake, can we not do this? I’m an anarchist, I know this. I oppose the state on a conceptual level for this very reason. I’m speaking to you like a normal person using language that I know you understood the intended meaning of. There’s no need to engage in academic fartsniffery here. Just be normal.

The only reason there is the illusion of freedom of speech is due to the fact that mainstream views are carefully curated.

The owners of our media have a vested interest in maintaining their own control. They are not compelled to act by outside force, they largely act of their own free will to maintain their position in our corrupt system. Understanding this distinction is crucial to being able to fix it. This is the true insidious nature of our system, at this point it is maintained by people pursuing their own interests rather than by an overarching plot. There’s no need for one anymore, it is self-sustaining and perpetuating, like a cancer.

I can point one specific example with libre office: 3.9GB for the pack vs 785MB for the .deb.

You already have most of the major dependencies installed natively as they are depended on for many other packages, and you’re not including the space they take up as part of installing the native package, but you are including them as part of the flatpak.

When I first started using it, one of the talking points was that Linux kept the system clean of clutter and that improved longevity for the hardware and delivered stability by not having unnecessary and unused or orphaned and redundant libraries and dependencies.

Flatpaks literally improve this. The core system itself remains extremely minimal and lean when you use containers, in both the server and desktop space. This greatly improves stability and longevity. We all know how much of a pain it is to do a point release upgrade on a system with tons of installed software. Flatpaks do not have this problem because they are independent of the system and each other.

but we are carting in a ton of junk that should not be necessary

It is necessary, and it’s not junk.

Debian wiki links to this to further educate/alert on the down sides of flatpacks.

Much like Debian packages, the Debian wiki is stale and outdated.

When people talk about censorship, they usually mean of media. Yes, I’m aware that the US government is an evil institution that targets activists and whistleblowers. You’ll never believe me, but I actually despise my government and nearly every person in it. However, authoritarian regimes also strike down those people, but additionally censor the media on top of it. So to say that state censorship is worse here and now is just asinine. There’s no need to make things up to seem worse than they are when they’re already very bad, it just leads to people swinging at ghosts.

What I said was that people in the west are subjected to orders of magnitude of western propaganda, and perhaps should worry about that first.

I’m capable of worrying about two things. Perhaps even three on a good day.

Chomsky even pointed out recently that censorship in the west now is even worse than it was in USSR.

Media being bad because capitalism pushes them to do evil to further their own ends is not the same thing as censorship enforced with state violence. These are both bad things, but uniquely bad in their own ways. I’m sad that Chomsky’s age has caught up to him and he can no longer distinguish the two.

Imagine thinking any large state isn’t constantly injecting propaganda into the Internet. Couldn’t be me.

People are fine. Hierarchy turns man into monster. Destroy the hierarchy, destroy the beast.

1. Flatpaks are usually fresher than point release distro packages
2. Flatpaks are distro-agnostic
3. Flatpaks are easily containerized for increased security and privacy
4. Flatpaks can guarantee you have a known-good dependency chain directly tested by the developers/maintainers themselves
5. Flatpaks can be installed and managed entirely in userspace

Android managed it, so can desktop Linux. We just need manufacturers who will ship it as default.

This is the only answer, and anybody who doesn’t agree just doesn’t understand users. They just use whatever you give them.

We all go down this hole at the start. The truth is, you should only reserve IPs if you actually need it to stay the same. You don’t need to check IPs as often as you think, I promise. The only segmentation and planning you should do for a home network is for subnets/vlans; LAN, Guest, IOT, Server, etc.

Instead of managing the IP addresses, just manage hostnames. Make sure every device with a customizable hostname is easily identifiable. This will help you so much more in the long run.

That’s what I do. All my IOT stuff that I can’t get wired or via Zigbee/Z-Wave goes on a separate VLAN along with my Home Assistant server. I have an mDNS repeater for ease of access to TV stuff via apps (might spin TVs off into its own VLAN, just haven’t gotten around to it) but a 1-way firewall rule that only allows the main network to initiate connections. Certain devices which don’t need internet at all get static IPs and completely firewalled.