Para_lyzed

Matrix leaks tons of metadata, and its encryption lacks perfect forward secrecy. Additionally, it requires an email to sign up, and there are accounts with unique identifiers.

Simplex does not have any accounts or identifiers, everything is stored entirely locally. Additionally, it is based on the double ratchet Signal protocol, with improvements made for post-quantum encryption. It does not require anything to sign up, as there are no accounts. Metadata is not leaked as it is with Matrix, as everything is encrypted or obscured. Messages are padded to 16KB, the sender/receiver is not attached to the message, and there are fake messages being sent to obscure the identity and frequency of contact of those you are talking to even under monitoring of your network. Additionally, for anonymity, SimpleX is allowing for repudiation so that you cannot prove that a specific person sent specific messages, allowing doubt if messages were to be use in a court case, for instance. It is the trend (especially from a security perspective) to implement nonrepudiation, but the SimpleX team decided to remove it to protect users (after years of it being present in SimpleX chat). This is a protection intended for journalists, but it extends to many other cases as well.

Matrix is a nice toy, but SimpleX chat is built for anonymity above all else, and it does that job far better than Matrix ever has or will.

Do you not consider Alpine Linux to fall into the general category of “Linux”, then? It lacks GNU user space utilities, though there is never a world where I would not consider it a “Linux” operating system. You seem to be overgeneralizing here and making assumptions about OP’s intentions that aren’t based in fact. I don’t see the point in drawing meaningless lines, here. What you’re referring to (as described by the GNU project) is GNU/Linux, not “Linux” by itself. The two are often but not always used interchangeably, and treating them as exactly the same leads to major outliers, like Alpine. I’ve heard plenty of people use the term “Linux” in practice to describe software running on embedded devices that don’t contain GNU utilities, so this isn’t exclusive to Alpine. In fact, the only real exception that I see consistently to operating systems that run the Linux kernel is Android, so it makes much more sense to formulate a description of the generic term “Linux” as simply having an exception for Android, though I’d argue that the only reasons that Android isn’t viewed as “Linux” is because it is a mobile operating system, it is developed with the sole intention of including non-free, proprietary software (AOSP by itself isn’t meant to be the full operating system on any device, but rather a framework), and the fact that the structure of the filesystem and the way apps are run differ completely from the ways of traditional “Linux”. It seems to be an exception purely by the fact that it operates in fundamentally different ways than other “Linux” operating systems.

Fedora is what I’d describe as cutting edge, but not bleeding edge. It’s still behind from source, and is semi-rolling release, so it’s further behind than Arch but way ahead of stable/fixed release distros like Debian

Idk, I think Gentoo and Void would be worse for a new user. But yeah, most other distros will be more new user friendly. Bazzite has a great new user experience, for instance

Not sure what the title was before you changed it, but if I see a post in my feed that looks like this (without the “very bad take” part), I wouldn’t even want to open the post to see the description. I’m glad you clarified by editing the title, but without making your stance clear in the title from the very beginning, it would be bound to receive a barrage of downvotes.

This is a bit late, but I just wanted to follow up to let you know that Fedora 40 updated to kernel 6.9 last week.

Fedora has pretty good SELinux configured out of the box, and isn’t focused on opsec. It’s just sane defaults and proper limitations to access. It also switched to Walyand-by-default this release, completely removing X11 from the default packages, which mitigates many of the “app spying on other app” scenarios that a previous user in the thread was talking about. That’s not to say that Fedora is the pinnacle of Linux security or anything, but it comes with pretty good defaults for the average user. You’d have to get into kernel hardening and deep into SELinux to do better as an end user, which is not something that most users are inclined to spend time or energy on.

Seconding partclone here, it’s the easiest solution for imaging that only backs up the data on the partition that is used. Plus, it’s in RescueZilla, which is pretty intuitive and user friendly for those that prefer GUIs

Shouldn’t be too long left, I’d expect it to hit Fedora 40 sometime this month. I also shared instructions on how to temporarily upgrade the kernel to the one in Fedora 41’s repos (which is past 6.9) if you were interested in trying that, though the instructions are untested as of yet (the issue doesn’t affect me since I don’t play games). It’s easily revertible if you wanted to give it a try. I probably wouldn’t bother if you use secure boot, because I’ve had issues with signing things before with similar steps, though those are the official steps from the Fedora documentation, so it may be that they just work fine.

Is it related to the issue described in the post attached to this comment? The linked comment also links to an issue page with details about the issue the poster experienced. If so, then that issue should actually be fixed in kernel 6.9 (which still has not been added to the Fedora 40 repos), and not caused by it.

An extension of this issue is present in 6.8.9+ before 6.9, which is why I ask if this seems to be related (since the versions are pretty close in time and Fedora doesn’t even have 6.9 yet).

It really depends on the individual case. There are many CS professions where the title “engineer” or “scientist” is incredibly accurate. I believe that is a minority of course, and further depends on how broad your definition of “cs people” is. There are specialties within the incredibly broad field of computer science that require education in classical engineering, as well as specialties that focus on research and experimentation with the scientific method.

Hm, it could be a new issue then. I’m not seeing it on the Bazzite issues page, perhaps you should open a new issue on it here, and provide your hardware specs. At the very least, you could see if this issue is reproducible on other installs, and someone there could help to obtain more useful debug info to determine the actual problem. You could also report it on the Mozilla Bugzilla page, as chances are this is a Firefox issue and not a Bazzite issue, but I admit that the interface for bug reports is less intuitive for non-developers there. Bazzite devs would likely direct you to there first anyway though.

All I can really say myself is that I don’t experience this on Fedora Atomic KDE 40.20240607 with Mullvad Browser or the Firefox flatpak. I suspect it is either a hardware/config issue (on fresh install, I’d say a config issue is a distro issue if you haven’t changed anything), or that this is Bazzite specific and not present in upstream Fedora Atomic. Regardless, it’s a good idea to report this so that other users don’t experience the same bug

Sounds about in line with what I’d expect. If that works for you where the flatpak doesn’t, then it at least makes a viable solution for the short term (though I don’t know how much overhead would be introduced). A minute of delay is ridiculously long for startup, so I still don’t know why you were having that issue with the flatpak

Is it? I was looking a few months ago at Nix support in Fedora Atomic (which Bazzite is based on), and it required some minor hacks to get the /nix folder and Nix itself working properly with rpm-ostree distros, as root is otherwise immutable. Plus, Nix isn’t available by default in the Fedora repos it seems. I believe it required something along the lines of making a /var/nix folder and symlinking it, but I believe you’d also have to work around SELinux contexts on the folder and symlink. I’ve heard of people even having issues after that, so I wouldn’t consider it “official” support. Here’s an open issue thread about it

Is this new, or has it been happening for a few days/weeks? I’m on Fedora Atomic (which Bazzite is based on) and have never experienced this (though I mostly use Mullvad browser, a fork of Firefox). I tried Bazzite a few weeks ago and also never experienced this with the Firefox flatpak. If it’s been happening for awhile, it may be hardware-specific or a config thing. Out of curiosity (just to get a 1:1 comparison), do you experience the same thing with the Mullvad browser flatpak?

Not that I know of? I’m not sure where to even find that information if it does exist

555 is still the big driver release that fixes a ton of Wayland issues with explicit sync support. It’s still in beta as of now

While I don’t particularly agree with the sentiment, those in the field of Computer Science could be argued to be “scientists”, though often not in the classical sense. As a Computer Science major myself, I would never consider myself a “scientist” in the classical definition of the term. Those involved in actual research, yes, though that does not describe me despite the title of my Bachelor’s. I would consider those involved in the theoretical side of Computer Science to be more akin to mathematicians, as most of the theory is based in mathematical proofs and models (take for instance the field describing formal computational models as a means to defining how computers operate, and how effective specific algorithms are in that context). Though I could understand the argument that those involved heavily in the theoretical side of Computer Science may be considered scientists, given their similarity to theoretical physicists. In that sense, there is also active experimentation to test hypotheses about algorithmic runtime. It’s a fascinating niche of Computer Science that I studied briefly in university, but likely will not be pursuing in the future.

Generally those involved with active development of commercial software don’t fit into that category, though. It’s very much a question of semantics.

Then I don’t really understand the issue here. It’s syntactically similar to C++ with the benefits of being memory safe. It’s a different language, so there are different conventions and some different syntax of course, but that’s to be said about any 2 languages; they are always different in some ways. I don’t see a reason to complain about the aesthetic value of a language you don’t know how to use, especially when it’s similar to one that you seem to be using regularly.

Its syntax is incredibly similar to C++, the programming language it is targeting as a replacement. I don’t really understand the confusion here; have you never used C++?