I also recommend rEFInd for the bootloader if you don’t want to set anything up (and risk messing up). You don’t need to configure your boot entries, it scans for boot options and shows them with a graphical interface, so your Linux and Windows should just show up.
The issue is, when doing sudo, you have to put in the password when doing sudo. In this case, you put in your password, some flag is set, the computer does a full reset, and then after it reads the flag and decides to bypass the password system. That sounds like just a step away of figuring out how to set this flag without a password to bypass logging in.
I think an issue is, this sets up your computer to have a way to bypass putting your password in on boot. If you don’t care about security too much and don’t have things like secure boot and encryption, then that’s bypassable anyways… But otherwise, I’d be concerned about introducing systems that specifically bypass security.
Why does every distro need yet another package manager?
I think most package managers - the ones actually part of a distro - are old. It’s not a question of why they all use different package managers, it’s a matter of them having developed them long ago before any single one matured.
That said, there are other considerations, which is also where new ones come from - different distros will have different approaches to package formats, dependency management, tracking of installed packages and system files, some might be implemented in a specific language due to the distro’s ideology, some might work in a different way (like NixOS), and there’s probably a whole bunch that just want a different interface.
You wouldn’t ask why Linux has a different way of viewing installed programs from Windows, and in the same vein packages are not a universal aspect of Linux, so each distro has to make its own choices.
Also I like pacman, some people complain about the commands being obscure, but I feel like they’re structured in a much more logical way. Don’t confuse it with yay though, pacman doesn’t build packages, and yay is specifically a wrapper around pacman that has different commands, while adding the ability to interact with the AUR.
That makes sense, thanks for explaining! I saw “makes space” as what’s happening right now, since Android does let you install alternatives for all those, including third party app stores, but it does go farther than that.
I don’t think anything you said makes it not free, as long as you can fork it. The same can be said about most FOSS, since somebody, usually the creator, is in control of the repository.
That’s the point of FOSS - your repository isn’t becoming a democracy by virtue of using a permissive license, but it means somebody could outcompete you with a fork and effectively take over as the dominant project.
But… Aren’t all of those things still very much dominant?
I mean, couldn’t an addon just read the password you put into a login field, or send in a request, and send it off to their servers?
Yeah, obs also has similar features - not sure if performance would actually differ, assuming it uses hardware acceleration for the encoding. That said, I suspect this is specifically directed at steam deck, Valve probably wants a built-in, easy to use version there.
Hold up, how is proton leveraging open source to avoid dev costs? Are you referring to steam using and contributing to existing projects instead of reinventing the wheel? Or to game developers that use it as a reason for not making native Linux versions, which wouldn’t be Valve’s workforce in the first place?
I can see how the things Valve does contribute to their business model - steam input giving their controller compatibility with games, proton letting them launch a Linux-based handheld, and the new recording feature probably there for the steam deck… But the thing is, Valve is still providing all those things to customers for no extra charge, and they keep adding new stuff.
Windows 10. The reason I switched was pretty funny - I had previously bought a cheap SSD and moved my install over to it, and installed Arch on my HDD hoping to experiment with it.
I never really did that, but one day before Christmas my computer booted straight to Arch to my confusion, and after a while I figured out my SSD failed. I ended up installing gnome to have something to use in the meanwhile, since I wasn’t gonna be buying a new SSD in the next few days, but then I just decided to stick with Linux. As I learned more about it I realised I was barely missing anything, and I preferred Linux for what I had.
Sure, you can probably clone it - I’m not 100% sure, but I think laws protect that as long as it’s private use.
You can also fork it on GitHub, that’s something you agree to in the GitHub ToS - though I think you’re not allowed to push any modifications if the license doesn’t allow it?
Straight up taking the content from GitHub, uploading it to your own servers, and letting people grab a copy from there? That’s redistribution, and is something that needs to be permitted by the license. It doesn’t matter if it’s git or something else, in the end that’s just a way to host potentially copyrighted material.
Though if you have some reference on why this is not the case, I’d love to see it - but I’m not gonna take a claim that “that’s very much a part of most git flows”.
I imagine they made this specifically for Steam Deck, since windows users already have stuff like this built into GPU software. They’d want to offer feature parity on their handheld, so it’ll probably work nicely out of the box.
I do believe it’s illegal if they take a repository with a restrictive license (which includes any repository without a license), and then make it available on their own service. I think China just doesn’t care.
This is from before my times, but… Deploying an app by uploading a pre built bundle? If it’s a fully self-contained package, that seems good to me, perhaps better than many websites today…
The good thing is, on Android you can get an APK without root or anything like that, same for installing it, and you can use an emulator (or something like waydroid) to run it on a computer. For cases where the game doesn’t use any more specialized servers, and just uses the app store for authentication, DRM, etc. the situation is no different from PC games with DRM - it’s bypassable, and if done right, will work for all games, not just one.
That said though, it’s very true for multiplayer/always online games, and those are very common on mobile. While it’s possible to reverse engineer and rewrite the servers, for most of them nobody is going to bother. And in the world of aggressively monetized games, developers have an incentive to keep it that way - they can’t make money from players who are still enjoying a game they’ve already squeezed every penny out of.
Apple has always been about locking down the system and forcing the user to do things the way Apple wants. Not only within one device, but also in locking down inter-device protocols and removing standard ones, as well as obfuscating information about the hardware, not letting the users make an informed decision. And that’s already after the fact that you aren’t legally allowed to use the system on non-Apple hardware.
PDFs are… Not an image format? It’s a document format that is difficult to edit, and thus mostly meant to be read-only, but a document nonetheless.
An image viewer can’t open a pdf, unless for some ungodly reason it also has a whole pdf reader built into it, which just sounds inane. Defaulting to a browser is icky, and I think stems from browsers having gotten good PDF support before Microsoft could figure it out. This is something that ideally belongs to a reader, either dedicated to PDF, or supporting similar formats, be it documents or ebooks.
That’s like saying that a 3D project file is basically an image format, if it’s built to be rendered out from a viewpoint into an image.
It is real, it’s just not data from YouTube. The information on how it works is made very clear, and people using it should be aware of the drawbacks.
I think on mutable distros, or at least arch, you can run a command to reinstall all installed packages, which will verify integrity of the package files (signatures) and then ensure the files in the filesystem match package files? And I think it takes minutes at most, at least for typical setups.
I do think it’s also possible to just verify integrity of all files installed from a package, but I don’t remember if it required an external utility, pretty sure it’s on the arch wiki under pacman/tips and tricks