iGurublog

Does systemd increase the security of the OS or reduce it? For example, does it allow currently-separated processes to dip into each others' memory space? I would appreciate a birds-eye view from someone familiar with the security ramifications of systemd. Would not the incorporation of many loosely-coupled but individually secure mechanisms into a single monolithic mechanism be useful to an entity whose purpose was to monitor communications, view/modify systems unbeknownst to sysadmins and users, etc.? Yes, I'm talking about the NSA et al. I reference the following which also brings up Red Hat's control of Linux: "Julian Assange: Debian Is Owned By The NSA" http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/julian-assange-debian-is-own…

>Try not to turn people into strawmen. As an aside, part of my frustration with talking to you is that specific problem. You're very early to dismiss complaints with things like > (me) If an outsider does submit patches to scratch their own itch they can expect to at best be held to a much higher standard and at worst be treated quite rudely. >> (you) This perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source. Now I can point to at least a few instances of that happening, but I know from experience that the goalposts will likely move again. I can point to a well respected SDL developer saying "this architecture is not how anything else works and will cause significant issues for the SDL project, and therefor many games on linux" and a gnome developer saying "Fix the applications and libraries that claim the support Wayland, but don't do it properly.". Now even if they were right on a technical level (they weren't) that's no way to talk to your fellow open-source developers who were being very polite and explaining why the proposed architecture wouldn't work. For that particular issue at some point gnome developers did step back and implement CSD. But regardless, "this perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source" is completely out of line and where I decided you weren't worth talking to. I can point to multiple specific instances where gnome developers were rude, unhelpful, arrogant, etc, but I'd rather not drag into that. Like I…

My experience is that you're not going to get as cohesive a desktop computing experience in any BSD as you do in macOS. However, if you're annoyed with all the little gotchas of the Mac environment but you want to stay on BSD, TrueOS is a great place to start. Going further down the rabbit hole, if you are willing to forego an easy OOTB experience and want to really get your hands dirty, give OpenBSD a go. I've found its installation process to be the fastest and easiest of any BSD, and it gives you a bare bones foundation to build into whatever you want. For desktop use it does require some tweaking, but it's minor stuff and you end up with a rock-solid OS that gets out of your way and lets you get on with your work. Some of my go-to resources for setting up a proper OpenBSD desktop: https://sivers.org/openbsd https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13223351 (ymmv, I use Xfce instead of Lumina) https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/openbsd-as-a-linux-desktop-…

>Have you tried Gnome 3? Not being sarcastic :). These days it's a very stable, slick environment with a very good window manager. Beats the pants off of OS X at least. I used to use OSX but now I use Arch with GNOME3 and your comment is not based in reality. GNOME3 doesn't even have feature-parity with Snow Leopard. It's many years behind the OSX in features and polish department [0]. I encounter various GNOME3 issues and bugs daily and have been subscribed to many issues on GNOME's Bugzilla to keep track of fixes. The worst issue, by far, is memory usage and memory leaks. On my PC, GNOME3 sometimes ends up using 1.5GB or RAM. GNOME is also infamous for being the only Linux DE that regularly removes features that people use [1]. Anyway, while I do like GNOME and have used it every day for the past 4 months, it's nowehere near OSX's Aqua. [0] https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-thre… [1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2013-March/msg09987.html

I agree that a code of conduct is a great idea but I'm really bummed to read that the Django CoC is going to be adopted by golang. 1. The Django CoC uses very vague language on what it is forbidden and explicitly tells you that "this isn’t an exhaustive list of things that you can’t do" just to be extra vague in what constitutes unacceptable behaviour. 2. It does not define what process will be used to address CoC violations, being ejected from an OS project for violating the CoC can be a serious thing with personal and professional ramifications but an accused is not given the right to face their accuser nor the right to an impartial jury (which would be hard to do anyway since the accusation could be something like "he's making me anxious") 3. It overextends itself "violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them" which means that not only you are under the scrutiny of the kangaroo court when you are posting on golang spaces but everywhere else: ycombinator, reddit, your personal blog, etc. Honestly I feel like just writing this criticism is painting a target on my forehead, talk about safe spaces. I wouldn't be making this comment if CoCs hadn't already been used in bad faith to attempt to character assassinate OS contributors (for exmaple the Kubuntu debacle or this [1]) [1] https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/

Before I started to use Qt in my python projects, I was using GTK. At the time, there was no absolute reason for doing so - it was merely the first thing I tried. For various reasons (memory is vague, it was a while back), I soon began to get frustrated with GTK. Then I started reading various articles on the subject of 3rd-party Gnome theme designers getting extremely frustrated because for every point release of Gnome/Gtk, their themes broke in lots of annoying ways. I read about those frustrations, about incredulity that a point release introduced non-backwards compatible changes, about anger at Gnome developer's responses to those frustrations. A very good article to read is http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-three… Gnome itself.. I stopped using Gnome desktop not long after that - the big push for me was the transition from being a great desktop environment in Gnome 2, to some horrible abomination in Gnome 3. Now, some people like Gnome 3's way of doing things, I don't. For similar reasons I refuse to have anything to do with Ubuntu's Unity. The Gnome developer response to issues leaves something to be desired... "We know best, shut up!" is the best way I can describe my impression of them. There's something almost, dare I say it, Communist Party in my opinion, of how they do things. It puts me off. I've been using KDE since then - it presents me with a desktop that's useful to me. It also led me to try out the Qt library. What a…

GNOME as a project has consistently made itself clear on how it feels about the rest of the desktop Linux ecosystem existing, or working well with it: 2012 — https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-thre… 2021 — https://joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-ecosystem/ 2023 — https://felipec.wordpress.com/2023/03/04/one-decade-later-gnome-still-… 2023 — https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-mess-is-not-an-accident-4e301032670c Nobody should be surprised anymore when GNOME pulls some shady and technically questionable crap to try to make their "product" look better by actively breaking other people's work.

In the case of GNOME, absolutely. GNOME devs are infamous for actively fighting users' desire for customization. They have a long history; here's[¹] an example from a couple of years ago (not sure how the situation described evolved); this [²] is an article that describes the wider point of view. [¹] https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming-wider-com… [²] https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-thre…

> can you point to the constant reinvention of themeing engines? https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-thre…

>At least everyone can stop hating on Gnome now. Performance isn't only reason for that. Mainly bizarre GNOME3 design decisions: lack of taskbar, tablet-like interface, atrocious file picker dialog, etc. Also maintainer attitude to themes and extensions, here's one rant from 2012: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-thre…

One potential problem is if Gnome make breaking changes, it's hard for Canonical (or anyone) to use it as a base for their own UI. I've not experienced this first-hand, since I haven't used Gnome or written GTK+ apps since the 2.x days, but judging by what I've seen online they like to break APIs at each release, drop working features if/when their opinions change, and be semi-hostile to any use-case other than their own default settings ("brand"), e.g. https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-thre… https://davmac.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/why-do-we-keep-building-rotten… I suppose Canonical are big enough to have their needs taken into account, unlike other app authors.

Open source projects are not shielded from this either. Plenty of paranoia, justified or not, going around these days. https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/julian-assange-debian-is-ow… http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-million-for-a-b… https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-backdoor-left-in-Unix-or-Linux-inte… https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-backdoor-in-rsa… On one hand, we've been privy to some of NSA's operations, on the other, there is still a lot left to be disclosed, most will of course, never be out in the open.

If you want to go down that rabbit hole, see: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/biography-of-a-cypherpunk-a…

Updating software shouldn't give a sense of security, instead use sandbox/cipher technologies more generalized, for firefox you could use firejail[0] or sandfox[1]. Or even more general approaches like subuser[2] or QubeOs[3]. Personally I use FF 28.x + Noscript + Adblock plus + Firejail 0.9.28-1 and I feel quite confident I won't get hacked by random attacks. [0] https://l3net.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/firejail-a-security-sandbox-for… [1] https://igurublog.wordpress.com/downloads/script-sandfox/ [2] http://subuser.org/ [3] https://www.qubes-os.org/

Below link may shed some light on gtk3 controversy. https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-thre…

"It's as if everyone Apple fanboy who was rejected by Apple's UX department is now making GTK themes." Or most of them probably just gave up making GTK themes. https://github.com/QtCurve/qtcurve-gtk3 https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-thre…

> Raytheon is converting the VTUAV TCS “block II” system from Sun’s aging, UNIX-based Solaris 8 OS to a “B2VL” version of Linux. I wonder what this B2VL version of Linux is. Also, it seems that USA is going full steam ahead with Linux adoption, what with NASA switching to Debian and similar stories. I wonder if it gives credibility to the (conspiracy) theories by some that Linux is systematically being made weaker by government agencies.[1][2] [1]: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/julian-assange-debian-is-ow… [2]: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/biography-of-a-cypherpunk-a…

The link in your title is broken (missing colon). It should be: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impot…

Because major Linux distros and the upstream developers like to ignore or mock use cases that deviate from their "brand identity" (witness https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-thre… which recently saw the HN front page).

Comment 13 on http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-three… suggests Red Hat is doing Embrace, Extend and Extinguish ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish ).

RPM equivalent is gtk4-devel (here: version 3.98.2), provides /usr/bin/gtk4-demo and /usr/bin/gtk4-demo-application. I just tried them. A pox on you, Gnome developers! You yet again broke the colour scheme. It comes as no surprise, you did so with (at least) versions 3.2, 3.4, 3.6, 3.16, 3.18… You have been doing that over such a long time (>9 years) and so often that even seasoned desktop environment developers working on infrastructure throw up their hands and walk away in disgust. See https://github.com/QtCurve/qtcurve-gtk3 and https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-thre… Gnome developers truly deserve the moniker of shame "cascade of attention deficit teenagers" because you absolutely do not take responsibility for the outcome of your decisions and refuse to acknowledge that environments other than Gnome exist where end users might want to run Gtk applications (e.g. Firefox).

> If you're willing to fiddle around, there are a few good themes that don't waste so much space. The point of this "first impressions" exercise was to explore the happy path. > It's not just Gnome that does that. There's an entire generation of designers that's cargo-culting mobile designs at the moment. Breeze, KDE's default theme, is equally space-wasting. I would agree with that sentiment, though I didn't want to get into that flame war today. I think a lot of other people have already written extensively on this subject and I don't feel I can contribute anything new. Here are some relevant articles... Several of these are about CSDs, which I think are a big point of contention with respect to the design philosophy of GTK/Gnome 3.X. This list does not include much about the KDE/Qt side, which I'm less familiar with. I would certainly like to expand the side of this list on the "Pro Gnome" side in the interest of a more fair and balanced debate. Pro Gnome 3.x: Client-Side Decorations Initiative - https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/CSD Restyling apps at scale - https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/ Introducing the CSD Initiative - https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/01/26/csd-initiative/ Against Gnome 3.x: Why do we keep building rotten foundations? - https://davmac.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/why-do-we-keep-building-rotten… GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes -…

https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impot… Yet just two days ago, we see Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux and maintainer of the Linux kernel), launching into a tirade against – yes, you guessed it – systemd developers because of their atrocious response to a bug in systemd that is crashing the kernel and preventing it from being debugged. Linus is so upset with systemd developer Kay Sievers (gee, where I have heard that name before – oh, that’s right, he’s the moron who refused to fix udev problems) that Linus is threatening to refuse any further contributions from this Red Hat developer, not just because of this bug, but because of a pattern of this behavior – a problem for Kay because Red Hat is also foaming at the mouth to have their kernel-based, no doubt bug- and security-flaw-ridden D-Bus implementation included in our kernels. Other developers were so peeved that they suggested simply triggering a kernel panic and halting the system when systemd is so much as detected in use. The key phrase there is: a bug in systemd that is crashing the kernel and preventing it from being debugged Honestly though when you get Linus flaming your behavior you're doing something really wrong.

Speaking for your opposition whilst misrepresenting their arguments is very dirty pool. There are numerous long-term expert users and developers of Linux who've spoken against systemd, its design, its behavior, and its developers. Including Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Ted T'so, and Patrick Volkerding (That's the original developer of Linux, the long-time second in command, the lead filesystem developer, and the Slackware distro's maintainer -- the oldest extant linux distro.) Mark Shuttleworth, Eric Raymond, and Ian Jackson are notable other critics. For actual arguments against systemd: http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_systemd https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impot… The laptop vs server divide: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2837182/linux/back-into-linux-systemd… Bad design and bad attitude. One or the other might be survivable. Both are likely not. http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608798/data-center/systemd--harbinge… Uselessd's observations on misrepresentations by systemd advocates: http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ Five troubles: http://www.draketo.de/light/english/top-5-systemd-troubles LWN on Debian's debates: https://lwn.net/Articles/452865/ Wikipedia on Systemd's controversy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History_and_controversy

Other than the FPGA, which the average person won't be programming, how is this different from other ARM-based dev boards with unlocked boot loader? Some software and hardware security info from a variety of perspectives: Rants on community: http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/biography-of-a-cypherpunk-an… & http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impote… Rant on Linux systemd: https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/8/12/459 Desktop security alternatives: http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-is-qubes-os-differe… Designing open crypto hardware: http://wiki.cryptech.is/