I just took an old Optiplex with a GTX1650 and got it going with Ubuntu 24.04 and my experience was mostly okay but I saw a number of issues which could confound a newbie. Firstly, I had to go to the command like to run the ubuntu-drivers auto install because the card wasn’t set up properly. If I hadn’t then games wouldn’t run properly. But then I was able to install Steam and get some games going. Acceleration looked okay and I tested games which were running under Windows emulation and natively with some success - however there was a long delay launching some games, like it was having to transpile shaders or something. Still, when they worked they seemed to work well.

The most egregious issue I had is that Ubuntu defaults to an X11 desktop and the desktop is slightly off but the games work well. If I change to a Wayland desktop, then the desktop is buttery smooth but the games are very choppy. I suspect that’s the driver for this old card just doesn’t work properly with the window manager for some reason in that mode, that the wm is not giving the game a proper surface to render in or is somehow interfering with performance.

I don’t really buy the “small incompatibilities” argument. The project strives for total compatibility, even down to the most esoteric parameter that nobody has ever heard of. And even that seems like overkill to me - there are alternative implementations of core commands on Linux and other *nix systems like BSD, Solaris etc. where the compatibility is way worse. For example, busybox is used in embedded Linux, and a containerized images like Alpine Linux.

It also seems a bit rich to complain that uutils might get extended. GNU coreutils came into being because of dissatisfaction with the commands that came with the default *nix. Same for bash (vs sh), GNU cc (vs cc), GNU emacs (vs emacs) and so on. Was there somebody back then complaining about devs “spamming commits” that extended functionality?

And other Rust applications won’t only work with uutils. That’s absurd. They’ll test the capabilities of the OS they’re built to run on either at build time with feature flags or at runtime by probing commands. Just like any other high level application.

As for license, MIT is used for plenty other things in a typical Linux dist, e.g. X11.

The biggest point of concern for a Rust rewrite is dependency integrity. Rust uses cargo to manage dependencies and absolutely everything in the Cargo.toml/Cargo.lock files has to be reviewed. The crates.io repository is beginning to support package signing and The Update Framework initiative but every single dependency of uutils would need to be carefully reviewed and signature validated for it to be considered trustworthy. Basically everything needs to get locked down, and wherever possible dependencies expunged altogether.

I think the issues is that you can’t pick and choose exactly what you want in your new vehicle. You can’t say, get just a simple AM/FM radio and get bluetooth. You buy a package of accessories.

This was a Toyota RAV 4 IIRC and despite the vehicle having no subscription to this thing, it occupied the right hand side of the infotainment system and was prominent in the menus too. I had the car for nearly a month and I played around in the settings but saw no way of getting rid of it.

I don’t live in the US but the last time I rented a car there the UI was festooned with functionality for Sirius XM that couldn’t be removed or hidden. Not small icons, but big fucking chunks of the screen. I find this kind of thing intolerable. It’s one thing to plug a service but if people don’t want it, then hide it away and don’t nag them about it ever again.

Someone should launch a Project Poison which offers information to websites to protect themselves from scrapers and to poison and devalue AIs and companies that ignore their restrictions. I’m sure there are plenty of ways it could be done - nonsense about niche subjects, libelous facts about celebrities and people with money, false attribution for quotes & art, images captioned with things they do not contain, offensive slurs. Just feed AIs with sufficient trash and it will output trash.

Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission

My experience with Linux with Nvidia drivers was basically - hey execute this “.run” file and you get drivers. Okay that worked but then if the kernel updated, the drivers broke and had to be reinstalled. And if the dist upgraded to a new version then the drivers broke completely. And NVidia gave up providing drivers at all for their older GPUs and I was stuck with Noveau which is better than nothing but useless for gaming.

Conversely, some dists are supported by graphics manufacturers with proper packages but there is always that gap where the driver dependencies and the kernel dependencies are out of sync. Or the graphics driver only works on the last couple of dists and support disappears after that. Or you upgrade the dist and then discover there are no drivers for it yet.

I know it rankles some purists, but really there should be an long term, versioned ABI for graphics drivers on Linux. There is sort-of is one with Gallium3D but it’s still not supported properly by all vendors.

The success of Steam Deck has helped a lot. Prior to that Linux ports tended to be very perfunctory and they weren’t tested or supported very well. I guess that now there are actual Linux gamers (via Steam Deck), that support has improved. That said, I think outside of Steam Deck and SteamOS, your experience of gaming is going to be extremely dependent on your GPU, driver support and a number of other factors. Things are far more likely to work well on Windows than they would for Linux.

No, YOU don’t understand end to end encryption, and you don’t understand browsers. You say you could “write down a base64 encoded binary blob on a website”. Yes you could and how do you decrypt it? The asnwer is with a key (asymmetric or symmetric) that the recipient must have in memory of the receiving software - the browser that the filter has already intercepted and compromised. So “moar layers” is not protection since the filter could inject any JS it likes to reveal the inner key and/or conversation. It could do this ad nauseum and the only protection is how determined the filter is.

But this is also a nonsense argument just on a practical level. The problem is kids connecting to adult websites, or websites with some adult content. The filter doesn’t need to do much - either block a domain outright, or do some DPI to determine from the path what part of the website the browser is calling. The government thinks it reasonable that every single website that potentially hosts adult content should capture proof of identity of adults. I contend that really the issue is kids having access to those websites at all, and that proxies can and would be a far more effective way to control the issue without imposing on adults. No solution is perfect, but a filter is a far more effective way than entrusting some random website with personal information. Only this week somebody found an app that was storing ids in a public S3 bucket compromising all those users. Multiply that by hundreds, thousands of websites all needing verification and this will not be the last compromise by any means.

Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail’s account recovery process.)

That could be it. What is certain is that these big corps really don’t want to pay human beings to sort out issues so if you get caught in the middle of some BS you may have no recourse out of it.

I honestly do not know what you are saying. Deep packet inspection through a firewall that does mitm interception demonstrably happens. It is not up for debate.

What isn’t made clear is if this had anything to do with him being a LibreOffice developer. Or just the usual Kafkaesque bullshit that happens when someone’s account gets flagged for “suspicious activity” or whatever and they cannot get a real human being to help or reverse the problem.

I really do not know what you are saying. I have just told you that Fortigate Firewall can and does do deep packet inspection on https connections. It does so by man in the middle proxying. If one filter / proxy can do it then any other could too. There would be ways for kids to circumvent this, e.g via VPN but that is no different than with age verification.

I’m intimately aware about what it can and cannot do. And it can intercept and man in the middles any https traffic

Did you read the text? This guy was providing a package because the default one was broken and he’s fed up of dealing with complaints. And the solution to that is just flatpak the thing and tell users to use that regardless of dist.

The answer for this guy and other people stretched by supporting Linux is to say it’s flatpak or nothing. Stop trying to build for each dist because it’s not sustainable. If someone on a dist wants to maintain a package then let them take the heat if it is broken.

You obviously didn’t know how it works if I had to explain it was already possible. And I am not aware of any mobile device that prevents you installing a new root CA.

And it isn’t “madness”, it’s a completely workable way to offer filtering for people who want it for kids and have no filtering or censorship for anybody else. It is a vastly better option than onerously demanding adults provide their identity to random and potentially adult themed websites where they could be victims of identity theft or extortion

Deep packet inspection already happens on encrypted traffic (Fortigate Firewall) so it’s eminently possible for filtering software to do the same.

Actually it can be done and is being done. Software like Fortigate Firewall can do deep packet inspection on encrypted connections by replacing certs with their own and doing man in the middle inspection. It requires the browser has a root CA cert that trusts the certs issued by the proxy but that’s about it. Filtering software could onboard a new device where the root cert could be installed.

And if Fortigate can do it then any filtering software can too. e.g. a kid uses their filtered device to go to reddit.com, the filter software substitutes reddit’s cert for their own and proxies the connection. Then it looks at the paths to see if the kid is visiting an innocuous group or an 18+ group. So basic filtering rules could be:

1. If domain is entirely blocked, just block it.
2. If domain hosts mixed content, deep packet inspection & block if necessary
3. If domain is innocuous allow it through

This is eminently possible for an ISP to implement and do so in a way that it ONLY happens when a user opts into it on a registered device while leaving everything open if they did not opt into it.

And like I said this is an ISP problem to figure out. The government could have set the rules and walked away. And as a solution it would be far more simple that requiring every website to implement age verification.

That’s a problem is for ISPs and content providers to figure out. I don’t see why the government has to care other than laying out the ground rules - you must offer and implement a parental filter for people who want it for free as part of your service. If ISPs have to do deep packet inspection and proxy certs for protected devices / accounts then that’s what they’ll have to do.

As far as the government is concerned it’s not their problem. They’ve said what should happen and providing the choice without being assholes to people over 18 who are exercising their rights to use the internet as they see fit.