Quoting: GuestLinux is still too hard for the non-technical people to use; it’s better than it was, but not quite there yet.

Not really (see https://linuxmint.com [External Link] for example... or the Steam Deck, why not?), but most windows users don't even know what an OS is (so are subject to whichever comes preinstalled... or are still under the (wrong for a while) impression that Linux is actually harder to use.

I'll just reuse my post from a couple weeks ago week on Phoronix to illustrate my point:

As someone who spends 8h each work day on win11, I can confidently say this:

A "nightmare UX" would make KDE feel more familiar to windows users, not less.

ps: i'll allow anyone to call me a blind linux fanboy for the above comment... after:
a) Microsoft fixes ctrl+c not always working
b) MS Teams starts to honor its own global settings when set to open documents on desktop apps instead of office365 web apps
c) volume controls stop using a 5-tiers control panel design with mixed modern and classic windows UIs where trivial features are in the 4th and 5th tier
d) nagging messaging from the OS (eg: to make MS Edge the default browser) is removed or at the very least can be marked "don't EVER ask this again" instead of "not now" which suppresses it for an undisclosed (too short) amount of time
e) default app for HTML files and clicking urls in non-browser apps stays at my custom setting instead of reverting to MS Edge every couple system updates
f) windows default file picker dialogs don't hang and crash if the last used location isn't accessible anymore (eg: save to sharepoint then disconnect VPN and try to save something else to somewhere else)
...
i'll stop short because my left eye is twitching now that i remembered this stuff... also today is Saturday and systematically describing those bugs feels like i'm working on a weekend, bleh!​

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Is there any better way though?

investing in building a more complete ecosystem of trustable (necessarily FOSS) apps for which fine-grained permissions aren't necessary

as long as the user and the OS need to rely on apps they cannot fully trust, preventing full access from that app to user data and system features is necessary for privacy and security... but if those apps are to be in any way useful, you must also poke holes in this perfect isolation in a way that allows the app to actually function

this is a conundrum, and a nigh-impossible one to solve, because apps can require a permission for legitimate reasons but use the same permissions for malicious uses

eg: in android 2 and 3 you could block internet access for a calculator app to prevent it from relaying user data to a remote server and even serving ad banners... because a calculator app doesn't need internet to function

google removed this user ability because displaying ads in android apps was generating revenue for google themselves, not just the app publisher...

...but besides that, app publishers learned to blackmail users into allowing permissions that weren't really needed by programatically testing (not just querying) if the permission was granted, and blocking useful functions unless granted... and refined the art of inventing arrangements where the permissions they wanted for ads and data gathering were plausibly tied to some useful function in the app (feature creep and SaaS are means to achieve this)... notto mention straight-up lying that you need internet so a server can do 2+2 or actually moving 2+2 server-side to be able to not be lying (but destroying app perf, reliability, etc)

(any resemblance to always-online single-player games is not a coincidence)

as for user interaction fatigue, this is cooked into Android by design for years already
eg: any single android app that you want to prevent sucking up sensible user data can spread invasive activity over
- normal app permissions page (16 of them)
- additional permissions subpage (9 of them)
- other permissions (5 of them)
- special permissions (17 of them)
- notifications (8 fixed options plus extensible list)
- connection method (2 fixed options)
- background autostart
- app lock
- battery performance
- fullscreen mode
- account sync
- dual apps
- second space
- enterprise mode
- Google Chrome privacy settings used by in-app web browser frames (those can bypass app permissions)
- Google Account privacy permissions such as advertiser ID, interest topics, search history, location history
- Google Play Framework permissions (which sometimes can bypass per-app permissions if called by apps)
- google (and vendor) backups (which can syphon non-user-encrypted settings like wifi passwords and user data from apps (ironically stored in user-inaccessible app content folders)
- OS usage & diagnostics (can send data to vendor but also to app devs)

many of those settings can be hidden or made read-only by app manifest, especially but not exclusively if the apps are preinstalled

android by default now wipes out user-set permissions after some time not using an app... while they claim it helps ensure apps don't keep permissions enabled when not really being useful, it also induces repetitive permissions fatigue by throwing off a user's fine-grained choices if they went through the trouble of actually setting things up... to make things worse, this feature can't be globally disabled and there are 2 independent toggles for the same thing where the most visible one isn't honoured (at least on xiaomi)

It's worth noting most of these settings started out separated by severity, but then google bundled them thematically and made it impossible to eg: grant an app permission to know if i'm connected to the internet without also granting permission to know my currently connected wifi SSID and all other memorized wifi SSIDs and current IP and currently visible nearby wifi SSIDs and signal strength and all the equivalent 3G/4G/5G conection data

Windows 10 and 11 are going down the same road now

All those actors did was erode privacy, but they did so while maintaining a huge plausible deniability of their role in this erosion: "look at all this stuff I tried to do to help you get some privacy! it's just very very very hard!"

If Canonical finds a viable revenue source where closed-source apps are the ones paying for Ubuntu development, they'll also go down this road... this may or may not be what they're aiming at already

What's obvious is that Canonical is investing in creating a vibrant closed-source apps ecossystem inside Linux while at the same time trying to unburden themselves from the vetting work

I say this is problematic, not because their proposed solution allows users to tune permissions (this is choice, it's good, and fine-grained choice is necessary for sandboxing)...
... but because they are implying the initial choice will already be on the user's hands (and no mention of this being optional, as an alternative to sane defaults)
...and because the screenshot notably lacks the all-important anti-nag "deny always" option
...and they're even considering a complete takeover of the user's workflow for permission prompting?! a malicious app could even use repetitive prompting to block a user out of their own desktop, LOL! this is a terrible thing to entertain

All in all it's user prompt hell all over again, which is exactly what's eating away at my ability to endure Android on a smartphone

For a better design, see CyanogenMod's global default permissions management from ~ a decade ago (and probably LineageOS and any other AOSP-derived custom ROM out there nowadays, though I stopped keeping tabs a while back)... any given permission there had a global default, where one option worked like "always deny by default (don't even ask)"

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[quote=Jarmer]

Quoting: Cloversheenit's a bug in 24.1.4 with relation to video in vlc. So they rolled it back to 24.1.3 and are working on getting 24.1.5 ready for release which should be any week now, so best just to wait.

shouldn't Mesa (or the distro) have pushed a 24.1.4.1 or 24.1.5 with the rolled-back code to ensure [broken]!=[newest]? then the fix is eimmediate and the new feature (in a version that actually works) comes later, when ready, no rush

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but absolutely not a programmer

try Linux Mint

while I have done a couple things via terminal and developed a couple scripts for personal use, it was entirely optional to go that route for daily driving that distro over the several years i've been using it in my family's laptops, desktops and miniPCs

• there is a complete liveboot OS on the usb iso
• you'll feel right at home on a traditional desktop design
• it has a GUI for everything
• it works out-of-the-box almost anywhere
• it won't change it's entire looks on a whim
• just the right amount of hand-holding (which is there to guide, not force you)
• auto-updates are optional, unintrusive, light on resources, safe and usually don't even ask for an update (which is never going to force-reboot)

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As for Valve, the only thing i'm sad about regarding the steam deck is that they STILL haven't even started direct sales of the steam deck in my country...

This item is not available for purchase in your region

...while bad resellers are a plague here

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dude's sour he can't get no more Conan-style white male dom RPGs so he says there's "forced" (you don't HAVE to play that game, you know?) LGBT, race and etc variations... which is totally "not how the world REALLY looks like"... on a freaking fictional world where an undead ancient dragon commands magical hordes

noice!

ps:
you can totally still get your Conan fix... go play God of War

Dragon Age: Anything is a horribly poor and buggy execution of a great story moto... "woke" is not even in the top 100 things that make it a bad game series... i mean, who remembers a dragon in DA:O spawning halfway into the floor?!!

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the new visual changelog is an absolute pleasure to read through, and this can actually help more game devs hop into this train

it shows progress, attention to details, openness to suggestions, flexibility, ... dayum! :heart:

the improvements, bugfixes and added features look awesome... there's so much stuff going on that it feels like a ChronoTrigger character is sending commits from the future into the current codebase :grin:

i also have high hopes for Godot's future after seeing how capable it became in the hands of talented indie devs like Cassette Beasts... that game rocked me off my chair a few times, especially knowing it came from a FOSS game engine like this... Unity3D better not blink :wink:

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Quoting: Highball

Quoting: MarlockQuick question: what system has a copy of grub installed (not by windows, because it's never used by windows) but doesn't have linux so it's ok to replace/block grub?

Any system.

Please elaborate

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Quick question: what system has a copy of grub installed (not by windows, because it's never used by windows) but doesn't have linux so it's ok to replace/block grub?

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Some Yoga models had a bad screen hinge system which made it not stay in place when used as a normal laptop... and most of them had horrible cpu and gpu power, because they were from before the AMD Ryzen tier of efficiency...

what else made it horrible back then that isn't better/solved now?

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