PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default
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Having said that, 2022 was already the year of the Linux desktop. Everything works. KDE gets better every week. Be the owner of your technology. Join us!
And correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t KDE neon supposed to be a bit less stable?
I haven’t seen it in a while, though, so it just might be they have fixed it. Fedora + zawertun COPR, for what it’s worth.
Trying to explain it I'm actually not sure I 100% understand the solution. It looks like it uses systemd for sleep AND saves all of the VRAM (I'm guessing into RAM if I'm using anything other than hibernate).
I too think you were unlucky on your combination of hardware-distro-setup in some unusual way.
I still use KDE though.
...if you're a software engineer. If you need Photoshop or Word or another industry standard software then you don't count.
But you can always use GIMP, right?!
OK, this was a bad joke.
Similar tricks that work for the ESEA Anti Cheat client and Nvidia code 43 will likely suffice
VFIO takes this a step further and provides one less virtualized device
You have experience with this? If so, just wondering...are there linux distributions to avoid for VFIO? I'm between arch and NixOS, nothing too outside of the mainstream.
I was using this as my method of 'Gaming on Linux' until Proton became a thing.
Lots of experience, indeed, though my memory hasn't aged particularly well. I even had SLi working with two RTX2080s! Hacked drivers and EFIGuard to bypass security things
Valorant was the one game I couldn't really manage.
Perhaps with more determination, but I lost interest rather quickly. Not that into the game and Proton really hurt my VFIO involvement; the timing was unfortunate.
There are some rote edits to the libvirt XML I can't recall. Both to get the nvidia driver to work (if applicable, look for 'code 43'), and to hide the VM state for anti-cheats.
You'll generally be well served by your distribution of choice with modern kernels and QEMU/libvirt.
I don't know Nix well, but from what I gather, you get to pick a lot... so it shouldn't be a problem. Arch is Arch, it'll be fine being so new!
That's kind of hilarious because my aging thing is manifesting itself in making me unable to play more complicated games. Like, I wish I could get into dwarf fortress or the new baldur's gate but always feel fried and opt for a round of call of duty (and now diablo 4). Those games are require 0 reading, it's all instinct and nothing in the game happens without some audio-visual feedback...
The irony here is that I might take a deep dive into VFIO because call of duty is one of those games that will never work with Proton...I guess for you that was Valorant?
These must all be the side effect of having kernel level anti cheat programs running on Windows and very dedicated anti-cheating teams.
> I don't know Nix well, but from what I gather, you get to pick a lot... so it shouldn't be a problem. Arch is Arch, it'll be fine being so new!
I have a habit of setting up linux machines and forgetting the process. I'm hoping NixOS will help with that :D
Though... I suspect it's a compound issue. Work is draining! Mindless fun is all I can handle, too :D
Kernel level anti-cheat is indeed the bane of Proton. Fortunately, VFIO can help there - giving a full trusty Windows kernel.
I long for a future where 'we' collectively reject these. I believe there are less-technically-invasive methods for dealing with cheaters than... essentially writing a driver and creating attack surface area.
NixOS should indeed - forcing you to write things down as you go!
I'm partial to Ansible for this, personally. You can automate quite a lot with it - there's a very healthy ecosystem of modules for almost anything you could imagine
If written well, it will work on any distribution. It's a fun challenge/art
Could you elaborate? It was my impression they simply didn't care, but I never looked into it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Desktop,_...
I'm a software engineer and you'd have to pry Visual Studio out of my cold dead hands, it's the reason why I deal with all the nonsense of using Windows.
Unless you mean VSCode which is cross platform.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/linux/download-install...
VSCode is of course very portable. It also seems to be Microsoft’s (successful) attempt to get everybody to use a reasonable Linux-style workfow. If you look at it as a text editor and terminal in a tiling window manager, it suddenly makes sense that it became so popular.
That said, my next project is connecting my Wacom One screen to a Raspberry Pi 4 (which unfortunately means giving up touch --- I'd be very interested in graphics tablet/screen w/ support for current Wacom styluses _and_ touch). Can't quite justify a Wacom Cintiq since I don't want the complication of a different stylus technology than my other devices (it's really nice to be able to switch between drawing on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 to taking notes on my Kindle Scribe to checking something on my Note 10+).
I suppose I should try an Android tablet, but there's not much software there which is suited to the work I do.
I'm a video games developer. Neither PS5, Xbox nor Switch toolchains work under linux - not to mention that actual proper Visual Studio doesn't and that alone is worth staying on windows for.
For playing games though - sure, Linux is already great. Steam Deck proves that by playing pretty much everything flawlessly.
If you're already content with Reaper as a DAW, use "yabridge" which runs VSTs in WINE. It's virtually perfect for most purposes. Getting Linux audio set up for low latency is another Linux rabbit hole, though.
[0] https://lmms.io/ [1] https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/
The issue with most professional VST plug-ins is mainly the UI which is not compatible with Linux.
Go to Plugin Alliance [0] and select any plugin and when you scroll down you'll see that they are Windows and Mac only. Same for Plugin Boutique [1].
[0] https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/amek_eq_250.html
[1] https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth...
My package manager has the latest versions of maven and gradle. Ant is behind; upstream is up to 1.10.13 but my package manager only has 1.10.9.
maven 3.9.4: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-java/maven-bin
gradle 8.2.1: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-java/gradle-bin
ant 1.10.9 (upstream is 1.10.13): https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-java/ant
Oddly there's no overlay that has a more up to date version of ant. So even if I did want to enter magic strings, that wouldn't have helped.
The caveat is that this is only true when applied to games on Steam. I play games that aren't on Steam, and I've not even bothered to see if they would run on Linux because it's just not worth my time.
(No, I do not expect something in Japanese that communicates with DMM Game Player for user authentication and DRM shenanigans to work in Linux.)
I hate it so much when people equal games to steam.
I play Diablo 4 on my steam deck and it's so little effort to install it - you install Lutris, install battle.net and then it just works, you can launch it directly from the Steam Deck UI.
I don't think that's a fair criticism of the platform 'working'. That's just status quo / profit maximizing on the part of the tool selectors and developers.
Linux works very well with regards to hardware.
Calling out microsoft tools like visual studio as proof linux doesn't work is sort of dumb. It's a tool that targets windows (mostly) written by the developers that sell windows.
You don't have to look very hard for a world class c/c++ tool chain on linux.
Oh sorry this wasn't my intention at all. I'm just countering the argument that I see a lot on HN(and tbf, maybe this isn't what OP was saying) - that Linux is so good that there is literally no reason for anyone to ever stay on Windows. Like......yeah, it's great and a lot of things work really really well - but some things still don't. That's all. It's not a criticism of Linux, or at least I don't mean it in that way.
It is amazing how much improvement there has been in recent years. The main thing that makes me want linux ecosystems to be used is that at least they are slowly improving, not simply positioning for a rent-seeking position in the 'market'.
I would love more than anything to see a paid fork of linux whose goal was to make a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI.
People will come out of woodwork here to suggest whatever shitty half-assed CLI wrapper enviroment. No. No. No. They suck. I have been using them on and off for 20 years. Including right now.
I'm someone who does way more than email and youtube, but has less than zero interest in spending 6 months learning the nomenclature and structure of linux so I can become a proper user.
That's the path a lot of Mac Users are on, though we also have a telemetry problem; the only advantage is that it stays "in house".
Oh, yes it was. The Macintosh was once a platform for independent professionals and small businesses to build their own software using native tooling. The add-in cards you could buy for the Apple II would shock you in today's anti-consumer ownership war being waged by vendors.
1. The Apple II
2. Late 80s/early 90s when screen savers and [I can’t remember the name. Something makes me want to say ‘shell extensions’? small apps that made deep and wondrous tweaks to the system] were allowed to experiment with almost complete freedom
3. OSX. The first version was specifically designed for power users who had existing Unix/Linux skills. Special shout-out to some of the early tools as well: Automator, Quartz Composer, Audio Unit Lab, and even Applescript.
Isn't NeXTSTEP quite a bit older than FreeBSD?
> spending 6 months learning the nomenclature and structure of linux
> become a proper user
Care to elaborate? My parents have been using Ubuntu successfully for over a decade now for "email and youtube". They do not even know what a CLI is. What are you trying to accomplish that does not work out of the box?
Add my 87 year old grandmother to that list. Firefox->email, youtube, kroger, banking etc. These days most users just need access to a web browser via their OS.
That's the thing, linux is great for linux power users and absolute hands off users. Its terrible for people in the middle, and hence why it cannot get the ball rolling towards adoption for 30 year now.
There are tons of tech literate people who know what a problem is, know what the fix is, but do not want to deal with climbing through forum posts and documentation to figure out the correctly structured command to do the actions (and how to unfuck if the command wasn't right). Just make fucking buttons, toggle switches and drop down menus.
Learning specific API's are over. Mostly.
I think you’re currently right and will be even more right in a year or two.
Also, "power user friendly" but hates CLI..... I see. You might have to hand in your power user card over that one
I am a diehard windows user but the OS's affinity for burying settings in nested, labyrinthine setting dialogs gets old super fast.
"You might have to hand in your power user card over that one"
And these attitudes are why most consumers almost exclusively use proprietary software. You have to let people be lazy to get mass adoption. Businesses know and exploit this, the foss world writes tools with steep learning curves and says "take it or leave it." And that's perfectly fine as long as we can be honest with ourselves: the vast majority of people will never invest the time to learn to use cmd line applications, or debug wifi drivers, or learn to use an environment that's more complicated than what they already have. Time is money so even a highly motivated person should question spending months to learn new tools.
I love Linux for being superior for servers and hackable and having so much powerful software available for free...but if I weren't a software developer and I didn't enjoy this stuff there'd be no justification for the time I spent learning it.
Enshittification is real. Knowledge is the antidote...
The issue is that this has to scale to everyone if the goal here is mass adoption (meaning your family, maybe including your grandma, running Linux). If someone says "I don't have 6 months to learn this" or "I couldn't learn this even with 6 months to do so" and your goal is mass adoption, your action should be resolving whatever the roadblock is, not blaming the individual with the issue.
"It's not linux that's the problem, it's you!"
Seems like a very defeatist attitude to have..
Often that just seems like an argument used to justify poor UX. There is nothing wrong with learning but many people have other interests and/or prefer/have to spend their effort on learning other things.
Outright dismissing them as "too stupid" seems a bit elitist especially if you want them to user your software.
Or even better, for many things the option doesn't exist any more? Why? Because fuck you thats why!
I just LOVE watching Windows take away features because some normie asshole decided options were bad for usability and testing.
Typing this on my Windows daily driver, btw. And I have to drop into CLI on a pretty regular basis.
I love watching Linux stay stuck on design choices from 1970 because to change the interface now would cause the operating system to implode and the resulting riot would exceed even the asspain over systemd
A lot of text config now has way more documentation -- right there above the freaking setting! -- than a Windows design analogy could ever cram into (never-used) help files. The majority of config I deal with is like 25 lines of comments for every 1 line of setting.
Systemd's not that bad either, I will take writing systemd config files over trying to make a service daemon in init.d scripts any day of the week.
Do you know how annoying it is to have to go into etc/netbeans.conf, scroll all the way down, then find the JDK path from somewhere else and paste it in the quotes after netbeans_jdkhome= just to get Netbeans to run? That's not computing zen! It's the reason nobody uses Netbeans -- old, bad design.
The more people use your help files, the more you know your program sucks. This is not disputable. This is why Linux requires a literal support group called LUG.
If you accidentally delete the comments you can usually look the file up online, sometimes even just googling the name of the file will do the trick. Sometimes there's a default or template sitting right next to the file in its folder.
And I don't think you're going to find any arguments against your experience with Netbeans, at last recently. It's old software. New software doesn't just magically spring into being, it has to be written. And there's plenty of good replacements for NetBeans (I like IntelliJ) so I don't know what the issue is there. It's like calling Windows 3.1's Program Manager 'dated'... its like, well duh, of course its dated. It's old!
Also can't you just `echo $JDK_HOME` and paste that output into your config?
> The more people use your help files, the more you know your program sucks.
I really hate it when programs make important decisions for me. Having optionality kind of requires documentation, so one can understand the change they are trying to make. One man's intuitive is another man's pain in the ass. To say nothing of differences between culture, time period, training, or upbringing, that might change those assumptions.
If you want mindless information appliances, you are very likely holding one in your hand right now. Mobile is fantastic for that form of braindead design.
>can't you just `echo $JDK_HOME` and paste that output into your config?
Yes, but every time I download a new version of Netbeans this has to be done again. I only use Netbeans to make sure my project works there, so a significant percentage of my experience is the annoying 30 seconds of telling it where the JDK is (which if they put in any effort they could do in a startup dialog).
>One man's intuitive is another man's pain in the ass.
Press 1 for English. Press 1 for QWERTY. Press 1 for GUI. It would be nice if there were Press 1 for GUI! It's up to the user to hack his OS with shady third-party hobby projects to get a GUI for basic functionality like entering key value pairs. Why don't webpages force users to enter "last_name=Jones;\nfirst_name=Bobby" when filling out forms? It's clearly so much better than boxes! The world has moved on for a reason. 1971 was the year of the nix desktop when chmod came out.
I quit Android development because I hate phones and I'd quit Linux development too if I ever was dumb enough to start because it's a bunch of unproductive hobbyists trying to make everyone's OS into vim. And I'm on Windows 10 as always. Which is very customizable. And not in the dwarf fortress way like linux and bsd.
We're all just writing code to scratch our own or others' itches, everyone has differing opinions on what is good or not.
What strange creature is this? Is it a mythical creature like a unicorn or closer to big foot?
One example of many: https://github.com/mattvr/ShellGPT
ERROR: Does not compute.
A CLI is the pinacle of power user friendlyness.
Ubuntu, I haven't tried anything else so far, is a charm on Lenovo hardware. Update wise, it is were Windows was a couple of years ago. Meaning there are random updates that just kill and break certain functions. Happened last week, everything was running fine, including steam, as it always did. Until an update managed to delete the GUI, reinstalling the GUI killed nVidia drivers, Steam couldn't be installed under 23.04 for some missing dataset, installing said data (some 32-bit stuff) killed WiFi...
No attack on Linux so, I rember that not too long ago I stopped all Eindows updates because for months the auto-updates had the same effect (save the WiFi bit).
So yes, my dqily, private driver is Linux. And will be, except for games, for the time being. All I uave to do now, well after vacation, is to get Steam running properly again. Feels like a throwback to the pre Win 10 days, when Windows randomly did the same thing with regards to drivers and certain games / programs.
And here's the crux of it, isn't it? Unless it's accessible and enabled by default, it might as well not exist from the PoV of the end user.
Windows' restore points happen automatically before updates or driver updates. Then you're prompted automatically to restore if Windows fails to boot after an update.
As usual Linux has all the pieces but no desire to create UX to go with it. Which is a shame because ZFS with automatic snapshotting daily or before major events combined with a simple UI that can run in the preboot environment would be a game changer and make Windows look like a toy.
For what it's worth, at one point Ubuntu supported installing on ZFS through its regular installer and installed the boot environment thingy, with a snapshot before every update. I have one such machine which is now running 23.04 and that still works. I've never had to use in practice, though.
The boot UI for most modern UEFI-Firmwares is really primitive and they usually don't come with EFI shells.
Linux mint has timeshift.
The now defunct Project Trident installer set up a zfs root with zfsbootmenu and an update script that automatically sets up a boot environment you can revert and boot from with the built in feature of zfsbootmenu.
Both let you achieve your goal. You can set up either system even if they aren't built in.
Insofar as timeshift consider the review source, circumstances, and nature of complaints. Users who don't have difficulties rarely post anything and yet many reviews are positive. Those that aren't seem to focus on people who didn't realize they could provide a secondary drive and just kept storing data until their OS drive filled up.
Mint leans heavily towards technically incompetent users and yet many people were able to use it successfully. Meeting every users needs no matter how incapable is probably a poor benchmark to define if somethings is "crap" or not even if those users problems are are a great guideline to a path forward to helping all users better.
For instance it might be better if timeshift only supported a fs with snapshots instead of rsync and required a secondary disk and warned of space issues long before the disk fills up but it seems quite possible to competently use it right now.
Not that I would really have turned any Linux significantly non-functional by updating during the last 15 years. But it's all software, so everything can happen one day...
Mostly been using PopOS and Ubuntu-Budgie.
It does too much. It will update things for you, or give you a pop-up to tell you to update. Updates happen all at once, rather than a little at a time, so you get these big dramatic updates with combinatorial bug explosions. Maybe the repos will be gone if you don’t update in time. Maybe your favorite packages have moved from apt to snap. Good luck!
A rolling release distro like Arch would be a better first experience for most people I think.
Linux is not where Windows was years ago. Software gently rolls in at a nice steady rate. Some distros choose to take that nice steady flow, chop it up, and for some reason emulate the Windows catastrophic update experience. It is… an odd decision.
Debian may take a touch more wrenching to get running but it has been good for me, although I haven't tried 12 yet. Fedora was good but Red Hat shenanigans seems to have messed with it.
I may try Mint next time. I've heard good things about it.
I said all of that to say, isn't Linux great?
If you have a quibble with it, you can kick it to the curb and try something else in an hour and everything just works. There's so many options to choose from, and you don't have weirdo corporations tracking your every application launch or building a psychological profile off of you from how you tab through a spreadsheet or cloud mapping your speaking patterns based off of how you type.
Positive side effect of above tepuble shooting, I got pretty fast installing Linux now.
Admittedly I'm reasonably comfortable in CLI, but I don't know a whole lot about bash, just cd, mv, cp, ls -a, etc.
Is xubuntu better than ubuntu just because it removes a lot of cruft?
Yes. My Ubuntu installations always have bugs when I do big updates. A
And while I'm here, snapd can suck it. Me and my homies hate Snap.
I'm not happy with some of Canonical's decisions, but I can't deny that using LTS as a daily driver is boring because most things just work without fiddling. I don't have as much time to fiddle with the OS nowadays.
I don't understand why Canonical decides to backport breaking changes to LTS releases, but they do it on a regular basis, and I don't trust them for anything important. (I'm not suggesting using manjaro for stuff that needs to be stable over a long time period -- it's not meant for that, which is precisely my point!)
It might not be the best for people who want a web browser/computing appliance, but I’m not sure what is, there just might not be a good one yet.
Nah. Most people can't grok partitions or do the command line installs by hand. "Most people" aren't very technical, and even white collar office types will struggle.
Likewise they don't grok rolling updates and snap, they just get their updates and they restart once a month, just like on their windows box. That's enough, and once they get comfortable with the rest of the Ubanto env they can start thinkin about their Gentoo build from scratch.
Phones, with their app stores, are sort of like rolling release with automatic updates, right?
Microsoft has normalized default optout telemetry in the OS, IDE & developer tooling and now others are also following suit even in areas where telemetry doesn't make sense.
I wish there is an easy solution to the pervasive telemetry problem for those who can't switch for any reason.
Technical solutions (firewalls, switching to Linux, etc.) aren't necessarily practical for many people.
> the ideal solution is one where corporations do not or are not allowed to collect telemetry by default
This is probably the only effective solution, but I don't see it happening without enforceable legislation.
At least "monitors" don't seem to have telemetry. Yet.
Who knew that companies would use 1984 as a product roadmap.
But https://xkcd.com/619/ is just as true today in spirit: mainstream multimedia has serious issues. Bluetooth often just doesn't work, forget about any decent resolution from any streaming service.
Heaven forbid you wanted to dock to an eGPU, might as well reboot because you need to restart your apps anyways.
Multifunction printer/scanners are a crapshoot. Strange enterprise VPN and wifi, well, I am wishing you good fortune in the wars to come.
Nah. Life is too short to struggle with this.
O&O ShutUp10++ handles the telemetry. Way easier to deal with that once then constantly struggle with Linux.
No it doesn't. Every Linux desktop requires me to spend hours tweaking things or finding workarounds to make it usable for myself. Window management is horrible compared to other OS. Fractional scaling mostly doesn't work. The Pomodoro timer in the "Software" store is no longer maintained and doesn't work at all on the latest Gnome. (Windows 11 has it built-in). Even so, I have to live with certain restrictions. I tried to get into Linux desktop every few years, and I never find the situation has improved much.
By comparison, setting up the environment on Windows or MacOS takes no more than a fem minutes.
I know this is true because i'm a non developer, non power user (though still relatively technical) who has been using linux since 2006 and it works just fine. Not only that my dad has been happily setup using linux since around 2014 and he is as non technical as they come.
To really go in on this point I bought a macbook pro when the m1 devices came out and the experience you have with linux I have with macos. It's the worst operating system I have ever used. You complain about linux having bad window management but macos has basically no window management. you double click the top bar and depending on the software sometimes it will maximize, sometimes it will pull the window all the way down the screen and sometimes it will do nothing at all. You drag the window to the top or to the side and nothing happens at all. Window management on macos is so bad that most people say that you need to install external tools to mac it even half way usable. Even when you do its still less performant and buggier than what gnome or windows offers out of the box. You say macos needs no setup, but I spent 10's of hours desperately trying to make the workflow and ux of macos not be a horrible experience for me. Everything from no tools and trying to work within its paradigm, simple window management tools even going so far as to trying yabai and none of them felt right to me.
Now that said I would bet a person who has spent a decade daily driving macos probably has internalized the ins and outs and quirks relating to macos and wouldn't find it nearly as problematic. Most of the issues people have with linux are much less problems with linux and much more a lack of workflow understanding that they haven't built up but have built up around other operating systems instead.
The main exception being that there are some proprietary tools that are pretty explicitly not supported on linux which require windows or macos.
When I instruct my package manager to uninstall your desktop environment, and the package manager says, "You are about to delete critical system components. Are you sure? (yes/no)" and I type in "yes" I expect my package manager to uninstall the desktop environment. That is the correct thing for it to do. Anything else is the wrong thing to do.
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." -Douglas Adams
The package (Steam, if memory serves?) should not have had the other packages referenced as they were. The dependency/requirement resolution was faulty...
Then he didn't truly take in the message and this is the result we get.
There's plenty of "probably say no if you don't know what this means" in what he ignored. Fault is all over.
- His distribution of choice [or] the repository supporting it
- him for not reading and acting accordingly
- sheer chance
If he repeated it on the same one now, it wouldn't happen. When you choose a niche distribution, you get niche problems.
My entire family manages fine on 'bleeding edge' Fedora, yet it doesn't market itself this way. Packaging is specifically in their domain of expertise
This isn't to say Linux is for everyone, but I really wish for a more fair representation.
As the reporters they should have dug in a bit more. They become part of the problem, in a sense, by not clarifying where there truly be dragons.
Users will pretty much always click what they think will make the goal they're trying to accomplish work. Usually "yes" or whatever the default is.
The packaging snafu was unfortunate, but beyond preventing him from having the ability, I don't know how it could have improved
The spec shouldn't have been so egregiously incorrect. Pretending it didn't happen... how is something both powerful and safe?
I don't know how anything could be made to take arbitrary input and sort it out to meaningful work
Edit: Fedora does well to mark things as protected, this would likely help. But still, the operator should serve as a filter
MacOS is somewhat better than Windows(less garbage to hose off), but it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware it runs on.
I guess it's what you're used to. I don't find Windows decrapification to be that much more effort than Linux configuration.
> it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware
For your use case, presumably not.
The ship seems to have sailed for upgradable Apple hardware (and I expect Apple did their homework and discovered 90% of Mac Pro systems were never upgraded anyway) but I still appreciate the advantages of hardware-software integration, nice form factor and battery life, unified CPU/GPU memory, etc.
Exactly. All these exchanges of experiences boil down to people rationalising their own preferences, which are really just about familiarity. I do it too. I'm really just more familiar with Linux systems because I used it since I was 10-12, and as a main OS since I was about 14(I'm 30 now).
My view is that Windows being more user friendly is really just a myth. Most non-technical people use their Windows PCs or macs for the same 4 different tasks they always have. Ask them to do something new or do some troubleshooting and they'll struggle with it and get nowhere. Whether they're staring at a terminal window with no idea what to type or a "troubleshooting wizard" that offers no useful advice and links to an MSDN article with no useful information, is really irrelevant. They'll still need help from a technical person.
And technical people like us all just prefer what we're more familiar with too.
Windows breaking itself with updates is less a symptom of Windows and more of a side-effect of “decrapification”. I’ve seen a pretty damn large sample size of windows users undergoing windows updates and Windows Update does really not break computers other than by annoyingly changing your defaults to Microsoft stuff “woops, by accident” but if you do stuff like use Edge as your default browser it stops breaking.
Apple forces you to use their defaults, Microsoft theirs, and Google theirs. When you accept these companies operating system is not Linux, and stop acting like they are Linux, and stop acting like you own your windows PC, they do become pretty simple to use.
If you want a PC you can own, you use Linux. Linux is great. My grandmother uses Microsoft Windows in S mode with edge as her browser. Her photos get backed up. She only uses Edge at 175% DPI scaling and maybe looks up a few family photos. It is easier for her than using Linux because she’s familiar with it and because nobody has taught her that unless she is using Windows for education without a decrapify script she is doing things all wrong.
There are many things you can criticize Linux for, but this is not one of them.
.profile, /etc/profile is a mechanism from the bourne shell, so you would go sh(1) as long as its not bash again. Otherwise mksh(1) or dash(1).
/etc/environment is pam_env(8)
And I didn't understand anything you said after and including bourne shell. I don't know if Windows has any documentation for its environment variables program, but I have never needed documentation for it because it's not brain dead. It's a GUI. An interface which is self-documenting.
I wanna see you find the right dialogue windows in the control panel.
Would you know how to enable/disable IPv6 from your head?
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Bash-Star...
These files are all shell scripts and largely empty before distribution-specific customizations, there isn't much to document there. They are commands that you want to run in startup.
Nevertheless, your criticisms are fair. However, unlike on Windows, Linux is actually working on that. Distributions like NixOS and Fedora Silverblue are starting to take the whole "put everything under control" very seriously.
I see no comparable efforts on Windows.
My wife is constantly taking her laptop into her IT staff.
The main difference between Windows and Linux is that corporate IT staff are willing to futz with Windows but not Linux.
The main difference between macOS and Linux is that macOS users will spend money to futz with macOS but not Linux.
As someone who has tried KDE off and on over the years since its version 2.0 release in SuSE Linux, and through various versions and distros since is there a fork that doesn't have twenty different configuration options in their own apps?
I was most happy with Ubuntu's Gnome 2.x desktop and am currently using Mate Desktop these days to try to hold on to what I consider the best desktop and what I always felt "home" at when using it. But it gets more and more inconsistent release after release due to intentional theme breakages. I'd love to be able to use KDE or Plasma instead and take advantage of the way that desktop leverages its shared libraries for performance if only I could get over the behavior of its shell and configuration.
Is there anything that I can run that re-organizes it into the traditional desktop that I prefer? A script? A combined theme?
I see all sorts of themes for Windows (why?) and themes for OSX (also why? especially without the skeuomorphic looks of the past?) but there seems to be very little that would take someone from Gnome 2.x\Mate to KDE. Am I just missing it? Is there any way off this burning platform?
I keep hearing how great KDE is and can perform but it makes my skin crawl when using it. Is there any way to change it that doesn't leave me lost at sea going between multiple applications with nested options?
Thanks in advance for any advice given.
> Also, I shouldn't have to hold down twelve modifier keys to move a file from one place to another
> I should be able to drag a file to a segment of the file path in the file explorer and have it move to that directory level
Guess what, that's exactly what happens in Dolphin (KDE Plasma). Please don't spread falsehoods.
EDIT: ha, I just looked it up. exactly as I remember, you need to use a modifier key to do any dropping. And it opens a dialog half the time instead of just doing it. I'm 99.99% sure it's not integrated with bash at all, let alone the OS, meaning you can't drag and drop a path from one program to another. Something you could probably do starting in windows 95
Correct me if I'm wrong.
I am skeptical about the claim that KDE's file explorer supports dropping files onto any part of a file path e.g. three levels up in one go, but if you say so.
Nobody's been so obviously burned by it yet that the lawsuits have started flying.
Just imagine the kind of data (say) Microsoft is leaking to Google, via all those users running Chrome. How about all those AMD users who are running Intel/NVIDIA graphics drivers in their laptops?
If I am a big tech company sitting on a pile of that telemetry data, you can bet I'll be tempted to data mine it for such leaked data about what the competition is up to. It'll probably take an email leak to reveal the practice, and cause some sort of consequences for this though.
I feel like you may be making some pretty wild assumptions. The Intel GPU drivers for Linux have little to nothing in common with the Intel GPU drivers for Windows.
I figured that the effort of decrapifying Windows has outgrown the effort of configuring a Linux system, and furthermore, the former becomes obsolete with every Windows update, but the latter stays with you forever.
In 2022, Linux port of Far Manager, far2l, got a fork with LuaJIT scripting support, far2m, and that was the last thing holding me on Windows.
Why the fuck does Intel need to know "the category of websites I visit, but not the URL themselves"? Who defines the categories? We all know that metadata is at this point as important as data.
Stallman was right.
Also, in favor of freedude's position, we may have just not waited long enough to see yet, because unless they're forced to there's no way they'll ever be deleting the data.
The "Don't be evil" rule.
And yes, Stallman was and is right about a great many things. He will be remembered with respect in the underground general-purpose computing scene of the not-too-distant future.
It is all bollocks. A smoke screen. A slippery slope. It starts with performance metrics and ends with selling user data for profit.
--
1: I am wondering that if you know what category of website an anonymous user is visiting, and what time they open/close the tab, it should be possible for three-letter agencies to uniquely identify you and track you across the internet.
No idea what data Nvidia collects but this sounds even more shady.
It gets worse - if you're on Windows and your driver was not installed by an OEM (if it didn't come with the computer, or you reinstalled the OS or something), GeForce Experience wants you to connect to the internet and sign into an Nvidia account to access some features of the graphics card, like ShadowPlay.
Honestly it doesn't even have any critical feature https://www.nvidia.com/en-eu/geforce/geforce-experience/
If you don't want Nvidia to record you... It sounds like you don't want shadowplay either.
No, it doesn't make sense. Why do you need an internet connection in order for your graphics card to record video? Even if it's inherently networked, NASes exist and don't need Nvidia's servers.
Basically it aims to replace the need to for an additional out-of-band capture card (those can get very expensive, especially if you want 4k60).
It's a bit worrying that it already requires this though, the whole thing is as close as it can be to DRM without obviously being DRM. And Nvidia is known to DRM their GPUs a lot.
Edit: Apparently the GeForce Experience that showed up in my search was actually the one that came in the driver support package for my laptop (which I no longer use), I may have never even used it on this computer at all.
Nothing critical no, but all things that, if you don't have and need, have no real alternative.
I do this anyway even though I don't have GFE installed because other components of the driver also try to connect to Nvidia's servers for some reason. Not on my watch.
(Though I wonder if there is some registry key or something to make GFE believe you've logged in, even if it's never connected to the internet. Surely someone would've figured it out by now.)
Exactly. It is a reason I never install it when updating Nvidia drivers (yes I know I'm missing out eg. on shadowplay but I don't use it anyway).
Not sure if anything like OBS implements this or not.
Telemetry on window information, focus times, click spots et al is collected with just the driver.
GeForce experience additionally collects personal information.
events.gfe.nvidia.com lightstep.kaizen.nvidia.com
For the record: I'm a graphics driver engineer myself.
How many of us click accept on those annoying cookie dialogs or have an extension do it for them?
And how many take the time to find the reject button and/or install appropriate extensions that will do the rejection?
I'm in the second category but I'm sure the first one is the majority, mostly because they just don't care.
I was never particularly privacy conscious. I was “normal”. Now that my fucking GPU driver spies on me, I think I’m rightfully becoming slowly paranoid about it.
Edit for FirmwareBurner: I will, after you point out the part of my comment in which I claim that some F500 companies aren't greedy.
The way our capitalist economy functions and CEO compensations are set, encourages nothing but greed and short therm profits at the expense of everything else.
The demand for returns comes from equity owners, such as people with 401k and pension funds.
This is before taking into account how these things are taxed.
Edit: you changed your comment :) I answered the previous version.
Edit 2: and even a pension fund could take their dividends and reinvest them. But I guess that would be too much work.
> Yes but if your numbers are constant you can still pay dividends, as long as you're profitable,
Is this not where the money for share buybacks comes from? The business can choose to pay dividends (cash), or it can spend the cash on buying back its shares. Either way, it should offset equally.
>while if you need to provide capital gains you need to increase the numbers so the share price will go up.
This does not make sense. The share price depends on supply and demand of the share. If the business is doing share buybacks, then there is less supply and more demand for the shares, hence share price increase.
Anyway, my point is the pressure for growth has nothing to do with share buybacks versus dividends. Investors like more money than less money just like anyone else does. One could even say all these taxpayer underfunded pension plans for government employees that have long assumed 8%+ growth to meet their obligations are “pressuring” businesses for growth.
The origin of the pressure is likely a shift from shareholders being primarily people who want to hold onto a given stock for many years, and be rewarded through dividends, to being primarily financially-oriented institutions who want to buy low and sell high constantly.
And yes, that was my point.
It probably requires not thinking about it and just following the plan laid out by the PM, which a lot of people are very good at.
Same how can Google/Meta engineers work at the biggest user tracking ad empires and not be ashamed.
What do you expect them to do? Quit their jobs in protest? Other engineers who need that money will gladly do it. Everyone has their price, not everyone has the luxury of being so picky with their carriers, especially when it comes to having a big name like Intel on your resume. You go to work, implement the tickets assigned to you, then go home, without vocalizing on the ethics of the big picture, is what the vast majority of employees do.
If you want this practice to end you have to legally regulate it, the free market alone doesn't work in favor of the end user's privacy. Without laws and regulations in place, if Intel won't do it, all the other companies would. It's why regulations are important.
Plus, I think half of HN userbase built their wealth or currently works for FAANG companies that make their money from spying, tracking or monetizing user data for ads, so the stone you threw will break a lot of glass here. How do you think they justify it other than "I like money"? So why single out only Intel engineers for what is common place around these parts?
If they can't bring themselves to do what's right, the least they can do is be ashamed of what they're doing.
> So why single out only Intel engineers for what is common place around these parts?
Because this particular example is about Intel. When other companies that do this come into the spotlight, then the same criticism is levelled at the devs enabling them as well. Big picture, Intel's not being singled out.
It isn't. Nobody criticizes those who work at Google or Meta here. There's more talk about maximizing your TC there, than telling people not to work there.
Double standards, probably because Intel doesn't pay as good as Google/Meta so it's easy to throw stones where you don't plan to work anyway, but people stay quiet when it comes to places where they earn their wealth.
What can I say? I see such criticism frequently. I even pile onto it from time to time.
Sure they are. I've seen comments like these aimed at workers of those companies far more than workers at Intel. There have even been entire threads about whether or not having Meta or Google on your CV hurts you, and should hurt you.
For Nvidia you're expected to pay $1000 for a graphics card and then they will collect data on you and send it to their servers even though you didn't choose to use their online services at all.
The Yuppie Nuremberg Defense, I've got a mortgage to pay.
These aren't engineering decisions but marketing ones. The role of an engineer is to engineer a solution, not make business decisions. The decision to turn telemetry on by default was not taken by an engineer, so engineers at intel shouldn't feel ashamed of anything at first place.
And this lack of accountability is exactly why our world is the way it is. Just remember anyone can justify evil behavior if they try hard enough. Why? because people are not basically good by nature. They are basically evil by nature. Observe any 2-3 year old throwing a fit and you might begin to grasp the concept.
There is no "lack of accountability" anywhere in that story. Nothing done here was illegal, nor "evil" which is an unnecessary hyperbole.
No argument, resorts to personal attacks.
Yes, they should, because it's those engineers that are implementing the decision. It doesn't matter even a little whether or not they were one of the decisionmakers.
The engineers implementing things like this should be deeply ashamed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
No need to say that how easy it is to brush off that kind of argumentation for the fallacy it is.
In this case, it was a relevant comparison. Court cases involving former concentration camp staff have established that "I just work here" is not a particularly strong defense. If your work enables harmful actions, and if you are aware of it, you may be found responsible for the consequences. Even if you don't participate directly in it. Even if you could face adverse consequences (including death) for refusing to do your job. And even if someone else would likely just take your place.
No it wasn't a relevant comparison, no genocide is happening because someone turned on telemetry by default, this is completely unhinged.
If you're so outraged by all this then you should give these engineers alternative opportunities of work that don't involve telemetry. Can you do that?
These workers CHOSE to work for FAANG. Nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you choose the $300k a year FAANG job over the $200k a year non-FAANG job. Hell, even IN FAANG, Netflix isn't really doing anything unethical. Sometimes taking the high road means less personal profit.
Intel isn't a FAANG to begin with, second, I'm asking you again, are you creating alternative opportunities for the people who would refuse to do their jobs because it goes against your sense of morals? What are these opportunities of work you've built for these people? Answer that question. If you can't answer that, then who are you to judge? Not everybody can afford your grandstanding.
I put considerable thought into the ethics of storing data and letting that data get inaccurate and harming people. Same with providing that information to people whose goals actively cause harm.
But I'm here for the war, not the individual battles. I raise objections and sometimes I can make a difference. This is one I'm going to lose most of the time. So I say my bit and do my job in a way that causes as little damage as possible because the next person won't.
Meanwhile, I get paid and live another day to make a difference somewhere else.
And yes, I know exactly where that reasoning leads. I wrote a story with an assassin justifying his actions the same way. There are limits in the amount of damage I'm willing to contribute to, telemetry doesn't cross that line.
So, upper management, government agencies, finance departments, and marketing departments.
And EU has tried making sites classify and ask for permission for cookie storage.
And maybe mixpanel and Google and cross site tracking should be opt-in for users.
When I'm using an Nvidia graphics card I'm not actively looking to use their web services. I want the graphics card that I bought to work and that's it. The graphics card doesn't improve as a device by connecting to the internet.
I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here, what I truly think is that all monitoring and analytics should require user approval a bit like cookies. E.g.: you visit a website and it would ask for permission to send monitoring data to listed sites.
If you want to be protected for telemetry then you need to advocate for better legislation. Stating that something is covered by the GDPR ultimately masks the issue because it's not against the GDPR and you lose an opportunity to advocate for better legislation to reduce, or kill telemetry.
Whether or not this is compliant depends on the way their installer is set up.
Is it not?
There are laws that limit your ability to collect certain types of sensitive information without some quasi-meaningful user consent, but most telemetry goes around this by notionally not collecting PII.
The gotcha is that in practice, most companies don't put a whole lot of effort into making sure there's no incidental PII in the telemetry, and no other way to infer who you are. Browsers automatically collect crash reports that, for a good while, might have contained your cookies, URLs, and other goodies in the logs or memory dumps... cars collect "anonymized" telemetry that shows you driving from your single-family home to wherever you're headed... etc.
The problem is that an IP address is considered PII and is inherently sent in any HTTP request, so you could argue that any non-essential request to any third-party should be opt-in since it contains PII.
or, it is just another reflection of the "complete and irreversible moral decay that permeates all of society". the decay of any civilization is predictable and irreversible, and not a pretty sight...
I remember months (years?) ago when it was discovered wacom tablet drivers did the same on MacOS; well, not on linux.
The vast majority of third party applications are also sending everything they can access and then some, often far exceeding in scope and nowhere even close to meeting the privacy and security standards as is claimed in the relevant policies.
Telemetry endpoints are increasingly being CNAME masked or called through anynymous proxies. Betraying the customer/user trust this way is absolutely despicable. Shipping normal release channel apps with a Sentry SDK configured to run in debug mode seems to be the new meta for some reason (nothing good, probably).
And then there's Mozilla... Not only are many of their recommended extensions secretly sending telemetry and doing all sorts of other things that violate their extension policies multiple times over (strict verification and thorough code auditing process my arse), but Firefox itself includes UTM and other tracking parameters in its outgoing links to third parties (including all preinstalled search providers) even when "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data" is unmistakably set not to allow it.
Things would be different if this software were to have actually improved over time, but in most cases the opposite is true. Thinking about it, the more telemetry an app collects, the faster it seems to deteriorate across the board. An example of two opposites on this spectrum would be VIM vs Spotify.
Slipping it into already secret code (proprietary drivers), though, would be a cinch.
So, it's Windows.
For Linux users, all that is required is a periodic update to the open source kernel, as well as proprietary firmware blobs, and open source Mesa software, and that's it. If you really feel it necessary to see statistics for your Intel GPU, there is a sysfs interface for doing so, and open source tools readily available to make it easy to view and use these statistics[3].
[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/726609/inte...
[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discre...
[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/igt-gpu-tools/-/blob/mast...
I look forward to the day where one could take such an installer, have AI assistant install it inside a simulator, decode & categorize every byte installed (+ in the installer that goes in), then maps out the function of each byte. Just for giggles.
I'll predict the functionality vs. fluff ratio must be 1:10000 or worse on this thing.
But that doesn't make it right if it's done without the user's informed consent.
This sounds like a really bad idea to let it run on your pc. This is basically Spyware, that Scans your (corporate) network too.
Thank you, AI!
Move to Linux. Take a look at NixOS.
It's open source version supports system wide firewall and blocklists. Pretty easy on battery as well.
> We are unilaterally altering the Terms & Conditions for the device you purchased. Pray we don't alter them further.
Give them fire.
The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself
Software usage: for example, frequency and duration of application usage such as Intel® Driver & Support Assistant, but not the application content itself such as specific actions or keyboard input.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/topics/idsa-...
But I agree with a previous poster. If you're OK with what Windows already then this barely registers. For all we know this one won't even reset the manual opt-out every 6months to a year so it might be a minor annoyance in comparison.
Oh man, they left a typo in there. Did anybody catch it? They use the word 'permission' when this is actually selected by default for all users who install their drivers. Hey, that's not how you ask for permission! I would love to see the look on their faces when they realize this mistake.
Blame telemetry for collection of unreasonable stuff, not for collecting data that is valuable for software improvement and doesnt violate privacy.
Just arguing against hate for all telemetry
Especially if you cannot think of a single example.
What if I collect data about the way you use my software?
As a dev im using telemetry to provide better product for my users
The purpose of spying is to gain advantage over e.g enemies. There is no good faith.
The purpose of telemetry is to collect some data about how my product is used in order to make it better.
Also telemetry is documented, so it is no secret, but it is just that users dont give a shit. Meanwhile spy tries to be undisclosed as long as possible.
Intention makes difference
* https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/10/28/241384089/...
* https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9bp8/us-spies-allies-south...
And good faith and intent is not a sufficient guard.
Intent makes a difference, but it's not magic. It only makes a meaningful difference if it changes what data gets collected and stored. The data gets collected either way. Data breeches happen, and intent isn't stable (or even fully coherent in companies. You might trust them now, but you probably shouldn't trust them a few years down the line. Look at how different google of today acts than the google of 2000.
For the case in point, that data includes "The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself, Includes universal plug and play devices and devices that broadcast information to your computer on a local area network: for example, smart TV model and vendor information, and video streaming devices.", so far more than "data about how my product is used in order to make it better". That's some other purpose. We already have evident of bad intent. Bad faith is not at all uncommon with large companies. You do remember the sony rootkit[0], right?
And even with good intent it's easy to overcollect data, because of the fear of missing out on something useful. It really could be useful be useful to see if crashes correlate with other running software, various registry settings, etc, but collecting that absolutely should be considered way beyond the line. (That rootkit was packed with telemetry too, collecting e-mail addresses and listening habits)
Telemetry we _know about_ tends to be documented, however there's an unknown amount of sampling bias. Further, secrecy is not binary, things can be poorly disclosed. I'd argue they often are, with documents that are neither obviously visible nor transparent about what is collected. This is in no way surprising. Disclosure doesn't directly help any bottom line, it just guards against possible reputation and legal damage if it is discovered.
As you say, users mostly don't care. We live in an age of mass surveillance and have raised generations who think it normal.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
That's collecting data about me, my machine, or my use of my machine. If you aren't getting people's informed consent before you do this, you're spying. If you have consent, then that's people sharing data with you and isn't spying.
> As a dev im using telemetry to provide better product for my users
Cool. I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'm just saying that you should ask first.
The purpose of spying is to gain advantage over e.g enemies. There is no good faith.
The purpose of telemetry is to collect some data about how my product is used in order to make it better.
Also telemetry is documented, so it is no secret, but it is just that users dont give a shit. Meanwhile spy tries to be undisclosed as long as possible.
Intention makes difference
We in the software industry have already burned that bridge. There's been so much abuse for so long that there can be no reasonable assumption of good faith. Trust now has to be proactively earned.
> Intention makes difference
I disagree. If some guy decided to follow you around and write down every place you go and when you go there, wouldn't you say he's spying on you? Even if he has no ill intent, you can clearly see him doing it, and he literally does nothing with the data he records?
"Spying" is when you're collecting personal data without consent. What that data specifically is and what purpose it's to be put to don't enter into it.
> Also telemetry is documented, so it is no secret
An activity doesn't have to be secret to be spying. And sometimes telemetry is documented, but certainly not always. And often, even when it is, that "documentation" is buried and is hard to find. But regardless, simply documenting a thing is not equivalent to getting consent for the thing.
Think of it this way... why is there so much resistance to getting consent to collect telemetry data? The most common answer I've seen to that question (from the pro-telemetry camp) is "because if we give people a choice, too many will decline to provide telemetry". Which means that they know that lots people don't want this data collected, but want it so badly that they don't care. How in the world is that not spying on people?
Collecting the categories of websites I visit violates my privacy, full stop, end of discussion.
1) Roll over
2) Reject as much as possible
But if you let them all activated you end up with a computer that connect to hundredth of remote hosts constantly.
But why does a display driver need to know the categories of websites I visit? They have no need for that.
And who is making that determination? You?
Because all data going out of my system without my explicit and freely-given consent is a violation of my privacy.