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ztnktl

26 karma · joined April 17, 2023

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ztnktl··on Microsoft exec says Windows 11 kernel will soon be booting with Rust inside
>Microsoft Windows ends up being the most secure general operating system

It already is. What, exactly, is better than Windows at security features on desktop computers? Linux? There is nothing in there that comes even close to the defensive features of windows, like HVCI, a subsystem that checks for driver signatures and the likes isolated by virtualization mechanisms, which completely prevents tempering with the kernel. Linux's support for secure boot only exists to make it convenient to dual boot with windows, it doesn't do enough to prevent kernel level rootkits, it's a total placebo and it's even worse if you use a distro that doesn't have signed kernels, like Archlinux. If you're self signing on the same computer, how exactly are you stopping malware?

Since Vista, the OS also gained some serious resilience against crashes that I have never seen on other operating systems. For example, it is possible for your desktop session to survive a GPU driver crash. On linux this is a guaranteed freeze or kernel panic. This is, fortunately, a rare event, but the last times I've seen my computer freeze on linux, it was always because of the graphic stack.

openBSD's slogan for having few remotely exploitable exploits out of the box doesn't mention that it's because it has literally no features enabled out of the box.

macOS and iOS are the systems with the greatest amount of privilege escalation fails by far. In fact, what do people think jailbreaks are? Some of which are truly frightening when you think about what could have been. Multiple jailbreaks were made that could be run just by browsing a webpage on safari. This means they punched through the browser, punched through privilege escalation and had the potential to install a rootkit on your phone. Just by visiting. A. Webpage.

How many times such a thing has happened on Windows in the recent years? visiting a webpage installed a rootkit on your computer?

ztnktl··on Dropbox telemetry can't be disabled
If, a big if, you don't need version control, rsync will do. It can handle any imaginable amount of data and it can work over ssh or for local file syncing. It is much, much faster than other solutions too.

It is my main tool to manage things that aren't code, and I give myself the ability to go back to older files or undelete things in a KISS manner by having multiple rsync destinations that are used in rotation.

ztnktl··on Valve Releases Proton 8.0-1c
> Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better.

No, Windows 11 is a cargo cult. It imitates the look of an OS X dock (centered icons, no window titles, large icons etc) but not the parts that makes it properly functional. Have you tried to drag and drop an app to make a shortcut there? It doesn't work. For that matter, many modern windows 11 things do not understand the very notion of drag and drop.

By the way, the windows 11 taskbar has no quicklaunch. Without quicklaunch, you can't pin documents or folders to your taskbar.

Mac OS X allows you to drag anything to the dock. App, folders, documents. In the case of folders, clicking them will even show you the last modified files in a quick preview list. The dock can't do everything a windows taskbar can do, but it has its own advantages.

Windows 11's taskbar is, on the other hand, a dock with no advantages. There's nothing it does that makes it an improvement over what Windows 7 could already do (I cite windows 7 because it was the one that added most of the features that can make the taskbar feel more like OS X's dock, but those features, like grouped windows, were purely optional). You can't even have it on the sides of the screen anymore too. It was rewritten.. just for the sake of being rewritten. Developer churn at MS with no improvement on the user's side. Why?

I, as a person who has dealt for many reasons regularly with all the major desktop OSes, hate Windows 11 the most for how arbitrary the loss of features has felt. I hate it almost as much as I hate Gnome 3, but one advantage Gnome 3 has is that... you don't have to use it, Linux has a lot of real desktops. KDE, XFCE, LXDE, customized tilers..