Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 236 posts

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#71

Post by Brakenshire »

okasaki wrote: post #68
DanBC wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fedora isn't for non technical family members. Here's a bit of mild whinging that's only relevant if you want to give it to non-technical people. There's a move to give stuff generic names, rather than the obscure names they had in the past. For example, Nautilus has been renamed to Gnome Files, or just Files. When a non technical person needs to search for hep this new name makes it impossible for them to create a u…

> For example, Nautilus has been renamed to Gnome Files, or just Files. It's a bad trend. It's really frustrating when you're trying to find out what the executable or package name is.

I don't think there's that much wrong with "Gnome Files". That should be enough to search for help, and also gives information about what the program does. Similarly, I would say the names should be "Firefox Browser", "Geary Email" etc (if we're aiming to be user friendly).

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#73

Post by dizzystar »

purpled_haze wrote: post #40
jnbiche wrote: post #21

I've used Mint in the past, and it was my go-to distro for family members who aren't so technical. I'm not bothered by the licensing issues mentioned, and I'm ambivalent about the namespace issues, but I've been increasingly uneasy for some time now about Mint's security practices. Serving downloads over http and not providing GPG signed SHA hashes like every other distro is fairly irresponsible in this day and age.…

I'm curious- what do you think of Fedora? It's in the top 5 distros along with OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint, and yet I hardly ever hear people talk about it. I had personally given up on Fedora years ago, but recently was told I should give it a second look and I've not had time to try it out.

I use Fedora and I truly do love it. I find it to be far more stable than other distros I've tried, and it really does "just work."

I know I've been suggesting it to people who are considering Linux for the first time, with the caveat of disabling SElinux.

With that said, I'm not sure if it is good for non-technical people or people who aren't interested in learning about it. Getting certain things installed can be a bit of work, as they don't support things like Chrome or even Chromium by default. I also view it from the perspective of not knowing how to use any graphical installers (do they exist?). If I was aware of that stuff, I'd possibly consider it for non-technical users, but as it stands, I don't.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#74

Post by DanBC »

Brakenshire wrote: post #71
okasaki wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, Nautilus has been renamed to Gnome Files, or just Files. It's a bad trend. It's really frustrating when you're trying to find out what the executable or package name is.

I don't think there's that much wrong with "Gnome Files". That should be enough to search for help, and also gives information about what the program does. Similarly, I would say the names should be "Firefox Browser", "Geary Email" etc (if we're aiming to be user friendly).

"Gnome Files" should be fine, if people know it's called "Gnome Files", and if people know to use "exact search".

In Fedora 20 the name "Gnome Files" was hard to discover (that may have changed in later Fedoras) and non technical people just don't know how to search.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#75

Post by scriptproof »

snarfy wrote: post #24

I remember installing it when it was relatively new and people were gushing over it. A few weeks later a new version came out. I tried upgrading when I found there was no upgrade path. Upgrading Mint means reinstalling Mint. I remember the days before apt-get when there was only dpkg. Before Debian I used Slackware so I'm all too familiar with package management (or lack of). The idea that someone would release a new…

I have upgraded to the last version from the manager menu. From the Update Manager: Edit->Upgrade.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#76

Post by mjhoy »

smt88 wrote: post #59
JupiterMoon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out NixOS

I absolutely love the concept of NixOS, but I haven't tried it out. Is it well-supported enough to use day-to-day as a developer? Do you often have to build things from source?

It's worth playing with to see if it could fit into your work; for instance, the Haskell ecosystem is very well supported, while Ruby seems to have issues. I am now using it for work on some of my projects. Generally you won't have to compile from source; that said I did recompile glibc when that last bug hit. (Security updates for core packages are not a great story now.) It's not perfect, but it's very hackable.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#78

Post by beefsack »

smt88 wrote: post #53
mschuster91 wrote: post #41

> Add to that, that they do not care about copyright and license issues and just ship their ISOs with pre-installed Oracle Java and Adobe Flash packages and several multimedia codec packages which infringe patents and may therefore not be distributed freely at all in countries like the US. Seriously, with the rotten-ness of the US patent/copyright/political system, it's better for mankind to just say "ok, US users ca…

> "ok, US users can't get this, but everyone else can" Setting aside for a minute that this isn't possible, it's like saying you won't release your app on iOS because of Apple's walled gardens. Sure, the walls suck, but the users inside are numerous and spend lots of money. Most product creators don't have the option to exclude US users.

Not everyone is entirely driven by money, I choose not to write software for any of the walled gardens.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#79

Post by Kliment »

spdionis wrote: post #38
VarunAgw wrote: post #28

Every once in a while, I get difference error in /etc/issue*. I really hate all of these. I use Mint only because I like its GUI interface. I really cannot stand Ubuntu desktop for a moment

I also use Mint mostly because of its interface and i hate Ubuntu desktop too. Given this, what are the best alternatives to Mint GUI that offer the same level of comfort?

There's a mate flavor of ubuntu out now, and it works wonderfully.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#80

Post by downtide »

kozukumi wrote: post #13

Fucking bang on point. Mint has a nice out of the box experience but after using it for a while you begin to see all the shit they stuffed in the cracks. It is a shame as Cinnamon is a lovely DE, I wish there were an official Ubuntu build with Cinnamon as the default DE similar to Xubuntu with Xfce.

I've felt the same thing with many Ubuntu releases.
Post reply on HN