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Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

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Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#81

Post by creshal »

takluyver wrote: post #66
creshal wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's user friendly, yes, but also reckless. The distro won't "work" any more if it gets sued into oblivion by Oracle, Adobe, Nvidia, AMD and whoever else feels like kicking puppies.

The flip side is that if you believe that laws like those around software patents should change, someone ignoring them and taking the risk of being sued is a more compelling demonstration than carefully observing the rules and then complaining about them on HN. More pragmatically, it seems unlikely that Oracle or Adobe will sue a distro for helping them distribute the Java/Flash runtimes. They want their runtime to b…

> The flip side is that if you believe that laws like those around software patents should change, someone ignoring them and taking the risk of being sued is a more compelling demonstration than carefully observing the rules and then complaining about them on HN.

As EU citizen I have zero influence on US politics. Complaining on HN to US citizens is literally all I can do.

> More pragmatically, it seems unlikely that Oracle or Adobe will sue a distro for helping them distribute the Java/Flash runtimes.

Then maybe those companies should change their license terms. Right now, Adobe does not even allow you to use a downloaded Flash installer on two computers, you must either download it separately on each PC or apply for a special license: http://www.adobe.com/products/players/flash-player-distribut...

If they want to shoot themselves in their feet, I'm not going to interfere.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#82

Post by auxym »

baldfat wrote: post #65
purpled_haze wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't want to be that evangelist guy BUT OpenSUSE really deserves a second looks and it is non-technical family member friendly. They are super stable and provide one-click install off the web like Mint, but it install them as a regular repo which makes updating them a breeze. On the technical I love OpenSUSE for zypper, build (Any software you need is probably on there and it will even build for other distros), roll…

OpenSUSE is great, YAST is the best "control panel" app I've seen in any distro, you can configure antyhing without ever opening a terminal or vim. Zypper has also been more robust for me than apt (I've seen apt-get hell once or twice).

That said, stay away from Tumbleweed (rolling release). In my experience it's been even less stable than Arch or Sid. In the past I've had kernel updates making the machine unbootable, though thankfully the distro does keep all previously installed kernels, easily selectable in GRUB. Just yesterday I banged my head against a year-old bug that pgadmin3 is broken because it hasn't been rebuilt against the distributed version of wx (come on).

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#83

Post by sandGorgon »

DanBC wrote: post #44
purpled_haze wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

so I just moved to Fedora 23 after 10 years on Ubuntu. It was something that I was very hesitant about, but Fedora 23 has totally smashed it out of the park.

I think the usability is miles ahead of Ubuntu atleast - I realize that is a personal opinion, but I love that Fedora is a tightly integrated Gnome (and soon Wayland distro).

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#84

Post by snarfy »

scriptproof wrote: post #75
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.

I understand Slackware is much better these days. It was Slackware 2.0 the last time I used it.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#85

Post by claudius »

mhw wrote: post #47

Hmm; I'm puzzled by a contradiction between this and another recent article. From this article we learn that we shouldn't do this: "Secondly, they are mixing their own binary packages with binary packages from Debian and Ubuntu without rebuilding the latter. This creates something that we in Debian call a "FrankenDebian" which results in system updates becoming unpredictable " rel="nofollow">https://wiki.debian.org/D…

> to just copy all of Ubuntu's (or Debian's) binary packages and build a new derivative distribution on top of it

This is okay. However, copying Ubuntu’s and Debian’s packages into the same repository and then mixing them willy-nilly is not.

You can either:

a) Base your derivative on binaries from Debian xor Ubuntu, then add source packages compiled with these binaries as you like.

or

b) Base your derivative on sources from Debian and/or Ubuntu, then compile everything together with your custom packages to make sure that all ABIs match.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#86

Post by viperscape »

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.…

Have you given Arch a try yet? Their are also some family friendly projects like Antergos. Arch wiki is my all time favorite for great documentation, even when not using arch, go figure.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#87

Post by PerryCox »

bildung wrote: post #29
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…

> Cinnamon is nice but I never understood why it needs its own distribution. I should be able to apt-get install cinammon-desktop or whatever and it work like any other package. On Debian you actually can 'apt-get install cinnamon' and have the full desktop.

There is also a Fedora spin with Cinnamon as the default DE: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/cinnamon/

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#88

Post by downtide »

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 like the categorisation aswell as a name (and version).

In your desktop environment, 'Open web browser' (as an action), can be associated with whichever browser you prefer. And perhaps a context menu on that to choose between many.

I prefer something like: Gnome file manager: 'Nautilus', to the browser: 'Web'. How ghastly.

To differentiate between many, like both of Windows' web browsers: Edge and Internet Explorer. You could say Windows web browser Edge. Or Edge; Windows' web browser. Windows itself is a confusing name, but that's another conversation.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#89

Post by sokoloff »

mintplant wrote: post #49
sokoloff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original page title is more communicative (so I suspect dang will fix it when he notices): Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

The linked page is actually a comment on an LWN article with that title. Changing the submission title to that wouldn't reflect the content being highlighted here.

I don't want to have a lengthy meta-discussion about titles, but as someone who is not in the mint community (either one), the HTML page title of the comment thread linked is more informative than the editorialized-by-excerpting text from the comment body.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#90

Post by unixhero »

I realize they have not taken security seriously in designing their delivery mechanisms. However I do not care. Linux Mint solves all my problems of configuration. It is configured so nicely and with Cinnamon it comes with so many useful bells and whistles, I'm not moving anywhere. It's great. Mint will be back after this blow and I am sure it will not happen again. I use it daily and I am super productive on it as my desktop. My family uses it also, on new and old computers, and it is perfect.
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