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Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

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Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#131

Post by toyg »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #105
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…

> There's a move to give stuff generic names That's not so much a Fedora thing but a GNOME move, as the RPM containing "Files" is still called Nautilus. Also, I am a bit surprised since it goes contrary to your argument, because when a user looks for a file explorer he's much more likely to find that looking for "Files" rather than the (rather strange, really) name of "Nautilus". I would see myself as a technical use…

KDE historically worked around this problem by displaying a description as well as the name, e.g. something like "Nautilus - File explorer". It worked great.

Thing is, the move to generic names is basically an ego trip from Linux developers. Consistent products like Windows or OSX, which are monolithic and have bazillion of users with the exact same configuration, can get away with it; but the Linux world is a forest of different apps from random developers, haphazardly packaged by this or that distribution and continuously updated every few months. In this environment, thinking you can just refer to "Ubuntu files" or "Fedora files" is a pipe dream; often the solution to your problems will be on sources that are not specific to the distro you are actually using (see for example the Arch and Gentoo wikis).

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#132

Post by talideon »

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 woudn't mind so much if they were running WordPress on the same machine if it were isolated in a container or jail. There's certainly no excuse not to do so these days now that php-fpm exists.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#133

Post by _yy »

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.

It's easily the most secure Linux distro. It has SELinux enabled by default (and it actually works!) and compiles binaries using most of the available hardening features, other than basically any other mainstream distro.

They have an excellent testing/QA process, especially given the speed at which they're developing - this results in a very high quality.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#134

Post by seqastian »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #123
Crespyl wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend Arch (even the "friendly" variants like Antergos) to the less technically inclined. You don't need a to be extremely familiar with Linux to get started with Arch, but you do need to be comfortable at the command line and are expected to be able to read the (excellent) docs and debug things yourself. It's a very educational experience, but not really something the "average grandmother"…

Ubuntu with a post install script that grabs flash etc? EDIT Write the post install script yourself don't use one of the many flawed ones that a search will show up. I really don't see why the downvote? The OP wants an easy to use distro that their grandmother can use but seems happy to install it them-self.

flash? isn't that what the chrome cage is for?

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#135

Post by y4mi »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #105
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…

> There's a move to give stuff generic names That's not so much a Fedora thing but a GNOME move, as the RPM containing "Files" is still called Nautilus. Also, I am a bit surprised since it goes contrary to your argument, because when a user looks for a file explorer he's much more likely to find that looking for "Files" rather than the (rather strange, really) name of "Nautilus". I would see myself as a technical use…

They are not exclusive though - there is nothing stopping them from calling it 'Nautilus Files' ^^

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#136

Post by creshal »

akerro wrote: post #122
creshal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manjaro, really? The one distribution with a worse security track record than Mint? "Our SSL certificate expired, please change your computer clocks one year back" Manjaro?

Yea, I know, I expected this answer. I needed something quick to install, not deb... and with latest versions of packages. I was thinking about Arch, but it's too long to install, I had ~20 minutes. Manjaro is ok to people how know what they're doing and who know how to setup basic features of OS.

Antergos is a hands-free installer for Arch that doesn't cripple the installed system with unreliable third-party repositories.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#137

Post by autoreleasepool »

eatonphil wrote: post #116
autoreleasepool wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: I'm also playing around with FreeBSD for my development environment, since I can use Mate on there. To be honest, I don't really need a DE these days anyway, since I only use terminal and a web browser. I should look into just using a Windows Manager. FreeBSD has good support for DEs with XFCE and Lumina, anyways. At least I've never had a problem.

I've been running Mate and Gnome3 for the past 6 months as well. Mate had some issues and, for both, the screen went black for 1-2 seconds when videos start playing. I was able to get a compositor (Compiz) working on Mate and this fixed the tearing issue. It had some issues where it just kept crashing and rebooting that I never figured out. So I switched back to Gnome3. Although Gnome3 comes with a compositor (I thin…

Me either. Media is definitely not my use case. I'm running FreeBSD in a VM on top of OS X as a host anyways, so graphics support is likely more stable for me for that reason.

I think Lumina is looking really promising, though. I recommend giving it a try if you have the time.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#138

Post by jsjohnst »

jnbiche wrote: post #46
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.

I used to use Fedora with KDE 5 or so years ago. I liked it fine. The only think I lacked was the convenience of deb packages since so many projects offer debs, and using alien to install debs with yum was painful (they've changed package managers now, if I'm not mistaken). Probably, if I move away from the convenience of a Debian derivative these days, it will be to FreeBSD.

What projects are you looking at that primarily only package a deb? I frequent far flung corners of the web and have never had trouble finding an RPM (have on occasion had trouble finding a deb though)

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#139

Post by kedean »

DonHopkins wrote: post #119
teekert wrote: post #35

An yet, it just works, looks nice, is fast on old hardware, mounts everything out of the box, controls your audio from the volume icon and gets out of your way in general. 17.3 is one the best out of box experiences imo.

How bad must desktop Linux in general be, if people are so busy rejoicing about a volume icon that works, that they accept poor security?

They mean from a usability perspective. Mint is famous for it's volume icon that includes album art for what's playing, various other info, and controls to let you pause/skip tracks. It's like a tiny music player in your task bar.

That said, no it should not excuse poor security.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#140

Post by mayhew »

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.

Installing Ubuntu GNOME and then installing Cinnamon would give you a nearly identical setup. Cinnamon is basically just a replacement for GNOME Shell. You could also install Nemo if you prefer that file manager.
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