Live data from Hacker News

Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

lwn.net

181–190 of 236 posts

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#181
post #133

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.

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.

If you call secure an OS which can crash process without giving meaningful errors.

I have lost hours debugging mysterious crashes because of SELinux, and it is really not safe to have components unexpectedly crashing when they are part of your core infra.

Plus I guess that like every security frameworks it runs with priviledge, it has a lot of lines of code, is hard to audit, and thus highers the surface of vulnerability.

Hint: they use for instance strcmp a lot http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24353504/whats-wrong-with...

Their code mixes if(){} with the if() else (without braces)

They are sometimes using enums, sometimes #define sometimes magic values to refer to constant values.

You should really read the source code.

Definitively above the average of C code in the wild, still having well known code smell.

I would like to see if PVS studio could confirm my intuition.

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#182
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 sourc…

Ah, ok. So the issue is mixing binary packages from different distributions or different releases of the same distribution (the Debian doc mentions mixing Debian stable and testing for example). If that's what Mint are doing then I'm surprised they aren't stuck in perpetual dependency hell.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#183
post #36
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found Xubuntu to be a pretty decent albeit simple environment. Runs great on my VM too.

Indeed. I never got why people are not just sticking with Xubuntu. It is the most solid, reliable, balanced and beautiful distro I have ever tried. Everytime I tried something else, I finally came back to Xubuntu, and try to remind myself to never switch away again.

Because some things are broken in xubuntu - like wacom tablet configuration is missing :(

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#185

> 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…

I'm also surprised how often I ear about this "patent" argument while actually "the world except US" don't recognize software patents. It's really a "US only" problem, the rest of the world don't care about this.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#186
post #112

Mint's HiDPI is simply the best experience on Linux these days, not to mention it just works. But let's attack it because it doesn't conform to some autistic standards of ours. Way to go friendly Linux community! Let's make all distros unusable, super complex, require all people to wear their own personal TPMs and certificates so that they can feel finally secure . Let's blame Mint for not having DNA real-time sequen…

Sorry between Mint and Gnome 3 - Gnome seems to have better HiDPI support, but cinnamon is close :)

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the grave lapses that are described here, I hope it's obvious to you that absolutely yes, you should be using something else. I'll guess that Ubuntu might be your cup of tea.

Yeah you're right. Downloading Ubuntu now.

Ubuntu mate has the same desktop environment as Mint with Ubuntu underneath it.

https://ubuntu-mate.org/

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#188
So, functionally, is there any real difference between using Mint's ISO to install-from-scratch versus using you're preferred distro of choice (Ubuntu/Fedora/FreeBSD, etc.) and installing the Cinnamon Mint desktop on top of it?

I've been playing with Mint for the past few weeks and experimenting with full-Mint-on-a-VM versus Ubuntu-with-Cinnamon-desktop, and I don't really notice much of a difference. After reading about all of Mint's problems this morning, I'm tempted to stick with Cinnamon exclusively as a DE unless someone offers a compelling reason to use the full distro.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#189
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

What about making nice things that US citizens can't legally have? If you're legally in the clear in your own jurisdiction, you don't even need to take a risk yourself.

I'm not a lawyer and I don't know exactly what our situation is in the EU, so don't take my word that that's safe. Software patents may be technically banned, but I think people disguise them as 'business method' patents. And if you use US project hosting like Github, maybe someone can sue you there. I'm suggesting that, at the margins, we should take some risks.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the grave lapses that are described here, I hope it's obvious to you that absolutely yes, you should be using something else. I'll guess that Ubuntu might be your cup of tea.

Yeah you're right. Downloading Ubuntu now.

The issues described are not going to impact the average user, and due to some of these issues Mint would probably be more convenient, for the average user.
Post reply on HN