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Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

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Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#211

Post by bsamuels »

blubb-fish wrote: post #196
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've used Mint in the past, and it was my go-to distro for family members who aren't so technical. I would consider myself pretty "technical". And yet, I am not willing to spend more effort than absolutely necessary for setting up my Linux OS. Just b/c I am a programmer and even love to use zsh and Git from the CLI does not imply that I have any patience for fiddling with drivers and kernels. In the "Linux Communit…

> In the "Linux Community" there only seems to exist the hacker (who loves to spend ages tinkering with config files and debugging hardware issues) and the technically incompetent user (who most likely uses Windows anyway).

wow, that's a pretty elitist comment, even for HN. essentially what you're saying is that people who don't like spending time trying to make their computer work are technically incompetent?

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#212

Post by blubb-fish »

bsamuels wrote: post #211
blubb-fish wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've used Mint in the past, and it was my go-to distro for family members who aren't so technical. I would consider myself pretty "technical". And yet, I am not willing to spend more effort than absolutely necessary for setting up my Linux OS. Just b/c I am a programmer and even love to use zsh and Git from the CLI does not imply that I have any patience for fiddling with drivers and kernels. In the "Linux Communit…

> In the "Linux Community" there only seems to exist the hacker (who loves to spend ages tinkering with config files and debugging hardware issues) and the technically incompetent user (who most likely uses Windows anyway). wow, that's a pretty elitist comment, even for HN. essentially what you're saying is that people who don't like spending time trying to make their computer work are technically incompetent?

I beg to differ ... maybe you should reread my comment

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#213

Post by brobinson »

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…

>E.g. many European banks do this for "US persons" - they simply cannot get accounts because the legal risks are just too high.

It's not legal risks, it's the cost of compliance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#214

Post by TD-Linux »

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…

The copyright and patent issues involved with those packages are still valid in other countries though.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#215

Post by TD-Linux »

Narann wrote: post #185
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…

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.

Most patent encumbered codecs have patents worldwide, including in most EU countries. Go to the MPEG-LA website and take a look at the patent lists if you're curious.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#216

Post by cookiecaper »

mmcclure wrote: post #201
blubb-fish wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've used Mint in the past, and it was my go-to distro for family members who aren't so technical. I would consider myself pretty "technical". And yet, I am not willing to spend more effort than absolutely necessary for setting up my Linux OS. Just b/c I am a programmer and even love to use zsh and Git from the CLI does not imply that I have any patience for fiddling with drivers and kernels. In the "Linux Communit…

So, so, so much this. I did a full-stop switch to Mint for ~2 months and, for the most part, quite enjoyed it. What finally killed it for me was when I was back in an "office" setting where I wanted to use a monitor and bluetooth peripherals. After a few days of struggling through various bluetooth drivers and CLI management tools, I gave up. To make things worse, the general response I've heard from other folks that…

I've found Linux is better at Bluetooth than Windows.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#217

Post by cookiecaper »

ergo14 wrote: post #186
bitL wrote: 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 :)

Gnome 3 only allows whole integer steps in DPI scaling. This means that the options for me are a) too small at 1x or b) too big at 2x. I use a scale factor of 1.4x in KDE. I haven't tested on Cinnamon, so I don't know if it accepts non-integers for scaling.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#218

Post by flurpitude »

hotcool wrote: post #175
bitL wrote: post #99

As a super happy user of Linux Mint - guys, please keep doing what you are doing! Thank you so much for giving us a proper desktop Linux! You have my (financial) support! Don't get pressured by some random loud Internet criticism and change for worse! Please don't do Win7->Win8 or iOS6->iOS7 regression in Mint as well because of a few unhappy voices trying to acquire power over you!

I'm going to back you up on this. I'm sorry to hear there are problems, but I won't be switching OS's. Mint has been rock solid for me.

It has been stable and reliable for me too. But the concern is not about reliability so much as security: some patches are not delivered due to the way Mint (apparently) mixes binaries from Debian and Ubuntu. It may be quite reliable but still insecure.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#219

Post by versteegen »

tremon wrote: post #110
versteegen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry for the rant, it's a bit off topic and not called for, but would like to say my experience is sort of the opposite: I've been a Slackware-current user for most of a decade, and I love that it's so easy to upgrade the OS using slackpkg. I can (and do) often only upgrade a subset of packages, and never even need to reboot afterwards, not even after replacing the kernel (although, obviously...). A simple packa…

A simple package system without dependency tracking has had many advantages for me. Are you equating "simple package system" with "per-package service isolation" here? Because otherwise I don't see how your example about upgrades not requiring a reboot ties in with the package system. Debian has probably the most extensive package system, yet it still allows you to do upgrades without reboot. The major exception to t…

Thanks for the information. So I assume Ubuntu now also allows parallel multiarch devel packages?

I've never tried Debian, and my experience with Ubuntu is very limited. I guess my comment on reboots was off-base, and maybe more of it. I meant that packages aren't densely interconnected with dependencies. (macports has it really bad, seems every time I want to upgrade python I need to recompile gcc or something.) Anyway, the simplicity makes it easy to modify packages. E.g. last week I fiddled around with lua packages to allow parallel installing multiple versions (lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 are incompatible languages which are often mistaken for the same language by distro maintainers). However I realise creating .deb files is also easy, so I guess I could do just the same there. Also, Slackware's multiarch support is a very simple hack using a small script that works 100% of the time as far as I've seen. It's telling that Debian still only supports 80% of packages after who knows how much work put into it.

Re: Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

#220

Post by banterfoil »

pimeys wrote: post #203
joshgachnang wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's why a lot of people wind up on OSX. You get the CLI environment you're used to with Linux, but rarely lose half a day because a driver upgrade broke your desktop.

Funny, because I've been using Arch Linux now almost 5 years on my work computer without any problems. Same desktop (xmonad), same editor (emacs) and same terminal (xterm) with the most awesome configuration stored in Github. The only problems I've heard here are coming from the OSX users, who face difficulties when upgrading the OS into a new version, which breaks homebrew or something...

Perhaps Servercobra was talking about the barrier for entry. I haven't yet set up an Arch distro, but I can say that getting started with OSX is beyond simple. Based on what I have heard, setting up Arch can be rather difficult.

I really like the idea of Arch but I am intimidated to jump in. What was your experience like when you first booted up Arch?

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