Do you have access to Signal servers to verify your claims by any chance?
That’s not how it works. The signal protocol is designed in a way that the server can’t have access to your message contents if the client encrypts them properly. You’re supposed to assume the server might be compromised at any time. The parts you actually need to verify for safe communication are:
Yeah, that section is bad.
For one, it’s has classic vibe “if you want to keep the nazis out, you’re the one who’s exclusionary”.
But also, how is refusing to engage on a platform “shutting out a significant portion of [the] community”? That sounds backwards to me. Blocking people from engaging with Debian on its own platforms would be shutting them out. The implication in the article is that Debian is obligated to be unconditionally present on every social platform its users might be on.
Comparing pregnant women who drink to men in prison as equally violent individuals?
Straight up adding pregnant women who smoke to pregnant women who drink alcohol to women who get late stage abortions with no concern that an individual might belong to more than one group?
Removing fathers who drank before conception from the equation entirely with the justification that an article called it less harmful, but clearly not harmless, which is the opposite of what he did when he put number of drinkers and convicted criminals in the same equation.
Go there & argue with guy if you are capable of showing a more accurate math
I’m not going to argue with that dipshit because it’s total waste of time. And so is arguing with you. I only commented for the benefit of other users who might scroll by without noticing the absolutely ridiculous evidence you cited, and get trapped into taking your position at face value.
Bro, no way you’re not a troll. I clicked on the 2nd link to see what the source is. It’s a guy using copilot to calculate percentage of women smoking and drinking during pregnancy, as well as late abortions, then does completely arbitrary math to conclude that women are more violent. If I wrote a parody of a person abusing stats to prove stupid points I would never have managed to make it as ridiculous as this.
Most of Proton code is Wine. So basically if you have Wine in your system, library dependencies are not an issue anymore, apart from DLLs that some games require
If I have wine on my system and try to run steam-managed proton without any sort of runtime or container, then I’m running proton on different versions of libraries than the ones it was compiled for and tested on. Proton also has additional components which might mean additional dependencies, so your statement is false to begin with.
Why are they doing a fork instead of contributing?
The fork is open source. As far as I know, some contributions do get merged into wine. Valve is also funding work from Collabora which is contributed directly into wine. They cannot contribute the entirety of proton to wine because wine does not want all their contributions. This is a very common situation to arise when someone wants to use an open source project but their goals don’t align.
But I expect it will be easier to push back on using containerization in Proton, than making Valve allow us such control
Valve is never going to rip out a solution that is working great for them and risk causing issues for customers for no good reason. Thinking that Valve are more likely to remove containerization than they are to allow you to modify the container is, frankly, delusional. It’s also completely irrelevant, as I’ve already said. If Valve wants to “fuck us up” then they’re going to do it. Steam is a proprietary piece of software that supports DRM for all your (also proprietary) games, which are stored on the cloud. You have no control over your games, but containers have nothing to do with it. And if they did, and Valve really wanted to pull a trick on us, asking them to remove the containers would make even less sense…
Just follow the instructions here. Snapshots do not recursively traverse subvolumes. So putting the swapfile into its own subvolume means it will be excluded from any snapshots of / . The command should also set No_COW which also implicitly turns of compression if you use that.
I’ll repeat what another user said because it’s important. If you want filesystem encryption you also want swap encryption. Otherwise any data is liable to get leaked by being written to swap.
The issue is that even if you choose a hosting service outside the US, they might choose to block your content anyway in order to comply with US regulations and avoid legal trouble.
We are going through more or less Wine anyway, the libraries on the system don’t matter as long as Wine compiles
Which wine though?
The one pre-packaged by your distro? That doesn’t work because Valve needs to control the version you use and to provide additional stuff not part of vanilla wine.
The one part of proton that is built and delivered to your system by Valve? They would have to compile and support it for every set of dependency versions out there.
One of the core features of containers is process and process memory separation from host.
As far as container technology is concerned, the isolation is configurable. pressure-vessel is most likely using (possibly indirectly) namespaces and/or cgroups to achieve the isolation. I don’t see a technical reason that you can’t disable the isolation of shared memory or any other resource. The issue is whether you are given access to disable it.
According to the docs the runtime is based on flatpak and uses bubblewrap and libcapsule. I don’t know about libcapsule, but I recall that bubblewrap has granular control over what resources it isolates.
We have no control over what they put in those containers.
Apparently, you can modify the container as shown here. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to install custom containers alongside the default ones in the same way that you can install custom proton versions. Steam just doesn’t provide the interface for it.
Once they disable the
PRESSURE_VESSEL_SHELL=insteadwe will have no insight into what’s inside.
There already exists an alternative that is “more likely to be extended in future” rather than being removed as shown here. But I believe you would always be able to gain access to the container because it remains a chroot + namespace + cgroup isolation, all of which you can control on your system.
and app developers neither have!
App developers don’t control what’s on your system either. The container is a huge improvement for them because it at least gives them a known target to build for. They can still bundle dependencies in any way that they would on a non-containerized system. There’s no loss of control from their perspective.
if it doesn’t work for some reason (with Wine I don’t really see it happening as what we run doesn’t rely on our OS libraries directly), you can create chroot, additional library packages with old versions, etc.
That’s what pressure-vessel is and as shown above you can modify it. And if you couldn’t it would be a tooling issue, not an inherent container disadvantage.
Worst case scenario, Linux community will figure something out
No, they won’t. Compatibility significantly increased after Valve got involved. In fact, the linux community is porting pressure-vessel outside of Steam to use it across different launchers as umu. The community is headed towards using pressure-vessel for everything.
Now I replied to each claim individually, but it’s not really about any specific point you’re making. The general idea is that there’s nothing inherent to container technology that prevents you from tinkering with it. Anything that you can’t do currently is because Steam is not designed to allow you to do it. It’s got nothing to do with whether Steam uses containers or not. Any control that you’ve lost over your system is because you’re using a proprietary app. They could remove the containers and still prevent tinkering, eg by using a bundled wine with no way for you to modify it or its launch options. It’s not about what Steam does, but about how it does it.
And the most recent comment indicates that it’s not currently being worked on by someone.
No way. Containers are absolutely necessary to provide reliability across a wide range of distros and to keep games working in the future.
It makes running additional programs harder (opentrack for example)
Then we need better tooling and documentation to interact with the container, not to get rid of them. I don’t see any technical limitation that would prevent your use case. It’s just not implemented or maybe simply undocumented.
our computers less ours
How so? The end result is probably the opposite. Without the containers Steam would be less reliable on unsupported distros, which might mean your only choice would be to use Ubuntu LTS. That would be a much bigger loss of control.
It’s a custom solution called pressure-vessel, which seems to be based on flatpak. You can read about it here. This is used to create a reproducible linux environment and has nothing to do with the windows translation layer. They run wine (proton) inside the container as you would expect.
There is a recent effort to port this solution outside of steam in the form of umu. As far as I know it’s in a working state but I don’t know if it’s at feature parity with steam, especially on the game-specific fixes front. The end goal is to be a universal launcher that can be used from all frontends, so that all windows games run reliably and identically regardless of which GUI you use to manage your games.
EDIT: welp, I just now noticed this info has already been posted by another user 🤷
The other commenter already answers your quest, but I will just point out that python doesn’t come included “on Linux”. It just happens to be a dependency of so much stuff that some other packages is going to pull it in. A minimal distro which doesn’t include programs written in python will probably not have python installed at all.
The 75% of your contacts you describe sound like they installed Signal only to talk to you or at most a handful of people, while most of their social circle is on WhatsApp. These people are trapped on WhatsApp exactly because there is no interoperability.
My question: How do I actually physically notice the difference between these kernels?
Generally, you don’t. You can look for some benchmark to try and find a difference between them, but if you don’t notice a difference in your day to day tasks, then it’s all the same. In my experience you should pick a kernel based on your desired experience. For my needs this is how the kernels differ:
I encrypt all my filesystems, boot partitions excluded. I started with my work laptop. It made the most sense because there is a real possibility that it gets lost or stolen at some point. But once I learned how simple encryption is, I just started doing it everywhere. It’s probably not gonna come into play ever for my desktop, but it also doesn’t really cost me anything to be extra safe.
Who’s gonna come at me with a $5 wrench because they really want my data, though? The attack I’m most likely to experience is someone stealing my laptop while I’m out traveling. That’s what full filesystem encryption solves best.
This wouldn’t appear like this when upgrading the system with pacman. pacman does not automatically remove orphaned dependencies during upgrades. You have to query for them and remove them explicitly as a separate operation afterwards. So in the OP what we’re seeing is the new versions of packages themselves getting smaller.
These are valid concerns but to me they sound more like lack of tooling rather than inherent disadvantages of immutable distros. Linux distros have not historically been designed from the ground up for immutability and it makes sense that there are issues that aren’t handled optimally. Surely we can come up with clean and simple solutions to basic problems like setting up daemons and drivers if we work on it!
I think the immune system can be likened to a muscle if someone really wants to go with that metaphor, but only if you consider vaccines to be the gym and getting sick is uncontrollable and dangerous physical exertion. So, wanting to develop natural immunity is like wanting to get into street fights to build arm strength. It might kinda work, but you’ll also be in a lot of unnecessary danger.