It’s “its”.

Also, thou shalt not editorialise headlines.

I’m a simple man. I see Cory, I upvote. Then I read the text.

Depending on where you are, Meta will ask the government to intervene on their behalf. They’ll be claiming your national legislation is unfairly targeting of the poor, poor American companies and make the orange moron tell your lawmakers to scrap it unless they don’t want to get tariffed. (It’s the only tool this tool of a man knows.) They’ve started to deploy this exact tactic against the EU’s DMA.

You’re forgetting that Meta has bought the U.S. government (like all the other oligarch-owned companies have), and the corrupt “officials” tell their agencies to stand down. Just look at where the antitrust cases against Google and Apple went…

Enough has been said about the dogshit company doing this. That’s a lost cause. At this point, you know what you’re signing up for if you’re getting in bed with Meta. In a sane world, the company should crash and burn - but yet it doesn’t. So what’s wrong with the people who still use Meta’s services? What’s wrong with the people still willing to work at this dumpster fire? They’re a part of the problem.

Same here, parents. Feel free to turn on automatic updates. It’s never broken anything, and vulnerabilities do need patching.

Thank you very much for the detailed and well-sourced write-up! I’ve saved it for later when I get to drill down on this.

It kind of proves OP’s point though: distros do come with a lot of idiosyncrasies of “how things are done around these parts”.

I have zero experience with that. 😄

Basically, anything that isn’t packaged as a flatpak needs to be installed from the CLI using distrobox containers, which will go over the heads of the majority of new users.

Just like your “opponents” are over-generalising, you’re deliberately picking the most extreme examples to make your argument. (Batocera as a daily driver - you know that’s what Hanna Montana Linux is for!)

My Linux axioms are: for most new users…

1. choice of DE is most noticeable and decides whether they like their initial experience.
2. choice of base distro family does matter a lot in the long run (Debian-based vs. Arch-based vs. Redhat-based); if you stay inside the same family (e.g. Pop!OS vs. Ubuntu vs. Zorin vs. Mint), choice matters a lot less (and DE is most impactful, c.f. point one).
3. choosing a distro with specialised security hardening (immutable systems, Nix, Qubes, Bazzite) does matter; most of these will make new users unhappy or even question their sanity.

Where you are right: yes, the choices embedded within these three axioms do matter a lot and are noticeable, so it is helpful to have an experienced user recommend a distro to you when starting out.

Where the “distro don’t matter” people are right: there are a lot less choices to be made than meets the eye. Effectively, it can be boiled down to three.

Oh, you’d be surprised how the average elderly relative responds to the absence of a “start menu button” and total lack of desktop items on vanilla GNOME…

Define what you mean by “locked down”. If you don’t give your user superuser privileges, every distro is locked down because the user can only ever write to their own /home

I’d strongly recommend Mint:

• with Cinnamon DE: very Windows-esque UI
• Ubuntu / Debian-based, i.e. rock-solid, unlikely to break
• 100% automated updates (including automatic removal of old kernels so your /boot won’t get clogged
• Timeshift system snapshots in case something does break. (Note: I’ve only ever used Timeshift to un-fuck systems that I, personally, had fucked with superuser rights and manual meddling.)

“You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” Vance said.

“Oh!”, I thought, "this must be one of the rare occasions when I can agree on something with JD Vance. But then I noticed I had missed the qualifier:

“You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” Vance said.

“Oh!”, I thought. “So if you’re 350 million people, you absolutely can?” And I knew that today would be another day when there was nothing to be agreed upon with the eyelined furniture lover.

VLC for files in local storage.

Tempus for streaming / downloading the rest from my Navidrome instance.

In the laptop, I tried Supersonic to stream music from my server, but for some odd reason it audibly degraded sound quality, so I ditched it. I have since been using my browser. I might try it again, though, and see if the issue has been fixed.

We know. And yet: I’d take great peace from not having his demented rambles in my newsfeed every day, reminding me that this diapered buffoon is the leader of the U.S.

I don’t care about the hill part. Get on with the dying already!

*crickets*

In the interview, Diachenko put it more succinctly. “The scale is the sophistication,” he said.

The scale shows dedication (and deep pockets). The methods used - apart from the recursive dictionary attacks - were pretty mundane, as far as the report goes.

They then used a custom binary with 25,000 threads to spray hundreds of thousands of those endpoints with thousands of login and password combinations. Successful attempts now gave the attackers a “network tap inside the organization.”

Shouldn’t these fairly unsophisticated “spray-and-pray” brute force attempts show up in logs and at least alert security personnel that an active attack was underway?

the attackers went on to “actively intercept SSL VPN authentication hashes and crack them using a massive, dedicated 45-GPU cluster managed via Hashtopolis.” From there, they used the GPU cluster to crack the hashes, meaning to try massive combinations of plain-text passwords until they found the right one.

Again, not particularly sophisticated, but supported by heavy machinery to burn energy and money to do the actual work. Again, I ask: shouldn’t these types of attempts be mitigated by sufficiently long hashes? Even a 45-GPU cluster can be exhausted by hash length, can’t it?

This right here. Nextcloud is also great for syncing your address book via CardDAV, even allowing for a shared contacts list with your significant other for contacts you both need to access.

Apologies for being imprecise on terminology. I meant the latter, per service.