Seriously for all the protests and walkouts over Gaza last year, my main thought was “didn’t you know MSFT/Google/Meta is literally evil?”

I can’t blame anyone for wanting a stable income, but you might as well be working for Lockheed Martin. There’s a reason why these megacorps stay in an oligopoly at the top, and it has nothing to do with talent or quality solutions.

“Man if we had the original source code, it’d be so much easier than reverse engineering this binary in Ghidra”

The source code in question:

This one is funny because it 100% still exists somewhere, but I haven’t had the chance to verify it again.

Okay so basically its a data recorder box (ex: brainbox) that connects to a bunch of industrial sensors and sends the data over the network with your preferred method.

Builtin firmware gives you an HTTP webui to login and configure the device, with a user # and password.

I think the user itself had a builtin default admin which was #0, which everyone uses since there wasn’t really much use for other users.

Anyway, I was looking at the small JS code for the webui and noticed it had an MD5 hashing code that was very detailed with comments. It carefully laid out each operation, and explained each step to generate a hash, and then even why hashes should be used for passwords.

Here’s the kicker: It was all client side JS, so the login page would take your password, hash it, and then send the hash over plaintext HTTP POST to the server, where it would be authenticated.

Meaning you could just mitm the connection to grab the hash, and then login with the hash.

I sat there for like 10 minutes looking at the request over and over again. Like someone was smart enough to think “hey let’s use password hashing to keep this secure” and then proceeded to use it in the compleltly wrong way. And not even part of like a challenge/handshake where the server gives you a token to hash with. Just straight up MD5(password).

It was so funny because there were like a hundred of these on a network, so getting a valid hash was laughably easy.

I never got to check if this was fixed in a newer firmware version.

Yeah except I have never seen anyone actually suggest Zorin OS for this purpose due to its controversial pro edition.

There are other distros that achieve the same thing. My point is that Zorin is making money off of something I could do with zero effort, which implies its not even worth making a pay to use distro when one of the inherent benefits of linux is that its free.

I could understand if Zorin provided some groundbreaking software like Crossover, which for a long time had some serious advantages over wine and proton (yes I know irony that all are based on wine). But as other people have pointed out, most of this OS is just a reskin + preinstalled app combo. Might as well just use Nobara, which GE made in his spare time with some lazy scripts for Fedora.

Bruh ain’t no way people are choosing Zorin OS over all the available options.

If this is a result of people searching “best windows like distro”, they’re profiting off of a windows theme for GNOME, not even a full DE.

You can achieve the same thing with zero effort on any distro because DEs and themes aren’t tied to a distro.

VLC sucks ass when you want to do any type of live transcoding or remuxing without setting up a video stream. Especially with multichannel audio:

This has been an issue ever since feature added, the maximum bitrate you can set is 512 kb/s on every codec, despite codecs that support more.

The bug thread for this was basically “stop complaining about our shit UI and use the CLI”

Much prefer Kodi for this purpose, and an ffmpeg based player for lightweight stuff.

People making jokes about dihydrogen monoxide, and imma be honest, I feel like it should have been the gold standard internet stupidity filter that disqualifies your credentials in any form of discussion because of the insane amount of people that fell for it back when the internet was still new.

If you couldn’t handle H2O, you can’t be trusted to use the internet seriously lol.

Its still lagging is its MRs, like HDR coming in just less than a year ago.

Valve’s complaint was that even after getting approval from at least 3 DE projects, protocols were not getting merged due to hypothetical discussions and implementation baggage.

I imagine it all started with them making their gamescope compositor a few years ago and realizing a bunch of stuff was still missing.

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia

Check if you have ffmpeg-free or ffmpeg (from RPMFusion)

Honestly forgot which codecs+encode/decode aren’t included in Fedora’s free build, but I think they don’t include some parts of H264, H265, and other proprietary codecs.

Yes Yes I have been continously using it and it wasn’t viable until around late 2023 and early 2024.

My complaint isn’t that it sucks now, its that it sucked for a solid decade doing nothing.

proper HDR

Is completly up to each compositor to implement properly. Its still experimental in KDE because afaik theres no proper SDR + HDR tone mapping for mixed apps on the display, like a desktop.

Valve made their own compositor and cheats the problem by ensuring their client and overlay supports HDR colors + only having to handle the HDR from game output.

full VRR support

Not if you have an Nvidia GPU before 2017, and again already a thing in X11.

no screen tearing and reduced latency

Again, VRR and wayland’s ingenious solution to this was triple buffering, which is a pure software solution that adds latency making it unsuitable in several cases like this: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/3373

The clipboard also works fine

Welcome to Xwayland clipboard hell: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/6132

Its not that Wayland can’t easily fix any of these issues or that the other major improvements you mentioned are not worth it, its that it took Wayland like 13 years to do so.

Most of this should have been sorted out in the first couple years of development. People were already making fun of Wayland back in the day for pretending to be “decoupled from the graphics hardware” and then deciding on the aforementioned triple buffer.

Wayland didn’t even merge in HDR support until 9 months ago: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14#note_2777587

Fedora (with KDE Plasma) or OpenSUSE tumbleweed (with KDE Plasma)

Mint is good but its kernel is usually slightly out of date and it still has upstream Ubuntu issues.

Other Ubuntu downstreams are subpar imo.

Plus Fedora & OpenSUSE ships with SELinux if you want MAC security support.

The only downside for Fedora is you have to enable 3rd party software after install and run a couple of commands to swap to full ffmpeg and Nvidia drivers if you have Nvidia hardware. I think OpenSUSE might ship with these enabled but I forgot.

Wayland is responsible for kneecapping linux desktop in so many ways its infuriating, especially since linux basically figured out the golden standard of UX design back in the 2000s with stuff like GNOME 2 and Compiz.

It’s such an unnecessary burden with progress as slow as ripoff projects like star citizen.

I hope valve picks up the slack with frog protocols or at least gets PRs merged, because it would be stupid to ship steam machine and then explain to the user that the clipboard doesn’t work yet, even though it used to work perfectly fine in X11.

This is the general sentiment I’ve been hearing, though surprisingly a lot of people belive that these games will eventually reach steam machine anyway because it seems stupid to them that it never happens.

I didn’t expect it, but a lot of Xbox players I know are considering saving up for the steam machine because it replaces their need for a console + PC for games, and they are aware that Xbox has been pretty open to putting their games on PC anyway. Some even considered Nintendo emulation which is defnitley something I didn’t expect to see from Xbox only players.

Halo Infinite and MCC run just fine on Linux. If they were comfortable letting their core IP on steam, it would be easy and probably beneficial for MSFT to do the same for CoD.

I think the main holdout will be Epic Games, simply because they want to be a competitor to steam and they seem to hate the idea of giving valve any leverage in the gaming industry.

Oh no the trackpad itself is actually pretty okay. Its the fact that I have to drag a ridiculous length for the subsequent input to match on screen, even with the highest sensitivity setting.

Apple’s ingenious design was to make the trackpad feel like a 1:1 representation of your display, which is why its so huge.

And since way too much stuff in MacOS is functional around mouse clicks, I was constantly swiping all over the place for basic functions.

I think apple users kind of got used to using only their arm, but thats hard for me to do since I’m used to regular old trackpads and mice.

EDIT: Comparatively, I’m fine one something like a thinkpad or even a very cheap HP notebook, so long as the OS or Application UX is cool enough to keep things sensible.

Oh lol, guess they inflated its capabilities ¯_(ツ)_/¯

That’s why it’s called “federated” and nont “decentralized”

Freenet/Hyphanet is I think too slow for modern internet users. P2P networks have always struggled with solving the service lookup and access problem.

Even advancements like DHTs or cheat methods like trackers will still only get you so far compared to plain old client server DNS.

AD and LDAP is notoriously insecure as hell by default. It took until 24H2 for MSFT to enable SMB signing, which was a solid 50% chance for an unauthenticated attacker to reach domain admin on any enterprise network.

There are a lot of solutions that eclipse AD in both quality and scope. It’s just like VMWare, a once solid product that orgs got vendor locked into, and are stuck for life.

No, EAC, BattilEye, and a handful of other anticheat solutions have a native user space linux binary, and wine provides a way for the windows portion to hook into the linux portion, allowing the anticheat host to work with wine/proton games.

This involves the developer enabling the option to allow this when building their game which most devs do except for the notorious few that refuse to enable it because they don’t want to spend the extra .00002% worth of budget into making proper anticheat solutions and instead rely on kernel rootkits to solve that problem for them.

As someone who went through this, I would honestly take Window 11’s bs over pos unusable mac.

First time ever I think I felt pain in my wrist from using a trackpad. Absolute clownshow of a UX