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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • All of that can be publicly audited. When we talk about “trust” we’re referring to what happens server side, which we have to assume can never be publicly audited. The importance of e2e encryption is that what ever happens server side doesn’t matter. There’s a massive gulch between trusting a binary you’re able to inspect and trusting one you can’t.

    What you said is valid though, if you want/need privacy, you need to put in effort, but you also have to assume there’s someone smarter than you who will be able to outsmart your own audit. The absolute best you can hope for is that at least the binary is publicly reviewable and that they’re not smarter than every pair of eyes who reviews it. That’s basically the backbone of open source security.











  • The Arch repos are completely different from the AUR. The Arch repos are officially maintained and tested. The AUR is where anyone can go upload a little pkgbuild script to make building and installing an arbitrary package as easy as possible.

    Arch’s package manager (pacman) does not work with the AUR. The AUR is basically a glorified pastebin. It’s a convenience for people who know what they’re doing, but you should not go downloading and executing files at random from there. Arch explicitly warns against doing this, and deliberately does not ship with any easy way to do this.







  • Note: Gaming performance is purely based on money spent. There’s no fundamental reason windows would have better gaming performance, it’s just that there is more money being paid to engineers and vendors to support DirectX and related tooling.

    Then there’s the self-fulfilling aspect that, windows has the largest marketshare, so devs are going to spend the most money targeting it, so that they can get the most money in return, which means more people will use it, which leads to the high marketshare.

    The ONLY reason Linux use is seeing the few percent blip in gaming is because Valve has dumped truckloads of cash into making it viable.




  • The better comparison is that distros are the operating systems (like “windows”, “macos”, and “android”), while “linux” is the kernel under the hood that end users likely never interact with (like “NT”, “XNU”, and…“linux”).

    A distro represents an intended user experience. If you want a distro that has an intended user experience that is similar to windows, go with Mint or OpenSUSE. If your desired experience is like the SteamDeck, install bazzite (with an AMD GPU ideally). If that’s all you care to know, then that’s all you need to know; go use your new system how you would any other.

    But if you want to dig deeper, yeah, the fact that all the distros are based on linux (and more importantly, are posix compatible) means that a lot of the software is portable across distros. But that doesn’t mean your experience on all distros will be the same. Different distros organize their filesystems differently, they might ship with different versions of core utilities based on the stability testing they’ve done, and they likely offer varying means of installing and managing new packages.

    The tl;dr is, go use one distro, and then later try doing the same stuff in a different distro, and inevitably at some point you’ll go “oh, this didn’t work exactly how I expected because the other distro I’m used to handles this differently”. That’s the difference.