Sure but Red Hat is a US company and Canonical is not, while Mint is basically just a bunch of volinteers. I assume Canonical does not have the same legal vulnerabilities as Red Hat does and certainly doesn’t have the same export control and IP restrictions.

At the heart of it though even if Red Hat didn’t exist in the Fedora Project anymore, you’d have to convince them to drop one of their top tenants. You could try right now by submitting a proposal to include Nvidia drivers or various codecs or you could just use one of the Fedora Remixes that already do.

Fedora itself doesn’t really aim for market share, to sell itself as a commercial product and it’s really all about the people that make up the Fedora Project and what they want. Sure Red Hat holds a lot of sway and provide a lot of resources but there hasn’t been a fork and major migration either. So in that way some Fedora contributors that and run RPMFusion is a good enough compromise for the Fedora Project as a whole.

Though who is the source of these problems to begin with? I’d say codec/patent owners and Nvidia itself are the source to the problems caused by their unwillingness to support FOSS.

In particular Nvidia has had criticism for years over this and still haven’t really changed. Even their drivers aren’t great in Linux even if you don’t account for the proprietary part. They have the resources and the ability to change everything without hurting their company, yet they do not. You could argue Linux market share is why but Nvidia makes enough profit to barely scratch the bottom line to just support Linux similarly to AMD. They certainly support slicing vGPUs for hypervisors in Linux, provided you pay for the privilege, so it isn’t like this is a technical challenge but it is obviously a pure business objective for them. You can and I guess do respect it but that’s on you not anyone else.

Different person here but I’ve been using Fedora for many, many years. This discussion comes up all the time and though RPMFusion is a checkbox in the software store GUI people obviously would like to have Nvidia proprietary drivers and proprietary codecs as an easy install like from a button click on install.

The problem is that Fedora has had a FOSS only core value since the beginning and I’m sure a big part of that is to keep Redhat out of legal troubles but it also resonates with a lot of the actual Fedora volunteers (those folks on the SIGs that do all the work).

I don’t think it’ll change anytime soon. Normally the response to this is “then new users will go elsewhere” or “If Linux wants to (something number of users or something market share)”. The thing is the Fedora project doesn’t ‘care’ about that and why should they?

Flatpak doesn’t come with more libraries to interact with other flatpaks. It comes with libraries that the application’s flatpak you’re downloading requires. However, when installing the flatpak those libraries do not get installed if they are already on the system.

So widget-flatpak needs lib-a and lib-b. You’re system already has lib-b that flatpak is using for as another flatpak.

You install widget-flatpak. lib-a gets installed but lib-b does not because you already have it.

I know that. That still misses the point. The point of the law is to clarify that on digital storefronts that you make purchases for licensed digital goods, that you can’t imply to the consumer that they actually own those goods. It doesn’t matter if there is an offline installer. It doesn’t matter if you can ‘keep your installers forever’.

It doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t change the point that people think they own digital goods when they don’t. GOG may have a more consumer friendly system in place but it doesn’t change what has happened with people’s music, movies, shows, games and music in games at these digital storefronts, where people have clicked “Buy X” and later on, it’s no longer in their libraries anymore. This has happened even when the business still exists and is still providing digital goods.

Right, if you download the offline installers, then they can’t stop you from doing whatever you’re going to do with it but you don’t own them. Legally, you can’t sell them, transfer them to someone else, etc.

There are other sections that make the lack of ownership by you clear and that you still have to abide by the publisher’s/developer’s licensing agreements but Section 10 states the situation outright:

Section 10 of the GOG user agreement says:

GOG content is owned by its developers/publishers and licensed by us.

It should because their use agreement makes it clear that you don’t own the games but are licensing them. That’s pretty much why they had to clarify what they said I’d imagine. IMO, proving the point of the law, really.

They didn’t lose their case in front of SCOTUS. SCOTUS just decided not to hear the case so the lower court’s ruling stood in that lower jurisdiction.

The Elder Scrolls 6: Skyrim 2

Step 1: License the technology for very cheap or free to competitors.

Step 2: Include features but its free because ads. Pay small monthly fee for ad-free.

Step 3: Revise CANNBus or replace it with new system. Make it a ‘standard’ so that aftermarket units can provide features but will also serve ads from the original car manufacturer and its DRM. Anyone reverse engineering the system gets sued into the ground for DMCA/Copyright laws because now they are bypassing DRM.

Step 4: Everyone gets ads regardless. Also, you must pay subscription fee to basically use the car. Ads are to “keep costs down” for features and/or car purchasing price.

Step 5: After everyone is mad, give slightly higher cost for subscription for ad-free.

People that complain are told 'It’s just one coffee a month. No big deal."

Step 6: Offer a 5-year (non-transferrable or refundable) plan that you can just roll into the price of the car loan and ‘locks in the price’ and 'You don’t have to worry about it anymore." Maybe toss in lame very small discounts for certain branded charging stations while on the plan. People already sign up for credit cards, give away their personal info. and become loyal customers to gas stations to save single digit percentages off on fuel.

People that buy new every 5 years usually buy the package.

People that try to save money and buy used cars pay the subscriptions.

Step 7: Double monthly price for ad-free tier and market it to “we had to raise prices for those that want a premium experience but kept the ad-based subscription fee cheap. We had to pass the cost somewhere.” This will increase the demand for those 5-year plans.

Overall new car purchase demand increases a bit because of those plans.

Over the course of 15 or 20 years there will be an entire generation of drivers used to ads always being in cars and will just accept subscriptions and ads are just the way it’s always been that way and that it must be that way.

For the EU, it’ll probably be different where the car can perform basic functions without ads but ‘premium features’ for stuff like traction control, auto lane following, etc. will probably still be behind the system I’d imagine.

/usr used to be the user home directory on Unix…well most of them. I think Solaris/SunOS has always been /export/home as I recall.

You need SPF, DKIM, DMARC with a RUA set up to an email that doesn’t bounce. That’s pretty much it. I’ve been running email servers a long time and actually set up email from a new domain/IP a couple of years ago as well.

This is true. If you have DMARC and your RUA set up (with a working email (or one that doesn’t bounce at least)) along with SPF and DKIM, Google and MS will accept your mail. The only time it won’t at that point is if your IP is in the same /24 as a known spammer but so long as the spam stops, you’ll fall off the list. Some of the common spamlists allow you to request your IP be removed by request and I can only recall one list that almost nobody uses that makes you pay for the removal though there may be more I don’t recall.

Here’s how to delete the SBAT policy that the Windows Update applies.

It updates Secure Boot in the BIOS, so you could completely remove Windows but the Secure Boot update would still be in the BIOS and affect the boot loader.

I used to do this on one of my sites that was moderately popular in the 00’s. I had a link hidden via javascript, so a user couldn’t click it (unless they disabled javascript and clicked it), though it was hidden pretty well for that too.

IP hits would be put into a log and my script would add a /24 of that subnet into my firewall. I allowed specific IP ranges for some search engines.

Anyway, it caught a lot of bots. I really just wanted to stop automated attacks and spambots on the web front.

I also had a honeypot port that basically did the same thing. If you sent packets to it, your /24 was added to the firewall for a week or so. I think I just used netcat to add to yet another log and wrote a script to add those /24’s to iptables.

I did it because I had so much bad noise on my logs and spambots, it was pretty crazy.

Lynx is still actively maintained. I use it from time to time when I don’t feel like leaving the command line to look something up or whatever. It works really well still. So long as all you care about is text.

If you like to use reader mode you’ll probably like Lynx.

There are a couple of OEMs like System76 and Starlabs that sell laptops with Linux on them, provide tech support for customers and so on.

And no, installing most distros aren’t hard. You just click the buttons to proceed and fill out the username and password box, select your time zone and select your wi-fi network if you’re using wifi.

You can do manual partitioning but why would you if you don’t know what you’re doing?

Installing software in the GUI is as easy as installing software from the Microsoft Store. Just search or look around and when you see something you want, just click the Install button.

I get the sentiment but defense in depth is a methodology to live by in IT and auto updating via the Internet is not a good risk to take in general. For example, should Crowdstrike just disappear one day, your entire infrastructure shouldn’t be at enormous risk nor should critical services. Even if it’s your anti-virus, a virus or ransomware shouldn’t be able to easily propagate through the enterprise. If it did, then it is doubtful something like Crowdstrike is going to be able to update and suddenly reverse course. If it can then you’re just lucky that the ransomware that made it through didn’t do anything in defense of itself (disconnecting from the network, blocking CIDRs like Crowdsource’s update servers, blocking processes, whatever) and frankly you can still update those clients anyway from your own AV update server which is a product you’d be using if you aren’t allowing updates from the Internet in order to roll them out in dev first, phasing and/or schedules from your own infrastructure.

Crowdstrike is just another lesson in that.

What I usually do is set next boot to BIOS so I have time to get into the console and do whatever.

Also instead of using a browser, I prefer to connect vmware Workstation to vCenter so all the consoles insta open in their own tabs in the workspace.