Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • The main issue you’ll run into is nicher proprietary software being hard to install, but that’s what containers are for. The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoying, but since you’ll be running a VM anyway you can do some network trickery. My work’s antivirus only works on Ubuntu and RHEL, proprietary kernel modules so it’s got to be at least one of those kernels.

    Linux is Linux, nothing’s impossible to solve even with Bazzite’s immutability. Worst comes to worst you make your own images and it’s not that hard, you basically just fork it on GitHub and let the CI do its thing.

    But do you have time to fiddle to make it work and take the risk, or do you want to play it safe? How confident are you with Bazzite’s more advanced topics?







  • The guy gives a ton of “I don’t care about anyone’s use cases except mines” vibes too. Also called Gnome and KDE teletubbies DEs when I mentioned xcomposite being an important feature. Basically considering the widely known issues around multimonitor vsync and mismatched resolutions and all as basically not real issues with Xorg.

    XLibre is 100% a political fork because the guy claims Xorg is deprecated by a big tech conspiracy pushing inferior software onto users. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to continue Xorg’s legacy but come on we don’t have to pretend Xorg is this perfect thing that always works. Xorg has been hated for decades for a reason. This xkcd exists for a reason: https://xkcd.com/963/







  • It depends on your overall energy use but generally that would be negligible when compared to heating and hot water, especially during winter when the furnace runs 24/7.

    In particular, during the winter, all excess energy from the oven is heat the furnace doesn’t have to provide so it’s basically free: you’d use that energy anyway.

    Generally the economy of scale should technically favor the prebaked bread, at least before the store slaps its value added surcharge for it. The store still needs to pay for the energy (but probably gets it cheaper than you), but also needs to pay to maintain a factory, equipment, employees. So you kinda need to factor in the price of your oven too and its wear and tear.

    I just buy the loaf because one thing I know for sure is if I factor in the value of my time, it’s way better and easier to work an hour than spend an hour baking a loaf of bread. The time to bake the bread costs more than if I used that time to work the equivalent time and buy 5 loaves of bread with the money.



  • That kind of makes sense? Aren’t the labs when they’re A/B testing or benchmarking new features before general release and toggle random people’s settings doing so? I vaguely recall some drama around that.

    If I turn off telemetry I want those off too, it makes sense they’re linked. It you want a new feature there’s always nightly+about:config, but I don’t want it downloading random config toggles especially if it’s not reporting back that it broke my stuff. The code should be what I installed and compiled by my distro, not some random lab blob downloaded off their servers at runtime.




  • It’s derived by both a key from the TEE and the PIN/password.

    The reason for that is so you need both the user’s correct password, and the TEE to agree to hand out the key, which it may refuse to do if there’s been too many attempts. When you factory reset it just generates a new key, instantly making all the previous data permanently inaccessible. The TEE will also wipe the key if you unlock the bootloader or try to break in the wrong way.

    It’s still only roadblocks though, extract the key from the TEE and you have unlimited attempts on what are usually weak 4-6 digit PINs. It’s not a lot of tries. Then you better hope you had a good password.


  • Biometrics are worst than a pin in a situation where your phone us hooked up to Cellebrite, because most likely they can just take your fingerprints, or make you press the sensor by force. Or even worse with facial recognition, because they can just wave the phone in front of you to unlock it.

    It’s generally not super good otherwise either, at least not as a reliable way to derive an encryption key while being tolerant enough to damaged skin and positioning and all.

    Biometrics are a good compromise for daily convenience: most people care about if they lose their phones or it gets stolen, and a thief will just factory reset it and flip it especially of the full qwerty keyboard pops up. Biometrics are still usually backed by a PIN or password, so biometrics makes it bearable to use a strong password since you only need to enter it once every couple days. And that password is the encryption key, so in BFU state you’re safe.