Chobbes @ Chobbes @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Could be, but I don’t know anything about it! Of course there are distributions based on Arch (like SteamOS) and Gentoo (like ChromeOS) that can be perfectly usable for beginners to the Linux world. In general, though, I’d probably recommend using something common, and not using a rolling release distro as a beginner.

Realistically, though, the distro probably doesn’t matter too much for a first install, as long as you pick one where you get a reasonably well featured desktop environment out of the box. Beyond that the biggest difference between most distros is the package repository and package manager… You’ll probably pick up pretty quickly that you need to use dnf or yum or whatever on something like Fedora vs the apt suite on something like mint. It’s also kind of a time honoured tradition to do some distro hopping when dipping your toes in Linux, which I think is a good idea because you’ll learn about some of the different things that are available :). It’s not even too big of a deal if you preserve your home partition between installs (have a backup if you mess this up, though).

I’ve been in Unix land pretty much my whole life and I’ve been on Gentoo and NixOS for a long time so I’m not totally up to date on the beginner friendly distros either haha. Frankly, as long as you pick something with a short and simple install process (which most distros have) you’ll be fine in my opinion.

You don’t need to be a programmer to use Linux. I’d probably recommend you go with something like mint. Avoid things like Arch or Gentoo or NixOS for now as they involve a lot more manual configuration and it’s probably best to understand the landscape of things first.

This is why I really hope we prioritize public transit as much as possible. Cars are insanely expensive, and if we spent a fraction of that money on public transit it could be awesome. I don’t want people like you to end up in a situation where your car breaks down and you can’t get around and can’t afford to fix it / get a new one. That’s really scary :(. Having good public transit infrastructure is an important social safety net.

Depends how Microsoft handles education licenses. I think historically they’ve been pretty good about giving university students licenses for free, and if they consider the education sector important enough (which they probably should) I am certain they could provide generous terms. If the schools don’t have to pay for the licenses I’m not sure they would bother switching off of windows at least. It will be interesting to see how the ChromeOS dominance in education plays out in the future, though!

Yeah, I use Linux full time and have always used unixy operating systems and have never really used windows. So, like, sure, I think a lot of people could switch to Linux and be perfectly happy… but I’m under no delusions that people will and wouldn’t just pay a little more for a windows license instead. There’s probably a good chunk of people (particularly here) who would be more on the edge and willing to just drop the windows in this situation… but I doubt the average computer user is dying to try Gentoo in the event that Microsoft charges a subscription fee, haha.

Most people would probably end up paying the subscription rather than relearning everything they already know. It may have long term impacts, but, like... I don't think this would make the average person switch to Linux. If any migration happens I'd expect more people to switch to Macs than Linux over time because that's more of a mainstream option.

That said there's lots of interesting stuff going on in the Linux world right now, and it's slowly but surely becoming a more interesting option for a lot of people. Valve's work on Proton / Linux in general is pretty huge. I still think you'd need a huge marketing push to convince the average person (which people on Lemmy are not) to install Linux themselves, or prefer buying a laptop with Linux pre-installed, though. It could happen eventually, and has happened in special cases (like the Steam Deck)... But short term I think most people are just going to pay a yearly subscription rather than upend their entire computing life.

In my experience self hosting email it has pretty much been “set it and forget it”. I feel like there’s a lot of fud from people with misconfigured email servers (because there is a lot that can go wrong on setup). In every case I’ve seen where people are complaining about email deliverability I’ve found that they haven’t configured DKIM or rDNS properly. That doesn’t mean there can’t be issues, and I am sure it is technically possible to get sent to oblivion, but I feel like this issue might be somewhat overblown.

Smart TVs are god awful, and I hate the OS on our LG TV. That said there is finally a Jellyfin app on WebOS so it has that going for it now… I’m too cheap to buy a separate box for Jellyfin and stuff for the TV, so I guess it’s good enough… but in general I wish the TV OS got out of the way a little more.

Kiwix is great and Wikipedia is surprisingly small :).

The human genome one was the one that stood out to me. I’d be curious to see a source from the time if you’ve got one!

Honestly, I'm still not sure I would recommend Arch to those people. I think most of those people would be better off on something like Gentoo or NixOS (depending on the class of weirdo we're talking about). Arch in my experience is just more painful than it needs to be. Like, honest to god, there is no reason the user should have to fiddle with the keyring when updating... Figure it out.

NixOS is great and you'd probably see benefits from using it even if your usage is fairly simple to be honest (and potentially some challenges as well, haha). If nothing else easy rollbacks are a win on the rare occasion when a system update borks something. That said, there is a learning curve, and if what you currently have is working for you and you don't want to switch... Then you don't have to switch :).

Yeah, something arch based is a really weird recommendation for beginners...

Pulseaudio was also replaced relatively quickly by pipewire.

I really wouldn't say that... PulseAudio has been around since like 2004, and PipeWire's initial release was in 2017 (13 years later). I don't think PulseAudio was incorporated into most distros by default until like 2007 or so, but that's still 10 years before PipeWire was even released. PipeWire is only recently becoming the default in popular distros. We've had to deal with Pulse for a long time.

One thing that's kind of funny to me about this is the 1940s, which has a lot of the ones from modern times...

You were probably taught at some point that we'd never be able to map out the entire human genome due to its complexity. However, in 2003, we documented the first 92%, and in 2022 we documented the remaining 8%.

I could be wrong (and I'd be super interested to hear if this was the case), but... Were we teaching kids about the human genome before we even knew the structure of DNA and before we knew that DNA carried genetic information? I know we knew DNA existed, and it was probably hypothesized that it could play a roll in genetics before the Hershey-Chase experiments in 1952, but I'm not sure whether most schools would talk much about anything resembling the human genome in the 1940s? What would have been in the curriculum then? It's actually kind of wild how much the scientific landscape has changed since then.

I highly doubt that any commercial company is going out of their way to store encrypted conversations and working on quantum computing to break those conversations in order to train AI. There is no way that this is a cost effective way to train AI, and there is no way that this will be more legal or considered more ethical than scraping public facing websites (even if those websites request not to be scraped).

That said, of course "capture now, decrypt later" attacks are a concern! I would probably bet against companies planning to do that for the purpose of training AI, but I would not bet against governments doing that for other reasons :). This is why post-quantum cryptography is being rolled out now (albeit slowly, it's still rare). As an example OpenSSH defaults to using post-quantum algorithms for key exchange ever since the 9.0 release. It uses a mix of the NTRU Prime + X25519 ECC algorithm for key exchange, so it is guaranteed to not be weaker than normal ECC cryptography, even if the NTRU Prime lattice cryptography proves to be horribly broken. Once the key is exchanged the symmetric cipher used for the connection is also assumed to be quantum resistant. If quantum computing becomes a serious concern you will have to retire your old RSA / ECC SSH keys, but they are only used for authentication at the moment (so it doesn't matter if this cryptography is broken in the future), not for encrypting any of the "real" content between devices --- all of that is likely quantum resistant as of more than a year ago. Most of what you do on the internet, however, is still vulnerable and could be captured to be decrypted later... But I suspect we will slowly see things move over to post quantum cryptography transparently over the years.

It is not known when or even if we will have quantum computers capable of breaking RSA at common key sizes. There are concerns about whether it will ever be viable, and if it is who knows what the cost to run it will be (it may only be viable for targeted attacks, and not decrypting all internet traffic ever... If it's expensive and takes hours or days to break a single key it might not even be super effective for decrypting old messages in protocols where keys are renegotiated frequently, like with Signal). I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we never have quantum computers effective at this (though I'd probably bet for it to happen rather than against it), and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there already is one somewhere kept secret (though I'd probably bet against this being effective for decrypting an entire population's messages?). I don't actually have much insight over the feasibility of large scale quantum computers, though, so take that with a grain of salt. At any rate... You probably don't have to worry too much about it as a looming threat right now, there are likely far easier ways to attack you now.

The guarantees in cryptography are super weird. It's kind of odd, but in all of the cryptographic algorithms we use today... We don't actually know how hard the problems are? Symmetric ciphers are generally thought to be more secure than public key cryptography, but it's a bit easier to see how hard public key cryptography is to break (at least in my opinion). With RSA for instance you know that if you can factor large numbers efficiently you can break apart the keys, but with AES we kind of just hope we mixed things up good enough that it's hard to reverse without the key. But what's kind of funny is that we just think that factoring large numbers is hard, but we don't even know if it's an NP-complete problem --- it's probably an easier problem, and even if P≠NP it could be the case that there's an efficient polynomial-time algorithm to factor large numbers. It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that there is just some math waiting to be discovered that would break these algorithms on a classical computer, and there's a non-zero chance that it is already known and kept secret (though this is probably unlikely).

For sure! There's definitely going to be problems with digital radio when it's used to cram more channels on the same frequency band or whatever. But the particular implementation of broadcast digital radio aside, if we're just talking modulation, I would bet on digital modes being able to transmit further more reliably than any analog FM signal.

I know that some of the digital modes like FT8 that hams use can be super effective at making long distance contacts in low noise environments. Of course these are text modes, and not used for voice. I'm not sure whether or not something like FT8 will do better than regular CW in the same conditions, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it could... Being able to do error correction for signals would likely make a huge difference in noisy environments.

I'm not sure I'd consider it a losing battle at all. It's certainly possible for there to be weaknesses in modern day cryptography, but in general it has stood up remarkably well over quite a long period of time so far. The possibility of quantum computers makes things like RSA and ECC a little dicey in the long term, but we're already working on post-quantum cryptography and are starting to deploy it. Assuming that those algorithms hold up there's a good chance that if quantum computing is ever practical we will be ready for it. There's a good chance that you are even using post-quantum cryptography now in certain situations (e.g., recent versions of SSH uses post-quantum cryptography for key exchange).

Most people do not decide what cryptography they are using. I'm not really worried that in 50 years I'll be using something dated for most stuff as long as I'm using modern software. The most likely case where this could matter is for something like SSH or PGP where you are manually managing your own keys... When RSA and ECC keys are no longer considered secure that will be pretty big news, and you'll probably hear about it, but there's also a good chance that the software will be updated and provide warnings that you should generate new keys too?

As far as I know, this is not strictly true either. I believe most browsers currently block mixed active content like JavaScript or iframes, but will happily load images and such over HTTP (although I would not be surprised if this is changing).

Yeah. There’s an attack that roughly halves the effectiveness of AES, but symmetric encryption is thought to be safe overall. If it’s not we’re super fucked.

Fair enough! I always get the ECC and lattice stuff mixed up too. ECC isn’t really all that different from RSA. The key sizes can be smaller for the same strength and it’s more efficient, though. This mostly benefits servers that will be handling a lot of encrypted connections AFAIK.