Hard disagree - the point is a decade ago there wasn’t enough Linux market share for bad actors to target Linux. Proton is a compatibility layer, which while technically being a sandbox, it isn’t designed around security the way a browser sandbox is. It would not be hard for a virus embedded in a made-for-windows program to identify that it’s actually a proton sandbox, then deploy a Linux-specific payload (assuming the malware designer gave it some forethought for that situation). Heck - there’s plenty of viruses that do their work in scripting languages that don’t care what OS you’re running on.

It’s a lowest common denominator kinda issue, methinks. Gnome is chasing it’s own tail trying to create a single UI that will please everyone, plus have it simple to use and both similar enough yet distinct enough to/from Windows/Mac experiences. It’s a noble enough goal - but honestly strikes me as well impossible.

KDE gives you a barely updated Win95 era desktop and then becomes a tinkerer’s paradise - whenever there was two or more options, they focused on making each available, but neither becomes the default.

Honestly - even if there were no other practical benefit to the code base - having a new language to recode everything in is healthy for programmers - it gets newer engineers excited.

I’ve been advocating for Linux for decades. People who have historically just dismissed me have been trying and many have converted.

Also (credit where it’s due) behind the scenes Valve has been greasing the wheels on a transition to Linux gaming … which has quite often been the biggest fiction point in the past.

I’vs seen several content creators outside the traditional Linux bubble try Linux, notably including PewDiePie.

Copilot has shaken many small businesses out of complacency, often into modern self-hosted turn-key Linux solutions.

I have friends on Windows 10 who tell me they will not move to 11 - they’re hoping Microsoft folds, but they’re beginning to build a Linux-shaped parachute.

Yes, I know - but my concern is eventual capture, like Microsoft has done to GitHub or how IBM is ‘partially closing’ RHEL’s source code. My point is that off were all in one basket (Bazzite) it’s easier to be taken over and reigned in. Bazzite is fine, but I hope is not the only distro all the influx of Windows users settle on. There’s a wealth of great projects - Garuda for example is a great gaming Linux distro.

I’m glad Bazzite is what it is, but I’m hoping some of y’all get interested in other distros in the next few years. There’s several great options out there (and I don’t want to say … have everyone wind up on Ubuntu flavors and be having the same conversation about corporate overreach in a decade with Canonical as the new Microsoft)

I think we’re broadly in agreement here, and I think both our statements are important to the Linux discussion. Moreover, we’re not speaking privately - I wish I could direct recent converts from Windows to this thread as a whole, as you offer good advice - be wary of your sources & learning how to inspect gifts you’re offered is excellent advice.

This is absolutely a shortcoming of Arch - but I don’t see it getting fixed soon. Your change is practical, and could reduce the attack surface for bad actors, but it also introduces gatekeeping and would slow down time from code change to deployment. The open community and blazing fast end-to-end turnaround are both Arch key features (in my opinion).

If you prefer more vetted code, there’s other great distros (Debian leaps to mind).

But honestly - yes, some people got hurt - but it was addressed in a day. That’s not a bad turnaround ~ I’ve certainly seen that damage wrought by Windows- and iOS-based malware run at least that long.

This can be seen as the system working as intended. Please don’t run Arch on mission critical systems. There’s other distros for that. While this vulnerability is Arch-specific, this OS is often a canary for others. But if you can tolerate being on the frontier, Arch is very well documented and is great for learning - and yes it has some risk.

For you and me, that’s fine, but for little johnny first time, it’s adding friction and new points of failure that push the whole idea further away from their comfort zone.

It could be argued that Microsoft knows this and is deliberately weaponizing peoples insecurities to keep them in line.

Also, “Been available since 2023” means Microsoft gave distros 2-3 years to implement the new signing keys. Yet they’ll give themselves decades between signing and updating their own root certificates.

Example: on my work machine, “Microsoft RSA Root Certificate Authority 2017” is valid from 2019 to 2042. It’s valid for 25 years, but it took Microsoft 2 whole years to deploy the certificate within it’s own structure, specifically to get all the relevant sign-offs needed to issue the cert.

At the time, Microsoft and Sony were playing this “more graphics = more better” game and Nintendo decided it couldn’t compete on that front. You can see a bit of the “compete on anything but graphics” mentality in the Wii and Wii U, then they took what worked and refined it into the Switch and Switch 2.

Not really. Browsers were one of the first pieces of software to do sandboxing, but now virtually everything uses sandboxing for organization and security - Android apps have a permissions manifest so they can be sandboxed. Amazon cloud servers are mostly Kubernetes clusters, which is just sandboxed virtual machines. ChromeOS already is a OS/browser hybrid with native sandboxing (and the short lived Firefox OS. Running a 32 bit app in a 64 bit environment requires a compatibility layer, which is a sandbox. If browser technology has already been pushed through the OS stack, why not complete the loop.

The main use case for hardware acceleration is progressive web apps, which is literally a plan as old as 2006 to make browsers able to securely run signed code natively (as an alternative to using extensions like ActiveX, Java, Shockwave, etc, all of which were notoriously insecure).

So honestly, I don’t think it’s a dumb idea at all. It would honestly be kinda cool if I could go to blizzard.com and just launch a game full screen, securely with a simple approval rather than downloading and running a separate launcher app. (Assuming the implementation was otherwise sane; I know the current environment of enshittification could torpedo the idea entirely)

Unless they track Steam Deck specific fingerprints the OS may be classified as Arch, but either way: yes, every Steam Deck counts as a Linux system out of the box.

Congratulations!

The UI was overhauled in the 3.0 update on March. The new documentation says changing brush size is fairly easy: https://testing.docs.gimp.org/3.0/tr/gimp-using-variable-size-brush.html

All brushes have a variable size that can be changed.

You can change the brush size in several ways:

• By using the default shortcut keys for changing a tool’s size:

  • Decrease size by 1: [

  • Increase size by 1: ]

  • Decrease size by 10: {

  • Increase size by 10: }

• By using the default mouse scrollwheel actions for changing a tool’s size:

  • Decrease size by 1: Ctrl+Alt+Scrollwheel Down

  • Increase size by 1: Ctrl+Alt+Scrollwheel Up

I get where you’re coming from, but maybe you haven’t heard the news! GIMP 3.0 just got released in March including an overhaul of the UI. While I haven’t checked it out myself, reviewers are saying it’s now really good.

(currently scrolling from the throne) Fixed that for you

I saw a video recently where a Steam Deck was repurposed as a robotics controller and monitor unit for prototypes. Having an off-the-shelf highly customizations controller for $350 is a steal for this industry, but they’re not using it for games.

(Video for reference: https://youtu.be/1KEtxTQUzxY)