lotharcable

The current "Linux distro desktop" approach is just one of those bad ideas that won't go away.

Desktops work best as appliances.

If you want to do development work or want "Unix workstation" experiences and other things on a desktop then containerization can provide levels of flexibility and power that is unattainable on a traditional Linux distribution.

This sort of Gnome OS and KDE Linux OS approach is one of the better ideas to come along in a long time.

Some of that was driven by people wanting hibernation to be reliable.

The other part was that it kinda matched the money you were spending on the machine.

The guy with 128MB of ram could likely afford to spend the extra disk space on a swap partition then the guy stuck with just 32MB.

In the distant past there was plenty of times I tried to fix dying web servers by logging in and restarting a rogue process or cleaning up a memory leak... only to have my SSH session and shell sessions being repeatedly killed by OOMs.

Not as big of a problem as it used to be. Both because OOM killer has gotten better and also web servers are such a commodity that remotely cycling them isn't going to cause a outage and is the quickest and cleanest way to get them back into production.

It just meant that you spent too much on servers. Either that or they could of been doing more.

Not a big deal. Being efficient isn't really all it is cracked up to be. Sometimes having a big server that sits mostly idle is a good trade off for what you want to accomplish.

There are lots of very good reasons why running small root partitions on Linux desktops is a very bad idea.

The smart money is on a single large partition for home and root and everything else. This way you get 100% disk availability with zero extra effort and you get maximum performance. No need to shuffle disk space around with resizing partitions or thing volumes or anything like that.

Unless you have some sort of special use case were root partition can't be shared with root then on most desktop setups having a single large partition is the most straightforward way to do things.

Hibernation isn't really something really useful anymore. If people really really want it then I don't see why they shouldn't get it... but I really don't see the point.

XWayland is actively developed.

XFree86, which is the "standalone DDX" you see on X11 desktops, is being actively maintained.

Nowhere (and everywhere).

It is my understanding that XACE doesn't actually provide any security features itself. It just provides the "hooks" to implement security extensions. Like LSM feature in Linux kernel. You have to install a additional X11 extension to do something useful with it.

So the most common X11 security extension is going to be xcsecurity which enables the SECURITY extension. It allows a course permission model were applications can be designated as "Trusted" or "Untrusted". That is going to show up in many Linux distributions.

However all applications default to "trusted" because if they are untrusted they tend to cause lots of other annoying problems and crashes a lot of apps, apparently.

In practice the only place it shows up is if you are using "ssh -X". That uses the security extension by default. Which is why there is also a "ssh -Y" that disables it for applications that it breaks.

This sort of thing is why to fix X11 security you have to give up backwards compatibility and create a new X version.

Oh, wait, that is what the X developers did with Wayland.

probably because there is a ton of open source projects out there with disabled tests in their training data.

Lobbyists turning into government regulator is a lot more common then people realize. It is normal regardless of what party occupies the Whitehouse.

This is one of those things were most people don't realize this goes on because it is rarely reported on. Also who is involved in running administrative agencies is largely irrelevant and very boring subject. It isn't like you get to vote for any of them.

Loabyist-as-head-regulator situation is a reflection of how the administrative state actually works and the role that large public corporations play in that administration.

The 'ELI5' explanation is...

Modern politicians are career politicians. Meaning most of them they start off by getting their law degrees and then immediately pursue a political career using whatever connections they have. This means that they have no real experience of the world outside of law and internal bureaucracy of their parties and governments.

This means they are extremely unqualified at regulating any sort of industry. They just don't know anything about 'the real world'. They know nothing about how to make cars, smelt steel, drill for oil or designing light switches.

It is a similar situation for career administrators in the 400+ administrative agencies in the Federal Government. They get degrees in public administrator or in fields related to their regulatory function. Many of the top administrators will have masters and PHDs. But as anybody with experience in the "private sector" there is a very significant gap between what you can learn in a University setting versus what gets applied in actual practice.

So to fill the gap they require the participation of the major corporations in these industries. They help draft legislation, they have representatives in regulatory committees, the provide the information necessary for economic analysis, and so on and so forth.

This, after 80 years of USA history of the modern administrative state, even involves having corporate representatives participate in party politics, sometimes even becoming politicians, and having positions in the agencies that regulate them.

The term for this is "regulatory capture".

There is a trade off for having highly regulated industries. The main one is that by accepting control of the government the government takes on the responsibility of making sure these corporations remain profitable.

The cost of regulatory overhead is very significant and forms a massive barrier of entry for new businesses. So the established corporations are likely the only corporations that are going to exist for some major industries. Once you lose them they are gone forever.

So the more regulation you have the more protective the government needs to be of these businesses and their profits.

Fixing X11's security would of broken window positioning as well. Since that is a security issue.

The deal here is that the only way to fix X11's security issues is by breaking all those types of workflows and forcing application rewrites to implement them in authenticated ways.

So if you are going have to go and break all that stuff, why not fix a crapload of other problems while you are at it?

Calling Wayland "X13" may have avoided a lot of misunderstandings, but it probably would of caused others.

Yes it was bit uncharitable, but I couldn't resist based on the way he phrased it. It was just a joke.

"Preventing" the vulnerability would indeed require going back to 1994. Since it is a vulnerability that has existed in every display server released since then.