Nothing much, just getting far fewer client emails for some reason…

Well, we got to see roughly something play out with the xz thing. In which case only redhat were going to be impacted because they were the only ones to patch ssh that way.

Most examples I can think of only end of affecting one slice or another of the Linux ecosystem. So a Linux based heterogenous market would likely be more diverse than this.

Of course, this was a relative nothing burger for companies that used windows but not crowdstrike. Including my own company. Well except a whole lot fewer emails from clients today compared to typical Fridays…

I’ve not used crowdstrike, but looks like a part of the pitch is “cloud managed”, which often implies that the vendor takes care of everything, including updates. Particularly since they market it as a security solution, they weld likely emphasize that they can update rapidly enough to keep up with security attacks that move very quickly because they don’t care about “risk”.

All I’ve noticed is that a lot of internet related things in my work are much faster today.

The schadenfreude could only be sweeter if my company used CrowdStrike on all the Windows systems. Then I really would have had a very peaceful focused day.

Yeah, time to switch from CrowdStrike to SolarWinds…

Related, I predict Windows on ARM will be a massive failure, again.

Windows is Windows because a critical mass of their market is terrified of being vaguely incompatible with any software they use today. Wine will never give them enough confidence just like ARM emulation of x86 will never give them confidence.

Extra bizarre, from what I’ve seen the Windows devices vendors are treating the ARM variants as a premium model and charging more for them, despite having no real compelling story for the customers. You can either have an x86 offering that’s from all appearances just as overall capable and absolutely able to run your software today, on an ARM offering that is more expensive and maybe a bit less compatible, with maybe better battery life (either sincerely or at least a belief).

Mac is able to force the issue because the hardware and software all wanted to make ARM happen and forced it, but with Windows on ARM, only Qualcomm really cares, Microsoft and all the device vendors would prefer to hedge their bets, which in this case tie goes to the incumbent.

Define “the OS package manager”. If the distro comes with flatpack and dnf equally, and both are invoked by the generic “get updates” tooling, then both could count as “the” update manager. They both check all apps for updates.

Odd to advocate for docker containers, they always have the app provider also on the hook for all dependencies because they always are inherently bundled. If a library has a critical bug fix, then your docker like containers will be stuck without the fix until the app provider gets around to fixing it, and app providers are highly unreliable on docker hub. Besides, update discipline among docker/podman users is generally atrocious, and given the relatively tedious nature of following updates with that ecosystem, I am not surprised. Even best case, docker style uses more disk space and more memory than any other option, apart from VM.

With respect to never having to worry about bundled dependencies with rpm/deb, third party packages bundle or statically link all the time. If they don’t, then they sometimes overwrite the OS provided dependency with an incompatible one that breaks OS packages, if the dependency is obscure enough for them not to notice other usage.

Depends on if you stick to distro provided dependencies, then you are generally good, unless a third party repo decided to supersede that dependency.

I have spent a long time carefully packaging as a third party repository and it’s generally doable. Just sometimes another repository isn’t as careful and blows away the distribution provided libraries.

You don’t need the distro to package your sodtware through their package management systems though. Apt and dnf repositories are extensible, anyone can publish. If you go to copr or ppa you can have a little extra help too, without distro maintainers.

The headache comes up when multiple third party repositories start conflicting with each other when you add enough of them, despite they’re best efforts. This scenario starts needing flatpack, which can, for example concurrently provide multiple distinct library versions installed that traditionally would conflict with each other. This doesn’t mean application has to bundle the dependency, that dependency can still be external to the package and independently updated, it just means conflicts can be gracefully handled.

Flatpack can be centrally managed, it’s just like a parallel distribution scheme, where apps have dependencies and are centrally updated. If a flatpack is made reasonably, then it gets library updates independent of the app developer doing it.

“App image” and " install from tarball" violate those principles, but not snap or flatpack.

And at least in some distributions, they do exactly that, a number of aliases for the same interface. And you can add your own.

Per https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/, it’s been the case since 2004, so for about 19 and a half years…

Well, tar.zstd is starting to be the thing now.

You don’t need the z, it auto detects the compression

I also speak English, and now I’m extra exiled and will have to go to some country that I don’t speak the language.

I was not familiar and I’m American. Guess they’ll have to exile me somewhere…

Yep, and I see evidence of that over complication in some ‘getting started’ questions where people are asking about really convoluted design points and then people reinforcing that by doubling down or sometimes mentioning other weird exotic stuff, when they might be served by a checkbox in a ‘dumbed down’ self-hosting distribution on a single server, or maybe installing a package and just having it run, or maybe having to run a podman or docker command for some. But if they are struggling with complicated networking and scaling across a set of systems, then they are going way beyond what makes sense for a self host scenario.

Based on what I’ve seen, I’d also say a homelab is often needlessly complex compared to what I’d consider a sane approach to self hosting. You’ll throw all sorts of complexity to imitate the complexity of things you are asked to do professionally, that are either actually bad, but have hype/marketing, or may bring value, but only at scales beyond a household’s hosting needs and far simpler setups will suffice that are nearly 0 touch day to day.

While that is technically true, Microsoft didn’t really make any effort to correct the misunderstanding, despite it being a widely reported story in tech.

I suspect they had a legitimate faction that was going to say “rolling release” and so they let it go.

For the “don’t care” computer user? absolutely. Given that the key doesn’t exist at all by default, means it’s not discoverable even for someone that might think to randomly peruse the registry hierarchy. Even if you know it, it’s a typically tedious registry path. Based on Microsoft’s track record, the fact you know the registry key today doesn’t mean that key won’t change behaviors or move somewhere else randomly, or start having to be paired with some other registry key.

Contrast with Plasma, where the same capability is possible, and I just right clicked the button to check out settings and could easily figure out without help or internet search how to enable/disable internet results in the search. Further when I enabled it, the non-internet search stayed blazing fast. Then disabled it again because, well, why would I want that. I did however add browser tab search since I bothered to look because that is handy, just removed history and web search.