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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Windows XP. I worked MSN tech support the year Blaster hit. I remember droning through the same repair steps every 15 minutes with caller after caller in a neverending stream that lasted for weeks.

    After a couple of weeks of this, my coworkers and I had a weekend off together and we planned to party it up and blow off some steam with a LAN Party with Freelancer and beers. I had my comp all prepped and ready, it was freshly reinstalled and the game had been tested and benchmarked.

    I came home from a long shift to find the one of the new Blaster variants, which used a new vulnerability that had not been patched until I had been at work that day. It had triggered so many reboots while I was at work it triggered NTFS corruption somehow. I had to reinstall… And I had done nothing to deserve that.

    That virus fucking broke me. I went to work after that weekend and went to the Linux guru in Tier 3, and said “Teach me”.

    I have never looked back with the exception of having to install it for a specific reason, and I’m usually appalled at the state of it. I just had to install Win 11 for a Google Cloud certification exam (DaFuq!?!?!) and with all the issues I encountered it took about 6 hours to get it ready for the exam. Win11 doesn’t come with network drivers anymore? Two NICs and a WiFi card in my machine, and none of them had drivers in the install. Nice to see we’ve gone full cycle back to Windows ME, except the OEM bloatware is a core part of the OS.

    When my wife finally dropped Windows a month ago between the ads and recall, it marked the death of daily users of Windows in our house. I’m raising my kid on Linux.



  • Its a silly default. Might also be to allow people to edit /etc configs with the app since its a basic editor. With enough dummies complaining about “doesn’t work can’t access files in <directory>” the dev may have set that to reduce negative review bloat (seriously look at the flatpak and snap stores and the number of bad reviews due to people not understanding the permissions system).

    I would be turning that off immediately until I knew how trustworthy the app was or not installing it, just saying I can see where that default setting might be coming from.

    Flatpak could use a permissions prompting api, so a prompt could be displayed to the user when they try to access a file outside the permissions scope, but that’s probably a lot of work to get in place. Maybe something we’ll see in flatpak in a few years.

    Until then I think there needs to be some way to point new users to Flatseal and a summary of what these warnings imply and how to grok them.