Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

  • 0 Posts
  • 122 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • tal@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Ending support for Windows 10 could send 240 million computers to the landfill. Why not install Linux on them?
    261·
    11 months ago

    It depends on the definition of “support ended”. Like, there are various forms of extended support that you can pay for for versions of Windows, and some companies do.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#Support_lifecycle

    Support for the original release of Windows XP (without a service pack) ended on August 30, 2005.[4] Both Windows XP Service Pack 1 and 1a were retired on October 10, 2006,[4] and both Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 reached their end of support on July 13, 2010, about 24 months after the launch of Windows XP Service Pack 3.[4] The company stopped general licensing of Windows XP to OEMs and terminated retail sales of the operating system on June 30, 2008, 17 months after the release of Windows Vista.[114] However, an exception was announced on April 3, 2008, for OEMs producing what it defined as “ultra low-cost personal computers”, particularly netbooks, until one year after the availability of Windows 7 on October 22, 2009. Analysts felt that the move was primarily intended to compete against Linux-based netbooks, although Microsoft’s Kevin Hutz stated that the decision was due to apparent market demand for low-end computers with Windows.[115]

    So for those, we’re all definitely a decade past the end of normal support. However, they have their extended support packages that can be purchased, and we aren’t a decade past the end of those…but most users probably aren’t actually getting those:

    On April 14, 2009, Windows XP exited mainstream support and entered the extended support phase; Microsoft continued to provide security updates every month for Windows XP, however, free technical support, warranty claims, and design changes were no longer being offered. Extended support ended on April 8, 2014, over 12 years after the release of Windows XP; normally Microsoft products have a support life cycle of only 10 years.[118] Beyond the final security updates released on April 8, no more security patches or support information are provided for XP free-of-charge; “critical patches” will still be created, and made available only to customers subscribing to a paid “Custom Support” plan.[119] As it is a Windows component, all versions of Internet Explorer for Windows XP also became unsupported.[120]

    In January 2014, it was estimated that more than 95% of the 3 million automated teller machines in the world were still running Windows XP (which largely replaced IBM’s OS/2 as the predominant operating system on ATMs); ATMs have an average lifecycle of between seven and ten years, but some have had lifecycles as long as 15. Plans were being made by several ATM vendors and their customers to migrate to Windows 7-based systems over the course of 2014, while vendors have also considered the possibility of using Linux-based platforms in the future to give them more flexibility for support lifecycles, and the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) has since endorsed Windows 10 as a further replacement.[121] However, ATMs typically run the embedded variant of Windows XP, which was supported through January 2016.[122] As of May 2017, around 60% of the 220,000 ATMs in India still run Windows XP.[123]

    Furthermore, at least 49% of all computers in China still ran XP at the beginning of 2014. These holdouts were influenced by several factors; prices of genuine copies of later versions of Windows in the country are high, while Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences warned that Windows 8 could allegedly expose users to surveillance by the United States government,[124] and the Chinese government banned the purchase of Windows 8 products for government use in May 2014 in protest of Microsoft’s inability to provide “guaranteed” support.[125] The government also had concerns that the impending end of support could affect their anti-piracy initiatives with Microsoft, as users would simply pirate newer versions rather than purchasing them legally. As such, government officials formally requested that Microsoft extend the support period for XP for these reasons. While Microsoft did not comply with their requests, a number of major Chinese software developers, such as Lenovo, Kingsoft and Tencent, will provide free support and resources for Chinese users migrating from XP.[126] Several governments, in particular those of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, elected to negotiate “Custom Support” plans with Microsoft for their continued, internal use of Windows XP; the British government’s deal lasted for a year, and also covered support for Office 2003 (which reached end-of-life the same day) and cost £5.5 million.[127]

    For the typical, individual end user, one probably wants to have been off Windows XP by 2008.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•A self-hosted wiki that can integrate with a fediverse instance
    12·
    1 year ago

    Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

    That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

    I don’t know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

    EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.ml•There is still no Linux app store
    2·
    1 year ago

    Well, whoever does that for closed-source software is going to basically have to do what they have done. Probably some kind of cross-distro fixed binary target, client software to do updates, probably some level of DRM functionality like steamlib integration.

    If it’s not Steam, it’s gonna be something that has a lot of the same characteristics.

    Personally, I kind of wish that there was better sandboxing for apps from Steam (think what the mobile crowd has) since I’d rather not trust each one with the ability to muck up my system, but given how many improvements Valve’s driven so far, I don’t feel like I can complain at them for that. A lot of the software they sell is actually designed for Windows, which isn’t sandboxed, and given the fact that not all the infrastructure is in place (like, you’d need Wayland, I dunno how much I’d trust 3d drivers to be hardened, you maybe have to do firejail-style restrictions on filesystem and network access, and I have no idea how hardened WINE is), it’d still take real work.

    Their use of per-app WINE prefixes helps keep apps that play nicely from messing each other up, but it isn’t gonna keep a malicious mod on Steam Workshop or something from compromising your system.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Dotfiles matter! Please stop dumping files in users’ $HOME directories.
    527·
    1 year ago

    They may not want their configuration stored in $HOME, for example:

    they’re on a machine that isn’t under their physical control and ~/.config is mounted over the network from their personal machine;

    That sounds like it’s a bad way to handle configuration, since among many other problems, it won’t work with the many programs that do have dotfiles in home directory, but even if that happened, you could just symlink it.

    they prefer to version control their configuration files using git, with a configuration directory managed over different branches;

    I do that. I symlink that config into a git-controlled directory. If OP plans to put his entire ~/.config in git, he is doing things wrong, because some of that needs to be machine-local.

    the user simply wants to have a clean and consistent $HOME directory and filesystem

    If whatever program you are using to view your home directory cannot hide those files, it is broken, as it does not work with a whole lot of existing software.

    less secure,

    If your home directory is “not secure”, you’re probably in trouble already.

    Like, there are reasons you may not want to put dotfiles in a homedir, but none of the arguments in the article are them.

    EDIT: I will ask developers to stop dumping directories and files that don’t start with a dot in people’s home directories, though. I gave up over twenty years ago and put my actual stuff under ~/m just to keep it from being polluted with all the other things that dump non-dotfiles/-dotdirs in a home directory. Looking at my current system, I have:

    • A number of directories containing video game saves and configuration. I am pretty sure that these are mostly bad Windows ports or possibly Windows programs under WINE that just dump stuff into a user’s home directory there (not even good on Windows). Some are Windows Steam games.

    • WINE apparently has decided that it’s a good idea to default to sticking the Windows home directory and all of its directories in there.

    • Apparently some webcam software that I used at one point.

    • A few logfiles