Technus

joined 2 years ago
[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 41 points 2 days ago

I'm not saying there's no people trying it, or that the actual number is negligible. I'm just saying I highly fucking doubt that 780,000 people have actually installed Zorin OS in the last month.

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 311 points 2 days ago (13 children)

That "780,000 Windows users" number is just made up for the title as clickbait.

That number is never mentioned in the original blog post.

All they said is they have a million downloads and "over 78% of these downloads came from Windows". At no fucking point did they imply that means 780k unique users. There's no reason to assume that everyone who downloaded the ISO actually went on to install it.

They also want $48 for their Pro version which comes with a "professional-grade creative suite" consisting of... GIMP, Blender, Inkscape, Kdenlive, and... Audacity (?), going off the screenshots they show:

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They're shamelessly reselling free software as some sort of comprehensive package, and it's not even their own distro. They're just piggybacking on Ubuntu.

And their premium support only covers... installation?

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But hey, they support this edition with updates until 2029!

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Of course, pay no attention to the coincidence that the Ubuntu LTS version it's based on also hits end-of-life around then:

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So I'm not really sure what you're actually getting out of this purchase besides some extra themes and some really formulaic desktop wallpapers, and a couple proprietary apps. They say they "contribute to upstream Open Source projects" but offer zero evidence; their site doesn't even have any Github/Gitlab links.

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago

See the reply thread just above this: https://lemmy.zip/comment/22938983

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 days ago

Exactly, it's worse all around.

And it's not like it's hard to use a different configuration; the threshold and total number of keys are just parameters of the algorithm.

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 103 points 4 days ago (11 children)

Assuming they were using threshold cryptography, they could have easily configured some redundancy into the system, e.g. by requiring 3 out of 5 people to decrypt it instead of 3 of 3.

It's easy to blame the one guy for losing the key, but he could have gotten hit by a bus or lost the hard drive in a house fire and they would have been equally as screwed. This is more of a system design failure than a PEBKAC failure.

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I know, after I posted that I was looking at their outages and worrying that my 1/month estimate too much of an exaggeration cause they hadn't had a big one in a bit.

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

I wasn't the original person that replied.

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Could start with the fact that they go down about once a month now and take half the Internet with them.

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 month ago (18 children)

At the risk of losing brain cells, I'm extremely curious what her reasoning is here.

Is it just cause it's childish? Is shaming men for liking childish things not enforcing toxic masculinity?

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If someone's self-hosting, I'd be willing to bet they don't have the same hardened config or isolation that a cloud provider would.

[–] Technus@lemmy.zip 15 points 1 month ago (4 children)

No. Docker containers aren't a full sandbox. There's a number of exploits that can break out of a container and gain root access to the host.

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