SpaceCadet

Heh the comparison also holds if you use 10=Windows 7 and 11=Windows 8

Or 10=Windows 98 and 11=Windows ME

Kont is also not the most used, nicest way of saying it. “Billen” is a better match.

"Billen" is "buttocks", it's less vulgar than "kont" but it doesn't mean exactly the same thing. I think kont is also more socially acceptable with Flemish Dutch speakers than with Dutch speakers from the Netherlands.

Should also note that the word "aars" exists too. Given that they went with Arsch in German and Ass in English, it's a bit strange that they chose the word "kont" to represent Dutch.

organization that decided that a lot of Dutchified English would be changed to more Dutch terms. So is “Math” changed into “Wiskunde/Rekenen”.

Why shouldn't we use our own words to refer to things?

Also the word "wiskunde" wasn't made up by the organization you mention. It came from Simon Stevin, a Flemish 16th century mathematician.

The same people who still think of millennials as people in their early/mid 20s instead of late 30s early 40s.

Doesn't sound as catchy I guess?

You're good. That's the latest image, it's just the confusing Debian version scheme where the package version is not the same as the kernel version. Debian package version 6.1.0-17 = kernel version 6.1.69-1

See:

$ uname -a
Linux debian12 6.1.0-17-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.69-1 (2023-12-30) x86_64 GNU/Linux

And:

$ dpkg-query --list linux-image-6.1.0-17-amd64
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                       Version      Architecture Description
+++-==========================-============-============-=================================
ii  linux-image-6.1.0-17-amd64 6.1.69-1     amd64        Linux 6.1 for 64-bit PCs (signed)

I remember when PC keyboards had zero Windows keys.

That's what I said yes.

Realistically it's not super dangerous, and no you probably don't have a virus just from browsing a few tech support sites, but you do eliminate your last line of defense when you run software as root. As you know, root can read/change/delete anything on your system whereas regular users are generally restricted to their own data. So if there is a security problem in the software, it's made worse by the fact that you were running it as root.

You are right though that Firefox does still have its own protections - it's probably one of the most hardened pieces of software on your computer exactly because it connects to the whole wide internet - and those protections are not negated by running as root. However if those protections fail, the attacker has the keys to the kingdom rather than just a sizable chunk of the kingdom.

To put that in perspective though, if there is a Firefox exploit and a hacker gets access to your regular user account, that's already pretty bad in itself. Even if you run as a regular unprivileged user they would still have have access to things like: your personal documents, your ssh keys, your Firefox profile with your browsing history, your session cookies and your saved passwords, your e-mail, your paypal account, your banking information, ...

As root, they could obviously do even more like damage like reading all users' data, installing a keylogger or screengrabber, installing a rootkit to make themselves undetectable, but for most regular users most of the damage is already done when their own account is compromised.

So when these discussions come up, I always have to think about this XKCD comic:

I know wlroots exists. It's a library that helps you implement a compositor (i.e. does some of the heavy lifting), but at the end of the day the window manager developer is still implementing a compositor and is responsible for maintaining their compositor.

The mere fact that wlroots, and other efforts like louvre, are necessary at all actually prove my point that it was an idiotic design to push everything off into "compositors".

I agree that at some point you have to be able to ditch technical debt, but you still should be able to do more or less the same things with the new system as with the old system and that's currently still not the case.

The problem is that the architecture of Wayland and the organization around it themselves impose limitations that have a chilling effect on development for it. One issue is that Wayland has been deliberately left very slim, leaving a lot of complexity and implementation details up to the compositor. A compositor can be seen as something that approaches the size and complexity of an entire X display server. This means that if someone wants to create a window manager, they have to implement a whole compositor first. So instead of writing window manager code, which is what the developer is probably the most interested in, they are spending most of their time implementing the compositor.

Naturally this also leads to a lot of duplication of effort. For example: GNOME, KDE and the window managers that have implemented a wayland version each have their own compositor that by and large does the same thing.

Another issue is the standardization of the protocols and interfaces that the different compositors use, or lack thereof. There is a steering group containing the major stakeholders that votes on proposed extensions, but good proposals often get shot down because the major stakeholders can't agree on it and sometimes ego or principles gets in the way. And then you have cases where one compositor just goes their own way and implements something regardless of what the others do.

For example, as a result of this there's still no standard screen capture API, so if you want to do things like screenshots, remote desktop, desktop streaming, ... whether or not you can do that, and with which tool, depends on the compositor you use. Another example: they're currently still bickering over whether or not an application should be allowed to place windows with absolute coordinates, and how that should be implemented. We're currently 15 years after initial release of Wayland...

In my opinion, this is all completely backwards. Both in an organizational and technical sense way too much has been left up to the individual compositors that should have been a core part of Wayland itself.

Unfortunately, it's all too late to fix this. We're 15 years into Wayland development, and the flawed architecture has been set in stone. Wayland isn't going to go away soon either, too many parties are invested in it. So for me the reasonable thing to do is to wait and stick with X11 until the dust settles and something emerges on the other side that is better than what I currently have.

they cannot access the data from software because it is blocked by login screen

The system may still be vulnerable to over the network exploits. So for example, if the system is running sshd, and a couple of months from now a root exploit is found (à la heartbleed), the attacker may get inside.

It's somewhat of a long shot, but it's still a much larger attack surface than butting your head against a LUKS encrypted drive that's at rest.

they cannot access the data from hardware because it is protected by FDE.

RAM is not protected by FDE. There are (obviously non-trivial) ways to dump the RAM of a running system (Cold Boot attacks, and other forensic tools exist). So if the attacker is dedicated enough, there are ways.

One of the misconceptions I had before is that I assumed that the disk will be decrypted when you enter the LUKS password. This is not true, the password is loaded into the ram, and only decrypts necessary parts to RAM. All the data on the disk is never decrypted, even when you are working in your OS.

Hah! That would be impractical :) Imagine having to decrypt your entire 32TB drive array everytime you booted your computer.

Besides, if anyone tries to boot any other OS which is not mine, the keys are erased.

There are forensic tools that can capture the contents of RAM, and so access your decrypted LUKS encryption key.

I guess it depends on who you are protecting against, but if for example law enforcement wants evidence against you for what they think is a serious enough crime, they just may go through the trouble to do it.