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Seems kinda cruel to inflict linux on a mere child.
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Apr 24, 2024 17:51
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Worse than windows 11?
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Apr 24, 2024 17:53
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keep punching joe posted:Seems kinda cruel to inflict linux on a mere child. Have you seen Windows 11 Home?
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Apr 24, 2024 17:53
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mawarannahr posted:Have you seen Windows 11 Home? Installing this for a family member is what got me to finally switch to Linux 
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Apr 24, 2024 17:55
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keep punching joe posted:Seems kinda cruel to inflict linux on a mere child. I mean it's free and she'll just be word processing and maybe playing simple games. It seems similarly weird to pay for Windows if that's all she's doing. It should be pretty drat easy to use once set up, and if not and she learns a little about fiddling with computers til they work, bonus imo. When I was 6 we had a DOS computer and I had to learn to launch games by typing A:\run.exe or type dir and figure out what the run file was. Looking back it was not that hard, it was a cool and formative learning experience, and I'm sure it's somewhat informing my thinking here
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Apr 24, 2024 18:00
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Nah I think it's a fine idea.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:17
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alnilam posted:I'm looking to get a crappy old computer from the thrift store and set it up with linux to be my 5 year old's babby's first computer. alnilam posted:maybe even make it so games have no shortcuts and must be launched from terminal for bonus computer learningness? The terminal is always there for when its actually needed. alnilam posted:Anyway I'm posting here wondering if anyone here has done something similar and has any advice based on their experience.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:25
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Yeah good points. She does not have any tablet or phone experience apart from video calls with grandparents so I think she'll be pretty excited by a computer she can actually do stuff with, but forcing the CLI usage might be a bit much atm. I did think about a raspberry pi actually. I mostly use one for media playing, but I guess it should be good enough for the light usage I'm describing. Are there especially lightweight distros people tend to run on them or will Mint work fine?
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Apr 24, 2024 18:34
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Raspberry Pi have a lot of stuff aimed at kids, even preteens. You could pick up a 400 which has the dinky little keyboard and mouse, or the bare board if she wanted to get into building stuff. Or my advice, refurb thinkpad, vanilla arch install with hyprland WM.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:35
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alnilam posted:I'm looking to get a crappy old computer from the thrift store and set it up with linux to be my 5 year old's babby's first computer. Mainly a learn-to-type/use a computer, a homework station, and maybe some simple games (I'm thinking maybe an NES emulator and gamepad). Probably will have internet browsing locked for the time being and slowly introduce the web as we go along. Half of the aliexpress thread bought a new N100 box last week because they finally fell under 100$, might even be cheaper then an old computer. I do think going with whatever distro you are familiar with sound like the best option.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:38
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Pi is supported for most mainstream distros, though whether it can run them well is the main thing. Maybe a lightweight one like MX or Mint XFCE would be better.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:41
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You don't want kids playing with a CLI or they might end up like us.
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Apr 24, 2024 19:15
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xzzy posted:You don't want kids playing with a CLI or they might end up like us. Someone has to, or the only way I can retire is to disappear in the night and change my name. e: retire alive
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Apr 24, 2024 19:32
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alnilam posted:I'm looking to get a crappy old computer from the thrift store and set it up with linux to be my 5 year old's babby's first computer. Mainly a learn-to-type/use a computer, a homework station, and maybe some simple games (I'm thinking maybe an NES emulator and gamepad). Probably will have internet browsing locked for the time being and slowly introduce the web as we go along. gcompris, and scummvm with freddi fish.
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Apr 24, 2024 21:56
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cruft posted:gcompris, and scummvm with freddi fish. I was thinking dosbox and reader rabbit to start with, these are good ideas too
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Apr 24, 2024 23:16
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Voodoo Cafe posted:copy chrome's .desktop file from /usr/share/applications to $HOME/.local/share/applications/ , then you can edit the lines starting with 'Exec=' to include the flag you want This worked. Thanks!
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Apr 25, 2024 01:12
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alnilam posted:I was thinking dosbox and reader rabbit to start with, these are good ideas too YES I loved the x Rabbit series as a kid. Number Muncher passed some time, too, when I was that age. And yeah kids will learn whatever interests them, so if she gets into CLI, cool, and if not, well, at least you can make sure she knows what a file folder is.
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Apr 25, 2024 02:02
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VictualSquid posted:Half of the aliexpress thread bought a new N100 box last week because they finally fell under 100$, might even be cheaper then an old computer. This is probably a better idea than some old, loud and power hungry second hand machine with parts that may be on the way out. You can still put *nix on it if you want but it comes with Windows installed already if you don't want to deal with that and your kid (put an immutable OS and teach your kid about container orchestration at a young age - it's important to learn the basics asap)
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Apr 25, 2024 02:15
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FAT32 SHAMER posted:Another kind of dumb Bazzite/atomic desktop question: FYI, KDE global themes are a massive security hole because their scripts can execute arbitrary code, which is not something one would expect of a theme - which also gets infinitely less scrutiny than any app package. Recently, a buggy theme (with 3k+ downloads) ended up running rm -rf / on a user, and the KDE devs are planning how to overhaul the store to prevent this. Until then, I would be extremely careful with themes. The bugged script was removed, but this incident may well attract malicious actors.
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Apr 25, 2024 06:56
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Ok yeah so I am gonna quick fuckin around with it and go back to gnome lol
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Apr 25, 2024 07:09
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VictualSquid posted:Half of the aliexpress thread bought a new N100 box last week because they finally fell under 100$, might even be cheaper then an old computer.
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Apr 25, 2024 09:11
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Kivi posted:Do you have link for this? I'm in the market for these sort of box and actual goon opinions are usually better than whatever I find on reddit. It's these things. They've gone up in price a bit again but if you watch for a bit they should hopefully come back down soon. I'm running Sericea on a 16G one rn and it's been a bit of fun and all worked out of the box. I'm using it headless so nfi if that introduces any drama but given how hassle free setting things up has been I'd assume not.
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Apr 25, 2024 10:17
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FAT32 SHAMER posted:Ok yeah so I am gonna quick fuckin around with it and go back to gnome lol or just use the default theme whose behavior is tested before it's packaged
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Apr 25, 2024 12:15
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NihilCredo posted:FYI, KDE global themes are a massive security hole because their scripts can execute arbitrary code, which is not something one would expect of a theme - which also gets infinitely less scrutiny than any app package. Note that the plasmashell process is running at your standard unprivileged user level, so it's no more or less of a security hole than any other app with unverified code. A gnome extension could do the same thing. Only thing massive about it is "massively unexpected". I'm kinda doubtful that it's likely to attract copycats, other than a skiddie who wants to logic bomb you for using the wrong distro. A random theme used by a few hundred or thousand desktop users is not exactly a tempting target. spiritual bypass posted:or just use the default theme whose behavior is tested before it's packaged or just use themes that have been around and have a history with other users, same as you would normally judge whether to install & run a random application (if your normal app security policy is "nothing but what's packaged by my distro" then I guess yeah only the default themes, but also I can't imagine sticking to that with a desktop system)
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Apr 25, 2024 13:51
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Klyith posted:
On the other hand this is the kind of low risk high reward trick that griefers love. You're right that it's not a major security hole vector but it being able to do that much damage from something so innocuous is terrible design. Why should a theme even be able to touch the root filesystem?
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Apr 25, 2024 14:18
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Dehumanise yourself and face to Gnome, theming is a waste of your time and security. Just accept the adwaita lifestyle.
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Apr 25, 2024 14:24
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spiritual bypass posted:or just use the default theme whose behavior is tested before it's packaged I was fuckin around with it since I wanted something closer to macOS haha. Bazzite 3.0 just came out so I’ll play with Plasma 6 for a little bit then probably reinstall to gnome
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Apr 25, 2024 14:35
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Started mucking about with desktop environments again in my eternal quest for Exactly What I Want™, which mainly Wayland with fractional scaling. I run a moderately-sized (32") 4k monitor, so 100% is typically too tiny, and so far, 200% has been way too big. My experiences so far under Fedora 40 (updated this morning from 39): Gnome 46 - Wayland with fractional scaling out of the box. But dash2dock is dead, so meh. XFCE 4.18 - Wayland support, says it supports fractional scaling, but choosing any of the scaling options keeps me at 100%. Cinnamon 6 - Experimental Wayland support, and so far completely broken for me. Desktop loads, but no launcher/taskbar, etc. 125% SEEMS to work, but hard to tell when nothing else is really loaded. KDE Plasma 6.0.3 - Everything seems to work. Loads to 175% out of the gate, and 125% seems to be that sweet spot again. Hoo boy does plasma 6 look more and more like Windows as we go. Tempting me to fire up some bottles for stuff like Office and see how that goes.
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Apr 25, 2024 15:51
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AlexDeGruven posted:Hoo boy does plasma 6 look more and more like Windows as we go. Tempting me to fire up some bottles for stuff like Office and see how that goes.
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Apr 25, 2024 15:55
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Tesseraction posted:Why should a theme even be able to touch the root filesystem? It can't, the guy who got his system rm-rf'd by a buggy theme only had all the user-accessible directories wiped. Plasmashell is a user process. (I know "only" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.) Why can themes run code? Because it lets them do cool things, and is why KDE is super customizable. SDDM themes are in /usr, but if a plasma theme that included both a malicious script and a SDDM theme, the script would not get to piggyback access to root. ... As far as why SSDM themes go in /usr, they have to go somewhere in the root area right? GDM theming is also in /usr, and only the fact that GDM is not officially themeable stops them from having the same problem. I dunno what the best way to make that compatible with immutable distros would be. Also, is this not a thing that immutable distros should be solving with overlays or symlinks or something? Regardless, SDDM spent a lot of years with a semi-absent maintainer, and it sounds like this is still a problem.
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Apr 25, 2024 16:19
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Themes as flatpacks sounds like it would be annoying to arrange, but some sort of containerization would perhaps make sense.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:08
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You need an immutable distro install which launches a containerized distro with your Only way to be save.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:32
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Inceltown posted:It's these things. They've gone up in price a bit again but if you watch for a bit they should hopefully come back down soon. I'm running Sericea on a 16G one rn and it's been a bit of fun and all worked out of the box. I'm using it headless so nfi if that introduces any drama but given how hassle free setting things up has been I'd assume not.
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Apr 25, 2024 19:52
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Since the only files of any importance on the computer reside in /home , it doesn't really matter what privileges can a theme get. It doesn't need to get anything. The most amount of damage is right then and there at their fingertips. The fact that themes can run code is ... yeah, less than ideal, to put it mildly. They should not.
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Apr 25, 2024 20:34
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Have fun using your computer to not run code
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Apr 25, 2024 20:47
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spiritual bypass posted:Have fun using your computer to not run code ? What does that have to do with anything? The themes, in my opinion, should not be able to execute anything, be at most: "color for X", "icon for Y", etc. Executing code in a theme, while it may have allowed for cool things to happen, especially when they're distributed via a "trustworthy" location (one would think they've vetted there, obviously they aren't), just creates an unnecessary attack vector. And that attack vector is against the most important thing on a computer drive: the /home folder. The only important thing.
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Apr 25, 2024 21:04
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I should have clarified that the issue is specifically with Global Themes, which are meta-packages that are meant to deliver full UX setups, stuff like "make KDE look like Windows / MacOS / Android". To that end they install a bunch of components at once, and are allowed to include install scripts since they can touch more or less everything, e.g. the theme for your console app, or the behaviour of the task switcher or the login screen. The part about them being made of several components is very clear in the settings UI (you can individually pick and choose); the part about the package including an install.sh is not, which is the issue. However, if you simply want to change the appearance of KDE, you can safely browse and install individual "Colours" and "Windows Decorations" components, which are plain .svg and .colors files. Those are more like what people would think of as 'themes'. While avoiding the parts that can actually run code, ie. widgets, login screens. 
NihilCredo fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Apr 25, 2024 |
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Apr 25, 2024 21:29
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Volguus posted:? What does that have to do with anything? The themes, in my opinion, should not be able to execute anything, be at most: "color for X", "icon for Y", etc. KDE has a lot of UI stuff that's programmatic. OSD popups, splash screens, your alt-tab, etc. Themes can redefine that stuff, and even do cool theme-y things that go beyond what the standard functions do. Examples I've seen in popular ones include adding transparency effects to stuff that normally doesn't have it, dynamically re-coloring their components, and wallpaper fade/blur effects. And that's not even getting into Kwin scripts, which is another big source of customization. Basically the difference between "plugin/widget" and "theme component" is really blurry and mostly a matter of what category name you give it. Volguus posted:especially when they're distributed via a "trustworthy" location (one would think they've vetted there, obviously they aren't) When you go to add new stuff it directly says "The content available here has been uploaded by users like you, and has not been reviewed by your distributor for functionality or stability." They're planning to change that to a more explicit warning, but it's already pretty much saying that it's not vetted. Note also that the theme that rm-rf'd a dude's /home only did it because of some sort of bad interaction with another plugin. And the guy was somehow running that plugin in Plasma 6 despite it being a Plasma 5 plugin. I don't think there was ever a firm answer for how it got triggered, and it wouldn't have been caught with the most extensive vetting possible. (Also we've just had a really good object lesson on the impossibility of vetting code to prevent a determined attack, so good luck with that.)
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Apr 26, 2024 00:06
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drat, I've been spoiled by the Fedora packaging of KDE. Never felt the need to go change it from the standard Fedora Breeze. Just the wallpaper (picture of the day) and it's flying.
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Apr 26, 2024 02:08
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Volguus posted:drat, I've been spoiled by the Fedora packaging of KDE. Never felt the need to go change it from the standard Fedora Breeze. Just the wallpaper (picture of the day) and it's flying. Nah that's pretty much the KDE defaults everywhere. The standard theme is great unless you need your desktop to look like a vaporwave meme or whatever. Right now I have one clock widget and a cute splash screen installed from the store. In plasma 5 I briefly used a store theme that could self-modify to change the highlight color, on things like the active app on the taskbar. But I didn't like some parts of it, so I figured out how to do the accent color and modded the default breeze theme instead. But if other people like crazy themes I ain't gonna yuck their yums. And I think it's very good that themes can do more than just change icons or reskin the window borders.
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Apr 26, 2024 03:23
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