Linus Torvalds Speaks on the the divide between Rust and C Linux developers an the future Linux. Will things like fragmentation among the open source community hurt the Linux Kernel? We'll listen to the Creator of Linux.

For the full key note, checkout: Keynote: Linus Torvalds in Conversation with Dirk Hohndel

The Register's summary: Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Over the past few years, the evolution of AI-driven tools like GitHub’s Copilot and other large language models (LLMs) has promised to revolutionise programming. By leveraging deep learning, these tools can generate code, suggest solutions, and even troubleshoot issues in real-time, saving developers hours of work. While these tools have obvious benefits in terms of productivity, there’s a growing concern that they may also have unintended consequences on the quality and skillset of programmers.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1104312

The upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 operating system promises a new feature called “permissions prompting” for an extra layer of privacy and security.

The new permissions prompting feature in Ubuntu will let users control, manage, and understand the behavior of apps running on their machines. It leverages Ubuntu’s AppArmor implementation and enables fine-grained access control over unmodified binaries without having to change the app’s source code.

From Ubuntu Discourse: Ubuntu Desktop’s 24.10 Dev Cycle - Part 5: Introducing Permissions Prompting

This solution consists of two new seeded components in Ubuntu 24.10, prompting-client and desktop-security-center alongside deeper changes to snapd and AppArmor available in the upcoming snapd 2.65. The first is a new prompting client (built in Flutter) that surfaces the prompt requests from the application via snapd. The second is our new Security Center:

In this release the Security Center is the home for managing your prompt rules, over time we will expand its functionality to cover additional security-related settings for your desktop such as encryption management and firewall control.

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With prompting enabled, an application that has access to the home interface in its AppArmor profile will trigger a request to snapd to ask the user for more granular permissions at the moment of access:

As a result, users now have direct control over the specific directories and file paths an application has access to, as well its duration. The results of prompts are then stored in snapd so they can be queried and managed by the user via the Security Center.

NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?

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Which brings me to this article—a collection of thoughts comparing the design of NT (July 1993) against contemporary Unix systems such as 4.4BSD (June 1994) or Linux 1.0 (March 1994). Beware that, due to my background, the text is written from the point of view of a Unix “expert” and an NT “clueless”, so it focuses on describing the things that NT does differently.

Long but interesting article that compares the Windows NT kernel to traditional Unix kernels such as that found in BSDs or Linux.

How does Linux move from an awake machine to a hibernating one? How does it then manage to restore all state? These questions led me to read way too much C in trying to figure out how this particular hardware/software boundary is navigated.

elementary OS may not be as much as popular as it used to be.

That being said, elementary OS 8 release is still on the horizon with some useful changes based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

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However, amidst disagreement between co-founders during the pandemic in 2022, co-founder Cassidy quit the elementary OS team.

Right after that, the development pace took a big hit, and we saw elementary OS 7 being released almost a year after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS came up.

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A good indicator about its development activity is its upcoming major release, elementary OS 8, based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

I took a sneak peek at it using the daily build, and elementary OS 8 is almost ready to have an RC release.

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You can expect things like:

• The settings app handles system updates (instead of AppCenter)
• AppCenter is now Flatpak only
• New toggle menu icon giving you easy access to the screen reader, onscreen keyboard, font size, and other system settings
• WireGuard VPN support

Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.

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All of this contributes to the strikingly poor record of American colleges in actually educating their students. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa showed in their 2011 book “Academically Adrift,” the time that the average full-time college student spent studying dropped by half in the five decades after 1960, falling to about a dozen hours a week. A clear majority of college students “showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing,” with about half failing to make any improvements at all in their first two years of higher education.

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In one of the oldest jokes about the Soviet Union, a worker says “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” To an uncomfortable degree, American universities now work in a similar fashion: Students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them. It’s high time for a radical reboot of a broken system.

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But grades don’t just have an important signaling function to the outside world; they are, first and foremost, meant to give students a clear sense of how they’re doing. When excellent, good and poor students get very similar grades, it is hard for students to know whether they are doing excellent, good or poor work.

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By the same logic, grade inflation also punishes students for uneven performance over time. If you are a middling student with few major life challenges and strong mental health, you will wind up with a high GPA. If you are a brilliant student who really struggles during one term because of a family crisis or some mental health problem, your GPA will tank, never to recover. The current grading system favors mediocre kids from stable homes over talented ones from less stable backgrounds.

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The best solution would be to take the simple, if somewhat brutal, step of ending grade inflation. But if that is not in the cards, then it’s time for universities to admit that the emperor has no clothes. The second best option may be to put an end to the whole charade: Universities could make all of their courses pass-fail.

In this article we will explore some lesser known, but interesting and useful corners of Python standard library.

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To provide more powerful containers for storing data in memory Python ships a collection module ...

Python has with keyword to create context manager that will auto-cleanup things within lexical scope ...

To address this problem, Python ships decimal module that allows us represent decimal numbers as Python objects with operator overloading ...

Likewise, we can run into problem when dealing with fractions - one third is not exactly equal to 0.333… Python ships with fractions module to represent them as Python objects with operator overloading ...

The standard Python installation ships with dis module that takes Python code units (e.g. a function) and disassembles the code into a kind of pseudo-assembler ...

Python statistics module provides a small toolkit of statistical algorithms for relatively simple applications where it is an overkill to use Pandas or Numpy: standard deviation, several kinds of average of numeric data, linear regression, correlation, normal distribution and others ...

To make this easier Python ships a webbrowser module with simple API to make a browser show a page ...

To make this less terrible Python ships zipapp module with CLI tool and Python API to package Python code into single file packages ...

I have completed an initial new port of systemd to musl. This patch set does not share much in common with the existing OpenEmbedded patchset. I wanted to make a fully updated patch series targeting more current releases of systemd and musl, taking advantage of the latest features and updates in both. I also took a focus on writing patches that could be sent for consideration of inclusion upstream.

The final result is a system that appears to be surprisingly reliable considering the newness of the port, and very fast to boot.

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And that is how I became the first person alive to see systemd passing its entire test suite on a big-endian 64-bit PowerPC musl libc system.

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While the system works really well, and boots in 1/3rd the time of OpenRC on the same system, it isn’t ready for prime time just yet.

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There aren’t any service unit files written or packaged yet, other than OpenSSH and utmps. We are working with our sponsor on an effort to add -systemd split packages to any of the packages with -openrc splits. We should be able to rely on upstream units where present, and lean on Gentoo and Fedora’s systemd experts to have good base files to reference when needed. I’ve already landed support for this in abuild.

This work is part of Adélie Linux

For those unfamiliar with it, power-profiles-daemon is a low-level component to provide power handling over DBus. Ever used the Power Mode options in the Quick Settings menu in GNOME Shell? Those options interface through this.

From 0.22 Release Notes:

Since this release power-profiles-daemon is also battery-level aware and some drivers use this value to be smarter at tuning their optimizations. In particular both the AMD panel power action now uses a progressive approach, changing the the ABM based on the battery percentage.

AMD p-state received various features and improvements:

• it supports core performance boost when not in power-saver mode.
• uses minimum frequency to lowest non-linear frequency
• it is more impervious to faulty firmware and kernel bugs

This should be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release.

There has been a steady uptick of people stating that they will migrate (or already have) to Debian – seeking refuge from what they see as greedy corporate influence. I understand the sentiment fully. However, there’s a problem here that I want to talk about: security.

The ugly truth is that security is hard. It’s tedious. Unpleasant. And requires a lot of work to get right.

Debian does not do enough here to protect users.

Long ago, Red Hat embraced the usage of SELinux. And they took it beyond just enabling the feature in their kernel. They put in the arduous work of crafting default SELinux policies for their distribution.

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However, its default security framework leaves much to be desired. Debian’s decision to enable AppArmor by default starting with version 10 signifies a positive step towards improved security, yet it falls short due to the half-baked implementation across the system.

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The fundamental difference between AppArmor and SELinux lies in their approach to Mandatory Access Control (MAC). AppArmor operates on a path-based model, while SELinux employs a significantly more complex type enforcement system. This distinction becomes particularly evident in container environments.

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The practical implications of these differences are significant. In a SELinux environment, a compromised container faces substantial hurdles in accessing or affecting the host system or other containers, thanks to the dual barriers of type enforcement and MCS labels.

TLDR: According to the author, Debian's use of AppArmour is not as effective as RedHat's use of SELinux when it comes to security.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1064425

And Linux isn't minimal effort. It's an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.

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That's why I'd love to see more developers take another look at Linux. Such that they may develop better proficiency in the basic katas of the internet. Such that they aren't scared to connect a computer to the internet without the cover of a cloud.

Related: Omakub