Max-P

They have a poor history of incidents that leaves many people not trust them.

https://manjarno.pages.dev/

It’s meant to protect the software, not the hardware. Of course you can still put a hardware keylogger on it.

You’re also only considering the use case of the owner and user being the same person. In a business context, the user and the owner are two different persons. It can be used to ensure the company’s MDM and security software aren’t tampered with, for example if you try to exfiltrate company data. In that situation, even if you have a keylogger, it doesn’t help you much, it still won’t allow you root access on the machine, because the user of the machine doesn’t have root access either.

Same with servers: you don’t even care if the hardware is keylogged, nobody’s ever using the local console anyway. But it’ll tell you if a tech at the datacentre opened the case, and they can’t backdoor the OS during a planned hardware maintenance.

Same with kiosk machines: you can deface the hardware all you want, the machine’s still not gonna let you order a free sandwich. If you buy one off eBay you can bypass secure boot and wipe it and use it, but it won’t let you sneak a USB on it while nobody’s watching and attack the network or anything like that.

But yes, for most consumers it’s a bit less useful and often exploited in anti-consumer ways.

It’s mostly for use cases where you can lose physical access to the computer like overnight at the office, at a hotel while travelling, in a shared server room, etc. It’s extra assurance that the computer runs the software you expect it to run and nothing else without at least being somewhat noisy about it.

This can in turn be used to use the TPM to get a disk encryption key, so you can do full disk encryption but still boot to a normal login screen without entering a password. It will only hand out the key with the correct signed boot chain.

If you have a desktop PC at home that nobody untrusted touches, then yeah there isn’t that much value to it for you.

If we deleted everything written by insufficiently pure developers, we wouldn’t have a Linux desktop. Especially if we count the ones that were smart enough to not bring up anything political in public.

Not a fan of DHH, but then you delete Rails then there’s no GitHub, GitLab, Mastodon, and many many other things given how popular Rails is, and that’s just that one guy.

If you include all the sketchy stuff that happens in the supply chain mining the minerals, processing, assembly all the way up to the final computer product, you just can’t morally justify supporting any manufacturer either.

This really doesn’t do anything useful other than feeling good to not support one of those guys. If anything it just adds extra political drama that feeds into a much bigger worldwide division problem.

Ubuntu 7.10 so late 2007, but I guess the nerd part came when I installed Arch in 2011. Still running that very same install.

My own personal example: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/s/8FM1ZvXi68

It just doesn’t look great nor serious nor welcoming.

The guy gives a ton of “I don’t care about anyone’s use cases except mines” vibes too. Also called Gnome and KDE teletubbies DEs when I mentioned xcomposite being an important feature. Basically considering the widely known issues around multimonitor vsync and mismatched resolutions and all as basically not real issues with Xorg.

XLibre is 100% a political fork because the guy claims Xorg is deprecated by a big tech conspiracy pushing inferior software onto users. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to continue Xorg’s legacy but come on we don’t have to pretend Xorg is this perfect thing that always works. Xorg has been hated for decades for a reason. This xkcd exists for a reason: https://xkcd.com/963/

I’ll take the autotools over Gradle, that’s how much it sucks.