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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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wanst that the whole damn (stated) point of making it proprietary?
I can recommend a minty flavored alternative if you're sick of it.
Green Ubuntu is Best Ubuntu
A fresh breath of minty cinnamon, mate?
Btw I have no idea why they want to mix Mint with Cinnamon, must taste ugly.
Literally what I'm chewing right now. Its pretty okay.
I should do a "sorting DEs by their taste" meme
Yeah, once you crunch down the edges its pretty good. Make sure to use optical rather than solid state tho.
Why just now? Meanwhile, all Debian packages on their apt repos are reviewed and maintained by Debian.
I would imagine the recent xz backdoor discovery spooked them a bit. So now they are going to check things.
We shall see if it continues or not.
It was probably the wave of phishing apps that scared them tbh
This predates that discovery.
Which means at all previous times, for 20 years, noone did check fck sht.
How is that not a security theater? , you just need to :
The extra cost added to override this is fairly small, i don't think it will help.
At least this prevents impersonation of well-known publishers or their software. Maybe all changes to metadata like the description should require a manual review even for established packages.
Maybe adding a proprietary *layer to an open-source OS was a bad idea (for end users)?
I've heard all the arguments about how these new packaging formats are supposed to make things easy for developers and for users with different use cases than my own (apparently), but I will continue to avoid them until they have further matured. I'm relieved that this is still possible.
The idea is good I think but the implementation has only ever caused me problems and seems to have a bunch of frustrating edge cases.
I've been using snaps for a few years now and while they still could use some improvements, the snaps I'm currently using seem to be fairly indistinguishable from deb-based packaging thanks to bug fixes they have done over the years. I think the idea of containerized applications is a good one, I think it actually can be safer. Performance is also fine for me with snap applications even like Firefox snap startup speed, although I'm using an R9 5900x and Gen 4 M2 NVMe SSD so maybe that's why, or maybe they really have improved the snap software and it is just as fast now for the most part.
I've had to swap Firefox on my laptop for the deb package, the snap took like 5sec to open, whereas the deb opens instantly. Other than that, i don't see much of a difference, but i run into sandboxing issues quite often (same with flatpak though)
Only took them 6 years of malware
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After repeatedly suffering issues with scam apps making it onto the Snap Store, Canonical maker of Ubuntu Linux have now decided to manually look over submissions.
I've covered the issues with the Snap Store a few times now like on March 19th when ten scam crypto apps appeared, got taken down and then reappeared under a different publisher.
Also earlier back in February there was an issue where a user actually lost their wallet as a result of a fake app.
Multiple fake apps were also put up back in October last year as well, so it was a repeating issue that really needed dealing with properly.
So to try and do something about it, Canonical's Holly Hall has posted on their Discourse forum about how "The Store team and other engineering teams within Canonical have been continuously monitoring new snaps that are being registered, to detect potentially malicious actors" and that they will now do manual reviews whenever people try to register "a new snap name".
Hopefully this will begin to put an end to scam apps making it into the Snap Store and onto machines running Ubuntu and any other Linux distribution that enables Snap packages.
The original article contains 238 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 18%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!