I’m the Never Ending Pie Throwing Robot, aka NEPTR.

Linux enthusiast, programmer, and privacy advocate. I’m nearly done with an IT Security degree.

TL;DR I am a nerd.

  • 4 Posts
  • 63 Comments
Joined 29 days ago
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Cake day: November 20th, 2024

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  • Alt text: When water’s temperature falls below 0°C, it undergoes Bouba to Kiki.

    Pic: The picture has a diagram showing water above freezing being flowy and liquid, and below freezing being rigid and icy. Many people find the sounds Bouba and Kiki to match visually to the look of rounded and pointy shapes respectively.


  • Operating systems can function very different. When creating software (like video games) the developer has to understand or use software dependencies which interact with the OS in a number of specific (OS dependent) ways. Stuff like where is app/user data stored, how to connect to the internet, how to display stuff on the screen (2D), how to display complex 3D geometry on the screen fast (3D graphics acceleration), where the host OS stores shared libraries (and what kind of libraries can the software expect to always be available), what security restrictions the host OS has, what filesystem the host OS uses, how to access the keyboard and mouse, how to interact with the kernel (very important).

    Since Windows and Linux are so very different, built for different purposes by different developers, it is impossible to take a Windows exe and run it on Linux.

    These days, the WINE project, with help from Valve’s fork Proton, is able to run basically any Windows game on Linux with similar performance (if not better because Linux is lighter to run than Windows). It does this by creating a environment for the software/game that provides all of the OS stuff Windows software expects and translating it to Linux specific things.

    TLDR: Linux is very different from Windows. Software meant for Windows won’t work natively on Linux (since everything is different). For Windows software to work on Linux, the WINE translates all the Linux specific OS stuff and creates an environment for the Windows software that feels like Windows. Most things work with WINE except exceedingly complex stuff, like browsers which have native Linux versions anyways.




  • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoLinux@lemmy.mlKali Linux 2024.4 released
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    1 day ago

    You mention “sane defaults”. That might mislead someone because it is ambiguous. The terminal defaults used to default to a root prompt, exemplifying that it isn’t a distro focused on sane defaults for a desktop distro.

    Kali is a tool for a specific job. Its meant mostly for hacking or troubleshooting/analysis, being an OS for executing a collection CLI/TUI and GUI utils.

    -Edited everything to make myself more intelligible.











  • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldMy thoughts on docker
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    6 days ago

    Docker is good when combined with gVisor runtime for better isolation.

    What is gVisor?

    gVisor is an application kernel, written in memory safe Golang, that emulates most system calls and massively reduces the attack surface of the kernel. This is important since the host and guest share the same kernel, and Docker runs rootful. Root inside a Docker container is the same as root on the host, as long as a sandbox escape is used. This could arise if a container image requires unsafe permissions like Docker socket access. gVisor protects against privilege escalation by only using root at the start and never handing root over to the guest.

    Sydbox OCI runtime is also cool and faster than gVisor (both are quick)





  • Linux Mint is built on top of Ubuntu, which itself was a fork of Debian. Ubuntu is not something I would call a “clean base”. It is clunky, slow to adopt new technologies, and very (Canonical) opinionated. Linux Mint actively works against its Ubuntu base by removing Snap and other Canonical weirdness.

    Tumbleweed and Leap offer the option to add or remove ANY package from your system before you even install it through their GUI installer, actually 2 GUI package choosers for either simple or advanced users. I don’t think it is accurate to suggest that Linux Mint is minimalist with its packages, especially when comparing to openSUSE distros.

    I will not argue against Linux Mint being user friendly, it is pretty good. But “not bloated”, especially when comparing against openSUSE, is inaccurate.