So, I’m not gonna pretend flatpak doesn’t use more space then normal apps, but due to deduplication (and sometimes filesystem compression), flatpaks often use less space than people think.

[nix-shell:~/Playables/chronosphere]$ sudo /nix/store/xdrhfj0c64pzn7gf33axlyjnizyq727v-compsize-1.5/bin/compsize -x /var/lib/flatpak/
Processed 49225 files, 21778 regular extents (46533 refs), 22188 inline.
Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL       53%      898M         1.6G         3.6G
none       100%      499M         499M         1.0G
zstd        34%      399M         1.1G         2.6G

[nix-shell:~/Playables/chronosphere]$ du -sh /var/lib/flatpak/
1.7G    /var/lib/flatpak/

I only have one flatpak app installed, and du says that takes up 1.7 GB of space… but actually, when using a tool that takes up BTRFS transparent compression into account, only half of that space is used on my disk.

I recommend using compsize for a BTRFS compression aware version of du and flatpak-dedup-checker for a flatpak filesystem deduplication aware checker of space used.

I think flatpak absolutely does use up more space, because yes, it is another linux distro in your distro. But I think that’s a tradeoff people accept in order to have a universal package manager for graphical apps.

Also, you can flatpak cli tools. They are just difficult to run at first because you have to do the flatpak run org.orgname.appname thing, but you can alias that to a short command. Here is a flatpak of micro, a terminal based text editor.

(I prefer nix for cli tools though, and docker/podman/containers for services).

So based on what you’ve said in the comments, I am guessing you are managing all your users with Nixos, in the Nixos config, and want to share these users to other services?

Yeah, I don’t even know sharing Unix users is possible. EDIT: It seems to be based on comments below.

But what I do know is possible, is for Unix/Linux to get it’s users from LDAP. Even sudo is able to read from LDAP, and use LDAP groups to authorize users as being able to sudo.

Setting these up on Nixos is trivial. You can use the users.ldap set of options on Nixos to configure authentication against an external LDAP user. Then, you can configure sudo

After all of that, you could declaratively configure an LDAP server using Nixos, including setting up users. For example, it looks like you can configure users and groups fro the kanidm ldap server

Or you could have a config file for the openldap server

RE: Manage auth at the reverse proxy: If you use Authentik as your LDAP server, it can reverse proxy services and auth users at that step. A common setup I’ve seen is to run another reverse proxy in front of authentik, and then just point that reverse proxy at authentik, and then use authentik to reverse proxy just the services you want behind a login page.

OP is on OpenWRT (a router distro), and Alpine. Those distros don’t come with very much by default, and perl is not a core dependency for any of their default tools. Neither is python.

Based on the way the cosmo project has statically linked builds of python, but not perl, I’m guessing it’s more difficult to create a statically linked perl. This means that it’s more difficult to put perl on a system where it isn’t already there, and that system doesn’t have a package manager*, than python or other options.

*or the the user doesn’t want to use a package manager. OP said they just want to copy a binary around. Can you do that with perl?

Not quite a scripting language, but I highly recommend you check out cosmo for your usecase. Cosmopolitan, and/or Actually Portable Executable (APE for short) is a project to compile a single binary in such a way that is is extremely portable, and that single binary can be copied across multiple operating systems and it will still just run. It supports, windows, linux, mac, and a few BSD’s.

https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ — this is where you can download precompiled binaries of certain things using cosmo.

From my testing, the APE version of python works great, and is only 34 megabytes, + 12 kilobytes for the ape elf interpreter.

In addition to python, cosmopolitan also has precompiled binaries of:

• Janet 2.5 MB
• Berry 4.0 MB
• Python 34 MB
• Php 11 MB
• Lua 2.1 MB
• Bash 5.1 MB

And a few more, like tclsh, zsh, dash or emacs (53 MB), which I’m pretty sure can be used as an emacs lisp intepreter.

And it should be noted these may require the ape elf interpeter, which is 12 kilobytes, or the ape assimilate program, which is 476 kilobytes.

EDIT: It also looks like there is an APE version of perl, and the full executable is 24 MB.

EDIT again: I found even more APE/cosmo binaries:

• quickjs (javascript) 2.5 MB
• lisp 20K

You might be able to run the latest KDE or gnome in a distrobox podman or docker container:

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/run_latest_gnome_kde_on_distrobox.md

I dunno what’s most appropriate for email, but I often joke:

Isn’t open source kinda like a cult?

It’s a not a cult I swear! Just switch to free software, and free yourself!

I’ve also heard my friend say something along the lines of:

Free software, free culture, free people

Or maybe it was free world or free trade? I can’t remember.

Although, for slogans like this, I might go with something that has more of an immediate effect, like shilling an adblocker.

• Install uBlock Origin. Blocking ads is one of the easiest ways to increase your security.
• Install uBlock Origin. It blocks more than just ads, but also tracker scripts that follow you around the net and collect your data.

Or the ever so simple:

• Free software means free as in freedom — not as in beer.

Anyway, I partially agree with the other poster, but I think a one sentence quip at the end of an email is unobtrusive enough that it gets a pass. Of course, it depends on your specific workplace and how strict they are, but I would assume most workplaces have a little space for humanity.

First things first: Check if any data was actually leaked/breached.

Many times, the data leaks news sites like to report in the most alarmist manner, don’t actually contain any new data, and are just aggregations of older breaches that already happened. Although still worth reporting, sadly, due to the way ads and clickbait works, they are incentivized to play it up and report it as the LARGEST DATA BREACH EVER 2024 CLICK ME IMMEDIATELY.

But yeah. My recommendation: Find high quality sources which either don’t report this stuff, or I like lemmy (and used to like reddit), because when stuff like that gets posted, it gets called out by users in the comments.

I want to like Plasma, really I do, but even when I haven’t chosen it as a DE it overheats my laptop because Baloo File Extractor just won’t fucking quit consuming a CPU core for what seems like hours a day.

I remember having this issue. Basically, it was a bug, where baloo file manager was stuck on a file. After some time (and maybe a reinstall?), and deleting the index, baloo worked fine.

Google put an API into Chrome that sends extra system info but only to*.google.com domains. In every Chromium browser.

Only vivaldi caught this issue. Brave had this api enabled, most likely on accident.

But the problem is, that chromium is just such big and complex software, when combined with development being driven by Google, it’s just impossible for any significant changes or auditing to be done by third parties. Google is capable of exteriting control over Brave, simply by hiding changes like above, or by making massive changes like manifest v3, which are expensive for third parties to maintain.

Brave can maintain 1 big change to chromium, but for how long? What about 2, 3, etc.

My other big problem with brave is that I see them somewhat mimicking Google’s beginnings. Google started out with 3 things: an ad network, a browser, and a search engine.

Right now, Brave has those same three things. It feels very ominous to me, and I would rather not repeat the cycle of enshittification that drove me away from chrome and goolgle.

Disabling javascript increases security, and offers a little bit of privacy. Those are both separate from anonymity, but people conflate the three often.

For example, javascript can be made to do arbitrary websoccket or http connections to any ip/hostname your computer has access to — even local networks or localhost.

I use the browser extension Port authority to block it.

Of course, port scanning is used by ebay to scan users computers, and discord.

Disabling javascript prevents websites from tracking exactly what you do on each site, or what local ports you have open. This is definitely an increase in privacy, as it relates to hiding what you’re doing. However, you noted it comes at the cost of anonymity, as you become uniquely identifiable.

Anyway the centralized nature of Revolt Chat makes it no very appealing for me.

I agree with this. I will probably stick with either matrix or xmpp due, to their federated nature, and strong E2EE. Matrix is a better discord replacement, as it has more features, is more standardized, has a better web client, and has “spaces”, which are somewhat analogous to discord servers.

Xmpp however, is much more lightweight on both servers and clients than matrix, and it’s E2EE works more reliably (none of that "failed to decrypt nonsense), and makes a better E2EE messenger.

I attempted to find evidence to support this.

I found one reddit post claiming this, but they themselves did not provide any evidence.

freedom of religion is a human right bruh i did not say anything but i believe in god the banned me and claimed i was being homophobic 1. i said nothing about it 2. stfu even if i was

​Not exactly the most compelling piece of evidence, and this was all I could find.

Yes

https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/blog/kde-6/#drawing-tablets/

My understanding is that gnome also has support for drawing tablets built in, and there are also other apps to customize buttons.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Graphics_tablet

The Arch Linux kernels include drivers by the linux-wacom and DIGImend projects. linuMLx-wacom supports Wacom devices, while DIGImend supports devices from other manufacturers. Both projects publish a list of supported devices: linux-wacom, DIGImend

Due to how many devices are supported, your best bet is to simply go to your nearest store that sells them and then checking if Linux supports it against those two lists, which there is an extremely high chance it does.

Then you should also check reviews, to make sure you get a good one.

I have a Wacom Intuos CTL-4100WL, and it’s served me well for math notes using Xournal++ (app for handwritten notetaking), but I truly have no idea how good it is for actual drawing related applications, as I don’t do it for that at all.

Probably not what you want, but rclone now has a simple web ui built in: https://rclone.org/gui/

Pip in a venv doesn’t get you non python tools.

Conda also has venvs, for seperate environments for stuff as well.

This reminds me of kasmweb, but fully open source.

https://rclone.org/drive/

https://rclone.org/crypt/

No way to protect emails, google chats, or many other things AFAIK. Yeah, I hate it too.

You could say the same thing about sudo. Sudo’s codebase is massive, compared to alternatives like doas, but it comes with many features doas does not have, like being able to ask a remote LDAP server if a user will be able to escalate.

I find it absurd that we have just simply accepted the idea of a setuid binary with built in networking code, as our primary admin escalation tool. 100,000+ lines of C code, code that has had multiple buffer overflow exploits*, in a setuid binary, just for temporary admin privileges. Does that seem necessary to you?

Polkit provides an alternative to that. If you don’t need the features, then fine, you don’t have to use run0 — but then you can’t use sudo without being a hypocrite. No longer do I have to have rely on a setuid binary that tries to do everything in one program when I really need sudo’s features, instead polkit handles authentication (including asking remote resources if an action is okay), and run0 handles actual escalation.

In another comment in this thread, you mention sudo being lightweight — which is outright false. Compared to doas or su, it’s extremely heavyweight, and with that complexity comes more risk of vulnerabilities. You also mention pkexec, for executing with polkit, but pkexec is also setuid, and has many of the same pitfalls.

*Buffer overflow exploits in sudo:

1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/02/serious-flaw-that-lurked-in-sudo-for-9-years-finally-gets-a-patch/
2. https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/2021/01/26/cve-2021-3156-heap-based-buffer-overflow-in-sudo-baron-samedit

No one complained when s6, another init system, also offered a sudo alternative (before systemd did, too). But when Poettering does it, it’s bad and wrong and ununixlike!

Maybe setuid has been extremely problematic, and more than one entity has sought alternatives?