This might be useful for some Linux users who want (but don’t need) to run Microsoft 365 occasionally, but actually relying on this kind of hack is a terrible idea.

Once fully implemented, this will help draw in people into Linux, as many shudder at the thought of switching to the platform because their preferred office suite doesn’t work here.

I certainly hope this doesn’t “help draw in people into Linux”. It’s sad to think about people and organizations switching to Linux on the basis of someone misleading them into thinking that relying on this kind of thing is a good idea because when it breaks it will give them a bad impression and they’ll blame “Linux” instead of Microsoft (or Bottles or whoever told them it was a good idea).

When the lack of a Linux version of a specific proprietary program is the blocker preventing someone from switching to Linux, relying on a workaround which remains unsupported by the proprietary/adversarial software vendor is… a recipe for a bad time.

Even if this mostly works today, it is extremely likely that (either intentionally or inadvertently) Microsoft will break it in the future.

So, although I do see how this can be useful for some people when/while it works, in my opinion Linux and the world at large would be better off if this software didn’t exist. I hope Microsoft breaks it sooner than later!

Removed by mod

iirc the Linux kernel dropped support for pre-Pentium x86 in the last few years, so any distro with 486 support now would be using an unmaintained kernel.

I think if you want a maintained operating system for your 486 today, NetBSD is probably the thing to run.

Check out the molotov ribbentrop pact

via this comment (which, if your request above for a serious rebuttal is sincere, you should read)

AUR is bad, actually

But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.

Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).

The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.

I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(

No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release

This bug was reported (and resolved by rolling back to the GNU coreutils version of cp) on June 30, a little over 15 weeks prior to the scheduled release date.

Which distros have a feature freeze that far in advance?

Ubuntu hasn’t even scheduled theirs for this release yet; if you edit that url to look at previous releases’ schedules you can see their feature freeze and debian import freezes are typically about 2 months prior to release. (See here for descriptions of all of the different types of freezes…)

What an absolute shitshow

I’d say the month of June is actually a good time to be breaking and fixing things in a release that is due to come out in (checks notes) October.

AI;DR - i literally could not bear to finish reading this slop, and went to find something human-written to confirm if any of it is based in reality. It is, but I wouldn’t assume any details in the slop summary are accurate.

From what i skimmed I think the sole real-world source on the topic which this “article” (if you can call it that) cites is this abstract for a seminar that happened in 2022. An 88-page report from 2019 (San Joaquin Kit Fox Response to the Topaz Solar Farms) has far more information as well as pictures of the foxes and one of the dens the researchers built for them:

As others have said it is a huge amount of work to maintain a fork of such a complicated piece of software.

Especially around security: web browsers constantly process potentially-malicious data, which gives them a large attack surface. Every browser regularly has new vulnerabilities discovered which must be fixed. Hard forking a browser means that, even ignoring any bugs in the new code the fork has added, every time a bug is discovered and fixed in the code they forked from someone needs to analyze the upstream’s fix and port it to the fork. The more they diverge, the more work this is. Failing to do this work lets any malicious website exploit the bugs and install malware on users’ computers.

moderator reports still don’t federate to other instances

you are mistaken. reports are federated from the reporter’s instance to the community’s instance, as well as to the instances of all moderators of the community, and to the instance of the user who posted the comment or post being reported.

that kernel release (which most distros have still not shipped yet) fixes only one of the two vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-43284); afaik even upstream still doesn’t have a patch for the second one (CVE-2026-43500) at this time.

(for people relying on Linux privilege separation, here are mitigation instructions.)

I was surprised to find that dbzer0 has 290 communities.

I guess they have 290 communities which are federated to the instance where you’re collecting these stats; according to dbzer0’s front page they actually have 332 communities. (Also your screenshot shows 1337 communities on lemmy.ml but we actually have 4.74K, and 3919 for .world which actually has 13.1K.)

unfortunately, like its predecessor (Nokia’s Maemo/Meego), Jolla’s SailfishOS has never been (and has never had plans to be) fully free/libre open source software.

many components of it are freely licensed, but not nearly enough to constitute an actual mobile operating system you can use.

Activity lights are useful

in even more ways than one might think.

(see also this and this later work from the same author…)

based on the other comments here i had to double check if this thread was in !shittyasklemmy@lemmy.ml smh my head

You’re correct on both points (🤦‍♂️ indeed).

I’ve now edited this post to link to their advisory text file instead of their advertising-heavy blog post about it which I had initially linked when the above comment was posted. Thanks.