Mike

That’s true. I think the only political (if we can call it that) heritage of the Turkish occupation is that the Turkish generally think of Hungarians as friends, probably since it’s a celebrated part of their history.

As for the Soviet era, I’m confident it still has its effects. Of course, it didn’t help economically, but also, I think that’s where our rampant corruption stems from (in most Soviet countries corruption was the norm, and I think it became normalised somewhat, as in “oh yeah, they are corrupt, but that’s nothing compared to what we had before!”).

I think our dependance on Russian gas also started back then (but I don’t have the receipts for that).

Also, there are plenty of people who look at the Soviet era through rose-tinted glasses and romanticise the past. I have relatives that have the attitude of “yes, but if you didn’t rebel, you could have a stable job and live an honest life; nowadays you have to worry about so much”, which doesn’t make sense.

Also out of those 7 countries, Slovenia, Slovakia and Hungary were not under Russian or Turkish influence.

Where did you get that from?

As a Hungarian, I can easily tell you that that’s not the case. Hungary was under Turkish rule for more than 100 years between 1526-1699. It has left deep marks on both our language and culture (sometimes good ones, like having a lot of Turkish bathhouses, but mostly just set us back quite some years).

As for Russia, Hungary was a Soviet puppet state between 1944-1989. We have a national holiday on October 23 that is a remembrance day for a failed revolution against the Soviet Union, that was shot down in a bloodbath. The current ruling party started as one of the anti-Russian parties, Orbán (our current president) literally held a speech where he was chanting “Ruszkik haza!” (“Russians go home!”)… It’s unfortunate that he has completely flipped since then and is now welcoming Russian influence back.

I can only assume something similar for our neighbours, but I’m happy to look it up for you.

EDIT: Also, before anyone says it, I’m not contesting that the countries in the list were under Austrian (or Austro-Hungarian) rule too. The lines are messy with whose side of the story you’re reading, but as for Hungary the easy way to summarise it from the Turkish invasion is:

• Turkish rule
• Gets liberated by the Habsburgs, leading to
• Austrian rule
• Revolution, leading to getting some representation (sadly, just Hungary, not the other countries in the empire), leading to
• Austria-Hungary, leading to
• WW1
• Loads of failed governments, the great depression hits hard, leading to
• WW2, leading to
• Soviet occupation, leading to
• Failed revolutions
• Soviet Union falls, leading to
• Independent Hungarian republic, heavy anti-Russian sentiment, leading to
• Hungary tries to warm up to western powers, leading to
• Hungary joins the EU
• And now, with corruption and foreign influence going strong worldwide, Russian influence is rising again

Holy shit, this article is garbage… the base premise that Play Services can access anything is true, but so many bad claims.

Google Play Services is a system app on phones that ship with Google services, and is the case on the author’s phone too, since he could only disable the app, not delete it. System apps can still be updated separately from the system, if their signature matches the updated version’s signature.

Also, I don’t think they dedicate enough time to describe just how much data Google gets through your device, like how it logs your location for Google Maps’ business popular times indicators and traffic metrics, or how they use all of your data to give you hyper-targeted advertising.

As for microG, it also runs with elevated permissions on most custom ROMs, and for some features (eg. integrity checks) it downloads & runs Google-made programs (eg. DroidGuard) with strong privileges. DivestOS (now discontinued) used to run microG in a sandbox.

There are ways to run Play Services as a normal app if the custom ROM has a compatibility layer for it, like GrapheneOS, where you can selectively enable permissions for Play Services. Of course, if you refuse some permissions, some features will break (eg. refuse SMS/call access and RCS will break), but it’s a mostly usable situation.

yes

https://youtu.be/1GeF9AjlqP8

yeah.

yes, but this change only affects certified Android devices (ie, ones that run software that Google put their blessings on), and /e/OS is squarely an uncertified (and Google-free) Android fork

Welp, that’s a good question, but the Graphene folks seem confident that they can support it for now.

If I were you, I’d wait until Aug 20, when the new Pixels get announched; they might have one with 512GB and you should be able to install GrapheneOS a bit after launch.

No one is using Cursor for the IDE feel; Cursor is just a VSCode without MS language servers and with extra AI. It’s an objectively worse experience to use Cursor over VSCode, except if you vibe code.

On Pixel 8 and above, you can plug in external displays, but it will only mirror your phone screen. Supposedly, Android 16 will allow you to “extend” the screen, ie. treat it as a separate screen. Also, the GUI stuff for the Linux Terminal will only drop in Android 16, so yeah, I’m stoked for that release.

Are you sure you’re talking about the Linux Terminal app that’s available in developer options and not Termux? For me, all Gnome things and Xfce things are present in the repos (and it’s using the deb.debian.org default Debian repos, so it makes sense)

I mean… This is kinda close. The “Linux Terminal” app is running a full Debian install in a KVM VM. On the newest version of the app (like on Android beta or on GrapheneOS), you even have a full GUI that you can use.

In theory, we should be able to boot any mainline Linux distro in a VM, if someone writes an app for it, as AVF (Android Virtualization Framework) is just a wrapper around Linux KVM with some restrictions. (for now the built-in app only supports Debian)

in the latest preview build

i assume you didn’t install today’s beta release a month ago 😉

EDIT: nevermind, i re-read your comment… it’s mandatory in some regions, I know for sure it’s mandatory in the US and in Hungary (EU).

One other thing is that if you created the installer with Rufus, that adds some magic optionally that can bypass it. I wonder if that still works with this beta.

still water

This is the reason I set my phone’s language to Irish English… I needed an English language option that uses sane measurements for everything.

Oh wow, cool story about Yasuke. Is that where Yakuake got its name from?

Most people dont use dark mode on Linux because most apps look horrible in Linux under dark mode

Among my friends, dark mode users hugely outnumber light mode users, I really don’t have any apps that struggle to support it. LibreOffice used to be really bad, but I don’t really edit documents anymore, so I don’t use it often, but when I do, I don’t see issues (although the document background is white, because paper, so the contrast is a bit weird). I’m curious about which apps didn’t work for you.

Unfortunately, this is probably because of the apps started using the Play Integrity API, which is a hardware-based attestation and can only be faked in two ways that GrapheneOS isn’t interested in:

• you can fake an older device that didn’t support hardware attestation yet, or had a broken implementation
• or you can try getting leaked vendor keys and emulate the crypto with those until they get revoked

Have you heard of social engineering and phishing? I consider those to be analogous to uploading new rules for ChatGPT, but since humans are still smarter, phishing and social engineering seems more advanced.

Whew, there’s a lot to unpack here.

First, microkernels being the future: This is a sentence that was said time and time again, but while microkernels definitely have some advantages in separating components which could yield better security, in practice it also introduces other security concerns, not present with monolithic kernels, mostly with the communication between the kernel services.

Second, about the no secure Linux distros thing: As many others have mentioned, there are security-conscious Linux distros, mostly the “immutable” distros. You can use Fedore Silverblue (or even better, SecureBlue) as a daily driver, with Flatpak for your apps. That way, your main OS is read-only, thus harder to infect and all system updates are signed and verified. Using Flatpak helps enforce permissions on apps in a manner similar to Android permission (you can deny an app the right to see your files, for example).

Third, I don’t really understand what you mean by “Linux’s security holes”. Of course it’s not bug free, but no kernel of this magnitude is. Also, GrapheneOS uses Linux as well, albeit with a hardening patchset, but you can also get that with desktop Linux distros. If you think Linux (being a monolithic kernel) is automatically less secure than microkernel and hybrid kernel based systems, take a look at Windows and macOS, which both use non-monolithic kernels, but most security experts will tell you that you’re better off using Linux.

Fourth, about all the niche, mostly hobby OSes you listed: A big part of security is about having more eyes on the source code. Even if you write a kernel in a “safe” programming language, there will be bugs. Something as advanced as a kernel that’s ready for daily desktop use and provides advanced isolation between processes is going to be so complex that you won’t be able to see what bugs arised from the different parts interacting with each other. Safe programming languages make it easier to write safe code, but don’t stop you from messing up the logic that defines what apps have which permissions. Your best bet is to stick to software that has had time to mature and had more people and companies look through it. Linux is regularly audited by all tech giants, because all clouds use Linux to some extent. If it’s secure enough to isolate the workloads in Google Cloud, and Amazon’s AWS, it’s going to be secure enough for your desktop, provided you use it well (make use of it’s security features and don’t shoot yourself in the foot by disabling mitigations and the like). This is partly why I think the idea that OpenBSD is more secure than Linux is somewhat outdated. Yes, they advertise it as such, but it has seen much-much less auditing than Linux did in the cloud era.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with playing around with alternatives operating systems, just don’t think you’ll be more secure just because something is written in Rust, or is a microkernel. Those can help, but there’s much more to security than the guardrails a programming language or software architecture can provide, especially with something as complex as a modern kernel.