Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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sysadmin, open source, GNOME, GNOME Community guy, photographer, a man who can hold his breath for 15 minutes

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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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12h

If I don't see any people from the Barcelona at GUADEC, I would be disappointed! (GUADEC is in Spain this year)

Originally shared by Softpedia

City of Barcelona wants to dump Windows and Microsoft's products and move to Ubuntu Linux, LibreOffice, and Open Source software!

Look Munich, City of Barcelona Is Dumping Windows and Moves to Ubuntu Linux

news.softpedia.com

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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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I noticed that Linux Plumbers is cohosted with Kernel Summit. While understandable that you want to co-host, but it reinforces the perception that LPC is nothing more than an extended kernel conference with a wider audience. If you're going to care about the entire eco-system then it needs to be more than just hardware and kernel.

Taking a look at last year's schedule, it seems that we've decided that userspace is not at all important in the scheme of anything. I guess desktops and applications are no longer something that is deemed part of the Linux eco-system.

Since the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves, I am sure we can fill up the gap with our own conference and work to increase that 4% desktop market share. But I'll happy invite our kernel developer friends to the party though.

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Steven Rostedt: (I would have replied earlier, but I just came back from a work trip)

+Sriram Ramkrishna actually KS being part of plumbers is to be the exact opposite of being "more kernel centric". What I want to do is have the kernel tracks be part of KS, and open up the other tracks to be more user space focused, which includes desktops. Have all these areas under a single roof.

The point of plumbers is to get together those that don't usually see each other in their own conference. I want gcc, gnome, kde, xfce, libc, systemd, apache, postgres, mysql and all other non-kernel systems to have a showing at Plumbers. The whole point of plumbers is the plumbing. That's why we call it that :-)

There's kernel developers that only go to kernel summit. We thought that combining kernel summit with plumbers would better expose those people to non kernel developers. That's the intention of combining the two.

Steven Rostedt: +Sriram Ramkrishna well, can you arrange to have a desktop micro-conference for the next LPC? This isn't just about having liaisons to pass on requests. This is to have real discussions about problems that go across the subsystems.

Sriram Ramkrishna (sri): +Steven Rostedt hey hey! I'd still like to do it but the problem is that I fear that the train has left the station in terms of userspace going other places. You have "All Systems Go" now for a lot of userspace stuff. But I will reach out to desktop people and see what they think about having such a thing. Being able to talk with kernel people directly I think would be a good thing.

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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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I wonder if we need to start looking into this with GNOME stuff.

Originally shared by Jon Masters - 3 comments

So then there's the issue of detecting attempts at exploitation. Let's pick Meltdown for a start.

There are multiple ways to implement an exploit, but most cache side channel attacks of this type will rely upon tight timing loops doing an rdtsc/rdtscp loop sequence with an embedded memory access in the middle. That's not quite unique enough for runtime, but you could modify virus scanners, script runtimes, or binfmt handlers to look for these in combination with cache flushes.

...and also...

In the common flush+reload type approach, you can use performance counters to measure the cache miss rate at run time, while in a flush+flush approach, you can't but you can look in the binary images for lots of clflush instructions and suspect sequences of clflush, prefetch<number>, and the PMU indications of the cache activity.

This is something I pondered aloud before the holiday with some colleagues. I am now interested in just sharing that we thought about it (and some other things I won't share just yet) and that I am open to feedback on whether there is any value in writing this up into some kind of proposal.

I would bet money some of the app stores are already doing some binary analysis.

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Philip Withnall: It’s not a bug, that’s precisely how the security model for GNOME (pre-flatpak) works: everything that runs within the session is trusted. Anything that can access the user’s session bus is trusted. The security boundary is between users (and between non-privileged users and the system). The reasons for this are many (X11 not being a decent security boundary, the ability for anything which gets run in the session to elevate its privileges to get access to anything else in the session, the lack of effective sandboxing technology at the time, the model that all software was curated by distros and hence was trusted). If you want a different security model, where not everything running in the user’s session is equally trusted, then you need to use sandboxing — and that’s exactly what flatpak does. flatpak can proxy/deny access to the keyring.

Rodney: +Philip Withnall Doesn't make it not a bug. There are certainly problems with X11, but it is not an excuse for insecure designs and broad trust.

Flatpak is also not a solution here. Flatpak is nice and all for a very small subset of things, but it is by no means a solution to fundamental problems in how operating systems and the software which powers them, are designed and developed.

Bugs are still bugs, even if they were designed a certain way over a decade ago because thing today didn't exist then.

Philip Withnall: +Rodney gnome-keyring is behaving exactly as specified with the security model it was designed for. That security model may not be appropriate these days, but it was appropriate at the time with the understanding that only trusted code should be executed in the user’s session. It’s still appropriate if you take the distro-centric view that only trusted code can be installed. I’m not saying it’s a security model we should preserve, though.

Flatpak definitely is a solution to the problem that untrusted code running in the user’s session can access anything on the D-Bus session bus. Unless I’ve misunderstood the problem you’re talking about, that’s fundamentally what we’re talking about, right? gnome-keyring allowing access to all of the user’s keyring over the session bus?

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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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From reddit - "systemd is much nicer than Gnome, lol, because systemd is actually usable and many of the decisions make sense, unlike the Gnome developers." - +Lennart Poettering is winning the PR war! :D

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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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Originally shared by GNOME - 1 comment

Happy New Years to all our users, developers and especially our contributors! Thank you for a great year and we are looking forward to the challenges that come with 2018. #HappyNewYears #GNOME #GNOMELove

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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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I found this fun rant while going through GNOME's twitter messages. (I'm trying to make an effort to spend a little time on it every couple of days since I'm sort of doing the same tasks for System76 and Pop!_OS)

The author laments the end of menus and various other UI bits. Brings up the great +Andy Hertzfeld especially in regards to the nautilus changes. It seems he has retreated to Mate to hide from the changes being done across all the linux desktops.

I don't particularly have a profound statement to make on this. GNOME designers (and Elementary as well) don't like menus. Unity takes this even further with the lens feature where you can just search the menu item from the app. Ultimately, menus are problematic because they require precision to find and choose and there are better ways to deal with them. They especially make it difficult in the hybrid world of 2-in-1 laptops.

Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability — Part 1 – probono – Medium

medium.com

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Damián Nohales: Every time I'm required to use menus I spent lot of time browsing until I find the right entry, macOS helps a little since in the Help menu item it includes a text entry to search in all the commands in the menu.Having lot of disabled commands because the current context of the application doesn't allow to use those doesn't help.

Also, there is a problem with the submenus, where you have to move the cursor horizontally from the parent menu item to reach it, that's a really difficult move even if you are using a high quality touchpad, imagine that for a newcomer, where s/he probably doesn't know they can use the arrow keys to navigate a menu.

Mathias Hasselmann: "It's all black and white!" - Or the root of all evil. Sure, many small tools and apps get away without any kind of menubar. They are significantly better without it. And then there are apps that are more complex.

It starts with apps like Nautilus which looks much slicker than ever before but also is a pain to use these days, because essential features like creation of new folders, USB stick handling or network server handling just got a axed or moved to arbitary places where nobody ever finds them, or that are not visible when things are not perfect, like wrongly partioned USB sticks. I find myself using the terminal for file handling task more often than ever, which is a horrible result for the UX designers' work.

Massive apps like LibreOffice, GIMP, QtCreator won't ever be able to get rid of their menus - because they simply have too many features to provide to be somewhat useful.

Another horrible example: The new monitor handing dialog. It's just confusing as hell, and UX designers surly have known of standard widgets like combo boxes instead of bogus two-clicks-to-select transient windows?

Something that also bugs me ever other day: The character table tool. Sure, it looks slick now and at the same time became entirely useless because the grouping is arbitary, because one cannot search by code point anymore and most importantly because all the Unicode and programming information is not shown anymore. Heck yes, grandpa doesn't care about. But heck! Face it! Get touch with reality! Grandpa is happy with his iOS or Android tablet. Desktops are for professional users, in the context of Linux for technical professional users. Importance of the Linux desktop was growing as long as this was respected. Please do design's for your real target audience again! Not for imaginary users do not exist!

End of half off-topic, somewhat unstructured rant. It's late, and it had to be said.

Alex G.S.: Depends on the app. Complex productivity apps seem to work well with menus. There's some interesting stuff with electron apps like Atom and VScode on terms of hiding them away. The real problem is wasted space in the panels and titlebars that are just empty for the most part. Also how UIs scale to different monitor sizes to optimize those layouts especially mutli-monitors.

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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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My way of dealing with non-GNOME fanboys now is to point them to monetary contribution pages of their favorite DE and ask them to donate. I figure that's way more positive than trying to engage with them in any other way. After all, giving resources to desktop projects is a good thing of whatever type.

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Jan Wildeboer: Put your money where your mouth is. And when you don’t have money, give your time and translate or help with documentation or code. Talking is cheap. Work is hard. But appreciated.

Georges Basile Stavracas Neto: Thanks for sharing this. If you don't mind, I'll take that approach from now on.

Rodney: Talk is so cheap, some people get a $400k+ retainer to speak for an hour at one event.

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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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I enjoy a good reddit GNOME bashing post. So awesome.. I think I should have been anthropologist.. the study of how people behave on these posts are so fascinating.. to me, you're not bilog78, you're a man of mystery! A man with passion, a man with motivations!

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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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If GNOME is slow, can I blame Spectre? Maybe hire James Bond to fix it?

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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri)

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Happy New Years to all my european and asian friends!

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