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!

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.

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.

For each participant, Dialog logs a membership status, every retreat the person has attended, a biography, a home city, and a private access token. WIRED is not publishing the tokens, which function as login credentials, or the personalized account links that contain them.

This is an odd thing to say given that neither Wired nor their source (“the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew”) appear to be publishing any of the actual data whatsoever, beyond the handful of mostly nonspecific references to it in the article text. (Eg, lots of sentences like “The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.” - omitting names of any of these people.)

Also, the linked archive says:

Update 6/16/2026, 5:47 pm EDT: WIRED updated this article to correct a conflation of two people named Jeff Epstein. A small revision was also made to address a security concern raised by a Dialog representative.

Someone helpfully had already made an earlier archive before that, so we can see what information Wired journalists Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova removed at the request of a Dialog representative: where it now says “The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at a venue near Dublin” it originally said “The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin”.

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.)

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.

Nice, thanks.

It would certainly be nice to be able to pre-download language pair models without selecting to and from and then actually initiating a translation using the model i don’t have yet.

re: getting uBlock externally, i also see the attraction of that approach but unfortunately Debian’s package was last updated in October (from 1.62 to 1.67) while AMO has a release from January (1.69) :/

imo it would be better to bundle UBO and ship its updates along with browser updates.

are there plans to distribute Konform via flathub?

Full-page machine translations are disabled

Firefox translations are done offline (after downloading the model for a langauge pair).

Does anybody know why Konform decided to disable this very useful feature?

could Red Hat eventually take control of the project

Fedora started in 2002 and merged with “Red Hat Linux” in 2003.

Red Hat, Inc has had full control of it ever since then.

It is a “community project” inasmuch as there are Fedora developers who are volunteers (and some who are paid by companies other than Red Hat), and the Fedora Council includes people who are not employed by Red Hat - but the Project Leader is always a Red Hat employee, and if the Council ever has an irreconcilable difference with Red Hat then Red Hat can simply ignore and/or dismiss them.

Red Hat owns all Fedora-related trademarks, and the Fedora Project is not an independent legal entity: it is a part of Red Hat.

If Fedora developers don’t like Red Hat’s decisions regarding the project, they can fork it but they’d need to change the name and find some other sources funding.

Also, icymi, Red Hat became a subsidiary of IBM in 2019.

Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR

I am not aware of any software distribution service with a comparable experience (massive userbase with zero vetting for uploaders) as Arch’s amazing AUR - if you are looking for a way to distribute malware to many unsuspecting people (who’s friends think they’re hackerman), it’s really unparalleled. (😢)

To your primary question, yes, many people do successfully daily drive various Linux distros without ever opening the terminal. 🙄

look at their responses in the .ml cross-post,

that post is now deleted, but you can see their modlog here