That still doesn't answer the question of why it's better. Unless you're paranoid about an OEM backdoor, I think this is cool but not worth the effort.
I'm not sure that's paranoia (as others have pointed out, OEM firmwares have had security problems before), but sure, let's ignore security problems for a moment.
1. Firmware contains bugs. Old proprietary firmware tends to not get fixes. If you switch to an open source version, you can get the bugs fixed.
(Edit) 1.a. Old proprietary firmware also doesn't tend to get new features, and open source replacements can cover that. (eg. booting over HTTP(S) or security features to help against Evil Maid attacks)
2. Libreboot claims to be faster to boot than the vendor firmware. Depending on the particular device/firmware, that wouldn't surprise me at all.
Yes, I said in another comment that I might have used the wrong word. It's still not something I have a lot of motivation to do something about. At least not until the process is easy.
I think firstly is the FOSS obsession and backdoor paranoia from evangelists, and secondly and the more practical one is that the proprietary IBM BIOS is full of bugs and anti-consumer blacklists and whitelists designed to limit repairability and upgradeability, which stil boggle my mind on how those laptops got such a good image on that front.
Yes, if you live and organize your life around things that are unlikely to happen to you, but only because they've happened ONCE to someone else, typically a high value target by state actors, that's called paranoia.
Most people are not gonna be targeted via BIOS hacks. From state actors to online scammers they all have easier ways to getting your data remotely.
As far as I'm aware, it has less functionality than the OEM, so you use it to _remove_ features (good and/or bad).
Aside from that, I suppose it means you can run a more up to date firmware if yours is no longer maintained, but I'm not sure what that means in practical terms.
There's also the "hyper paranoid" fork "canoeboot" which has no proprietary blobs, and presumably _even less_ functionality.
The short answer is; if you don't know why you want it or need it, you probably don't.
If this were a commercial project then I could understand the complaint.. but this is just a small, for-fun project and they have little motivation to put the extra effort into support for all browsers.
Bellard (yes, him) already had a working VM of Windows 2000 in the browser around a decade ago, with no specific "support for all browsers" (whatever that means):
Also, look at 8086tiny, or PCulator/XTulator. These could be ported with ease to EMSCripten and run everywhere, not just in Chrome.
Chrome almost became the new IE and Google, despite it's motto, the new Microsoft. Ok, the desktop? Android rules the smartphone sales in the world, and its online services are used by millions, with far more metadata grabbing than w9x/wxp on its day and with the same propietary OSes.
Consider: maybe it's not a matter of non-standard APIs, but bad performance. It's not simply porting to the lowest common denominator, it's making sure the code doesn't run at a snail's pace because the JIT/wasm compiler has a pathological edge case.
I'm not really complaining; just harking back to a shitty time that is, on some commercial sites, threatening to return. Especially as Apple finally allows Chrome on iOS, eroding the main bastion against it: Safari.
I feel like you're making a silly distinction. I mean, we ban cigarette use for minors because it's bad for them.. are you against that too? You're admitting that you think certain books are inappropriate for kids, but saying that we shouldn't do anything about preventing their use in schools.. why?
Not every kid goes to a school with wonderful teachers. I think banning books for use in schools is justifiable.
So, buy it refurbished? Google doesn't directly profit from it, you create less pollution, and once you have GrapheneOS on it you can leave Google out the door.
The problem with nearly every other phone, except maybe Samsung flagships, is that they don't fulfill the security requirements. And Samsung is hostile against unlocking (even when it was still possible, it would burn a Knox eFuse).
I used to dress down at work because that's how everyone else dressed and I just wanted to fit in. But at some point I stopped doing that because I was caring way too much about what other people were thinking.
I dress nice because I like it. It makes me feel good about myself, but has nothing to do with compensating.
And the best way to take advantage may be by unmasking the people that are incompetent enough to not assess others competence by looking at their work, and instead just look at their clothes.
Yes, I hear that a lot. Might as well push on a rope, though.
In my early career years, a fellow employee came to work in track shorts and flip flops. He was a very, very good programmer. But he never got raises, and never got promoted, and complained to me about it. I suggested it was the way he dressed. He said the same things you wrote.
A couple decades later, I ran into him again at a conference. He ran his own quite successful company. He also was dressed sharply.
Personally, I stopped dressing nicely at work after way too many people assumed I'd throw ethics at the trash and do what they say for the hint of a small promotion. Weirdly, that never stopped the people that actually wanted to do things from talking with me.
But if you are talking to (potential) customers, the calculation is completely different.
You can't control others, you can only control your response to them. How people perceive you is a comprehensive and isn't always based in logic. You can use this to your advantage and take control of your own narrative or not. But you'll be worse off for it if you don't.
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised about what kinds of things people look favorably on.
I'm on my phone so I'm too lazy to dig for this, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about the bit of shell script that gets run if you type a command that isn't found in PATH.
Fedora and Debian will both dive straight into searching apt/dnf for a matching package and ask "do you want to install this?"
I imagine you could create a hook that gets run for any command failure, but again I'm on my phone so not sure.
This is generally called a command-not-found handler and are a feature of all the major shells (though the exact details differ, the general idea is to define a function with a specific reserved name), and most majors distros have ones that can be installed, even if they aren't by default.
I vaguely remember that there are hook functions for processing all entered lines as well (at least for zsh), but it isn't something I have used myself so I know nothing more than that.
# if the command-not-found package is installed, use it
if [ -x /usr/lib/command-not-found -o -x /usr/share/command-not-found/command-not-found ]; then
...
fi
Maybe you're not the type of person who's struggled with addiction, but it can do awful things to you. Yes, including being addicted to scrolling social media. It screws with your head to the point where you don't know how to live in the moment anymore.
IMO it's a feature that's not valuable enough to justify the fact that it contributes to poor quality of life for people who can't put it down.
What will stop the addicts from just installing a modified build? Will distributors of modified builds be subject to jail sentences like drug dealers? What about authors of auto-paginate scripts like Reddit Enhancement Suite, or the various HN client apps?
During the few days TikTok was banned in the US a significant chunk of users went over to Xiaohongshu. This isn't merely a hypothetical.
This is also only addressing half of my comment. Will mod makers also face criminal penalties? If I make a HN client or even just a userscript, should I be delisting them or pushing an update that prevents EU citizens from using them?
The first step to get on track in life is to stop blaming the outside for all problems. Yes some people had really bad luck but in the end you can only change yourself.
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