383: Vanilla flavored OS, COSMIC Desktop Alpha, & Android Malware Scare

Shows Destination Linux Podcast
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On this weeks episode, we’re going to discuss a very Vanilla OS and there’s also a new desktop environment we’re going to be talking about that’s not very vanilla, but is very alpha. Welcome to Destination Linux, where we discuss the latest news, hot topics, gaming, mobile, and all things open source and Linux. Also this week, we might get to the Firefox news that we were planning to talk about for three weeks now. So let’s get this show on the road toward Destination Linux!

Support the show by becoming a patron at Membership - TuxDigital or get some swag at TuxDigital

Hosted by:
Michael Tunnell = https://michaeltunnell.com
Jill Bryant = https://jilllinuxgirl.com
Ryan (DasGeek) = https://dasgeek.net

Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro
00:01:10 Community Feedback
00:09:33 A New Way To Distro
00:25:05 System76 Cosmic Alpha Release
00:43:18 Mobile News: Texting Is Dangerous
00:50:51 Gaming: Motordoom
00:54:08 Tip of the Week: Disable Firefox Privacy Feature
01:09:03 Support the Show
01:12:05 Outro

Links:

linux #OpenSource podcast

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Music remakes/remix/covers recommendations:

Muscle Shoals - Hey Jude

For more recent music

Check out Pretty Lights - 2010 remixes album, free on the website for download. It has a lot of songs that have been remixed during I assume, live concert performances.

Also, the 2013 album by the same artist, “A Color Map of the Sun” has remixed songs on the disc 2, from a few different artists.

The same goes for the 2014 album “The Hidden Shades”

All other music released by the artist is also free to download, so just download it all and find out what you like.

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Regarding the CrowdStrike issue and an immutable A/B positioned Linux OS: that setup wouldn’t have helped you with the CrowdStrike crash.

CrowdStrike has a “Falcon Sensor” service for Linux (the thing that broke Windows) and assuming that the Linux version works the same way as on Windows (which it mostly does), and it crashed your Vanilla OS due to a broken update (which is unlikely, but let’s put that aside for now) - then rebooting wouldn’t cure the problem because the Falcon Sensor downloads updates automatically on boot up and applies them immediately.

If you saw your Vanilla OS install crashing and said to yourself “oh, an update gone wrong. I’ll reboot to the safe partition”, when the B partition starts, Falcon will download the broken update and now you have both partitions borked. If you wait with the reboot until after CrowdStrike releases a fix - then you’re in about the same situation as Windows machines (except maybe you’ll have to reboot fewer times😅).

The main reason Vanilla OS is better than Windows in CrowdStrike-crash resilience is that the Linux Falcon Sensor uses kernel eBPF programs to do it’s thing, and the eBPF VM is supposed to be able to detect and reject crashing programs. The previous Linux Falcon crashes were supposedly caused by the eBPF program triggering a bug in the verification process that would either crash the kernel itself or allow a crashing program to be loaded. Hopefully these have all been fixed.