lower case “america” hurts my eyes

well, the problem is not that forums are not real time. the problem is that people use real time chats for things that should’t be done in real time. like guides, which should stand on their own as an organized post, easily searched and found.

“real time” chats, that is, instant messengers, have their time and place. they have been around for a while, but they never really replaced forums. until discord came, which kind of then did. which i guess also resulted from facebook groups, twitter, instagram, and reddit first kind of partially replacing forums, after which then forums really fell out of favor, and discord really is way easier and better to interact with than any of the others mentioned (aside from maybe reddit). people are also just lazy and jusy use whatever works.

and people then started using discord like a forum since forums are almost dead and discord is just simple and easy. so many guides, info, announcements, etc. are put in discord like it is a forum since the admittedly amazing features for roles and bots make it convenient.

it all gets lost in a sea instant messaging organizing. to find something, one must go to one of a a bunch pinned messages in one of the bajillion channels that links to a post (i say oost, it is actually a message) which in turn links to a series of messages where someone knowledgeable posted something useful intertwined with shitpost messages fromither people. if you are lucky, someone made a google doc for a guide, but those also suck, and they are also not easily found unless you know the guy who knows the guy who knows which pinned message in which channel has the link to it.

actually, i believe the top two should be switched.

at least that is what my perception is of people who drink coffee vs people who don’t drink coffee.

but it does make sense in the sense that the pictures represent someone who is already addicted to coffee, which feels like must be a majority of programmers hahaha

upvote for SimpleX

upvote for org-mode

magit gang

well, a standalone WM will usually have less code than your usual DEs, but they also can be less secure in the sense that they might not come eith built-in security features. if your screenlock is buggy (it crashes or it lets you use WM shortcut key combinations or something), that can be a problem. or other stuff regarding saved passwords and keys etc must also be done by hand then usually and depending on if you know ehat you are doing either it works well or it is less secure than a built-in feature of your DE.

also, even though you are right that bigger applications potentially have more attack surface in general, the big DEs like KDE Plasma and GNOME might be (correct me if i am wrong) tested for security more than smaller standalone WMs. but i still tend to feel “safer” when i am in control of everyrhing and the DE doesn’t do all kinds of things automatically in the background.

a DE gives no security features that give your system additional security, yes. indeed, a running DE makesbyour system less secure, in some sense. but exactly here you can have less and more secure DEs, and some DEs have security features that make the DE itself more secure than other DEs.

the “missing something” was with regards to what i said about ctrl+alt+F-something not giving some extra attack point. missing something that would blow my mind. if you say the mind blowing is ironic or whtever then it doesn’t matter anyway.

reading your comments, you like to say that someone has “missed the point”.

well, my point is, you should not ignore the DE. i mean, you can, if you can bypass the login as is, sure. but from a user perspective, you should not ignore it, because the DE is a potential security risk. e.g. if your screen lock crashes and whatnot.

sure, yes indeed, your DE can be as secure as you want and it doesn’t matter if your underlying system is not secure. and yes indeed, with any non-encrypted drive, you can just mount the drives on another system (e.g. boot the computer from a USB drive). that almost goes without saying imo, and of course that’s why an encrypted drive is recommended.

the question is, how easy is it to get to the stuff with an encrypted drive when the system is booted and the encrypted drive(s) is (are) mounted? it is not that easy. and there, the quality of your screen lock setup is the biggest risk factor, usually. if you can crash your DE/WM somehow, if it is not setup right with your display manager or something, then you might be able to get into a login (and interactive) shell of that user (maybe because it is the parent process of your WM that you started with startx).

if you “allow” your potential attacker to reboot from a usb stick, then it is obvious that your DE doesn’t matter at all pretty much.

i don’t really get what people mean when they say this…

when you get tty you still get no access, you need to log in as always. a DE/wm/any x11 session/a wayland session (even though wayland is more secure probs?) should pretty much always be less secure, as depending on what state it is in, what features it has, or what happens when certsin components crash somehow, you can more easily “hack” your way in that way than via doing a “ctrl+alt+F-key”. so i don’t get the whole “get tour mind blown” thing there, i have heard it multiple times.

or am i missing something?