A distro working out-of-the-box for a certain user group is not a weird spinoff. Some people love to economize time; a distro that takes care of exactly that is a good deal.

None of these distros economize time. This is not Debian/Arch/Ubuntu with some preconfiguration. Every single user of these distros is in the hands of a tiny number of developers who mostly work on this as a hobby. Things are going to break and they will break in ways nobody will know why, since the base distro does not have these problems.

There is a very good reason why the Arch forums do want reports from arch derivatives, because they are all inevitably broken by their tiny maintainer teams.

Zorin is not a hobby distro. They are a small company that does this for profit. You may like or dislike that, but your assessment is wrong in this case.

> This is not Debian/Arch/Ubuntu with some preconfiguration.

Well yes it is. Zorin is literally based on Ubuntu LTS and their packages are binary compatible.

I think you have a typo. The arch forums don't want reports from arch derivative distros

I don't think personal blogs have made a comeback. Most modern blogs are ego-boosting camouflage, the same content you'd find on social media. This kind of content isn't intended to disseminate useful information, but rather to hijack your emotions and force you to react in a way you've been told. It's a form of psychic vampirism.

I have fond memories and miss profoundly the innocuous purity of 1994-2005 internet era. Back then, the content was created mostly by enthusiasts, not by attention seekers.

Camouflage in what sense?

in the sense that the supposed topic of the blog is not what it actually is about. it's about the emotion that it's selling.

just like the OP blog

I am kind of fascinated that some people move the world forward finding a solution even for supposedly dare conditions, while others kill innocent with bombs. This is what I've felt after watching the video.

Good luck to these manufacturers who serve the niche with such a passion. It needs a lion share of compassion to be able to design this kind of products for handicapped people.

DuckLake format has an unresolved built-in chicken and egg conflict: it requires SQL database to represent its catalog. But this is what some people are running away from when they choose Parquet format in the first place. Parquet = easy, SQL = hard, adding SQL to Parquet makes the resulting format hard. I would expect a catalog to be in Parquet format as well, then it becomes something self-bootstrapping and usable.

DuckLake is more comparable to Iceberg and Delta than to raw parquet files. Iceberg requires a catalog layer too, a file system based one at its simplest. For DuckLake any RDBMS will do, including fs-based ones like DuckDB and SQLite. The difference is that DuckLake will use that database with all its ACID goodness for all metadata operations and there is no need to implement transactional semantics over a REST or object storage API.

It is not a chicken and egg problem, it is just a requirement to have an RDBMS available for systems like DuckLake and Hive to store their catalogs in. Metadata is relatively small and needs to provide ACID r/w => great RDBMS use case.

What about file-based catalogs with Iceberg? Found one that puts it in a single json file: https://github.com/boringdata/boring-catalog

Then concurrency suffers since you have to have locks when you update files.

That's also why ducklake performs better than others.

For many use cases this trade-off is worth it.

TP-Gold router with polished surface so that the greatness could be fully reflected to its radiant carrier. Amen

An unmanaged switch is not going to realistically have exploitable vulnerabilities, the chances of that are dim.

A router, a managed switch or something having an OS is another story.

It's managed. I don't know, but I would bet that unmanaged switches have vulnerabilities too. Maybe they just aren't targeted.

What vulnerabilities would you imagine there to be in an unmanaged (aka: dumb) switch? Someone can force the switch to flood all traffic to all ports?

Bearing in mind that switches generally have special-purpose hardware that's responsible for handling switching, I find it unlikely that cheapass dumbswitches have enough CPU to copy LAN data and send it out to a remote system at any useful speed.

Also, next time you're looking for a switch (or if you're still within the return period for your used switch), consider Mikrotik switches. I've had four CRS326-24G-2S+ units for three, maybe five years now and I'm quite happy with them. However, I know nothing about their routers or WiFi APs.

"What vulnerabilities would you imagine there to be in an unmanaged (aka: dumb) switch?"

Probably stuff related to how they handle the MAC table and VLANs.

They aren't usually accessible until the network is compromised.

TP-Link cheap consumer configurable switches used to have, IIRC, a VLAN permanently available on all physical ports, giving access to everything going through a switch. After many complaints, they "upgraded" the firmware to support disabling the VLAN from the GUI, though it remained default enabled, and included a note with something like "we only had it that way because customers demanded it".

By "a VLAN permanently available" do you mean something like "all frames traversing the switch got a VLAN tag (whose ID was hard-coded) slapped onto them"?

If not, I'm not sure what you mean, as a cheapass dumbswitch always allows access to everything going through a switch. It's been my experience that any dumbswitch that can handle jumbo frames will fail to act on VLAN-tagged frames and just pass them through unmolested. (Ones that cannot handle jumbo frames might drop "large" VLAN-tagged frames on the floor.)

I don't like the terms "dumb" or "smart" when discussing switches, because it isn't very useful.

The term "configurable" is more useful, because it means that the switch can be configured (vs. non-configurable switches that may also be "smart", i.e., a "dumb" switch is really just a hub).

IIRC, the TP-Link models with this "feature" hard-coded into the GUI would enable a VLAN on all physical ports with VLAN enabled.

Oh, and it was fixed with a firmware update, so it's not like there was some hardware limitation.

> TP-Link models with this "feature" hard-coded into the GUI would enable a VLAN on all physical ports with VLAN enabled.

That's a slightly strange feature. I guess it was to cope with downstream switches (or administrators(!)) that refused to assign an administrator-assigned VLAN tag to untagged traffic?

> I don't like the terms "dumb" or "smart" when discussing switches, because it isn't very useful.

In the lore that I'm familiar with, there are three general categories, "dumb", "smart", and "managed". The boundaries between the latter two categories are fuzzy... with "smart" switches tending to offer you very little configurability, and "managed" switches offering you nearly everything you'd expect from an Enterprise switch.

It's true that the difference between "dumb" and "not dumb" switches are that the former offers no end-user configuration, but how do you succinctly distinguish between a switch that offers -say- only the ability to force link speeds on specific ports, and a switch that offers link bonding and IGMP snooping and VLANs, and etc., etc., etc.? Use the terms "Prosumer" and "Enterprise"? [0]

But yeah, naming is hard... case in point:

> vs. non-configurable switches that may also be "smart", i.e., a "dumb" switch is really just a hub

Perhaps this was a brain fart on your part, because that's completely incorrect. An Ethernet hub does absolutely no filtering... all traffic that enters on one port is flooded to all other ports on the device. This means that Ethernet collision detection is essential for operation when attached to a hub, and total throughput decreases sharply when one has many chatty stations on one's LAN. The feature that distinguishes a switch from a hub is that a switch doesn't flood unicast traffic because it learns which ports have which MAC addresses behind them and routes traffic based on that information.

[0] Though, if I were king of the world, every consumer-grade switch would have the features of a low-to-mid-range managed switch. While I understand why things are the way they are, it's a crying shame that dumbswitches are the norm.

TP-Link produces solid and affordable network equipment. A great value for the money, which makes their products a popular choice for many customers around the world. But as almost all hardware vendors out there, TP-Link has weaknesses in their software. In a way, they are victims of their own success and popularity. I wish them to get their software security act together.

Banning such a bright tech company is totally unwarranted, unless there are proofs of their intentional wrongdoings.

I always wonder why there are no download links. Alpha, beta, something at least.

Alpha is supposed to come out next year. Until then they don’t want to offer downloads so people who don’t understand software development don’t download highly unstable pre-alpha software and judge it based on that. Those kind of first impressions can stick.

I use these on Mac https://sizeof.cat/project/ladybird-builds/

I try to read blogs and hackernews on ladybird. Ofcourse it crashes sometimes but at the moment its pretty adequate for basic html+css.

Its pre alpha, you can build it from source.

Yeah, it's quite easy to do from a normal laptop. The instructions are very clear and straightforward. Have played around with it a few times.

Plenty of them. Image tracing is probably the most notable one (converts pixels to vectors).

After playing with it several hours, I can say that Affinity 3 is pretty solid release. The new AI persona is surprisingly useful too.

Initially, I was reluctant to migrate from Affinity 2 but now I'm sold.

Despite the mixed feelings I have about this direction, Canva's AI deal seems to be legit. Usually, AI does a fairly limited job when it comes to vector graphics, but this is what I've got with Affinity Studio:

> Generate a playful logo for product named "Serenity" using the style of Robin Hood forest and freedom themes

The result for such a simple prompt is pretty impressive: https://imgur.com/a/xLZlfQM, the produced artifact is already in vector format with tweakable curves, lines, and colors.

Well played, Canva. Maybe Affinity Studio is a smart move in the long run. I think I will be among Pro subscribers.