[–] 20 points 10 months ago

You can't, obviously. I know how to read code, but I still rarely do it since it's very time consuming. Usually, if I'm nervous about something, I'll first look at the author and see if they're well-known, or at least tied to a real identity. In the rare cases that I have reviewed a code base (I'm not a security expert or anything) to check for malware, the things I looked for were:

  • obvious red flags, like urls to fishy sites, or calls to filesystem APIs where it doesn't make sense, paths that it shouldn't be trying access, etc

  • anything that looks obfuscated, poorly written, or delibrately designed to be difficult to read

But if it's anything related to Node/NPM, I always use a throwaway rootless podman container without filesystem access. Even if the author is trustworthy, their dependency graph is likely a bag of used needles that they picked up on the side of the road.

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago

    A "distro" is basically just:

    • a precompiled kernel
    • some preinstalled software

    Idk anything about Poseidon but,

    is it easy enough to replicate just by downloading the relevant packages?

    The answer to that is yes. Just pick a base you like (eg debian, fedora, ubuntu, ...) and install the software you need. You could automate it with some simple scripts, or be fancy and write a Butane config to preconfigure a base Fedora CoreOS image. IIRC, the Omarchy distro is just the former, not even a proper "distro".

    If you want to create your own "proper" distro that other people will want to use, there's a lot more that goes into it: updates, builds, tests, deployment, patch sets (because you'll inevitably need to patch various components for compatibility), bug reports, some kind of governance structure...

    It's a whole software development thing. If you just need a customized platform for your buddies/workplace, customizing an existing distro is the only reasonable choice. I'd suggest looking into bootc and ublue if you need more than a simple post-install shell script.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago*

    Eclipse Theia is meant to be a 1:1 replacement for VSCode, and it's a completely independent rewrite. Afaik the only part they share is the "Monaco" text editor component, but there's not really much lock-in risk there.

    Eclipse are also the people who run the open-vsx extension registry.

    Personally, I am very happy with Sublime Text and don't see myself using anything else any time soon. But if I did need an alternative, Theia might be my first choice.

    Edit: another one that hasn't been mentioned yet is Lite-XL

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago

    https://scratchapixel.com/ for valuable background

    After that, I recommend you learn webGL and write your first project in javascript. It's not as cool as a native executable in C++, but you will gain a lot of crucial 3D graphics knowledge without getting sidetracked by typical native development woes (which should not be underestimated)

    Once you feel you have a good grasp on the 3D math, working with a graphics API, writing shaders, and the general architecture of a 3D application, THEN you should start looking into native development. Maybe start learning Vulkan as a next step, although that's a tough one if you don't already have C or C++ experience (mostly because of memory management concepts). Instead of Vulkan, you could instead go with OpenGL or a high level library like Sokol.

    It should go without saying that this isn't an easy topic. It's a deep, deep (but rewarding) rabbit hole. There's a lot of stuff to learn, and it will take a while. A sense of overwhelming dread, hopelessness, and inadequacy is part of the process.

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  • [–] -1 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Linux isn’t a replacement for Windows. It’s its own thing, with its own issues but also advantages.

    Linux isn't a replacement because Linux isn't an operating system. The "battle" isn't between Linux and Windows, it's between Windows and specific distros, like Ubuntu or Fedora. Mainstream Linux will require one of those to up their game when it comes to hardware partnerships and customer/end user support. Doing so will require competing against Microsoft along those same business areas, not just from an engineering perspective.

    Unfortunately, I don't think that will be easy. Microsoft is incompetent at a lot of things (incl business most of the time), but they have unlimited money and leverage, and their relationship with the US govt means they're unlikely to see any antitrust scrutiny when they do illegal shit to suppress competitors.

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  • [–] 16 points 10 months ago

    The fact they chose moonlight as their streaming protocol is proof they vibe coded the entire idea lmao. Moonlight/Sunshine are reverse engineered implementations of Nvidia's proprietary GameStream product, designed for low latency streaming of game video/input on a typical home network. No competent engineer would choose that for this kind of application.

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