Mint Under Fire, Ubuntu Mixed Reviews
Since Sunday's Mint reveal, a certain segment of users is upset over the lack of security measures that lead to the February 20 attack. Bryan Lunduke is impressed with a video of Ubuntu on a tablet, but actual users less so. A KDE NEON unstable repository is open and Jeff Law introduced folks to the new features in GCC 6. And finally,in light of the Mint mishap, Kevin Fenzi has offered up a "Fedora distribution download primer."
It wasn't very long after Clement Lefebvre made his shocking announcement of his project being hacked that users began expressing their disappointment. Some are saying the security was lax at Mint, which is inexcusable since Mint is such an important and popular distribution. They go further by suggesting folks may want to consider another distribution because of this and other security shortcomings (such as hiding some security updates). The word "unprofessional" was used.
The hack is already being used as an example of what not to do in Danny Stieben's Is Linux Really Secure? article. Stieben does say that this type of successful attack is rare, but obviously possible. He concludes Linux is safer than others, but not a "magic pill" for security.
Kevin Fenzi wrote today to "explain how Fedora handles image downloads and what you can do as an end user to make sure you have the correct and official Fedora images." Long story short, one should check the GPG signature of the checksum file then check the SHA256sum of the ISO.
Ubuntu was the topic of several articles today about its performance. First up, Bryan Lunduke watched a video of Ubuntu Unity 8 on a tablet and said that convergence looks to be working. He said the folks at Ubuntu "deserve a rather hearty high-five." But some folks using the phone aren't all that happy. Main problem seems to be not being able to make calls. NIck Summers at Engadget.com said the new flagship phone is "unadventurous" and "uninspired" and that the interface/operating system showed little improvement in the last year. It was buggy and needed work and still does. He added, "Given the choice, I would always choose the version that runs Google's OS." But Canonical can always count on Jack Wallen for love letters.
In other news: