umm....I use Artix btw

Community Off-Topic
1

image

Artix is growing in popularity. Slowely but people liking it getting comfortable in it and for years forgetting that they are not using Arch anymore.

Honestly I am not here to shill against systemd or arch. And i hope this place wont become the war zone.

I am here to have friendly convo to know your thoughts that if you are using artix then what about it you like the most and why do you prefer it over other distros if you do so?

I also like to know as a hacker how any specific distro is crucial or not.

1 Like
2

Debian fanboy, checking in here.

Arch, Gentoo, and the distros that are closer to the “source” side of Linux are more frustrating than anything to me. Linux is a tool, and if I had to sharpen my screwdriver before I used it I would not use that brand of screwdriver anymore. Same Same on *nix distros. I want to sit down and have at my disposal as much as I could possibly need “out of the box” without messing around with source, hardware, drivers, package managers, windows managers, desktops, on and on…

And I know there are derivative distros that are BASED on Arch that solve many of these issues that I have, hell, for all I know Artix is one of those that solves the issues that I have had in years (decades? Damn I feel old some days) past.

But I want a stable, secure, easy to use, out of the box experience. I would never, ever install Arch on a production server. Debain, or even Ubuntu (if at work). Full stop. Unless the corpo overlords spring for a RHEL license, then I would use THAT.

And I know that my use case is different than others. I run production applications and have a zero tolerance for downtime due to Operating Systems. If one of my systems goes down because of some unstable patch pushed from upstream, I lose money. That is frankly unacceptable.

Now, if Arch and it’s derivatives were perfectly stable, and had zero hardware or software compatibility issues, even then, I have become used to administrating Debian, specifically apt and all it’s glorious management. To me, the fact deb repos are “out of date” is a feature, not a bug.

TLDR: Happy you are finding use, not my jam.

3 Likes
3

Thanks @wother for your viewpoint. I agree most of the point you made while not completely agree on some.

I agree most linux users especially those, doing professions (where they required to practice their stuff within certain provided limit), and mostly beginners and students of development or non techy jobs preferes “just works out of the box” system. And thats perfectly reasonable reason to not use source based distros.

It saves a lot of time and money and you would be able to focus on the main thing instead of wasting more time and energy to learn its inner enginering to fix the error.

However, I was wondering for a student of OffSec, how this would be useful for security analyst, penetration tester, a hacker - ethical or gray hat one?
If I trying to put myself in their shoes i think A hacker would build his setup from bottom to top selecting only those software to build upon his setup which provide them maximum security.

We know possibility is that most proprietary tools are full of unfixed bugs from decades probably still unknown till this date. And I think what specific kernel we choose, what drivers we installed, and what tools are we working with definitely make impact on our privacy, security and confidentiality and how that drastically affect if we taken everything granted as on “just works” basis.

And not just for hacker and security specialist but for normal user too (although they most likely choose comfort over security unless they something is shaken or being educated in this area) I think its worth a effort to learn and getting educated on what tools they working on and how safe they are. Ik most people argue here – “thats why distros are to take care of our privacy so we dont have too” but same model apply to police and public scenario – yes police are there for you but you also need to be equiped with at least some level of self defense training.

A hacker must be so careful what tools he choose and what setup he’s working on. Although I dont imagin anyone using gentoo to hack to some big evil corp like something that would awesome but also if he uses old thinkpads with no tpm and libre kernel on top of it he might be practically untracable.

Although I am not expert yet in this field I like to know your humble opinion on this that if its just a fantasy or really been in practice?

4

most hackers use ubuntu.

not Parrot, Kali, Debian, Arch (btw), or anything else.

Ubuntu.

How do I know this? I ask. You can figure out who anyone who is worth anything by listening, learning, and seeing how they talk about technology. How they talk about DNS and fingerprinting. How the browser they use might have a custom user client, not to make it something unique, but rather to use the most common user client.

Hackers use tools. This might be BASH, something precompiled, something they wrote themselves, or any of a number of things. Gcc could be seen as a tool, or the JDK, or Python 2.7, a very out-of-date env. All those things run on Ubuntu.

Sure, you will get someone that wants a “pure” experiance, just like you will get hifi audio nerds with really fancy headphones, or MacOS nerds that have all Apple computers…

But nefarious folks want to blend in. They do not want to stick out in a crowd. Online, or in meat space. You don’t want a custom rolled kernel with a custom browser, and custom WM/DE. You want to be everyman.

Can they roll their own kernel? Roll all that source for every tool? Of course. But hackers are lazy. First and foremost, lazy.

Now… Should YOU, and aspiring technology enthusiast, learn how to roll a kernel? Yes. Shoudl you know how to pull source down and roll it yourself? Yes. Should you learn to read and write code? Totally. Just… don’t make it hard on yourself for the sake of making things hard on yourself. Make things hard because you want to learn.

2 Likes
5

Ohh right how could I missed that xD.
Hackers wants to blend in thats the most important point.
Nobody wants to send unique fingerprint which makes you recognizable out of the crowd. but just out of curiosity and now that you have brought to me. Isnt there tools to mask that uniqueness?
I see tails os and cube os are popular, containerization, useragent masking and what not tools are available to hide your unique fingerprint and make you look like everyone else.
So the argument that every hacker use ubuntu is null and void as this is what they want you to believe. and I know most of newbie hackers starts from kali and parrot and very rare ones from black arch and very paranoid ones from tails and cubes.

And yeah they are lazy but thats why they have scripts to automate their hardwork. And Yeah nobody wants to do hardwork. And believe me I learned it the hard way, I know that too. And I am not saying that you should be hard on yourself and waste hours of time in ricing the perfect distro from scratch.

My arguments is that “Ricing exist, and hackers knows that too, and they must have using their scripts to automate the hardwork and obscure their distro for some privacy and security reasons”.

I am not sure how that work to safe guard themselves. but it is a thing right?