Thread

1. ItsMattyG · 1791054287 · focus · HN ↗

   I don't see how this will survive the attacker/defender gap as ls get increasingly good at cyber security and finding 0 days... but maybe it's an obscure enough is it doesn't matter?

   1. PorciiVorbesc · 1791054482 · focus · HN ↗

      Probably because pop_os and Cosmic are so niche and their market share so insignificant, that they're irrelevant to attackers and bad actors, when those now have much bigger fish to fry to make their time and effort worth it. See the Arch AUR attacks, for perspective.

      I think even amongst the HN and Linux userbase, pop_os is still niche, let alone amongst normies who never heard about Linux. So they can afford take the high road and treat it like their personal sandbox, accepting only human written code.

      But larger and more important projects like Fedora and Debian are more pragmatic with the fact that they'll have to accept AI written(but human reviewed) code, if they wish to keep up with the real world development and threats, as expressed by Linus Torvalds himself.

      The thing is, the cat's out of the bag on this one now, especially in the field of pen-testing and reverse-engineering. AI can brute-force its way into projects in ways that beat even experienced researchers, so your only choice to keep up is to accept the use of AI generated fixes as a counter defense.

      1. badc0ffee · 1791056116 · focus · HN ↗

         It does show up on top 5 lists for Linux desktop distros quite a lot, and COSMIC is quite unique, so I suspect a lot of people are at least trying it.

         (I wasn't able to make it work on a scrap Dell I tried it on because the GPU was too old. Booted the USB key and COSMIC greeter failed to start)

         1. PorciiVorbesc · 1791056340 · focus · HN ↗

            >It does show up on top 5 lists for Linux desktop distros quite a lot

            1) Firstly, your source plase? My research according to Google Gemini 3.8 Pro shows top 5 DEs are as follows:

              +---+---------------+------------+-------------------------------------+
              | # | Environment   | Est. Share | Primary Ecosystem / Defaults        |
              +---+---------------+------------+-------------------------------------+
              | 1 | GNOME         | 45% - 50%  | Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, RHEL        |
              | 2 | KDE Plasma    | 25% - 30%  | SteamOS, openSUSE, Kubuntu, Manjaro |
              | 3 | Cinnamon      |  8% - 12%  | Linux Mint flagship                 |
              | 4 | Xfce          |  6% - 9%   | MX Linux, Xubuntu, low-spec PCs     |
              | 5 | MATE          |  2% - 4%   | Ubuntu MATE, Mint MATE (GNOME 2)    |
              | - | Others / WMs  |  3% - 5%   | Hyprland, i3, Sway, LXQt, Budgie    |
              +---+---------------+------------+-------------------------------------+ 
            

            So then COSMIC isn't even TOP 5, for this to be a major target by market share as originally claimed.

            2) Secondly, keep in mind that distrowatch is not representative of linux userbase. MX-Linux kept showing up at the top spot for many years despite being niche.

            3) And thirdly, TOP 5 DE isn't really an achievement when Linux DE market share is overwhelmingly dominated by KDE Plasma and Gnome as the majority shareholders, with XFCE and Cinnamon trailing. So Cosmic DE if it somehow made the no. 5 spot, would still be ignorable sub <1% market share, as I initially claimed, basically invisible to bad actors.

            1. badc0ffee · 1791058758 · focus · HN ↗

               Sorry for being unclear. I meant it shows up as a top 5 distro recommended by reviewers. This kind of thing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxblog.io&#x2F;best-linux-distro&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxblog.io&#x2F;best-linux-distro&#x2F;

               1. PorciiVorbesc · 1791058890 · focus · HN ↗

                  OK, but what&#x27;s the sample size of that and who&#x27;s measuring it? I never heard of that blog or took part in that poll. So how is that blog link the yardstick but mine is not?

                  1. nvme0n1p1 · 1791064680 · focus · HN ↗

                     Because that blog actually talked to real people and did real work, and yours is just a hallucinated list from one of the me-too LLM vendors

                     1. PorciiVorbesc · 1791065297 · focus · HN ↗

                        &gt;Because that blog actually talked to real people and did real wor

                        How did you verify that those people from the blog are &quot;real&quot;?

                        I also talked to real people for my own data, case in point, I asked my mom and dad which linux DE is most used, and the results came out different. Which &quot;real people&quot; are the ones representative for the ground truth of Linux DE sahre?

                        &gt; and yours is just a hallucinated list from one of the me-too LLM vendors

                        How do you know it&#x27;s hallucinated? Ask the LLM the population of your country? Is the answer mostly accurate or is it hallucinated in an inaccurate way?

                        Aren&#x27;t LLMs just outputting the highest statistical probability from the aggregate of their scraped data, which in this case would be including opinions on Reddit, and every website and blog on the entire internet (including that random one posted by badc0ffee) on the Linux DE uusage topic, making it a more accurate real-world representation than just a single random blog?

                        You can call it &quot;hallucinated&quot; if you want, but that doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not accurate. I asked for proof that my answer was inaccurate, not that it was &quot;hallucinated&quot;, those are two different things, and your argument didn&#x27;t prove it was inaccurate nor did it prove it was hallucinated. Would you like to try again?

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