Do you have access to Signal servers to verify your claims by any chance?

That’s not how it works. The signal protocol is designed in a way that the server can’t have access to your message contents if the client encrypts them properly. You’re supposed to assume the server might be compromised at any time. The parts you actually need to verify for safe communication are:

• the code running on your device
• the public key of your intended recipient

Yeah, that section is bad.

For one, it’s has classic vibe “if you want to keep the nazis out, you’re the one who’s exclusionary”.

But also, how is refusing to engage on a platform “shutting out a significant portion of [the] community”? That sounds backwards to me. Blocking people from engaging with Debian on its own platforms would be shutting them out. The implication in the article is that Debian is obligated to be unconditionally present on every social platform its users might be on.

Vaxrys literally arguing that Hitler should be welcome in communities as long as pushes his goal of gassing of people outside the discord server, but “SJWs” are the real bigots ruining communities

KDE and Hyprland have it already apparently, as well as the embedded gamescope session. It still needs to be implemented by apps/games as well, though. According to this mpv and games running on recent Proton versions have HDR support.

HDR means better contrast and colors if your monitor supports it.

The news in the OP specifically mean that the protocol is finalized, but you still have to wait for it to get implemented.

Most of Proton code is Wine. So basically if you have Wine in your system, library dependencies are not an issue anymore, apart from DLLs that some games require

If I have wine on my system and try to run steam-managed proton without any sort of runtime or container, then I’m running proton on different versions of libraries than the ones it was compiled for and tested on. Proton also has additional components which might mean additional dependencies, so your statement is false to begin with.

Why are they doing a fork instead of contributing?

The fork is open source. As far as I know, some contributions do get merged into wine. Valve is also funding work from Collabora which is contributed directly into wine. They cannot contribute the entirety of proton to wine because wine does not want all their contributions. This is a very common situation to arise when someone wants to use an open source project but their goals don’t align.

But I expect it will be easier to push back on using containerization in Proton, than making Valve allow us such control

Valve is never going to rip out a solution that is working great for them and risk causing issues for customers for no good reason. Thinking that Valve are more likely to remove containerization than they are to allow you to modify the container is, frankly, delusional. It’s also completely irrelevant, as I’ve already said. If Valve wants to “fuck us up” then they’re going to do it. Steam is a proprietary piece of software that supports DRM for all your (also proprietary) games, which are stored on the cloud. You have no control over your games, but containers have nothing to do with it. And if they did, and Valve really wanted to pull a trick on us, asking them to remove the containers would make even less sense…

We are going through more or less Wine anyway, the libraries on the system don’t matter as long as Wine compiles

Which wine though?

The one pre-packaged by your distro? That doesn’t work because Valve needs to control the version you use and to provide additional stuff not part of vanilla wine.

The one part of proton that is built and delivered to your system by Valve? They would have to compile and support it for every set of dependency versions out there.

One of the core features of containers is process and process memory separation from host.

As far as container technology is concerned, the isolation is configurable. pressure-vessel is most likely using (possibly indirectly) namespaces and/or cgroups to achieve the isolation. I don’t see a technical reason that you can’t disable the isolation of shared memory or any other resource. The issue is whether you are given access to disable it.

According to the docs the runtime is based on flatpak and uses bubblewrap and libcapsule. I don’t know about libcapsule, but I recall that bubblewrap has granular control over what resources it isolates.

We have no control over what they put in those containers.

Apparently, you can modify the container as shown here. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to install custom containers alongside the default ones in the same way that you can install custom proton versions. Steam just doesn’t provide the interface for it.

Once they disable the PRESSURE_VESSEL_SHELL=instead we will have no insight into what’s inside.

There already exists an alternative that is “more likely to be extended in future” rather than being removed as shown here. But I believe you would always be able to gain access to the container because it remains a chroot + namespace + cgroup isolation, all of which you can control on your system.

and app developers neither have!

App developers don’t control what’s on your system either. The container is a huge improvement for them because it at least gives them a known target to build for. They can still bundle dependencies in any way that they would on a non-containerized system. There’s no loss of control from their perspective.

if it doesn’t work for some reason (with Wine I don’t really see it happening as what we run doesn’t rely on our OS libraries directly), you can create chroot, additional library packages with old versions, etc.

That’s what pressure-vessel is and as shown above you can modify it. And if you couldn’t it would be a tooling issue, not an inherent container disadvantage.

Worst case scenario, Linux community will figure something out

No, they won’t. Compatibility significantly increased after Valve got involved. In fact, the linux community is porting pressure-vessel outside of Steam to use it across different launchers as umu. The community is headed towards using pressure-vessel for everything.

Now I replied to each claim individually, but it’s not really about any specific point you’re making. The general idea is that there’s nothing inherent to container technology that prevents you from tinkering with it. Anything that you can’t do currently is because Steam is not designed to allow you to do it. It’s got nothing to do with whether Steam uses containers or not. Any control that you’ve lost over your system is because you’re using a proprietary app. They could remove the containers and still prevent tinkering, eg by using a bundled wine with no way for you to modify it or its launch options. It’s not about what Steam does, but about how it does it.

No way. Containers are absolutely necessary to provide reliability across a wide range of distros and to keep games working in the future.

It makes running additional programs harder (opentrack for example)

Then we need better tooling and documentation to interact with the container, not to get rid of them. I don’t see any technical limitation that would prevent your use case. It’s just not implemented or maybe simply undocumented.

our computers less ours

How so? The end result is probably the opposite. Without the containers Steam would be less reliable on unsupported distros, which might mean your only choice would be to use Ubuntu LTS. That would be a much bigger loss of control.

It’s a custom solution called pressure-vessel, which seems to be based on flatpak. You can read about it here. This is used to create a reproducible linux environment and has nothing to do with the windows translation layer. They run wine (proton) inside the container as you would expect.

There is a recent effort to port this solution outside of steam in the form of umu. As far as I know it’s in a working state but I don’t know if it’s at feature parity with steam, especially on the game-specific fixes front. The end goal is to be a universal launcher that can be used from all frontends, so that all windows games run reliably and identically regardless of which GUI you use to manage your games.

EDIT: welp, I just now noticed this info has already been posted by another user 🤷

The other commenter already answers your quest, but I will just point out that python doesn’t come included “on Linux”. It just happens to be a dependency of so much stuff that some other packages is going to pull it in. A minimal distro which doesn’t include programs written in python will probably not have python installed at all.

My question: How do I actually physically notice the difference between these kernels?

Generally, you don’t. You can look for some benchmark to try and find a difference between them, but if you don’t notice a difference in your day to day tasks, then it’s all the same. In my experience you should pick a kernel based on your desired experience. For my needs this is how the kernels differ:

• Generic kernel: a sane default for most regular users
• LTS: only makes sense if you’re worried about regressions in the generic kernel causing issues, and only viable if you can afford to stay behind on hardware driver updates, ie you use old hardware and/or optimal performance is not required
• Zen: sometimes better for gaming, but often indistinguishable from the generic kernel
• Realtime: rarely what you want, it sounds “faster” but it’s basically optimized for very specific use cases and if you’re not among them you’ll see the same or worse performance

Who’s gonna come at me with a $5 wrench because they really want my data, though? The attack I’m most likely to experience is someone stealing my laptop while I’m out traveling. That’s what full filesystem encryption solves best.