Oinks

Discover itself doesn’t guarantee anything. Flathub (the Flatpak repository you are presumably using) requires a human review for new applications but not updates (and the human review doesn’t include a full audit of the app). I’m not aware of malware being distributed via Flathub in the past, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

Of course, legislators are getting more and more technically knowledgeable so trying to rebel against OS age verification by simply cosmetically making a computer different from your typical desktop like systems might not suffice… I’m admittedly not especially familiar with how law is practiced in the US but in my opinion trying to skirt the letter of the law while blatantly violating its intention is usually a bad idea. The more you piss off prosecutors and judges the more effort they will put into finding something to prosecute you over, and it also makes them more likely to push for the harshest fines/convictions that are legally possible. Of course a lot of the time the law is just bullshit, and this particular bill appears to have at least a few issues, but still… Nevertheless, I did not know about Cage! At least now I know how the hacks make those IoT control panels with their SBCs! Perhaps I’ll set up something cool in my living room like… A weather forecast screen? The stock market? Live GPU prices? For completeness sake, Cage isn’t the only way to do this. Gamescope is another popular “kiosk compositor”, notably used by the Steam Deck (in the “Deck mode”). And of course the same thing is possible with X window managers as well, Openbox seems to be a popular choice for X11 kiosks.

Oh no I wasn’t talking about you, sorry about that. I meant the tone of Timothy Roscoe which rubbed me the wrong way. I might be a bit oversensitive since it reminded me of how science cranks like to talk about their discoveries - You know, how people like Ovi Loeb or Eric Weinstein will go on Joe Rogan and complain how nobody in academia is taking them seriously. Obviously not what Roscoe is doing but it sounded a tiny bit like that to my ears (I also wrote that comment before finishing the Q&A section where he didn’t come off like that at all). I was mostly just trying to convince myself this morning I wasn’t insane. I had thought it was the standard terminology. No you are actually correct, “bare metal” does in fact mean “without an OS”. It just got co-opted to mean… other things additionally, and in the case of servers specifically the new usage ended up crowding out the original one.

There was a really interesting talk at USENIX a few years ago (Usenix 21 keynote with Timothy Roscoe, I just looked it up) that was basically saying that a modern OS like linux, isn’t even accessing hardware and is just an OS in a system of OSs on a computer. This was indeed a very interesting talk. Not sure if the accusatory tone was warranted but I’m not really the target audience. One aspect that he only mentioned in passing is that hardware manufacturers seem to be very happy to entertain Linux’s (and Windows’) assumptions about memory, just like they seem to be very happy to entertain assumptions about execution order. Nobody wants to make hardware that requires a weird bespoke operating system because of its bespoke microarchitecture (except perhaps for Apple, though I’m not confident they’re really innovating in this regard). Maybe I lack perspective but I don’t really see a nice way out of this either, since nobody wants to buy hardware that requires weird bespoke operating systems either (except once again Apple). And I don’t see how an operating system could be widely supported across many different SoC designs without accumulating a similar complexity to modern Linux. We should definitely be feeling mildly uncomfortable about this entire thing though.

Yeah I understand that’s what you meant, but it’s not what people think when they hear “bare-metal server” or what the commenter I was responding to was talking about. I’m not sure anyone is really deploying servers without an OS, even though I’m sure the concept has a lot of merit. Unfortunately there’s a strong trend of putting the absolute minimum possible effort into deployment at the expense of basically everything, which is how you end up with really stupid ideas like “serverless computing”.

Most TVs are probably already compliant because using them requires creating a Google or Apple account, which already want your age information (and the California bill explicitly allows using existing data like this IIRC). That’s good for avoiding disruption, but not so good from a privacy perspective.

The other advantage of a bare metal server is that the computing resources are guaranteed to actually be there when you need them. VM Providers are known to overbook their physical computing resources, so if other customers happen to use more compute than anticipated then your VMs mysteriously aren’t going to have the performance you paid for. There’s also a computational cost to virtualization itself, so you can add slightly more performance to a single server before you have to use a distributed system, but that’s probably not significant for the vast majority of businesses.

Theoretically you could create an appliance with just a Linux kernel, Cage and Firefox (plus dependencies) and boot that with init=cage firefox. This is how most information and advertisement displays and other kiosk systems (think of stuff like the McDonalds order machines) are made. It would be difficult to argue that this isn’t an operating system though, because typical definitions are very broad. In particular, you will always need “a program that manages a computer’s resources”, and you also need “the allocation of those resources among other programs” because websites are programs (in reality a browsers will liberally fork itself to take advantage of OS process isolation, but even if it didn’t the in-process threads would still qualify). Vendors of kiosk systems probably have better chances arguing that their devices aren’t general purpose than arguing that they don’t use an operating system.