Promoting AtlasOS is irresponsible

[jiibus]

I can appreciate the sentiment of enabling people to use their old hardware for longer, but AtlasOS is not the way. The 2 main problems are:

 

1. It completely removes Defender and Updates. Source
2. It disables Spectre & Meltdown mitigations. Source

These are especially problematic because the target audience, people who want to extend the life of their old PC, are most likely going to use these PCs as their general purpose computing device on the internet because they don't have anything better. It is almost inevitable that they will get wrecked by malware somewhere down the line with the above "optimizations" in play.

[YoungBlade]

I was a bit sad to see Linus jokingly say that Linux was pointless for this purpose with AtlasOS available. I understand that it was meant in jest (at least, I sure hope it was) but honestly, unless your primary use-case is gaming, Linux is a way better option for an old PC. And it really is user friendly compared to what it was like a decade ago.

 

I installed Ubuntu on an old computer for my mom, who is definitely not tech savvy, and she has no problem using it. It also runs great, which is miraculous considering the age of the hardware: Core 2 Quad Q9400, 4GB DDR2-800, Nvidia Quadro 600, 128GB HP SSD.

 

And unless AtlasOS plans to do the same for Windows 11, and mitigate the restrictions Windows 11 has, the whole project is truly pointless for that use-case after 2025 when Windows 10 loses support, whereas Linux should always be an option (at least for 64-bit capable CPUs, which is basically anything newer than Pentium 4).

[Vishera]

6 minutes ago, jiibus said:

It completely removes Defender and Updates. Source

Removing Windows Defender is fine if you have the common sense to not do something stupid.

Windows Defender is a performance hog so i understand why they did that.

But removing Windows Update?! - I guess they are afraid that Windows Update would reverse the changes they made.

9 minutes ago, jiibus said:

It disables Spectre & Meltdown mitigations. Source

Yep, That's bad.

 

The custom Windows image that i made has Windows Update and the Spectre & Meltdown mitigations enabled,

Only Windows Defender Anti-Virus is disabled (The firewall is enabled) security wise.

[jiibus]

7 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Removing Windows Defender is fine if you have the common sense to not do something stupid.

Windows Defender is a performance hog so i understand why they did that.

What you call "common sense" is practically non-existent when it comes to PC security. Why else would the cyber crime industry be pulling in many billions per year? There's a reason that Microsoft forcing defaults for things like no macros in Excel measurably reduces malware worldwide. People don't give a shit about it for the most part. They just want it to work.

[YoungBlade]

3 minutes ago, jiibus said:

What you call "common sense" is practically non-existent when it comes to PC security. Why else would the cyber crime industry be pulling in many billions per year? There's a reason that Microsoft forcing defaults for things like no macros in Excel measurably reduces malware worldwide. People don't give a shit about it for the most part. They just want it to work.

For the average user, I agree. You can't be running a Windows PC with no anti-virus installed. And as much as I hate things like forcing Windows Updates onto people, for 99% of users, it's the best way to handle the situation. And having a good-enough pre-installed anti-virus has also done good for helping folks.

[jiibus]

3 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

For the average user, I agree. You can't be running a Windows PC with no anti-virus installed. And as much as I hate things like forcing Windows Updates onto people, for 99% of users, it's the best way to handle the situation. And having a good-enough pre-installed anti-virus has also done good for helping folks.

Yea, the average user is the important thing to keep in mind here. They almost always just go with the defaults and install the apps they want and forget about the OS itself until it either stops them from doing something they want or breaks.

[Inception9269]

42 minutes ago, jiibus said:

I can appreciate the sentiment of enabling people to use their old hardware for longer, but AtlasOS is not the way. The 2 main problems are:

 

1. It completely removes Defender and Updates. Source
2. It disables Spectre & Meltdown mitigations. Source

These are especially problematic because the target audience, people who want to extend the life of their old PC, are most likely going to use these PCs as their general purpose computing device on the internet because they don't have anything better. It is almost inevitable that they will get wrecked by malware somewhere down the line with the above "optimizations" in play.

I use the Ghost Spectre custom Windows 11 iso (custom isos being the only way I will ever use W11), and I have Defender either disabled or removed entirely on both of my machines that run that iso. I use Kaspersky for security, and it blows Defender out of the water.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

32 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Yep, That's bad.

 

The custom Windows image that i made has Windows Update and the Spectre & Meltdown mitigations enabled

Why?

Isnt that the same shit that slows down cpus gaming performance? Looked at a tech yes city vid on these mitigations and the performance impact is noticable on older cpus

[Inception9269]

36 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

I was a bit sad to see Linus jokingly say that Linux was pointless for this purpose with AtlasOS available. I understand that it was meant in jest (at least, I sure hope it was) but honestly, unless your primary use-case is gaming, Linux is a way better option for an old PC. And it really is user friendly compared to what it was like a decade ago.

 

I installed Ubuntu on an old computer for my mom, who is definitely not tech savvy, and she has no problem using it. It also runs great, which is miraculous considering the age of the hardware: Core 2 Quad Q9400, 4GB DDR2-800, Nvidia Quadro 600, 128GB HP SSD.

 

And unless AtlasOS plans to do the same for Windows 11, and mitigate the restrictions Windows 11 has, the whole project is truly pointless for that use-case after 2025 when Windows 10 loses support, whereas Linux should always be an option (at least for 64-bit capable CPUs, which is basically anything newer than Pentium 4).

That's something that genuinely pisses me off about Linus, and is part of the many many reasons why I don't like him. The dude constantly throws sh*t at Linux, and does more harm than good to it. That month challenge Luke and him had I found to be so damaging to its image, with the only positive being that it prompted System76 to finally fix that one major bug.

 

That said, Ubuntu is definitely one of the last distros I'd ever use. I've installed it several times over the past year to see the state of it, and it was a broken mess every time. I last installed it earlier this month and the system legit broke when I started removing the Snaps it installed (such as Firefox) and replacing them with the flatpak versions. Linux Mint is definitely my go to distro for Ubuntu based systems, at least until System76 gets back to updating their OS.

[jiibus]

Just now, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Why?

Isnt that the same shit that slows down cpus gaming performance? Looked at a tech yes city vid on these mitigations and the performance impact is noticable on older cpus

It slows down performance as a trade off for security. Spectre & Meltdown are not something you want to gamble with on a device that's used on the open internet.

[jiibus]

4 minutes ago, Inception9269 said:

That said, Ubuntu is definitely one of the last distros I'd ever use. I've installed it several times over the past year to see the state of it, and it was a broken mess every time. I last installed it earlier this month and the system legit broke when I started removing the Snaps it installed (such as Firefox) and replacing them with the flatpak versions. Linux Mint is definitely my go to distro for Ubuntu based systems, at least until System76 gets back to updating their OS.

Yea, Mint is definitely a better noob-friendly distro. I'm looking forward to Redhat's efforts in the immutable space with Silverblue, Kinoite and the sway-based one. But that's a separate topic lol.

[YoungBlade]

6 minutes ago, Inception9269 said:

That's something that genuinely pisses me off about Linus, and is part of the many many reasons why I don't like him. The dude constantly throws sh*t at Linux, and does more harm than good to it. That month challenge Luke and him had I found to be so damaging to its image, with the only positive being that it prompted System76 to finally fix that one major bug.

 

That said, Ubuntu is definitely one of the last distros I'd ever use. I've installed it several times over the past year to see the state of it, and it was a broken mess every time. I last installed it earlier this month and the system legit broke when I started removing the Snaps it installed (such as Firefox) and replacing them with the flatpak versions. Linux Mint is definitely my go to distro for Ubuntu based systems, at least until System76 gets back to updating their OS.

Ubuntu is the only distro I've ever used that flat just worked on any hardware I've thrown it on. At least, until 22.04, that is. But I challenge you to find a PC that won't just work with Ubuntu 20.04 - there isn't one. By that point, Ubuntu was the king of compatibility.

 

Linux Mint, on the other hand, gave me so many headaches when trying to get it to work on a laptop that I gave up the first time around. On my second try, I decided to push past the issues.

 

And no one on here was able to help me with it - the people at the Linux Mint subreddit also weren't able to help me in a way that would be accessible to newbies.

 

No noob user could figure out what I had to in order to get this to work. Period. Whereas Ubuntu just worked on that laptop - except that the Snaps were unbearably slow.

 

I'm pissed at Ubuntu for pushing Snaps down my throat, which is why I'm going to Mint in the first place, but the Ubuntu install on that computer is 20.04, which doesn't have that problem - no Snaps are required to run it. It was basically the last usable version of Ubuntu, IMO, and I'm sad to see Ubuntu go down a path I can't follow. I've used it for almost 15 years...

 

But don't think Linux Mint is a perfect savior. They need to do some work to get their OS to be compatible with as much hardware as Ubuntu was.

[Vishera]

18 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Why?

Isnt that the same shit that slows down cpus gaming performance? Looked at a tech yes city vid on these mitigations and the performance impact is noticable on older cpus

From my testing performance is good enough even with the mitigations enabled on old quad core machines.

Though, I didn't test it on dual core machines.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

15 minutes ago, jiibus said:

It slows down performance as a trade off for security. Spectre & Meltdown are not something you want to gamble with on a device that's used on the open internet.

I am still absolutely not convinced till i actually see the affects for myself

 

I mean ive dailyed android 4 and 5 from 2014 - 2020 and android 8 from 2020 - 2021, no viruses no nothing, my current phone is android 11 and i am willingly not updating it cause i do not want more shitty bloatware or even worse cpu throttling, still no viruses

 

 

i determine what the hell i wanna trust and what i dont based on personal experience, and based on my personal experience i still do not belive any of this spectre meltdown crap nor any random viruses that i didnt just download myself like an idiot. I use the same philosophy for my oc shenanigans, i dont trust safe voltages until i see the affects for myself or theres VALID PROOF of degradation above said voltage, and whaddaya know while all the morons are running theyre westmere xeons at a pathetic 3200-3400 uncore at 1.35v vtt im enjoying the benifits of 3900-4000 uncore at 1.45-1.55v vtt with no degradation

 

4 minutes ago, Vishera said:

From my testing performance is good enough even with the mitigations enabled on old quad core machines.

Though, I didn't test it on dual core machines.

Im talking gaming performance

Think ill just leave that up to the customers then, but w10 ltsc gonna keep being updated till like 2032 or something

[LIGISTX]

15 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

I mean ive dailyed android 4 and 5 from 2014 - 2020 and android 8 from 2020 - 2021, no viruses no nothing, my current phone is android 11 and i am willingly not updating it cause i do not want more shitty bloatware or even worse cpu throttling, still no viruses

 

 

i determine what the hell i wanna trust and what i dont based on personal experience, and based on my personal experience i still do not belive any of this spectre meltdown crap nor any random viruses that i didnt just download myself like an idiot.

This is still a bad take… it was a few weeks ago in another thread, and it is here again. 
 

This is like saying you don’t trust seatbelts, because you personally have not been in an accident and don’t like the inconvenience they create. “Not until I personally see the benefit will I use one”. Well, sadly, at that point, it’s likely to late, and you already got t-boned and sent through a window… and won’t be in need of seatbelts ever again. 
 

Or it’s like saying “I don’t believe humans can’t breath under water, I won’t believe it until I try it myself”.  Bad news, you get 1 shot at that… and it won’t work out. 
 

Basing your internet security on what has and hasn’t happened to you is not a good idea, and it’s completely invalid since you don’t actually know if you have been compromised. Just because no one has done anything to lead you to believe you have been, doesn’t mean a key logger hasn’t been running on your device for years for example.

 

Patching systems is essential to stay ahead of vulnerabilities, but it also comes at a cost of potentially creating new vulnerabilities. It’s a cat and mouse game, but burring your head in the sand is absolutely the wrong answer. 

[Inception9269]

36 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

 

I've had a few issues with Mint that were definitely annoying. Some time ago I tried installing it on a living room pc of mine that I mainly run Plex on, as well as sometimes play games on. For some reason I can't get the software to work right on that machine, and something that has broken my system quite a few times is getting the OS to play nicely with the NTFS formatted drives I have all my media on (with most other distros I've used it's as simple as install NTFS-3g, and you're good, but Mint gave me trouble with this). The other major issue I have, which isn't specific to Mint (ran into this issue on other distros) is that on my laptop (a non-gaming, basic laptop) the keyboard will just not work for 30 seconds to a minute or two after turning it on. The only fix involves adding a certain argument to the grub bootloader, which means for that for that laptop I can only ever use distros that use grub as the bootloader, and not systemd. I would like to use Fedora on it, but it just won't work.

 

Given the choice between Ubuntu and Fedora, Fedora is (for the most part) significantly better. One gripe I have with it though is for some reason I couldn't get it to properly install snaps for Plex (I've heard Fedora is known to have issues with snaps in general). Also of all the distros I've used, I have to spend the most time to get Fedora setup properly. From installing KDE, Flathub (which they finally corrected with 38's release), the RPM fusion repositories, and also media codecs (something they fucked over all AMD users on, with my living room pc using AMD gpu). I like Fedora, but as it is I don't want to even touch it for a long while. Garuda and EndeavourOS will always be my go to distros for my desktops.

[Latvian Video]

https://fxtwitter.com/AtlasOS/status/1651284816489336832 They just made a tweet about the security. Have a read

[Vicarian]

I can see the point of trying to disable Defender.  It leaks memory like a sieve, runs constantly at the slightest hint of disk activity, and consumes way more CPU cycles (on the main thread no less) than it should.  However, I don't see the point of disabling mitigations for destructive malware such as Spectre or Meltdown.  I like Manjaro, but getting things I need for work to run on it has been a chore.  I'm in the "never W11" camp, so I'll want to surreptitiously run something at home that I can actually stand when 10 loses support.

[Sauron]

2 hours ago, YoungBlade said:

unless your primary use-case is gaming

...in which case, why would you even bother with hardware that can't run windows 10 properly?

32 minutes ago, Vicarian said:

I'm in the "never W11" camp

I find it so funny how we always get these types every windows release cycle... people were crying and gnashing their teeth about moving from 7 to 10 and now it's all magically forgotten because people are now used to 10 instead. I doubt many of those who "switched" to linux specifically to avoid updating to 10 lasted more than a month or two and I doubt they will last any longer this time.

[YoungBlade]

31 minutes ago, Sauron said:

...in which case, why would you even bother with hardware that can't run windows 10 properly?

If it's your only option, there's nothing that can be done about that. I'm not going to judge someone for trying to game on what they have.

 

I had a Vista laptop with a 2GHz Pentium Dual-Core, 3GB of RAM, and 250GB HDD using Intel 945G on-board graphics (as in, on the motherboard). I got between 5 and 25 fps in League of Legends depending on what was happening on screen with settings turned down to low - usually around 18fps average - and I lived with it for years. I was lucky to get 30fps in beta Minecraft using Fast graphics at only 8 chunks render distance. The most advanced game I ever successfully played on that thing was Spore at minimum settings. I tried playing Battlefield 3 on it once, and I got nowhere fast.

 

If it's all you've got, it's all you've got.

[Sauron]

54 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

If it's your only option, there's nothing that can be done about that. I'm not going to judge someone for trying to game on what they have.

 

I had a Vista laptop with a 2GHz Pentium Dual-Core, 3GB of RAM, and 250GB HDD using Intel 945G on-board graphics (as in, on the motherboard). I got between 5 and 25 fps in League of Legends depending on what was happening on screen with settings turned down to low - usually around 18fps average - and I lived with it for years. I was lucky to get 30fps in beta Minecraft using Fast graphics at only 8 chunks render distance. The most advanced game I ever successfully played on that thing was Spore at minimum settings. I tried playing Battlefield 3 on it once, and I got nowhere fast.

 

If it's all you've got, it's all you've got.

games that run on that kind of hardware almost always work on wine

[YoungBlade]

19 minutes ago, Sauron said:

games that run on that kind of hardware almost always work on wine

A lot of competitive multiplayer games today are not able to run on Linux due to their anti-cheat software. These esports titles should be a prime candidate for a game that runs on old hardware, but will not work on Linux, even with the help of Wine and Proton.

 

The recent advice I can find on this issue for playing games like Fortnite on Linux/Steam Deck is to run the game using a service like GeForce Now or Xbox Cloud Gaming, or to dual-boot with Windows 10.

[Sauron]

19 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

A lot of competitive multiplayer games today are not able to run on Linux due to their anti-cheat software. These esports titles should be a prime candidate for a game that runs on old hardware, but will not work on Linux, even with the help of Wine and Proton.

 

The recent advice I can find on this issue for playing games like Fortnite on Linux/Steam Deck is to run the game using a service like GeForce Now or Xbox Cloud Gaming, or to dual-boot with Windows 10.

The minimum specs to run fortnite are more than capable of running windows 10 acceptably:

Quote

Minimum System Requirements

Video Card: Intel HD 4000 on PC; AMD Radeon Vega 8
Processor: Core i3-3225 3.3 GHz
Memory: 8 GB RAM
OS: Windows 10/11 64-bit or Mac OS Mojave 10.14.6

 

[Biohazard777]

I'm just gonna leave this here 

 

[YoungBlade]

2 minutes ago, Sauron said:

The minimum specs to run fortnite are more than capable of running windows 10 acceptably:

Did you watch the video this thread is referring to? Linus was recommending this OS for a system with an i5 7400. So this clearly wasn't for people who are looking to run Windows 10 "acceptably" but for those who want to have a superior experience on low-end hardware.