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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2024

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  • What does Ente mean?

    In Malayalam, Vishnu’s native language, “ente” means “mine”. Thus “Ente Photos” has the literal meaning “my photos”.

    This was a good name, but still Vishnu looked around for better ones. But one day, he discovered that “ente” means “duck” in German. This unexpected connection sealed the deal. We should ask him why he likes ducks so much, but apparently he does, so this dual meaning (“mine” / “duck”) led him to finalize the name, and also led to the adoption of “Ducky”, Ente’s mascot Source







  • The dual root partitions we described in Deepin 20.5 are gone, but version 23 still sets up a moderately complex partitioning scheme, including an EFI system partition, a 1.5 GB /boot partition, a swap partition, and a 15 GB root partition, and the rest of the disk given to a partition labeled _dde_data. All are in plain old ext4 format, but there’s some magic being done with the data partition that we didn’t have time to trace. It appears to be mounted at multiple places, including /home/var/opt, and a mount point called /persistent beneath them all. We’re not sure exactly how it’s been done, but the distro has some kind of atomic installation facility with rollback.

    Lack of proper documentation by Deepins Devs is enough of a red flag for me to never consider trying it.





  • Some SATA and NVMe devices support hardware encryption (TCG OPAL2 standard) and with the latest cryptsetup LUKS devices can be configured to use hardware encryption to encrypt the data either by itself or together with the existing dm-crypt software encryption. Support for this feature was added in the latest cryptsetup upstream release and we’d like to provide an option for users to use this feature when installing Fedora with disk encryption.

    As this is an expert option, it will be available only through the kickstart interface. […] There will be two new options to select either hardware encryption only or hardware encryption in combination with software encryption (analogous to the --hw-opal-only and --hw-opal options used when configuring hardware encryption with cryptsetup).


  • It‘s not only about using the tpm to unlock the FDE, you should be able to do that on every distro with systemd-cryptenroll. The part that is new, is the the measuring of the systems integrity. It’s a way to ensure that the firmware has not been tampered with, the boot loader is the one that was installed and has not been replaced, that the kernel is exactly the one that comes from the distribution, that the kernel command line is the one that we expect, and that the initrd that is used does not contain any extra binary that we do not control.





  • The setup process isn’t really much different from other distros, quite easy. It’s documented here. If it’s still too intimidating for you, you could always do a test run in a virtual machine first, there is even an image that you can select at the bottom of the download menu on the website for virtual machines.

    The nice thing is that, if you have some kind of special hardware (e.g. certain laptops, nvidia gpu…) you only need to select it the downloading menu and then you are all set with the special tweaks that the hardware requires provided by the community.

    After the initial installation it’s an even better experience than other distros I have used. It gives you a first time portal, where you can choose additional applications that you would like installed. If you get your application via flatpak then you are all setup. If you need other applications not available in flathub, you will have to do some further reading in the documentation, it’s all explained there.