[Darth-Apple]

Debian vs. Ubuntu. This seems like this question should be absolutely obvious. Ubuntu is based on Debian, and is generally the more popular of the two. Most people would choose Ubuntu in a heartbeat.

So the question is why. And the answer is that, generally speaking, Ubuntu is so much easier to use. It has PPAs which make third party software much easier to install, and it includes a lot of non-free components that are at least available. Doesn't mean they are necessarily well... out of the box, but being available is a great thing. Because sometimes you want to be able to play an MP3. 

Debian sure does have its advantages though. I literally use it as my daily driver on my development virtual machine (and I do all C development, most of my HDL development, and a number of other things solely from the development box currently. I use it very frequently). 

Debian, in my experience, is much more stable. And it actually has more packages than Ubuntu, by a long shot (Ubuntu removes a lot and makes you use Snaps or PPAs for some of the more obscure ones). It is a much cleaner experience and it very rarely ever crashes or has any issue whatsoever. So personally, even though I prefer Ubuntu on a server (newer software), I prefer Debian on the desktop.

The only downside to Debian is that a lot of Ubuntu's desktop Gnome improvements aren't really available on Debian, and stock Gnome have never been my cup of tea. I installed a lot of extensions and a highly customized theme to get around this issue, but it's definitely a challenge at first if you aren't used to using Gnome. Dash to Panel is a lifesaver.

What are your preferences?

[Lain]

>systemd
into the trash it goes
Debian is more lightweight and more stable, but the Debian devs tend to get "stable" confused with "outdated by three years." I think qt is still like six versions behind or some shit, takes forever to get Latte-dock working unless you start using testing/unstable branches.

Just use gentoo desu

[Darth-Apple]

Gentoo is the hardest distribution of them all... You're on the deep end using that distribution.

I honestly don't find that Debian is terribly out of date. At least on the packages I've used, they tend to lag behind a couple versions, but they seem to have gotten better over the years a bit. If the distribution's version is a year or two old, it gets a little more noticeable, but when the new ones come out, they are generally not too bad.

The stability is what I love about it. It genuinely is much more stable than Ubuntu in my experience, and crashes far less (if ever). The downside is that it's almost impossible to actually update your packages to more recent versions if you need unless you compile them yourself. I hear there are a lot of solutions that make this easier and people have done it frequently, but I have never had any luck with them.

When a new version of Debian comes out, you get a chance to update to packages that are only slightly out of date, but then you have to wait two years before you can update anything easily again. That's where it truly bites.

[Lain]

Gentoo is the hardest distribution of them all... You're on the deep end using that distribution.

literally not even lmao, try LFS or any bsd lmao
maybe buster is finally catching up, debian9 was awful, the stable version of qt was on 1.9 when 1.16 was the latest, and most qt applications (and latest kde plasma) wouldnt compile because of the dependency mismatch. made me wanna just not try it anymore and move onto something i can have more control over.

but yeah when everything is tested so extensively (i.e. 3yrs of testing) then yeah its gonna be stable. never actually had it crash on me when i had it installed, until i switched to testing branches and a bad grub update f*** my bootloader and i needed to boot with chainloader/efi recovery terminal. never again.

and gentoo gives you that control by portage compiling all packages itself instead of just installing binaries like apt and yum. plus specifying compiler optimization flags, managing separate versions, playing with dependencies, etc. its very comfy and my OS uses less than 200mb of RAM on idle

[SpookyZalost]

bah, I'll stick with Source mage
it's like gentoo with the compilation but it's not as hard to setup.

plus I can get it to run OSS4 and or the OSS Compatibility libraries without as much issue, unlike debian, ubuntu, Mint, etc.

[Darth-Apple]

I don't know how you guys do LFS or Gentoo. I never got the hang of either. Debian was easy to be and they say it's hard, but I've been using it for years. It's a matter of experience I suppose...

Compiling from source has some performance incentives at times because of all of the new instructions they've come out with. They compile these things to be compatible with SSE and below, those instructions are over 10 years old and AVX blows them out of the water. However, GCC doesn't generally compile for AVX512, etc. unless some special code is hand-written for it, which is a shame. At which point the Intel compiler is the only one that does.

It's a lot of untapped performance in my opinion. Clear Linux does this IIRC, but your run of the mill Ubuntu is more worried about compatibility.

[SpookyZalost]

AVX?

you'll forgive me but most of the stuff I compile for is integrated stuff like Programmable micro controllers and old game consoles.

[Darth-Apple]

Ah. Yea those are just SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instructions IIRC. Basically they run the exact same instruction on tons of data at once in parallel. Suppose you need to multiply every number in a massive array by 3. You could use SIMD to run 16 of them at a time with a massive speed boost. Much better than running them one at a time.

Or if you need to perform the same formula on every pixel of an image, every sample of audio, or every byte in a ZIP archive, or so forth. If it's the same formula/instruction, you can use SIMD to do it and run a whole batch of pixels at once. AVX just so happens to be a hell of a lot faster (and far better) than SSE. And nobody compiles for it even though it's been around for years.

[SpookyZalost]

@darth: ooh, I want to try this with password cracking

it'd be hilarious to use it to up the cracking rate on my 8 core 16 thread 4.8ghz overclocked cpu for brute forcing wifi passwords.

[Darth-Apple]

@darth: ooh, I want to try this with password cracking

it'd be hilarious to use it to up the cracking rate on my 8 core 16 thread 4.8ghz overclocked cpu for brute forcing wifi passwords.

As long as the wifi adapter isn't the limiting factor/bottleneck, it'd probably work great. Lemme know how it goes.  

AVX is blisteringly fast when you can use it right. Like it can accelerate workloads up to 20x times or more.

[SpookyZalost]

@darth: my wifi adapter is PCI-E X4... and it uses dual channel wireless AC up to 1.5gbps so... I think the limiting factor is more than likely to be either the signal it's self or the PCI-E bus, but I don't think they make PCI-E X16 wifi adapters roflol.

Besides getting the packets is the easy and low cost part, the hard part is decrypting them which is where the password breaking comes in.

brute forcing effectively does comparative analysis by guessing the password and comparing it to the output using known encryption methods like WPA2 and AES.

it knows how long the password is but not what the characters are basically.

for most passwords which are WPA 2 these days, that means figuring out the password is N characters long, and running each character sequence through A through Z, 0 through 9 and the most common special characters which routers accept.
checking the output by outputting it as WPA 2, and comparing it to the encrypted password from captured packets.
rinse and repeat until it matches and try it.

that's why avx sounds interesting, SIMD means doing multiple characters at once which saves cracking time.

it's not as fast as a man in the middle attach where you can just nab the unencrypted password but it's a lot more stealthy.

[Darth-Apple]

Interesting analysis @SpookyZalost. I'd be interested in hearing how it goes.

We should do a (white hat) hacking board here and throw anything (white hat) hacking related in there.

[SpookyZalost]

Interesting analysis @SpookyZalost. I'd be interested in hearing how it goes.

We should do a (white hat) hacking board here and throw anything (white hat) hacking related in there.

I'm sure a couple of our users would have something to say lol.
Tools are tools, what makes it white or black is how you use them.
Personally I follow the old school code of hacking, technology is meant to be played with, you own it so you can do what you want with it so long as you don't intentionally harm others in the process.  To push the boundaries and find new purposes for stuff is the epitome of what this means.

It's why I hack, mod, and tinker with hardware  

[Darth-Apple]

It'd be hard to keep it strictly white hat. But we have some members from Hack Forums, and they're used to it...

In all seriousness, we're probably just gonna keep the tech section a regular tech section. Only because even the word "hacking" will raise some eyebrows.

[SpookyZalost]

It'd be hard to keep it strictly white hat. But we have some members from Hack Forums, and they're used to it...

In all seriousness, we're probably just gonna keep the tech section a regular tech section. Only because even the word "hacking" will raise some eyebrows.

Yeah I feel ya, stupid Hollywood media jerks.  Taking a word that means one thing and making it mean something evil.  It's our word gorramit!

[Darth-Apple]

We really are starting to expand in our technology sections a lot though. Makes sense being that a lot of us are designers, coders, and so forth.

[Lain]

Would need a ton of moderation. I'm talking manually approving threads and no links in replies.
Yes, it would attract attention of new users, but it will also most definitely attract the attention of anyone with malicious intent to spam their new 'hacking tool, hack ur ex, hack ur school, hack ur workplace, hack gfs iphone" etc. Tons of malicious stuff popping up.

Or, at the least terrible, users spamming links to articles on their blog, or stuff you can find on Google that really don't have much aspect of discussion to them and are only being posted here for the sake of 'sharing with the community' without putting any effort into it whatsoever.

I'd go as far as only allowing open-source discussion, i.e. no download links except for a GitHub repo (or something of that sort) and a virus scan with hashes to verify authenticity.
You'd also be attracting the leak community, which is most of the time illegal and more often than not malicious.

But under those circumstances, you may as well just have a new thread tag/prefix like [Hacking] which would either fall under hardware or software sections.

On the flip-side, I'd have a f*** field day practicing deobfuscation and malware analysis from all the threads that don't get approved lmfao.

Just my two-cents though.

[Guardian]

On the flip-side, I'd have a f*** field day practicing deobfuscation and malware analysis from all the threads that don't get approved lmfao.

That would be perfect for new thread ideas.

Jacko posted this tool. Well, let's break it down...