Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

How bad must desktop Linux in general be, if people are so busy rejoicing about a volume icon that works, that they accept poor security?

View on HN

Poor security in what sense? That something can be spoofed by an attacker with unlimited resources? How many of your desktop users are actually at risk? How about Win 10 telemetry? Or whatever OS X is sending back to Apple? Happy about it?

Did you read the article? Mint blocks many security patches because of the mish-mash of packages it has, makes updating impossible.

They mean from a usability perspective. Mint is famous for it's volume icon that includes album art for what's playing, various other info, and controls to let you pause/skip tracks. It's like a tiny music player in your task bar.

That said, no it should not excuse poor security.

> Mint is famous for it's volume icon that includes album art for what's playing, various other info, and controls to let you pause/skip tracks.

GNOME and Unity also have that, probably KDE too.

I've written a similar thing for the Mac, using NSStatusBar [1]. It's no big deal, or reason for a Linux distribution to be "famous". There are zillions of apps in the Mac store that do stuff like that.

Does Linux have a standard API for surfacing interactive icons and menus in the menu bar? An ICCCM extension, perhaps -- set some properties on the root window and cross you fingers? Or would you have to do it differently for every different Linux desktop environment or window manager that supported such a feature?

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...

> Or would you have to do it differently for every different Linux desktop environment or window manager that supported such a feature?

Exactly. Unity has libappindicator, KDE has Plasma, GNOME Shell also has its own plugin API and there's still the old tray API in Gtk+ and Qt.

It depends on the desktop environment. Most desktop environments provide a way to extend the desktop with extensions which can be written in various languages. In the case of Cinnamon for Linux Mint, being based on Gnome, it uses JavaScript to extend the desktop with extensions, applets (extensions that display on the menu bar), and desklets (extensions that display on the desktop). In fact, a good portion of Cinnamon[1] is actually written in JavaScript.

[1]: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon

Reply on news.ycombinator.com