AutoTux -- A No-brainer for Newbies? MAYBE, but it is MICROSOFT Linux!

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From TechNewsWorld, LINUX PICKS AND PANS
 


Weird ...
 
Yes -- gonna try it, so will be indisposed for a while. Watch for Victoria, please, @Condobloke and/or you, @jglen490
 
30 minutes from last post and AutoTux is up and running! Very fast install. Google Chrome browser.
Haven't had time to explore, so will get back later.
BTW, because I use Clonezilla and had a backup on an external drive, there were no worries that this distro was going to take over the SSD I'm using.
Screenshot_2020-07-17_23-37-17.png

This is what AutoTux did as far as partitioning the 120GB SSD
 
How much ram on that pc ?
 
@Condobloke
8GB (actual=7.5)

-- more to come when have photos/screenshots processed
 
Interesting Distro I'll keep a look out for your updates on how it is going for you.
 
Update
 

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BEWARE! After doing a final dist-upgrade on AutoTux and getting the distro to its latest state, I found this
2020-07-22-000611_1440x900_scrot.png

/opt/microsoft/powershell installed. As can be seen, it is not easily deleted AND the prompt is the C:\ prompt denoting M$ is in charge and looking at what is input through terminal.

While this may be what some desire, it's not for me. It's a really pretty distro, especially once I got the nVidia drivers installed via
smxi ater updating the kernel. Just want to MAKE ALL AWARE.

The hard drive was wiped with zeroes and antiX installed, posthaste!
 
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At the risk of repeating myself.

Weird ...

I guess we need to be very careful about some of the "Linux" that has popped up since MS declared their "love" for Linux :rolleyes:
 
That's a drag the your experimentation of Auto Tux went sour.
I to like to experiment with new Linux distros and have had some turn sour myself.

Something to be said about a known working sure thing however if a user doesn't experiment than a user will never really know the outcome.

One reason to always keep a few computers at the house or workplace for testing purposes.
 
Aha! Thanks, arochester!

Oh well! Live and learn!
At least, others have been made aware of the subterfuge and perhaps get some inlking of the lengths some will go to gain access to others' data.

@arochester - FAI came out when? Last September? It is definitely invasive under the guise of making things easier for those who value convenience over vigilance. When was it Ian Murdoch was killed by the police? Hmmm . . . But perish the thought of being called a 'conspiracy theorist!' LOL!

Have fun, all, but be careful!

I had to change my email password after it got changed around the time I used AutoTux to access it last. Hmmm . . . But perish the thought of being called a 'conspiracy theorist!' LOL! LOL X 2!!
 
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I honestly think that the only care we have to have, is to read and understand the privacy policy of anything we commit our data to. No matter where it comes from, no matter if it's something as minimal as popularity-contest, as barbaric as the Microsoft Telemetry Gargantua (which applies also to VSCode, by the way...) or as the Google Supermassive Black Hole (if we use Android).
 
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Also, the fact that the installer is opinionated and provides powershell out of the box doesn't mean that "Microsoft is behind". Anyone can install powershell almost anywhere, is just a CLI that can make the trip from Windows to macOS or Linux much easier, and it is even in GitHub under MIT License. Probably, the distribution packager thought it would be a good idea to be able to run powershell scripts to accommodate more users (e.g.: in Windows is how you check the SHA of the packages you download). EDIT: nowadays, indeed, it's much more worrying the fact that it installs Google Chrome.

Which doesn't excuse them of clearly show or link the privacy policies. The only concern, as said, can be solved by reading the privacy policy, specifically for telemetry stuff. If at AutoTux they don't make it easy by providing that info, very bad of them, and beware, yes, but preinstalling a Microsoft opensource package, today, doesn't mean anything as it would do 10 or 15 years ago.

And this applies to absolutely any software, without exception: don't assume that a piece of software would be fair to you just because its license is GPL. A software license doesn't even talk about what the software provider would want your data for.
 
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. . .

Which doesn't excuse them of clearly show or link the privacy policies. The only concern, as said, can be solved by reading the privacy policy, specifically for telemetry stuff. If at AutoTux they don't make it easy by providing that info, very bad of them, and beware, yes, but preinstalling a Microsoft opensource package, today, doesn't mean anything as it would do 10 or 15 years ago.

And this applies to absolutely any software, without exception: don't assume that a piece of software would be fair to you just because its license is GPL. A software license doesn't even talk about what the software provider would want your data for.

Very objective, @gvisoc, thank you!

And, no, powershell did not show up until the last dist-upgrade. I thought it was going well until then, even with google-chrome installed, which was to be deleted later, I thought. I suppose, being a teacher, he was simply trying to make it easier on pupils, but this is just speculation. i can only give him the benefit of the doubt (but being little naive, perhaps).

Caveat usor!
 
The rationale for each one of them, I guess, falls in the toolings they use in the "Vocational IT, Computing, Robotics and ICT C3 courses in Malta", and if that is so, they may be including any new addition.

I was browsing their page and the thing is that they state which packages come preinstalled (powershell is one of them), and the key, I guess, is that they update that least in each release. There's no apparent way to know what packages are added at what time: the releases announcement page is somewhat manually created, and doesn't match the front page.

That "quality", the fact that the ISO is downloaded from the domain itself instead from the usual AWS region or from GitHub, the lack of a SHA256 or similar to check the integrity, a bit of a research over the name of the author and the fact that his email is a GMail one, and not one from an educational institution... all that makes me think that this is more the case of a student or former student experimenting with Linux, FAI and his classmates...
 
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. . .
That "quality", the fact that the ISO is downloaded from the domain itself instead from the usual AWS region or from GitHub, the lack of a SHA256 or similar to check the integrity, a bit of a research over the name of the author and the fact that his email is a GMail one, and not one from an educational institution... all that makes me think that this is more the case of a student or former student experimenting with Linux, FAI and his classmates...
It sounds as if that could very well be the case. The email address I originally saw was from the domain fifthhorseman (dot) something. Thanks for the update, @gvisoc !
 

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