It mostly depends on your needs, the Note Air series is good if you are on the go while the bigger models like the Note Air Max are fit for a more stationary use.
> It also has a full Android system, which comes with advantages for sure but invites distractions and leads to very disappointing battery life.
While some models have a disappointing battery life, it's most definitely because of BSR[0] not because of them running Android. I had a Note Air 3 and that thing got easily 2 weeks of battery life with heavy use while the BSR version (Note Air 3C) barely survived 2 days.
OP mentioned he took over an existing project. He would then have to track all the people who contributed in order to be able to relicense to AGPL. Even then, Anthropic would probably then write their own.
> Screen offers a multi-user mode which allows to attach to Screen
sessions owned by other users in the system (given the proper
credentials). These multi-user features are only available when Screen
is installed with the setuid-root bit set. This configuration of Screen
results in highly increased attack surface, because of the complex
Screen code that runs with root privileges in this case
I wasn't aware of such a feature but I guess it's what makes stuff like tmate possible. Speaking of which, I wonder if tmux is affected by the same kind of vulnerability.
No, tmux uses unix domain sockets. I have no idea why screen chose to take the setuid approach instead here; it seems totally unnecessary to have root privileges.
EDIT: Further down, TFA gives a plausible explanation: the current screen devs are not fully familiar with the code base. If so, the setuid-root approach was probably the easiest way to make the feature work in lieu of such familiarity.
screen has a lot of architectural baggage that can be traced back to its initial 1987 comp.sources.unix/mod.sources versions in some cases. Being set-UID to the superuser is one of them. See the doco for screen as it was posted in volume 10:
* The original author of the project has not been involved in it since 1990. The people who took it over and made it a GNU project then largely stopped working on it in 2004. The people who are now working on it are something like its 3rd or 4th wave of developers.
* Learning the internals of screen now from scratch is a lot harder than when I did it in 1987. There's an awful lot more operating system historical and portability factors, now. In 1987, it was works-on-4.3BSD-might-not-on-your-Unix.
* If you deal with pseudo-terminals cross-platform, there are still huge variations on how pseudo-terminals work and how the long-standing security issues of pseudo-terminals, identified in the 1990s, have been addressed in operating systems.
* screen is encumbered by a lot of 1980s Think. It still today diligently manages, and puts quite a lot of effort into constructing, a generated-on-the-fly TERMCAP environment variable, for example.
* Attitudes to security have changed. At least one security hole in the headlined report was actually a neat-o feature of terminals in Unix in the 1970s and 1980s.
Port something like this to OpenBSD and then say that this sort of thing is not hard work. (-:
It's very hard work, especially nowadays. The sweet spot was probably in the 1990s, when novices were still likely to know that prime sources of knowledge about this stuff were posts on Usenet, or shell archives of text files written by Daniel J. Bernstein.
What's your point besides whining about the general state of "delevopers", whoever that is? Are you volunteering to take over maintenance of GNU Screen?
Really, the gall to complain about "laziness" when all you're doing is spreading negativity on a forum.
No, GNU screen is garbage software. I’ve used it over and over and feel better when I don’t have to. Because it’s lazy open source.
You reacted negatively to my opinion about a software I’ve used and react negatively to using. Screen is what’s propagated this negativity.
The world doesn’t revolve around me, but it doesn’t revolve around you either. You’re going to encounter opinions you don’t like. I’m going to encounter software I don’t like.
I’m off the hook for your real existence. I’m not going to tailor my opinions for every nobody I don’t have any real obligation to.
For me it felt (!) like screen is pretty much obsolute since 10+ years. When tmux came I switched and never looked back and I know a few that handled it the same.
If the keys and functionality don't work exactly as GNU Screen does then this won't help me. The behavior and keystrokes are so far burned into my brain that it doesn't make sense at this point to learn a new tool unless/until every system I use under the sun doesn't support GNU Screen anymore.
That’s great for your own machine or even common home directory scenarios. The issue is when you have a bunch of machines to manage without chef/puppet/etc or hop onto a random machine or a machine you don’t own etc… defaults are what you get to work with.
If screen is there and I need to do something that lasts longer than my ssh session, screen is what I reach for. If it’s non-interactive, I reach for nohup next.
They re-keyed it specifically so it could be nested, however, they mention the prefix key is intentionally dumb and ment to be remapped, probably to ^a like screen.
^a is the worst for emacs users since ^a is begging-of-line which we use a ton.
When I first started using screen some years ago the emacswiki (I think) even mentioned it and recommended to remap it to ^p which it is for me for screen and tmux since then.
I hadn't used Zellij before, but I tried it out. Visually it works better than tmux and it shares enough key bindings with tmux to make it a pretty seamless transition.
With that being said, the binary is huge. I get that zellij is statically linked, but tmux is about 900KiB and has minimal dependencies. I'm flabbergasted that a terminal multiplexer, stripped, is 38MiB.
True, but zellij also does more. I'd also give it more of a stink eye if it were something I were running many times inside the inner loop of a script, but as something you generally launch once and leave running forever, eh.
I occasionally have to recalibrate my units. I just launched Emacs on my Mac and it's using 350MB of RAM. That's astonishing when I think about Amiga programs I wrote, but it's also just 0.53% of the RAM in this particularly machine. It's probably larger than it could be if someone ruthlessly trimmed it back, but I'd rather spend that time using the other 99.4% of my machine to do more fun stuff.
I have a few embedded devices which have just 128MiB of flash, and they can run tmux just fine. I wouldn't even consider zellij for this purpose, of course, and having tmux down there is more of a "this is a nice thing for development purposes" thing.
Regarding memory usage, Zellij appears to take up 63 MiB versus tmux's 3.8MiB. It's nice and all, but quite a pig. This is on Linux, maybe Mac is different.
Embedded is a lot different, to be sure. I'm surprised there's room for tmux on something that tiny.
But on desktop systems, on my Mac, Zellij takes 28MB of disk and 40MB of RAM. That's 1/37,000th of my available disk and 1/1,600th of my RAM. I'm all for optimized, tiny apps, but those are below my attention threshold.
> I'm surprised there's room for tmux on something that tiny.
A question that comes to mind is, under what circumstances would you expect a TUI based program that processes streaming text not to fit on a system that is otherwise capable of user interaction? It seems vaguely in the vicinity of the simplest possible interactive task you could come up with.
Certainly it generally isn't worth hyper-optimizing mainstream desktop applications to wring out the last few MB, let alone KB, of RAM in this day and age. However that doesn't answer the question - why would more than 1 MB of program binary be required for multiplexing text in a terminal? At least at first glance it honestly seems a bit outlandish.
Note that "embedded" like this includes e.g. many modern routers.
Also note that computers with much less disk space than 128 Mb could and did run full-fledged GUI apps in the past. For example, the entirety of Windows 95 is ~100 Mb when installed.
The product uses libevent and libc already, so adding tmux only consumes a few hundred KiB in the image. The root filesystem is squashfs, so it's even less in practice.
Definitely more of a fish vs zsh situation, in my opinion.
tmux, to me, feels like "modern screen". It has some cool features, but at the end of the day, it just wants to be a terminal multiplexer. Great!
Zellij on the other hand seems to offer terminal multiplexing as an obvious first-class use case but "not the whole point". At the surface, Zellij is an opinionated terminal multiplexer that uses a nice TUI to give discoverability which you can turn off when you're ready to gain screen real estate. It's easy to make Zellij behave exactly like tmux/screen, and it's easy to configure via a single config file.
Where Zellij takes a turn in to a different direction, however, is that the workspaces you can configure with it can do all sorts of interesting things. For instance I once built[0] a python cli app which had a command that would launch a zellij workspace with various tabs plugged in to other entrypoints of that same python cli, basically allowing me to develop a multi-pane TUI as a single python Typer app. In one pane I had the main ui, and then in another stacked pane I had some diagnostic info as well as a chat session with an llm that can do tool-calling back out to the python cli again to update the session's state.
I think wrapping up a project's dev environment as a combination of mise (mise.jdx.dev) and zellij or nix+zellij to quickly onboard devs to, say, a containerized development environment, seems like a really neat idea.
> Where Zellij takes a turn in to a different direction, however, is that the workspaces you can configure with it can do all sorts of interesting things.
That’s been a pretty standard feature of tmux since forever.
In fact the reason I first discovered tmux was because some Irssi (terminal IRC client) plugins used tmux to create additional panes for Irssi.
tmux is one of those tools that does a lot more than most people realise but the learning curve is steep and features aren’t easy to discover.
Zellij looks interesting but these days I mostly use tmux as a control plane rather than a terminal UI. So the enhancements of Zellij are wasted on me.
A quick example is that mouse scrolling works by default. I see it more like ripgrep vs grep. Either can do almost anything the other can, but one has much more modern, ergonomic defaults.
I used to used zsh, like I still have have karma moving up on stackoverflow as I answered my own questions on some obscure configuration fine tuning. But currently I'm more in a "give me the thing that work off the shelf" moment, so I take fish and don't plan to either look back.
Byobu with tmux as backend is my go to solution if I want a multiplexer, for what it worths.
When I realized how powerful TRAMP was, I don't think I ever used screen/tmux again. I'm sure there are uses, mind. Just TRAMP fully hit all of my needs.
It really is magical, isn’t it? And although I rarely need to use it, I love the multihop setups where you can ssh to this system, then ssh again to this other, then mount an SMB filesystem using these credentials, and start editing.
It's used a lot for legacy reasons I think. People didn't move to something newer like tmux because why would they? It's super handy to keep stuff running on a console while disconnected from it. In that sense it (or at least, tools like it) are indispensable.
The problems here are more about the architecture. You can write 100% memory-safe but completely insecure code in Rust, Java. Haskell, Erlang, Smalltalk, bash, you name it. For instance, running a setuid binary may add problems to code written in any language.
It's a great feature! I have used it in training sessions by giving each student their own login on my laptop, with the ssh shell restricted to 'screen -x <specific user's window>' - the only window that user could use based on screen's ACLs. Then during exercises I (as the owner of the screen) could switch to each student's screen on the projector so the class could see what they had done.
Not surprised to hear it's full of security holes. :)
The problem isn't with the use of `screen -x ...` itself, but rather if `ls -l "$(which screen)"` returns something like `-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root ... /usr/bin/screen`, where the `s` in the fourth position indicates the setuid bit is set.
That means the screen binary runs with root privileges.
I use screen almost by default when connecting over SSH, but I've never used -x and didn't know about it.
Habbit from back in the dial-up days when connections got dropped quite frequently. Still relevant with laptop going into sleep mode and such.
So nice to just resume wherever you were as of nothing happened. Or to run jobs in the background, like long compiles, without an additional SSH session.
The risk is anything else dropping your connection while an interactive long-running process is going. You can nohup, or run inside something like screen/tmux,
You're not wrong, but largely in the virtualized world we live in, it matters less and less when you have a virtual console.
That said the sshd session you are connected on is still running the old executable until the service is restarted AND your session ends, so even if sshd gets upgraded, you should still be good to go.
> In windows, I can just shut the lid and not worry about it, because it will sleep first, and eventually hibernate. Ubuntu would just sleep until the battery dies.
It's really funny because this is one of the things I absolutely do not like about Windows. I absolutely hate it that I put the computer to sleep and when I come back the next day it has hibernated. That said, I agree that hibernation has always been finicky on Linux, however, I would say Ubuntu is not the best distro for this use case. I have been using Fedora and they even publish official guides for it[0] that's how seriously they take it.
0: https://github.com/whyisdifficult/jiratui
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