[tor-relays] Future versions and Vidalia?

[Moritz Bartl]

On 09/24/2013 04:01 AM, Jesse Victors wrote:
>> Are all future versions of Tor Browser Bundle going to have Vidalia
>> permanently stripped? 
> I'm in exactly the same boat. I would _highly_ recommend that the
> current TBB stay exactly the way it is.

Not going to happen. For years, nobody has picked up Vidalia, and it is
way too confusing for most users to have another, separate program
launched together with the browser (and even added to their Quicklaunch
list or whatever you call it).

There will still be Vidalia relay bundles independent from Tor *Browser*
Bundle.

> I'm against having a ton of
> services start up by themselves. As a Linux user, I enjoy having the
> power to control what I start things up, and when. Sometimes I start my
> computer and I don't want certain things to start. The disadvantage of
> having a service install is that I lose much of that control. I too have
> tried to set up a Tor relay via packages and such, and I also failed.

Nobody is forcing you to have Tor auto-start, like nobody is forcing you
to have TBB auto-start. You can run Tor as you would run TBB. Especially
as a Linux user, you really should learn enough about how your system
behaves to make a simple change such as remove a service:

update-rc.d tor disable

> The TBB was orders of magnitude easier: I just click "configure relay"
> and things work fine. Vidalia is also extremely easy to use, and I like
> the interface. I would advise that the dev team reconsider.

Honestly? Tor from a repository is so much nicer than having to update
TBB by hand, and reconfigure it every time there's an update. All you
have to do is add the Torproject repository, once, install Tor from it,
once, and configure your /etc/tor/torrc, once. You can copy most (if not
all) of the settings from your TBB torrc to that file, done.

Please understand it's not much a matter of decision. Developer
resources are very scarce, the old maintainer long gone, and nobody
seems to pick up Vidalia. It's not like it was decided to simply drop
it. It had to go, with way too many bugs piling up, and people emailing
help desk almost every day being confused about the separate application
that most users never need.

Free software is about freeing the users. Freedom comes at a price, and
that price is some investment into understanding the systems. It is
totally fine to not know, but if you want to be able to benefit from
that freedom, you really need to understand the basic principles
underlying a Linux distribution and its packages. Once you learned them,
once, it takes a fraction of the time installing and setting up Tor
properly, compared to downloading TBB for every update.

-- 
Moritz Bartl
https://www.torservers.net/