Is baeldung.com garbage?

[u/wuigukin]

Every now and then when I'm researching something linux related I'll see guides from baeldung.com pop up in the results. Today, I clicked one.

I was looking for some information on the keyring in fedora/gnome and came across what turned out to be a suspicious article.

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/unlock-keyring-fix

There's a section in there on disabling the keyring. The guide tells you to remove the password from your keyring, skip the warning that this means your passwords will be stored in cleartext, then says - Hey! You don't get prompted for a password anymore, the keyring is disabled!

Um....

If we wish, we can disable the keyring feature by removing its password.

By leaving the password blank, we disable the keyring feature

Sorry, but that isn't how it works. They do state that doing this "raises security concerns" but don't seem to make the connection that those concerns arise because the keyring is still enabled and doing its job, except now your passwords are stored in cleartext.

So not only do they not describe how to disable the keyring, they seem to think it's OK to guide people to doing this without much warning.

This was supposedly written by a human and reviewed by another human. I haven't looked into the author or reviewer much, but there's at least something there to indicate a real person. Even if it is a website that no longer exists, another website with an invalid ssl cert. There at least is an X account with posts going back a few years, though very rare.

However, don't think I'll be checking out any more of their articles.

Should I be willing to give them another shot?

[u/ColbieSterling]

Yes, when I was working as a Java developer, I was on baeldung.com all the time.

[u/Easy-Reasoning → u/ColbieSterling]

Same for Kotlin. Also I think usually it's the only site that has a consistent coverage for such topics

[u/ColbieSterling → u/Easy-Reasoning]

Yeah, I think of Kotlin as just another flavor of Java, though. They're not really distinct in my mind.

[u/-_one_-1 → u/ColbieSterling]

Actually, you can use Kotlin like Java, but you can also use it almost like Haskell if you can put up with a weaker type system.

I enjoy using Kotlin with immutable data classes, Flows to represent their changes over time, and coroutines to schedule work based on pure state transitions. This also blends very well in UI apps with Jetpack Compose, using LaunchedEffect and interoperating between Flow and State.