My favourite “lesson” I ever gave was in a grade 9 technology class. It was a pretty small class, about 10 kids. I split them up into two teams and made a competition. They chose their own teams — it ended up being boys vs girls. I never would have made it that way on my own but that’s how it worked out.
The school had a bunch of old, decommissioned PCs that were headed to the junk yard. I sorted through all of them to get two exact sets of working parts for the competition.
The goal of the competition was to recover a jpeg from one of the hard drives. Each team had a computer with the ram removed and two hard drives. One was blank and the other had the jpeg on it. They also had a Linux Mint installer on a usb stick.
I don’t remember exactly how I had set it up but it was points based, something about getting to different stages first. Like 5 points to be the team that turns the computer on first. One of the big ones was that they got an extra 10 points if they did the whole thing without a mouse.
I told the other classes about the competition and asked some other teachers if it would be okay for them to watch and cheer on. It ended up being the nerdiest and most exciting class ever. Students were literally cheering each team through a Linux install. One team got stuck and had to pull out the mouse. There was booing. It was so epic.
The girls won, being the first to recover the jpeg and they did it all without a mouse. It was so awesome. The jpeg was the meme about how would a dog wear pants.
It was about 5 years ago, my first year teaching. I really miss those days. I only teach math now, and while I like that, there was something magical about showing kids how fun computers can be.
Out of curiosity, how much had you already taught them about the tasks? Was it just expected that between the whole team there would be someone who knew this stuff?
If I recall correctly I didn’t tell them much about anything. One of them had a nerd dad who set up his daughter with Linux at home but she wasn’t familiar with the install process. I gave them some basic info when I gave them the rules (you have to connect the hard drives and ram) but for the most part everything was new to them.
On the other hand, I also ran a computer club with some other kids (in a younger grade) where we took that pile of broken computers and salvaged working parts. We ended up with 3 or 4 working pcs that we ran Linux mint on. They used the computers for Roblox or something at lunch lol. The computers ended up being a popular attraction at lunch!
Yeah I had formatted and partitioned the disk ahead of time. The JPEG was in the root directory IIRC. I warned them to not plug in both hard drives during the install process to be sure not to overwrite the wrong drive. They were labelled physically but were otherwise identical.
@maxprime@nayminlwin what an amazing story. I love that this could be gamified for them and made more fun. I presume you had a guide or helped them when they got stuck?
@maxprime my technology teacher in middle school did something similar with me and a bunch of other kids in 1995 or so. That's how I fixed my first pc, and eventually started a career in IT. There was no team competition, but he basicallt said "these are some broken computers, if you can fix them you can have a lab to play Doom or whatever you want. He helped us setting up the IPX network tbf, but we had to check what dimm banks were working, which not, same with hdd and processors, and put togheter everything and install Windows 3.11
If i were to become a teacher in the future (unlikely, but not impossible), i'd hope to be just as caring and enjoying the craft as you are. Keep it up! ☺️
I had some of my classes (14-15yr olds) assemble their own computers as the first class. It was cheap junk anyway, and I was willing to risk it, but it set the stage for the year. I dont think I got them to install system on it (whole school run on Linux btw), thats a great touch. And making it into something that entertaining, and stereotypes breaking is brilliant!
This is the only way I have seen porn on kbin, even after going out of my way to subscribe to the NSFW magazines in kbin. No porn has even shown up in my feed.
I remember the days of deciphering the scrambled tv channels on cable during the late hours perusing the late night adult programming as it scrolled in its warped and distorted menagerie of shapes and colors, feeling exited to spot an errant boob or something.
Sometimes I see the rare post when I sort by Newest but it almost feels like kbin is giving 18+ submissions a low priority or something. Meanwhile when I check through my Beehaw account I see a lot of it, relatively speaking. Definitely far more than on kbin.
I don't know if tagging him sends him a notification, but if you're reading this @ernest, it's doing the thumbnail thing but we kbin users are seeing a picture of a naked licking a lollypop on a linux post.
It's funny but I do think it's a bug rather than a feature.
This is well known and Ernest is working on a passel of fixes, and is really spread thin. I'd suggest tagging him for any bug (new or not) vs reporting an issue via bugtracker is counterproductive, and probably just adding to his stress.
Not sure if anyone else pointed it out to you, but op posted a thing, then edited the post to capitalize on an exploit.
Software is actually pretty intensely hard to create.
Ernest has done his best at creating a federverse instance for all us Kbin users, but also, none of us were here 3 years ago.
I also don't see Ernest becomming a Spez In 7 years, so I applaud the effort and the platform, and if we get more robust nsfw thumbnail handling, cool, but I also love the ability to edit my posts to fix my typos and whatnot, trolls thumbnails titties and all sometimes.
The disregard for simplicity and/or outright hostility towards ease of use and centralizing settings I see in the comments here is the primary reason Linux will never replace that other OS as the home computer OS. This culture of elitism, and yes it is elitism, is harmful to that cause. I see this attitude almost every time someone expresses frustration towards Linux for an issue that other OSs have overcome (or significantly lessened) literally decades ago.
There is, arguably, a sense of entitlement for wanting free software developers to ‘do the thing’, but that’s not a Linux problem. Free software exists on all platforms, and those developers still manage to follow the OS’s design philosophy.
The standard user should never, ever, ever have to use a CLI for anything ever, nor should they need to have a Linux Guy on speed dial to be able to solve a basic general issue. You might argue that an issue on those other OSs might need someone to open a CLI or dig into a settings file to fix, but those times are so few and far between that the average user may never have to do it in their lifetime. Meanwhile it seems like every solution to a Linux issue begins first thing with opening terminal.
User friendly flavors of Linux have made great strides towards making things much closer to those other OS design philosophies, and that’s great, but they’re not quite there yet. I’m also not saying every flavor of Linux needs to follow this pattern, as not every problem calls for a hammer. The problem is that Linux is still very much a Wild West OS where anything goes, hidden behind a roughly painted GUI facade.
Yeah, they keep changing their minds on how they want that unified settings window to look and never fully retiring the old way. It’s like that XKCD comic about so many standards.
Trust me, I’ve complained about that exact thing a ton too.
But most of the comments on this post really aren’t elitist. Most desktop tools are made by volunteers (with the exception of SUSE, Canonical, Red Hat, etc. who mostly deal with running on servers) and those volunteers only have so much time to work on projects. If they don’t have time/knowledge to build GUIs when the terminal is “good enough” for their use cases, why should they?
If someone else needs the GUI, they can develop a frontend separately (which also gives people the choice of being able to cut down on software they don’t need if they only use the terminal interface)
Personally, my take on this is that Linux isn’t mainstream for a reason. Windows/macOS still exist and (privacy concerns aside) function well. It would be amazing if Linux could become more beginner friendly, but let’s not try to act like desktop Linux developers who are already giving up their time owe it to us to do even more.
All I’m saying is that people shouldn’t be immediate turned away from Linux whenever they bring up a failing of the platform by the people who live and breathe CLI.
It would be good for Linux flavors intended for desktop OS use to have some kind of style guide. Developers who are donating their valuable time don’t have to follow it, but it would at least give them all a sort of unified target so they don’t have to constantly reinvent the settings wheel.
GUI doesn't make things simpler except for people who can't grasp the absolutely insane simplicity of CLI. It's the underpinning of everything and makes everything work so much better. Automation and customization is made easier through CLI.
GUIs hardly centralize anything. There's no standard place to put settings in a GUI. And have you seen GUIs created by many dev-first folks? Devs should rarely be in charge of frontend stuff. Front end development is for front end developers. It's a different class of individuals.
Linux won't catch on as long as new users are lazy. Every generation, that becomes more and more. I thought gen z would be better with PCs but they're only familiar with iOS and Android it seems. No wonder a CLI is scary. They have no actual experience with how to use a computer.
Linux will never replace that other OS as the home computer OS
Does it need to?
I'm fine with Linux, it works for me and I couldn't care less if it doesn't become mainstream, especially if opening to a wider audience means altering the status quo that makes the OS great for people like me.
I don't want a GUI if that entails sacrificing the CLI, you can look at the Flatpak CLI if you want an example: they went all-in with the graphical stores and the command line is neglected.
There are a non-insignificant number of people who want it to be, and frankly it would be good to have the competition in the market space if only to keep the other players honest.
Almost any discussion about another popular OS has a few token “switch to Linux” comments. I see people often using the phrase “The Year of Linux” after that other OS does something unfavorable in hopes to see a massive migration.
So there’s a desire for it to become popular. Maybe it will never replace that other OS, but that doesn’t mean it can’t compete for the desktop OS space.
Actually, Ctrl+C is the interrupt hotkey for pretty much every CLI app/terminal on every platform. Try it within the Command Prompt/PowerShell/Windows Terminal, or the macOS terminal - they’ll all behave the same.
The use of Ctrl+C as an interrupt/termination signal has a very long history even predating the old UNIX days and DEC - it goes back to the days of early telecommunications, where control characters were used for controlling the follow of data through telecommunication lines. These control characters, along with regular characters, were transmitted by being encoded in binary, and this encoding scheme was defined by ASCII (American Stanard Code for Information Interchange), published in 1963.
In ASCII, the control character ETX (meaning end-of-text; represented by the hex code 0x03) was used to indicate “this segment of input is over”, or “stop the current processing”.
Now what does all this have to do with with Ctrl+C you ask?
For that, you’ll need to go back to the days of early keyboards. Keyboards back then generated ASCII codes directly, and when a modifier key (Ctrl/Shift/Meta) on a keyboard was pressed in combination with another key, it modified the signal sent by the keyboard to produce a control character.
Specifically, pressing Ctrl with a letter key made the keyboard clear (set to zero) the upper three bits of the binary code of the letter, thus effectively mapping the letter keys to control characters (0x00 - 0x1F: the first 32 characters on the ASCII table).
The ASCII code for ‘C’ is 0x43 (binary 01000011).
Pressing Ctrl+C clears the upper three bits, resulting in 00000011, which is 0x03 in hex.
And would you look at that, 0x03 is the code which represents the control character ETX.
The use of ETX to interrupt a program in digital computers was first adopted by the TOPS-10 OS, which ran on DEC’s PDP-10 computer, back in the late 60s. It’s successor, TOPS-20 also included it, followed by the RSX-11 (on the PDP-11), and VMS (on the VAX-11).
RSX-11 was a very influential OS, created by a team that included David Cutler. It influenced the design of several OSes that followed, such as VMS and Windows NT. Cutler later moved to Microsoft and became the father of Windows NT. Early NT did not include a GUI, so it was natural to adopt existing terminal operation standards, including the use of ETX. In fact, NT’s internals were so similar to VMS that a lawsuit was in the works, but instead, MS agreed to pay off DEC millions of $$$.
Also, when UNIX first came out (1969), it ran on DEC hardware, and so they followed the tradition of using the ETX signal to stop programs. This convention flowed to BSD (1978) which was based on UNIX, and NeXTSTEP (1989), which was based on BSD. NeXTSTEP was developed by NeXT Computers, which was founded by Steve Jobs… and the rest is history.
Therefore, Ctrl+C is something that’s deeply rooted in history. You don’t just simply change something like that. Sure, you may be able to remap the keybindings, but it’s actually hardcoded into many programs so you’ll run into inconsistencies - that is, if you used the standard remapping tools built into GNOME/KDE etc.
If you want to truly remap Ctrl+C, you’ll want to do so at a lower level (evdev layer) so that it’s not intercepted by other programs, eg using tools like evremap or keyd. But even then, it’s not guaranteed to work everywhere, for instance, if you’re inside a VM or using a different OS, or in a remote session. So it’s best to remap the keys at the keyboard layer itself, which is possible on many popular mechanical keyboards using customisable firmware like QMK/VIA.
Switching it at the terminal emulator level should work fine for every CLI/TUI though, right? Just have your terminal send 0x03 when you press C-S-c and copy selected text on C-c. I haven’t tested it but I’m sure that alacritty, wezterm, windows terminal and probably tmux can do this.
Bravo, very good explanation! As fun fact, i still have at work several DEC ALPHA and OpenVMS servers (some are now VM but we still have physical servers from this era managing our data) and Ctrl+C works well!
I will point out that in modern Windows terminals, Ctrl+C does copy selected text if there’s text selected; personally, I don’t see a problem with having it be context aware like that to make it behave more like how the majority of current users will be expecting based on how programs outside the CLI behave
The distribution “managed by a single person” depends on hundreds of people working on different sofware to keep up. It’s not “one person doing better than the thousands of Microsoft employees combined” implication they are pushing
Windows 11 beat the linux distros by up to 20% in 1% lows which are argued as much more important by most tech reviewers. It wasn’t consistant at all which means that there was a giant margin of error.
I love linux and linux gaming has gotten radically better, but I am tired of tech “journalism” literally just cherrypicking, misleading, clickbait trash.
Yeah, the only time proton can actually outperform windows is when it spots a fundamental performance error that the app has made, and is able to optimize it out, AND no windows driver does the same. This is comparing Linux+proton at its best vs windows+native at its worst.
What we really want to see is Linux+native at its best vs windows+native at its best. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of demanding games that natively support Linux.
Not to mention the major hurdle for Linux gaming is anti cheat software being brought over. Too many games are 100% unplayable because the devs don’t allow their anticheat to be installed on Linux systems
If you compromise your system with software that you don't know and potentially can introduce a backdoor (even involuntary via bugs), you have a rootkit installed.
If you don't trust it, don't install it with admin privileges. Maybe don't install it at all. Anticheat is a shady business. And mostly not owned by the company that produces the maybe trusted product to be protected.
“A rootkit is a collection of computer software, typically malicious, designed to enable access to a computer or an area of its software that is not otherwise allowed (for example, to an unauthorized user) and often masks its existence or the existence of other software.”
That’s the Wikipedia definition, in CompTIA Security+ the concept of the malware masking itself is quintessential to the definition of a rootkit. I hear this shit all the time from people on here who think anything that gets elevated privileges is a “rootkit” and hasn’t the slightest idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
“But you don’t know if it could install a backdoor!”
You don’t know if half the shit you install is doing that either, or is Easy Anticheat known for doing this in some official investigation? Did someone find out that Activision is deploying malware in ricochet?
If not, you’re operating on suspicion that you don’t harbor for other software without evidence, based purely on things you’ve probably just barely heard about.
You should notice that I use the word "trust". I install stuff on my servers and PCs from people who I trust. Why should I trust someone who makes an anticheat engine. Why should I have a reason to do that?
You should also understand that a kernel-level piece of code that can be updated is a very good rootkit. It contains all essential tools to modify hardware, kernel, install drivers, keyloggers etc. It satisfies the definition of "rootkit" very well.
One single piece of code is enough to be a rootkit.
Rootkits: The rootkit is considered to be a type of Trojan horse. Many Trojan horses exhibit the characteristics of a rootkit. The main difference is that rootkits actively conceal themselves in a system and also typically provide the hacker with administrator rights.
I really wish valve would make this more clear on steam store pages. It says games are “unsupported” on steam deck due to anticheat when really it should say something like “The developer of this title does not allow players using the steam deck” so that people are more aware it’s not linux or valve’s fault
It also doesn’t work. I know that’s what the parent comment said, but it’s a total scam at the company level too.
“Oh, server networking is hard to do right. Let’s do it client side”
“Oh, people are cheating. Let’s add anticheat”
Ensue 3 years of fixing network consistency bugs and playing whackamole with cheaters
I’ve developed games where the client is the source of truth, and games where it’s the server. It is almost always better to do anything that will be developed for more than a few weeks serverside.
Also from an engineering perspective it makes LOADS more sense as you can apply patches to the servers instantly vs. requiring the users patch the game themselves.
Oh, absolutely. I can’t believe we deployed web apps on IIS for instance. What a shitshow that was. If you can run the important bits on something predictable like linux with all the serverside tools that gives you, why wouldn’t you.
In the defence of client side AC; if the entire game runs on the server, then network delay makes FPS:es awful to play. Being able to trust clients and let them do hit detection is quite important in making online FPS:es responsive. In addition, cheats that remove walls/grass, highlight players or even autoaim are near impossible to detect server side. One could try to use heuristics and statistics but it would be difficult to tell the difference between cheaters and players who are just good at aiming and map awareness.
Honestly I can't say that I miss installing rootkits with terrifying privileges just to play games. I'd rather limit the privileges games have with Flatpak etc., not give them even more.
Sure but gaming is predominantly a social pastime. Meaning that most gamers will make the trade off between installing anticheat and not playing the game their friends are all playing, much like the overwhelming majority of people will trade privacy in favor of being able to send a message to friends on Facebook.
It doesn’t matter how much you value your privacy: most people don’t care and never will. So without the option to give away privacy to play the latest Ubisoft game they won’t be using Linux. Full stop.
Yup. People always latch on to the “Sony (it was actually on Philips, who ran the disc factory that Sony had a stake in, but that’s just nitpicking) installed a rootkit on PCs in the 90s via CDs” and say about how awful that is, and they’re right, then they throw that out the Window and install more advanced rootkits filled with god knows what telemetry when they install games.
This is because most anti cheats for windows are kernel level rootkits that have full access to your entire system, and gamers just trust that known to be ineffective, scammy and profiteering, anti cheat companies software companies would /never/ do anything nefarious.
How can you trust them?
You can’t! Black boxed code, babyyyyyy.
Anyway yeah on linux systems basically the designs of all common anti cheat systems would be laughed at as hilariously insecure code that no sane person would allow on their computer because you would have to give it root level access.
This is basically insane as in the linux paradigm, root level access is reserved only for a bare minimum of system processes, whereas on Windows, well with the new Pluton tech in the latest lines of major CPUs, Windows has the ability to DRM literally anything you install on it and just get rid of your ability to run or install it, as they see fit, with a network enabled sub layer of the CPU that you as a user cannot override from within Windows.
The only hurdle for linux gaming is for more gamers and game developers to realize the truth of what I just said.
Its possible to do anti cheat in less invasive ways. But that requires more work from game development studios, and is costly.
Anyone else remember when servers had like actual human admins that would respond to player complaints, and would work on the backend of a server to come up with their own ways to detect cheating server side?
No, the links about Mozilla show how corrupt their directives are. Peole are so eager to scrutiny competing browsers/company and their forgive every shit Mozilla or their board do.
By the way, who cares about Brave’s CEO? I don’t agree with his political views, but for me their browser it’s the best out there at the moment and the company itself isn’t politically active at all.
Did you ask any other Mozilla employee what their political views are, by the way? How can you be sure that all of them are “good persons”? Do you buy your stuff on Amazon, by any chance, knowing how evil thy are? Are you sure that your grocery store’s owner/your mechanic/your doctor/etc. isn’t an homophobe or a bad person? Please, be coherent and go and ask all the people you make deals with what their political views are.
I’m not upset. I may have been unclear. I just find funny that people in the (F)OSS/Linux community (which I’m clearly part of) are very prone to scrutinize Brave and other companies, while they pretend not to see what’s going on at Mozilla, which seems to always get a free pass.
I used to like Firefox (been using is since 2002ish…). But after a lot feature removals and, last but not least, the ugly UI redesign (despite the negative feedback in the nightly/beta phase) I just jumped ship. I’m not going to waste my time fixing it with CSSs, unfucking what Mozilla did wrong. Anyway, Brave is just faster, it performs better and has a no-shit UI.
This, plus the disappointment I’ve had with Mozilla, gives me exactly 0 reason to go back.
Seriously, I had to use MacOS for a few months, a few years ago, and I fount the UX… poor? Apart from that, I woulnd’t buy something Apple regardlessly. Too restrictive.
Sorry, just because the board gets high salaries, you're using a different browser? Odds are that that other browser has either a board that earns more, or at least strengthens the dominance of a browser engine whose board earns more. And that's not even discussing how those other boards have incentives contrary to users' interests (either monopolising the web, or hamstringing it to push people towards apps), instead of the only browser maker that has no shareholders.
Not using the web at all would be consistent, but using a non-Mozilla-supported (I count Librewolf) browser is the worst idea, and so is wishing Mozilla harm before the other browser makers.
Ah right, so the salary was a straw man and you don't actually care about sainthood. Fair enough, but here's a callout to people who do care about a free and open society: support Firefox. When it comes to the open web, it's the best shot we've got.
Then they are just parasites of the society. haha (I mean, being paid for removing shit that another company worker get paid to put in, makes no sense, and it’s a waste of resources and money)
My point isn’t how simple it is to turn off, my point is why is that turn on by default in the first place? Last I checked to join a Window’s domain you need a Professional/Enterprise version of Windows. This is software intended for a business environment not only that, it also costs much more as well. Yet here we are by default my Profession Windows install comes with Candy Crush and Game Pass ads. Great job Microsoft you have done it again.
This is the only argument I find makes sense. It would definitely be elementary for Microsoft to have those consumer features turned off by default in the Pro/Pro for Workstations/Enterprise/etc editions.
It shouldn't even be part of an OS at all. I haven't purchased Windows in probably about twenty years but if I did I would expect that if I pay for software, it's not going to come and try to keep selling me more crap. This is just one of the reasons I use Linux.
We only ever buy second hand laptops. When our teen bought his brand new PC, it came installed with Windows. I asked the shop, when enquiring about customisation, if it could come without Windows but was told that it had already been installed and even if we opted to wait for one that wasn't built yet, the mount of money they charge for OEM Windows is very little so we wouldn't save much anyway.
Outside of donating, Linux distros don't cost anything so it's not like paying for an OS on top of paying for an OS.
And people just get on with it and download these chappy things that turn things off in group policy editor, like u shouldn’t need to download an app to not get ads on something u paid for
Tthe problem is now if you have the store disabled basic shit, like the ability to open .heic files is broken or use stuff people want like sticky notes is broken.
We turn off most of what we can’t but having the store enabled causes all sorts of stuff.
Also windows 11 has ads baked in even with the store disabled. Plug in a Logitech mouse, get a pop up for their software. Open the picture viewer and get an ad to install some video editor that isn’t clear whether it’s a Ms product or not.
No to mention basic things like copy paste and edit are now weird icons because I guess they think most users are illiterate.
Most of the 11 UI changes are not for the better. Having to beta test it for work is frustrating and I run an IT shop.
MS goes out of their way to make shit harder than it needs to be.
For example. The store, they have a store for business where you can simply whitelist known apps buts it’s a PITA to setup AND they have been threatening to decom it for ages
Want to add safety/security features like secuirty keys. Well if you do it on a non domain joined machine you can just sign into a m365 account to enable a passkey or yuibijey as a second factor.
Want to do that in a business environment. Congrats now you have to deploy a windows CA and issue user certificates to tie to this. Even if you are signing the machine into m365 with ADAL.
They go out of their way to add complexity and failure points.
They go out of their way to add complexity and failure points.
I read a thing just the other day about essentially that. Not that specific issue, but the way their timekeeping works (by default) and is a disaster (literally) when it fails.
That is crazy. According to a comment on that article, most BIOS uses UTC (as does Linux, obviously), but Windows uses localtime for some reason, so it converts UTC to localtime after boot, then back to UTC when it needs to do little things like networking or TLS.
Systemd is the first program that runs once the kernel has started. It’s job is mostly just starting up other processes, and managing those other processes. If you don’t know what systemd is, then you probably shouldn’t care about if you’re using it or not, it’s good software but there are fine alternatives.
What makes systemd particularly interesting is that it is different from historical init systems. Historically these init systems were an unholy mess of shell scripts. This offers maximum flexibility, but limits the functionality of the init system itself. Systemd replaces these shell scripts with simple ini-like service files that allow everything to be declared simply and declaratively, and allows specifying more rich metadata, like dependencies. But it’s different, and some people place a higher value on “how it’s always been” than pragmatism. I personally have zero sympathy for them because throwing out objective progress to hold onto a broken system designed for 1960s computing is just dumb.
I had to battle with the fucking initd and upstard before systemd. Those stupid headers of the scripts in /etc/init.d/ we wonderfully undocumented, didn't have syntax checks, depended on a bunch of other shell scripts that didn't have any damn comments in them.
systemd was going to happen sooner or later because nobody was going to put up with that bullshit forever.
Those people arguing about "do one thing right" blablabla don't care about principles, they care about superiority. They want to feel like they're the minority who can do stuff so that in forums they can be toxic and respond with "RTFM" or "LMGTFY". They don't want it easier and more functional, they want it hard so that they can gatekeep.
Like a bunch of Catholics: I experienced pain, so you have to too!
systemd can containerize services! To do that kind of stuff with initd, you'd have to know how create process-, user-, and network namespaces, and a bunch of other stuff.
It’s especially funny because systemd isn’t one program any more than GNU is. It’s a project. systemd-initd handles init. systemd-journald handles journal logs. systemd-resolved handles DNS resolution. Etc. Each systemd daemon has one area of responsibility!
I never used openRC (outside of Docker containers that run Alpine) so I wouldn’t know. Linux community has enough controversies, init utils shouldn’t be one of them
I was with you until the last paragraph. Just about every init system is different from historical init systems. Do you really think OpenRC or runit or any of the other init systems people are using have any similarity to SysV init? I think you’re attacking a strawman in the last paragraph. (Edit: Except Slackware users. Slackware still does init the way it’s traditionally been done, but I can’t think of anyone else who does)
I mean to a certain degree, I can understand if people find a problem with Poetterings approach of doing things !CORRECTLY!. Like, systemd-resolved resolving A-records with multiple addresses ina deterministic fashion because it’s not defined not to be deterministic, and because actual load balancing would be better. It’s not wrong, but it’s breaking everything. And it got patched after some uproar. And there are a few things like that.
But at the same time - I don’t think people appreciate how hard doing process management right on linux can be, especially if the daemon to run is shitty. Like, init scripts just triggering the shutdown port on a tomcat - except the tomcat is stuck and not reacting to the normal shutdown port and now you have a zombie process and an init script in a fucked up state. Or, just killing the main process and for some reason not really removing the children, now there’s zombies all over the place. Or, not trying appropriate shutdown procedures first and just killing things, “because it’s easier” - except my day just got harder with a corrupt dataset. Or, just trying soft and “Pwease wexit Mr Pwocess” signals and then just giving up. Or having “start” just crash because there was a stale PID from an OOM killed process around. Man I’m getting anxiety just thinking about this.
And that’s just talking about ExecStart and ExecStop, pretty much, which I have done somewhat correct in a few init scripts back in the day (over months of iteration of edge cases). Now start thinking about the security features systemd-analyze can tell you about, like namespaces, unmapping syscalls, masking parts of the filesystem, … imagine doing that with the jankyness of the average init.d script. At that point I’d start thinking about rebooting systems instead of trying to restart services, honestly.
And similarly, I’m growing fond of things like systemd-networkd, systemd-timesyncd. I’ve had to try to manage NetworkManager automatically and jeez… Or just directly handling networking with network-scripts. Always a pleasure. Chucking a bunch of pretty readable ini-files into /etc/systemd/networkd is a blessing. They are even readable even to people rather faint on the networking heart.
TPM is basically never for your benefit. It's becoming a requirement because Microsoft is going to one day say "you can only run apps installed from the Windows Store, because everything else is insecure" and lock down the software market. Valve knows this which is why they're going so hard on the Steam Deck and Linux.
TPM actually provides some useful components to isolate encryption outside of Ring 0, which is a trust win. But any technology must be weighted against its power to oppress.
And its power to make the system less secure. Isolating things outside ring 0 means malware can isolate itself outside ring 0 as well, and then it’s impossible to detect or remove without throwing out the entire machine.
Which is much, much scarier than anything an ordinary rootkit might do.
I’m sure you’ll be ok sending me your social security number, home address, bank login details, credit card number, a copy of all the files on your hard drive…
Sure, but does a grandmother’s Solitaire & Facebook PC really need quick encrypting and decrypting? Anyone not dealing with sensitive info doesn’t need one.
Sure there are. If it gets compromised with malicious code, I have no way of removing it.
I can protect ring 0. I can keep crap out of ring 0. If all else fails, I can nuke everything in ring 0 and boot a fresh OS installation. But I can’t do a single bleeping thing except throw out the whole machine if malware takes over ring -1.
This is already the case with your motherboard firmware, which fTPM is a part of. You are correct in that you have no real way to handle malware in it except throw it away. This doesn’t change in any way if you get rid of TPM.
It’s the way everything is moving. Hardware protected keys can be very useful but it’s a double edged sword. It’s more secure but also allows companies to lock consumers out.
We need rules that say when this tech is used the consumer still gets full control over it. Like what Google does with their Pixel phones and the Titan chip. Not what Apple does.
It’s only more secure until someone discovers yet another RCE bug in the firmware, and then you’ve got malware in your machine that’s impossible to detect or remove.
Like what google does? You mean disallowing people who use a privacy respecting android rom from using their banking apps and such? Soon very possibly banking websites included?
yes, the reason is to securely store cryptographic keys. even your own. It comes preloaded with microsoft ones usually, but you’re free to delete them and install your own
Sadly, I agree. I’m at the point now where as long as I’m not trying to game I can thrive on Linux. But even then I spend way more time than necessary getting things to work that do so out of the box on Windows. We have a long way to go before legacy apps is the only reason to run it.
Personally I found the time I saved from not having any control over my system has more than made up for tinkering that I have to do to get things running. My laptop would regularly become unusable for 20+ minutes on windows because of disk performance issues, and I as the user had no means to prevent windows from running the service that locked everything up. That along with other times windows just decides your use case is less important have added up to far more time then having to debug a game here and there
The people that prefer Windows for gaming are not the people that will have performance issues on an OS basis, their rig is powerful enough to run complex games, the OS based performance loss is negligible in comparison. Hell, I sometimes don’t reboot the work computer for days and it doesn’t freeze at all. The system is on an SSD and there are no hiccups nor disk performance issues. In any case, with current day prices, buying a new m2 stick and new ram is less than 100€ total, and to be honest, I’d rather pay that and be fine for 4-5 years than spend a big part of my free time trying to make witcher 3, baldur’s gate 3, path of exile, tons of steam games and league working perfectly for Linux. It’s just not worth it.
I use WSL for work because coding in a Linux environment is better but I still need access to office tools, because companies work with those tools.
Linux won the servers war, but it still has to do much to win the home/work computer war.
Ungh, yeah I used to have that problem with my laptop when I was in college.
I only booted it up for classes unless I had a test coming up I needed to study for or something. Because why the fuck would I not do that - I had a regular computer at home for everything else.
Every couple weeks, that meant it was updating instead of being available for note taking, and usually for the entire hour I needed it. Because apparently setting the updates to run during shutdown wasn’t good enough, they needed to be run on boot, because fuck you that’s why.
Linux is just… hey I should probably update this shit at some point… meh, tomorrow.
Because apparently setting the updates to run during shutdown wasn’t good enough, they needed to be run on boot, because fuck you that’s why.
Oh it also loves to install updates on shut down. So when you need to leave the class room to go home that fucking thing tells you to not cut power because it needs to install shit. Fuck you, I need to catch my bus!
Legit idgaf if you want to be plugged in for an update, if it’s inconvenient I’m unplugging it, fuck you for thinking I won’t, and it’s above 60% battery so it doesn’t matter anyway.
Maybe if my computer wasn’t buying so much avocado toast it could manage resources better.
"Long way" won't be long, because Google 2.0, err, MS' direction continues to make Win worse over time (cloudify everything, extract more data and strip more rights+control from each user, and gain more money via price-increasing subscription models) while the open source desktop ecosystem around Linux is getting noticeably better for almost every user every ~5 years or so. The era of Windows as a "pure" OS died with W7. Since W10, it's OS + integrated malware. Start of downfall.
Those things matter to you and me but we’re in the minority. As long as Johnny Gamer and Grandma Facebooker can still do their preferred activities in Windows there’s a close to zero percent chance they’ll put the effort into making the switch.
It seems unlikely Valve will ever make Windows the primary OS for their devices. And they’d lose a lot of user support if they ever required the TPM for their own software, so hopefully they wouldn’t risk it.
Why does everybody seem to think that userspace attestation is the only use for the TPM? The primary use is for data to be encrypted at rest but decrypted at boot as long as certain flags aren’t tripped. TPM is great for the security of your data if you know how to set it up.
Valve is never going to require TPM attestation to use Steam, that’s just silly. Anti-cheat companies might, but my suggestion there is to just not play games that bundle malware.
Anti-user features which are enabled by games and programs that were already anti-user before this. Hardly worth getting upset about, nothing has really changed. You already should have been avoiding them, because they were already anti-user.
TPM is basically never for your benefit. It’s becoming a requirement because Microsoft is going to one day say “you can only run apps installed from the Windows Store, because everything else is insecure” and lock down the software market. Valve knows this which is why they’re going so hard on the Steam Deck and Linux.
This is the comment I was replying to. I was simply pointing out that for a company “going hard” on SteamDeck and Linux, it’s curious that they would spend any amount of effort at all enabling the TPM to allow people to run Windows. I guess my point is I don’t think they’re “going hard” quite as much as the person I responded to thinks.
Also it was just pointing out that this specifically can affect the SteamDeck since they use an AMD processor with AMD fTPM.
I don't see how it affects the Steam Deck. It's entirely possible that the Steam Deck supports fTPM purely because it was part of the motherboard template Valve chose and it would have been more trouble to change it than to just leave it in.
They are “going hard” the way I see it. Without Valve doing legwork behind the scenes and collaborating with anticheat developers we wouldn’t even have Apex Legends running on Linux like we’ve had for a year and a half. They’ve been talking about wanting to use Linux as a viable PC gaming platform to escape Microsofts lockdown of their platform since the days of Steam Machines when Windows 8 and the new store app were giving bad signs.
Either way Valve would be silly not to provide a compatible way to use Windows on the Deck. Even though the situation is much better these days, they know very well that a lot of enthusiast PC gamers would be dismissive of the Deck if Windows couldn’t work properly on it and that word of mouth would bring less confidence in the product.
And now Imagine Linux had actually more market share on the Desktop. But for that, Linux needs at least a little more software support to be reliable for other people. And that software is usually not open source. Maybe with Flatpak, it will finally get somewhere in that regard, if there’s enough interest from people.
Most people are unable to administrate their own systems, therefore GNU/Linux–an operating system built on empowering developers and administrators–is basically unimaginable.
Microsoft and Apple have co-opted the admin duties for users, and that’s why people use their operating systems. It spares them from the disaster we all saw and experienced in the Window XP days–but that comes at a price.
It’s not software support, it’s not anythign to do with Linux. It’s a computer illiteracy problem.
Android could, in some respects, be considered linux’s biggest success story among regular users and that’s because Google co-opts admin duties.
Most people dont want an OS to be different. They are happy if it boots up and does what they want to do. It’s not lazy, it’s an active disagreement with the premise.
This is why nobody upgrades to Windows 10 from 7, or to 11 from 10. Security risks and lack of features aside, their OS just works for them.
Sorry but that’s just wrong. Enough people simply don’t even consider Linux because their needed software doesn’t work + there’s no equivalent alternative. And my PC/OS is not a hobby or a Ideology. It’s a tool that I use to work with.
Is it really wrong? Do you have numbers? I think the most people claim above is at least plausible. It surely fits my personal experience, but that is of course not worth much.
I would argue that most people use their PC for web browsing, light photo editing and personal office stuff and maybe gaming (at least outside work) and those people are not affected by “the software I need does not work and there is no alternative”.
Your first point is web browsing. Even that doesn‘t work properly on a linux desktop lol. Browser performance is abysmal because the browsers lack out of the box support for hardware acceleration. Even if you get it to work it might not work reliably and an update might break it again.
Try using a discord call and open a youtube video in 4k at the same time on a a freshly installed linux desktop. The audio will be choppy and the video will drop frames like crazy. Just moving around windows on your desktop is not nearly as smooth as it is on windows.
You seem to be very misinformed. Browsers do not lack hardware acceleration. Some distributions do not include the necessary packets in their default configuration. Some. And when you get it to work, like in Arch Linux, where almost nothing is installed by default, it works flawlessly for years, never had an update breaking browser hardware acceleration.
I can run 12 4k youtube videos at the same time and route the audio to different channels of my different audio devices AND accept several calls from different webapps and the only thing that is not smooth is your way of discussing things LOL
I‘ve had this issue on several distros and multiple friends have the same issue. Video hardware acceleration in a browser is a mess. This is definitely not only affecting me as there is a significant amount of complaints on forums and reddit.
And there is no way that the average computer user will use arch. And as long as you gotta fiddle around with your system to get even the most basic shit running smoothly like watching a high resolution youtube video and moving around windows on your other screen at the same time linux will stay irrelevant as a desktop os. It‘s still a system for nerds and I kinda feel like that this is okay.
I would argue that most people use their PC for web browsing, light photo editing
Maybe just me but I know nobody who still uses a PC for this things anyway. The vast majority of people use their smartphones or tablets for basic stuff like that. People who still use a PCs or Laptops, usually do more work than that.
Gaming is fine if you use Steam and the compatibility layer or jump through hoops, and don't play basically anything online.
The photo editing tools on Linux are dogshit.
Web browsing is fine, but not if you want to stream any content, because no one will serve you anything even medium quality without DRM.
Office stuff can kind of be replaced, but mostly by using the browser versions of the shit people actually use, because the tools to collaborate with others (particularly non-techy people) don't exist for open source alternatives.
The software available is absolutely a massive limitation.
Basically the entire multiplayer space is locked out. It's a massive compromise. And every platform that isn't Steam requires significant manual configuration and still has issues.
No, they're not good. And they're not suitable for any normal person because the UX is a dumpster fire.
Nobody with normal tv/movie content gives you comparable quality on Linux.
Yes, normal people do need to collaborate. And no, none of the office options on Linux are capable of functional collaboration for normal people, except Google/microsoft through browser nonsense.
Basically the entire multiplayer space is locked out.
Not all multiplayer games use this anti cheat techniques (and those might just be working in the near future anyway). CS:Go works perfectly, Rocket League does, Dota 2 does, LoL did at least (I don’t know what they’re up to these days), 7 days to die does, paradox grand strategy does, Mordhau does, Path of Exile does, and those are only sone of the games I personally can confirm.
And they’re not suitable for any normal person because the UX is a dumpster fire.
People who use Photoshop professionally mostly agree, that GIMP is a great app that has just a few drawbacks compared zo photoshop. The UI was a dumpster fire, but they sorted that out. Photo Editing is on par with photoshop, at least with other free plugins. If your UX sucks, maybe it’s an error on osi layer 8.
Nobody with normal tv/movie content gives you comparable quality on Linux.
I’m still running 1080p on everything and Netflix delivers 1080p to all my linux boxes. Is there a problem with 4k?
Yes, normal people do need to collaborate. And no, none of the office options on Linux are capable of functional collaboration for normal people, except Google/microsoft through browser nonsense.
Which tools on windows allow easy collaborative office projects other than microsoft or google? Well, other than cryptpad, OnlyOffice, koofr, almost every nextcloud provider, etherpad…
I am a gamer and I run into “the software doesnt do what I want, and theres no way around it/alternative” very often.
almost always cause I want to run another file in the same proton instance of a game to install a mod or do something else.
Or because something just doesnt work, despite following the instructions and others getting it to work.
Like, Cyberpunk is my most recent example. CET doesnt work, followed the guide, installed the packages the guide said to, still nothing. It doesnt prevent me from running the game, but it certainly stops me from enjoying it the way i want to.
I think it’s more that there’s a perception of things not being compatible with Linux nowadays. A lot of the games that didn’t work 5 years ago now do, and I’m still seeing people complain that games like Halo Infinite don’t work on there when they actually do.
The only things I can think of that aren’t compatible and required for some tasks are Photoshop and professional CAD/CAE software. For >90% of the population Linux should be able to handle everything they need
Realistically windows is really good at repairing itself (or just getting it to a state where its usable again, to most users would be ‘repaired’).
Until linux has some sort of system like this, its just not worth the headache to 99% of users. The linux errors aren’t even that descriptive when they happen, and could be cause by like anything.
they dont even bother to give anything else than an error code which is applicable to 482885 different roots of errors.
Indeed the repairing functionality works. but yeah. the problem will be solved. linux has moved exceptional towards usability and will continue to do so.
It will never be the year of the linux desktop, until linux is easy to use and easy to troubleshoot and fix.
and let me tell you, every minor problem requiring some kind of arcane terminal ritualism in ancient enochian that only veteran sysadmins know, is not, and will never be, easy to use or troubleshoot.
There, I just gave you 2 ways to turn that arcane terminal ritualism in ancient enochian that only veteran sysadmins know, into a plain english service manual that any literate human being can use to figure out basically any terminal application ever.
Yeah, I’ve done --help. It doesnt make it simple. and it doenst magically let you figure out how to solve the problem, assuming you even know what package is causing the problem.
I’ve gone through more than enough fixing of more than enough problems as an average, not-sysadmin person. I know how bullshit it is. Just because you are used to it doesnt make it easier for regular people to use.
Microsoft has done a lot of shit wrong, but the one thing they got right is the usability of the OS, how any idiot can be sat infront of a computer and know what they’re doing with less than a day of faffing about, and can easily fix most common problems in a few clicks.
I can’t speak for other distributions, but Pop!_OS has had a “Refresh Install” option for a while now that does exactly this. This hasn’t happened often, but there have been a couple of times when something borked my system to the point of making it no longer boot, and re-running the installer in “Refresh Install” mode got everything back and running within 30 minutes while preserving all of my non-system files; in particular this meant that I didn’t have to re-download my Steam and other locally installed games, which is significant because they are the largest apps on my system.
Fedora doesn't provide binary drivers even if they exist, you need to get a pluggable wifi usb tool that is supported and install the repositories and configure binary drivers to get wifi working on a huge amount of laptops.
Ubuntu does provide binary drivers but the configuration tool can just crash by itself a lot of the time and just fail to load the driver.
Ubuntu's desktop sometimes just crashes.
Fedora uses some strange memory compression driver to handle its paging file and this can sometimes just crash the OS entirely by itself.
These are major issues that shouldn't be issues, they should either have been fixed as a priority for the crashes or have some kind of workaround that doesn't require owning specific USBs that regular people just won't have. There's no reason for the memory compression thing either, it probably doesn't do that much for performance overall but random hard-locks are a huge negative. Linux is its own worst enemy on the desktop.
Sometimes the issues with WiFi chipsets is not the distro but the manufacturer. Debian for instance now includes non-free firmware on its installation ISO image, but some manufacturers do not allow the distribution (e.g. Broadcom) of firmware, so Debian can’t legally include them. And unfortunately the manufacturers don’t make it easy to “just download the firmware” so you can put it on the USB stick so the installer can see them. (Literally the only issue with putting Debian on my old 2013 Macbook Pro was the Broadcom firmware - but fortunately, having a Debian desktop I could install the firmware downloader there to get the two files the installer needed).
This is not a fault of the Linux distro, but a fault of the hardware manufacturer. Unfortuantely, like the smell of piss in a subway, we all have to deal with Broadcom.
Why do you need full disk encryption in your day to day life? Are you a secret agent? I feel like that would give you our though.
It’s not a matter that I would have nothing to hide, this defense is stupid. It’s a matter that you should use a security adapted to your need, because the cost doesn’t offset the benefit otherwise. And with disk encryption you will far more often be sorry than happy if you’re a normal person.
People are imperfect. People have left laptops full of personal and/or commercially sensitive data on trains or planes, had them stolen from cars and houses etc. Full disc encryption is a defence against data breaches especially for computers that are not bolted down. Or it might be as simple as a person not wanting the embarrassment of their porn stash being found.
You are only seeing what TPM is now. Not what TPM will become when it become an entire encrypted computing processor capable of executing any code while inspection is impossible.
Yes, it’s right in the name “trusted platform module”. There is no secret that their ambition is to become a space to run code outside the user’s reach and scrutiny.
They start with the most legitimate and innocuous purpose. Once it is adopted and ubiquitous it will not suffer the fate of the other attempts and rotting on the vine.
Then surprise TPM 5.0 become full scale full speed trusted execution environment and it’s too late to do anything about it. Eventually , non trusted processing capability will be phased out and only Intel and signed code will run.
I’m still on the hunt for a desktop Linux distro that has no security features or passwords. My usage for this may not be common but it can’t be rare enough that there are zero options
I agree that there should be an easy setting to at least allow updates without password. I installed Manjaro for my mom, after a while she complained “there are updates every day and I need to input the password too many times”
I’m an engineer with trade secrets on his laptop. I’ve heard of dozens of people getting laptops stolen from their cars that they left for like ten or fifteen minutes.
The chances are slims, but if it happens I’m in deep trouble whether those secrets leak of not. I’m not taking the risk. I’m encrypting my disk.
It’s not like there’s a difference in performance nowadays.
TPM’s not going to help with that situation, though, right? Either you’re typing in your encryption password on boot (in which case you don’t need TPM to keep your password), or you’re not, in which case the thief has your TPM module with the password in it.
From what I understand, TPM is “trusted” because of the fact the secrets it contains are supposed to be safe from an attacker with hardware access.
This is what makes it good at protecting data in case of a stolen laptop. This is also what makes it good at enforcing offline DRM or any kind of system where manufacturers can restrict the kind of software users can run on their hardware.
I mean, i do have some stuff that i encrypt, but encrypting the folder or packing it on a small partitiin and encrypting only this fs after booting makes more sense to me.
so you never caught a team of government officials in your living room brute forcing your bootloader at 4am as you got up to use the bathroom, huh. Lucky guy.
I don’t like flatpak or snap or any of them. System libraries exist for good reason, just because your computer is stupid fast and you have enough disk for the library of Congress a couple times over doesn’t mean you should run a veritable copy of your whole operating system for each program. IMO it’s lazy.
Sandboxing is a different thing though, if that’s the purpose then it’s doing it right.
Flatseal is super easy for anyone with a tech background to use. You can very quickly expand or reduce the access an app has to your system. Even below what the app comes with by default.
I do kinda wish the guis for installing flatpak apps were more forthcoming with the permissions, and possibly integrated some of the features of flatseal so you could modify the permission set before installing.
I like them for the opposite reason. I’m still quite new to Linux, so I’m figuring out which software is best for me. I set up my server with Xubuntu and installed everything through Apt. I uninstalled a lot of software, but inevitably missed some things like libraries and config files.
Using Flatpak seems to keep track of everything, so uninstalling gets rid of everything that I would otherwise miss.
If it’s doing what it says on the tin, Flatpak is making my life much easier :)
Yeah, that’s why Arch is almost the only distro that keeps everything installed natively. All other distros either have a troublesome workaround or only support flatpaks.
Rolling release just keeps everyone on the same pace. Yes, they break sometimes, but on the long run it just works.
I have a ton of flatpaks which means packages are shared between them, so no it’s not lazy or a copy of the whole system. It makes a ton of sense for stability.
Updates are diff’s so downloading and updating is fast. Not entire packages.
Making every package work with only a certain version of a dependency and hoping it is stable doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Besides that it’s only partially true (unless we speak Nix systems) That’s also not the point of it. It’s more about having runtime environment that an app was built against and tested with.
Sure. Except you gain universal compatibility for all distros that have flatpak and aren’t building all the different package formats. Makes it much more attractive for actual developers to package since it’s only done once.
There’s no right answer here, but there are definite benefits.
I’ve had many little issues since I moved to Linux years ago, most of which would never have been an issue if flatpaks were there at the time. My experience has been better with them.
Makes it much more attractive for actual developers to package since it’s only done once.
I maintain a few apps that are included into some distributions with no participation from my side apart from tagging what I consider releases in my git repo. How is doing something only once is more attractive as not doing it at all?
Because you can make sure it was done right. You don’t have to worry about bugs or other issues being the result of faulty packaging if you’re the one doing the packaging. Plus It makes reproducing bugs easier when everyone’s using the same package, and declaring the flatpak as the official package makes it much more likely that people will use the flatpak.
After booting into Windows, you know, an actual functioning OS, and fixed the issue within 4 seconds, I’m quite enjoying myself. This is actually fun, and the neanderthals just keep on coming! Btw, I use Arch.
This article is strange… The author uses “being able to open Microsoft Office documents” as a common example of what an OS that claims to be easy to use should be able to do. Then says…
When people download Ubuntu 23.04 they get an OS that can do everything Windows 95 did - with 23.10 they don’t
No default installation of Microsoft Windows EVER opened Microsoft Office documents. If this was a simple oversight in the write-up it’d be fine, but the point is hammered over and over again.
I don’t have an opinion about Ubuntu including or not including more software in the default installation (my guess is it became too big to fit on a DVD?) but this article failed to make it’s point to me by making a comparison to Windows that isn’t true.
Also…
the world’s most popular desktop Linux operating system (that’s Ubuntu, for those of you playing dumb)
Is this supposed to be a cocky joke? I can’t tell. What metric of “most popular” is the author using?
I reckon a nifty idea instead of preinstalling software is to have a file extension finder that suggests software based on the file extension. Sure, there are some file types that have multiple uses, but many proprietary solutions use distinct extensions, making it quite straightforward to organize the recommendations.
You don’t even need to look at the extension to identify most file formats, as there are unique magic numbers stored at the beginning of most (binary) formats. Only when a single binary format is reused to appear as two different formats to the user, e.g. zip and cbz are extensions relevant. This is how the file command and most (?) Linux file explorers identify files, and why file extensions are traditionally largely irrelevant on Linux/Unix.
This means your idea of suggesting software based on the file type is even more practicable than you described.
Any company invested enough to host a local mirror will not give a blank install of Ubuntu to their employees though.
You can argue that other distros are popular as well, but when it comes to the “I’ve heard of this Linux thing, let’s try it out” crowd Ubuntu is the goto option, no doubt about it. And the impact on this crowd is exactly what is discussed in the article.
Hundreds of thousands of people using eg. Debian plus a software profile plus a sources.list file with an intranet address don’t count as using Debian?
I’m not arguing about the contents of the article, I’m discussing specifically the relevance of generating usage statistics based on IP hits and ISO downloads.
If you want to discuss telemetry or how to measure popularity of Linux Distros, please submit and link me an appropriate post, I’ll be happy to discuss it there. But it simply adds nothing to the discussion here.
Absolutely. The author is criticizing something that can easily be solved by… installing more software that it’s probably in the same media a user used to install the OS. I don’t see the point of this review other than “I need to write something in my blog today.”
What metric of “most popular” is the author using?
Ubuntu claimed be the most popular Linux distro on their website, backed by hot air. People who didn’t know any better took that at face value, including the author of this shoddy article, perhaps.
They do have statistics about how many systems send upgrade pings. There are some caveats to that, but I believe the difference with other distros is significant enough for that not to matter.
What other desktop Linux would be more popular? Fedora? Arch?
Ubuntu chooses to log upgrade pings to create such statistics. Contrary to Ubuntu, others respect your privacy, and don’t log upgrade pings. Hypothetically, if Ubuntu is the only distro that logs upgrade pings even though everyone uses Linux Mint in practice as an example, they can’t claim to be the most popular distro as for a matter of fact, that reality has more people that use Linux Mint than Ubuntu.
Linux Mint is even more troublesome, because I believe it uses Ubuntu’s repos as well - meaning that they’d be counted in Ubuntu’s logs?
That said, with the exception of probably Distrowatch pageviews (which of course have very little relation to actual usage), AFAIK all proxy metrics we have do point to Ubuntu’s dominance, as well as anecdotal evidence such as the distros you see people using at e.g. FOSDEM. I’d be interested to see any data that might show otherwise though, but until then, my working hypothesis is that Ubuntu is still the most popular desktop Linux.
Officially it’s called the “Microsoft Store” but I don’t think anyone really calls it that (Same with the “Windows Explorer” until they renamed it to “File Explorer” as everyone has been calling it)
It’s mostly opinionated. systemd is written in C, uses a consistent config, is documented well, has a lot of good developers behind it, is very fast and light, and does what it’s doing very well. Since systemd also is split up into multiple parts, it still follows the “do one thing, do it right” philosophy.
There are some people that believe that systemd “took over” the init systems and configuration demons of their distro, and does “too much.” It really does quite a lot: it can replace GRUB (by choice), handle networking config, all the init stuff of course, and much more.
However, I have lived through the fragmented and one-off scripts that glued distros together. Some distros used completely custom scripts for init and networking, so you had to learn “the distro” instead of “learn Linux.” They were often slower, had worse error handling, had their own bugs, were written in various scripting languages like tcl, Perl, Bash, POSIX shell, etc. It was a mess.
The somewhat common agreed-upon init system was System V, which is ancient. It used runlevels, nested configuration (remember /etc/rc.d?), and generally, it was mostly used because it was battle tested and did the job. However, it is arguably esoteric by modern standards, and the init philosophy was revised to more modern needs with systemd.
You can probably tell my bias, here. If you have to ask, then you probably don’t have a “stance” on systemd, and in my opinion, I would stick with systemd. There were dozens of custom scripts running everywhere and constantly changing, and systemd is such an excellent purpose-built replacement. There’s a reason why a lot of distros switched to it!
If you want to experience what other init systems were like, I encourage you to experiment with distros like the one you mentioned. You might even play with virtual machines of old Linux versions to see how we did things a while back. Of course, you probably wouldn’t want to run an old version of Linux for daily use.
It should also be mentioned that init systems are fairly integral to distros. For example, if you install Apache httpd, you might get a few systemd .service files. Most distros won’t include init files for various init systems. You can write them yourself, but that’s quite a lot of work, and lots of packages need specific options when starting them as a service. For this reason, if you decide you want to use a different init system, a distro like the one you mentioned would be the best route.
I am fan of principles like KISS and “Do one thing and do it right”. From this point of view is systemd disaster because it is almost everywhere in the system - boot, network, logs, dns, user/home management… It’s always surprise for me if nothing breaks when I do upgrades.
I understand why systemd is here but I’m not at all happy to use it.
From this point of view is systemd disaster because it is almost everywhere in the system - boot, network, logs, dns, user/home management…
That’s almost like complaining that GNU coreutils is a disaster from KISS point of view because it includes too many things in a single project - cat, grep, dd, chown, touch, sync, base64, date, env… Not quite, because coreutils is actually a single package unlike systemd.
The core systemd is big (IMHO it needs to be in order to provide good service management, and service management is a reasonable thing to include in systemd), but everything you listed are optional components. If your distro bundles them into one package, that’s on them.
Systemd includes many complex things, coreutils includes many simple things. And coreutils are ported to many different OS’es, systemd is linux only. Ask why?
Lets imagine, my linux distro runs with openrc/upstart and I like systemd-journal features. Am I able to run system-journal without any other systemd components running?
It is well known that systemd’s service management is built around cgroups, which is a Linux-only concept for now. Other OSs have their own ways to accomplish similar things, but adapting to that would require huge changes in systemd.
Am I able to run system-journal without any other systemd components running?
No, the only part of systemd project that doesn’t depend on systemd core is systemd-boot. And there’s also elogind, which is an independent project to lift systemd-logind out of systemd.
But honestly, I don’t see the issue here. You can’t use systemd’s components elsewhere, but your previous complaint was the opposite - that systemd is everywhere, as if you were forced to use networkd, resolved (which pretty much no distro uses AFAIK because it’s way worse than other DNS resolvers), homed, timedated etc. when you use systemd as init.
Also, I have a correction for my previous comment: systemd-journald is not an optional dependency, as it’s used as a fallback if the configured log daemon fails. I’ve only learned after writing that comment.
Slackware uses the sysvinit program, but doesn’t have System V-style scripts. Which is somewhat confusing, but sysvinit is a basic init program that will just do whatever /etc/inittab tells it, so you can write your startup scripts to work however you want.
Slackware uses what people tend to call a BSD-style init, but it’s nothing like the modern BSDs, nor the older BSDs, not really. If you use Slackware, you’ll learn how Slackware’s init system works, but that’s about it.
Ah my mistake. I’m just generally curious about what distros use an alternative to systemd (not that I have any issues with systemd myself but I like variety).
So I googled what init system Slackware uses and read this page.
No, you’re right that it has scripts, they’re just not the scripts used by SysV-style init systems. They have different names, are in different locations, and are executed differently.
I used Slackware for several years back in the 90s, and from that experience I’d recommend against learning it. I mean, with VMs today it’s simple to try new distributions, so go for it, but I’d put it waaaaay down the list of distributions/operating systems to try. If you have anything else you’re interested, put it first. Slackware is standard Linux so there’s nothing really special you’d find when using it, and it’s just a painful experience in general. I think some people will argue that it helps you “really learn Linux”, but I don’t think so. It just helps you learn Slackware’s idiosyncrasies, and learning pretty much any other distribution would be more beneficial than that.
Slackware has advanced from when I used it in the 90s, but only barely (they have a network-based package manager now, I guess, although it proudly avoids dependency resolution!)
Oof that stance on dependency resolution is a big no for me. As much as I hated building gnome from source it was amazing that Gentoo can do that in a single command.
Great answer. I do use systemd boot on one of my systems as well. It isn’t exactly systemd itself is it? Simply a boot loader packaged as part of the general systemd boot suite, right?
Yeah exactly. It does have some features that require integration with the init system, which systemd obviously supports, but it could be used independently of systemd quite happily, and other init systems could easily support those integrations.
Systemd-the-init does depend on some core services and thise need to be used together: Init, logging and IPC. Anything running systemd-init will have journald for logging and IIRC DBus for communication. That’s because you need to control a system managing services, so you need to communicate with it and you need to document whatbthe managed services do, so you need logging. And you do want tested and stable code here (reusing something that was widely used in Linux before systemd started) and you do not want that code in the init process either. So systemd-the-init has very simple code tomlog and journald then has thencode needed to stream logs out to disk or to interact with other logging systems.
Everything else is optional and in separate binaries written in a layered architecuture: Each layer uses services provided by the lower layer and offers services to layers higher up in the stack. So lots of services depend on systemd-the-init to start other processes instead of reimplementing that over and over again (thus gaining unified config files for everything that gets started and all the bells and whistles systemd-the-init has already or will pick up later).
Or if you prefer a more negative spin: “Systemd is on huge entangled mess of interdependent binaries” :-)
Some distros used completely custom scripts for init and networking, so you had to learn “the distro” instead of “learn Linux.”
I never really noticed init scripts differing much between distros, but I also didn’t play around with many. If the systemD scripts are the same across every system, then this is the first positive thing that I’ve heard about systemD, so thanks for that.
Init scripts were different, I can confirm. And it was pretty bad if you were doing your job and had to change something on a Debian massive machine, then moved to a red hat one.
Ah ok, most of my experience has been on debian or derivations in the past decade. It seems weird that the init scripts would need to be different on various systems, I thought they had been pretty well standardized, with variables in the /etc/default/ entries pointing to specific folders or startup options. Ah well.
I guess you're not an opensource developer. Let me put it in terms that you understand:
Let's say you're a pizza delivery dude. You have to be out every day, delivering people to rude customers, no matter the weather. It's hot and your balls are sweating off, if cold and your fingers are freezing, there torrential rain and you get soaked for every delivery, but bossman don't care - you have to do it!
To relax, you have a hobby as a wood worker. It's your passion! You make small things to make life a little easier or things that look cool to you.
One day, you buy a cupboard that's been all the rage. Every store out there has it and it's flying off the shelves. But after a few months there's something annoying about the way it works. Not a problem for you, the handyman, the woodworker. It takes a few weeks, but you've designed, built, and tested a few solutions to arrive at something that works. It's not beautiful, it's not trendy, sexy or anything, it just works.
Thinking to yourself "hey somebody else might find this useful", you put the designs online. To your delight, there are a few people using it. Very few "thank you"s, but that's fine, at least it helped somebody.
Then one day, some dude writes a comment about your solution titled "Build something beautiful or GTFO".
Tell me, how would that make you, as the hobby wood worker feel?
I get it. I’m not a pro developer but I code quite regularly. I realise all the support you need to give for anything you develop, the time and effort involved. And frontends often take more time build than the thing it presents. My point is, there are basic gaps that need should have been addressed by now. the KDE and gnome devs could focus on those items rather than the next impressive theming function.
That's a valid opinion. It's yours. I disagree with your phrasing however. "GUI or GTFO" is not a nice way to present your case.
Also, it's mostly their free time. They get to choose what they do with it. If they decide writing a window effect would be cool in brain fuck, because why the hell not, it's completely up to them. They have no obligation to dedicate their free time to anything anybody else wants, so telling them off is at least disrespectful and at most a reason for them to stop.
The main developer of a popular rust framework (actix) was bullied enough that he quit and only when he quit did a bunch of people come out of the woodwork to support him - not before.
Hard work is often missed but rarely thanked. My heading was rather flapant. Hopefully my comment replies show I have more appropriation for Devs than the title suggests.
The main developer of a popular rust framework (actix) was bullied enough that he quit and only when he quit did a bunch of people come out of the woodwork to support him - not before.
That situation was more complex - it started when a security researcher found a flaw in the codebase, raised that concern including a patch to fix it with no negative impact on performance only for the patch to get rejected for being too “boring”. The bullying was a big step too far in that situation, but the maintainer of actix was not fully blameless by dismissing others honest work for no good reason.
It was his project, he can do whatever he likes with it. Rejecting "honest work" happens. I've had stuff reject with just a "sorry, no" even though it fixed a bug and "I don't understand it, therefore no".
A least he didn't pull a Linus on him and call him a "fucking idiot".
A least he didn’t pull a Linus on him and call him a “fucking idiot”.
No, he just called the patch boring and not creative enough. Rejecting a security fix because it was boring does not shine a good light on your management of the project. The community had concerns about his approach to the problem and he chose to double down and not fix the issue. Then the community got out of hand.
His users have just as much right to complain about the issue and rejection of the patch as he has to reject the patches. Both sides handled this case poorly and it resulted in a sad outcome for everyone involved.
linux
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.