Cool article. My two takeaways: 1) If your deployment process hurts do it it more often (small releases frequently are easier than few big bang releases. 2) Don't commit to being x days behind upstream, if there is a big workload on your team (upgrading, vacations, etc.) you have the flexibility to delay upgrades and reduce the stream of incoming issues.
How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
21–30 of 167 posts
Re: How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I liked Suse before Novell acquired it. Is it still good?
Yes. I've been using it for over a decade and it's still great. Like Fedora it's leading the charge in modernization (btrfs, /usr/etc, snapper, Yast, etc) and like Arch it has a big set of up-to-date packages, except they're in the main repo instead of an untrusted AUR.
You need third party repositories if you want full ffmpeg with h.264 support, and since these are binary (IIRC) repos, each third-party package is often either compatible with the latest or older snapshot, or tumbleweed, but often not both (unlike Arch's AUR which only has one distro to target, though it's a moving target).
Re: How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
#23Can I ask the following as this what Google did is literally what I try to achieve on a Raspberry Pi: I have configured unattended-upgrades (the package from apt) on a Raspberry Pi on Raspbian 10, but no security updates seem to ever be released. Is there a gotcha I’m missing resp. is there a better way of configuring an always-on computer and keep it secure?
Raspbian, or raspberry pi os? The latter is much closer to debian AFAIK, there is a 64-bit version/etc.
But if your using it for server tasks, your probably better off actually running Debian. Although if your looking for something that is closer to a rolling release, you could just pick one of the distro's that have a release policy that strikes your fancy WRT how they roll out new packages/etc. Most distro's have rpi specific images, or you just install their generic arm64 images on top of something like the PFTF firmware.
Put another way, raspberry pi os, has a fairly dated kernel/etc but works well with all the hardware on the machine for desktop purposes. If your using it as a server, its not a good choice because they frequently don't have useful things turned on (various filesystems, networking options, RAID levels, etc). The core storage/networking/cpu/etc type of things have been working quite well in mainline/etc for a couple years now, so that has trickled down into all these distros.
Re: How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
#24I always thought creating your own rolling distro with Gentoo was precisely the best case use of portage, but I’ve never seen anyone do it. I must be missing something.
Re: How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
#25Just use Arch
I wanted to give it a try, but SecureBoot is refusing to be set up correctly, despite following the manual '( (I suspect the problem is with NVidia drivers..)
Works fine here on my laptop with an nvidia gpu. I followed the instructions here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...
Though I had to stick to a slightly older version of grub to get it to load up properly with the given guide.
Re: How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
#26Re: How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
#27Just use Arch
Or NixOS unstable hehe
The nice thing with flake-based NixOS is that it's trivial to cherry-pick unstable onto a stable base. I do a bunch of that in my nixconfigs: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix
Re: How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
#28Can I ask the following as this what Google did is literally what I try to achieve on a Raspberry Pi: I have configured unattended-upgrades (the package from apt) on a Raspberry Pi on Raspbian 10, but no security updates seem to ever be released. Is there a gotcha I’m missing resp. is there a better way of configuring an always-on computer and keep it secure?
It sounds like you missed a step. You need to create an apt conf file that runs unattended-upgrades (in addition to the configuration you already did in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades). There are a lot of options (see /usr/lib/apt/apt.systemd.daily for a description of options; the manpages are lacking), but just running:
dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades
// Auto cleanup archives
APT::Periodic::MaxAge "10";
// Setting minage too is a good idea to prevent race conditions
APT::Periodic::MinAge "8";
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "10";
Re: How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
#29Out of curiosity, why would a Googler elect to use a Linux based workstation as opposed to a macOS workstation? Are they testing Linux binaries? Developing kernel extensions? Linux build tools? macOS offers such a superior desktop experience I can't imagine why else you'd ask an employer offering you a macOS machine to substitute it with a Linux one.
Re: How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
#30The more important question is where is this magical Google-blessed rolling release Debian available to download? We've all heard rumors of this internal Google distro and what I'm reading is their intent to give back. You can use Microsoft's CBL-Mariner today. Where is Google's?
Why yes, they could share Goobuntu with the world. But they don't have to, and so they won't.
It’s really not that interesting