Live data from Hacker News

A Linux Evening

fabiensanglard.net

141–150 of 330 posts

Re: A Linux Evening

#141
post #132

1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience . That or you're doing nothing interesting. 2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you—making practical tradeoffs. 3. U…

> 1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience. That or you're doing nothing interesting. There are 3 type of person who knows a lot about cars: 1. A Car mechanic 2. People who love cars, and tinker them constantly 3. People who have a shitty car and something always breaks. Personally I'm not a car guy, I treat them as tools. I can do this because I always ha…

My point here is that if you use Linux enough, then you will encounter issues, period, regardless of your technical level.

Re: A Linux Evening

#142

1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience . That or you're doing nothing interesting. 2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you—making practical tradeoffs. 3. U…

I'm gonna disagree on everything here...

> 1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience. That or you're doing nothing interesting.

I do loads of interesting stuff on linux, I use it for research, numerical computing, biology etc. None of these things cause linux to skip a beat.

> 2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you—making practical tradeoffs.

The world is not black and white! There are degrees to which people behave, and there is a spectrum of behaviour that abides by certain principals and doesn't. I had someone say to me recently that they didn't believe there are 'ethical people', instead people make use of the opportunities presented to them. This isn't true and is more a sign of how they've justified their own life choices.

> 3. Unless you are doing tons of system administration on your daily driver, most of your time is spent in applications, and the choice of operating system doesn't matter too much.

I, like many people, tend to use more than one application, so I find the OS does matter. On Windows 10, when I hit the start bar, and start typing the name of an application I want to launch, I really do care when the bar sits there loading up, scraping internet data to show me its suggested apps and adverts.

Re: A Linux Evening

#144
(Presuming there are some linux experts here) Slightly off-topic question but does anyone have any strong opinions about d-bus as an IPC mechanism? Is it actually used much or do most people prefer other lower level Linux/Posix IPC mechanisms (shm, pipes etc)? Does it have any glaring disadvantages compared to e.g. Android's Binder, or is that only more widely used because Google enforces it?

Re: A Linux Evening

#145
post #15

Thunderbolt devices appear in the OS as a PCIe switch, so you need two additional bus numbers (one for the Switch Upstream Port and one for the Switch Downstream Port). If the device is hotplugged to a port which has run out of bus numbers, you'll get this error message. Mika Westerberg is constantly fine-tuning the allocation of PCI resources in the Linux kernel to avoid such scenarios. Some recent patches: https://…

It sounds like the pause/unpause might be the way to fix this properly, since trying to be heuristically smarter sounds like a recipe for never-ending corner case bugs like the OP’s issue. The patch for pausing and unpausing seems quite reasonable, except that it does require driver support (unsurprising - you’re literally reallocating the resources used by the driver!). I suppose if you had at least a few movable de…

Would a workaround be that whenever the kernel detects this happening (and it did, it dmesg printed it) that it somehow increases an internal counter so on next reboot there will be more resources?

This would require the kernel being able to either update its own command line somehow, or having some permanent storage somewhere it could store it.

Or this could all be done by systemd - detect that message, increase the resource, next reboot will fix it.

Re: A Linux Evening

#146

This post resonates strongly with me. I love the term "a linux evening." This was precisely my experience when I used Linux full time: mostly it worked great, but then occasionally something wouldn't work (some personal examples: touchpad doesn't work after OS update, wifi card stops working etc.) and then I have to spend a few frustrating hours debugging the issue. All I can think in these moments is "you don't get…

I was reminded of this XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/349/

Re: A Linux Evening

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is like driving a car with your hands in the engine

This contradicts my experience. I use Linux every day and I never touch the engine. I also set up Linux for computer-illiterate old ladies. They love it.

Out of curiosity, what distro do you use and what is your distro of choice for the old ladies?

Re: A Linux Evening

#148
post #33

> I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to nothing in the process. This is probably true for this specific case here, but my experience with fixing stuff in Linux is actually the opposite. I learnt a lot doing so, and learnt stuff that turned out to be later useful in very unexpected spots. Back when I was a teen and using Windows, I've spent countless hours fiddling in stuff in regedit and other…

> but my experience with fixing stuff in Linux is actually the opposite. I learnt a lot doing so, and learnt stuff that turned out to be later useful in very unexpected spots.

Same, in fact it's how I fell ass-backwards into my career path.

Re: A Linux Evening

#149
post #33

> I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to nothing in the process. This is probably true for this specific case here, but my experience with fixing stuff in Linux is actually the opposite. I learnt a lot doing so, and learnt stuff that turned out to be later useful in very unexpected spots. Back when I was a teen and using Windows, I've spent countless hours fiddling in stuff in regedit and other…

I think unless one uses Linux on daily basis it's really difficult to sink in the knowledge. I decided to install an Archlinux VM and see what happens. I'm kinda disappointed to myself as I found out I didn't like too much trouble so I'll probably never be a good/great programmer.

Installing Arch is much closer to system administration than programming - they may be related somewhat and attractive to similar people; but you can be a quite successful programmer and barely be able to install Ubuntu.

I know people who have written kernel-level Linux drivers who have difficulty upgrading macOS. They're separate skillsets.

Re: A Linux Evening

#150
post #6

I hate linux for this. How the hell a modern OS can be frozen completely shut by some runaway python script running in a VS code debugger, to a point that you have to kill your PC with a button. And then non-obvious issues that just "appear" out of nowhere and steal your perfectly fine evening where you have planned to work on your favorite side project.

This seems like a random, unrelated yet incredibly specific rant, and not really a unique property of Linux.

Thunderbolt isn't that well supported, and they decided to specifically not use USB3 which is well supported for bogus reasons. #1 rule with Linux is pick well supported hardware.
Post reply on HN