Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#331

Post by amluto » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #287

MarkSweep wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but the whole business of PID 1 having to reap orphan PIDs seems like something the kernel should have to do. Is there a good reason for when a process exits that not other process is waiting on, that a user-mode PID 1 process has to observe that exit?

My understanding is that reaping children is a normal thing for most processes to do, and it's only orphans that fall through to PID 1, at which point it's easier to deal with it there rather than need to do anything special in ring zero.

Reaping children is "normal" in a universe where processes have numeric ids that can't be reused for unrelated processes until some handshake occurs that frees the id for reuse.

If you take anything resembling a fresh look at this concept, it's absurd. Imagine if every open file had a systemwide unique id, and one specific process owned that id and would continue to own it until it released it.

Reasonable designs use weak references that don't have values that can be compared across processes. These are usually called "handles" or "file descriptors", and they don't have this problem at all. Nothing reaps sockets, for example, and nothing needs to.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#332

Post by asdfkjhasdfhuh » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

stubish wrote: post #294

asdfkjhasdfhuh wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

slightly wrong. Ubuntu succeed in part because of what you mention, plus lots of marketing money. debian have caught up now. and most people seriously wanting up to date is over at gentoo or arch. But back to the "ubuntu exists" premise you started, it is because a rich guy wanted to take over debian and sell an enterprise solution based on it. remember at the time enterprise was all the rave. google was pushing thei…

Marketing money? For about the first decade I think the only marketing was shipping CDs for free to anyone who wanted them. A billboard or two might have been rented over the decades in highly targeted circumstances. There is approximately zero marketing.

you think free CDs worldwide is cheap?!

they paid for "CD vending machines" at several locations where you could get free cds... that is more expensive than a billboard and practically buys you a spot on specialized magazines. They were going those marketing campaigns all over the place.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#333

Post by asdfkjhasdfhuh » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 9:53 PM UTC

happymellon wrote: post #286

asdfkjhasdfhuh wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd is "easier" for people used to cisco/microsoft/etc. The huge list of services with not-for-human names so your job can look complicated and essential.

It may be easier for them, but as someone without Cisco experience, systemd was a lot easier for configuring service dependencies once I understood it. It's been 10 years now? I wouldn't go back, most of the suggested alternatives are so basic that troubleshooting becomes a chore. Almost all the hate is because they don't like Lennart. We should fork it, get someone else to head that with a different name to get them…

i also accepted it. And made a point to forget the cisco experience.

Yeah, the dependency is a fine feature, but before it was even *easier*... just put a number on the rc.d symlink.

c'mon, if you think that is harder than editing a dozen files, remembering weirdly named camelCase attributes and then pointing to randomly named services, then i don't know what to say. But again, i also accepted it, for better or worse.

Now, i don't care about lennart, but i hated systemd for most of the time because they pushed an incomplete crap over something that was working, just to get contributors. If redhat wanted their cisco/windows services management clone, they could have worked on it. Doing what they did (i call it to pull a gnome) was just shitty behaviour and they should always be remembered for such action.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#334

Post by stubish » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 1:05 AM UTC

asdfkjhasdfhuh wrote: post #332

stubish wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing money? For about the first decade I think the only marketing was shipping CDs for free to anyone who wanted them. A billboard or two might have been rented over the decades in highly targeted circumstances. There is approximately zero marketing.

you think free CDs worldwide is cheap?! they paid for "CD vending machines" at several locations where you could get free cds... that is more expensive than a billboard and practically buys you a spot on specialized magazines. They were going those marketing campaigns all over the place.

Oh yes. Free CDs worldwide was incredibly cheap as a form of marketing, especially when you have the ability to source the cheapest bulk pressing and shipping deals world wide. As are vending machines, compared with the ludicrous prices charged for a billboard in a relevant position. I can't even recall if the vending machines were Canonical or local Ubuntu user groups doing it for shits and giggles/course credit. A tiny drop of money compared to competitors marketing budgets.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#335

Post by jacooper » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 9:32 AM UTC

e1g wrote: post #317

jacooper wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the one year renewal thing annoying, but other than that it looks to be really good! Just the auto kernel update part is left

Kernel live patching helps to guard against major security and bug issues and is fully automated in RHEL via kpatch.

But it's paid, I don't necessarily need livepatching, just auto restarts to update the kernel

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#336

Post by taf2 » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 12:52 PM UTC

Fedora?

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#337

Post by e1g » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

jacooper wrote: post #335

e1g wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kernel live patching helps to guard against major security and bug issues and is fully automated in RHEL via kpatch.

But it's paid, I don't necessarily need livepatching, just auto restarts to update the kernel

Not quite sure which scenario you mean, but both of these work in the official RHEL distro that is free for up to 15 instances:

1. Restart is ok: automatically apply all security updates as they come out ("dnf-automatic), then restart if required ("needs-restarting -r").

2. Restart is not ok: automatically apply all kernel patches as they come out("kpatch auto")

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#338

Post by steelframe » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

npteljes wrote: post #306

steelframe wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you volunteering to redo debian.org? Because that's how this works.

That's not how it works. I don't think the people on top of the debian community would just let anyone redesign their home page, even if the website would be objectively better in some regard.

Oh, there would be a debate, for sure. It will probably go through a lot of bikeshedding. But if you demonstrate competence and commitment and stroke the right egos, it can certainly happen.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#339

Post by jacooper » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 4:09 PM UTC

e1g wrote: post #337

jacooper wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's paid, I don't necessarily need livepatching, just auto restarts to update the kernel

Not quite sure which scenario you mean, but both of these work in the official RHEL distro that is free for up to 15 instances: 1. Restart is ok: automatically apply all security updates as they come out ("dnf-automatic), then restart if required ("needs-restarting -r"). 2. Restart is not ok: automatically apply all kernel patches as they come out("kpatch auto")

Dnf automatic should support restart now! https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf/pull/1879

However its o my going to work on rhel 10 or anything that has very very up to date DNF version.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#340

Post by txutxu » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 7:56 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #258

jkepler wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean your laptop runs Devuan? I get that is nearly the same as Debian, but does it include the Debian social contract and community? Isn't it a separate project? https://www.debian.org/social_contract

If you're going that way Devuan is probably a better choice, but Debian did support running without systemd and still has sysvinit on a best-effort basis - https://wiki.debian.org/Init

Sorry, it's not Devuan, but Debian 11.6, previously was 10.x and was on testing until Bullseye was released.

Works for me without systemd, no problem.

I already use systemd in hundreds of systems at work and personal servers/vps.

But on my personal laptop, I have too many custom stuff after 20 years of thinking around, glued across all the layers (kernel, boot loader, init, background services, tty, graphical environment) and I did choose to keep my laptop with the traditional equiv of all the things that systemd does, just because of that.

Debian is really flexible to allow you to choose components in the system, or to have more than one equivalent component, and to configure how they interact, and still be considered an official Debian system.

And even to allow to people like me to do your own Debian if you want. That is the "official Debian" that I like, the one that allows me, that doesn't force me.