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Don't panic and keep forking Debian

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Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#101

Post by zanny »

tonyarkles wrote: post #97
zanny wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it never fails to boot, Except when it does. I have a friend who got a virus that deleted the Windows bootloader / ntldr from C:, but hes not as technically literate and lives two states away. Nothing can fix it. He does not have the technical wherewithal to remove the drive and recover files, there is no way to rewrite those specific files without reformatting the disk, and if the Windows install CD does not f…

This is way OT, and I'm pretty rusty in Windows land, but there used to be a tool you could run if you booted to a command prompt from a windows install disc that would rewrite ntldr and the boot sector. bootmgr.exe maybe? Something like that. Not all hope is lost!

The context is that he is tech illiterate. So much so that I tried to get him to just use a gui tool on his windows notebook to put Ubuntu on a 2GB flash drive to save his files but he couldn't do it.

There is no way he would have been able to boot to the Windows recovery CD command prompt and run anything. Also, I'm pretty sure the boot repair on the disk runs bootmgr repair options during its "please wait were doing stuff and not telling you what is going on" phase.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#102

Post by zanny »

bufordsharkley wrote: post #100
zanny wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> after they spend too long looking at StackExchange trying to figure something out. Why are they on Stack Exchange? If they are installing a Linux distro on a Windows computer, then of course you will have an unpleasant experience. If you want to use Ubuntu the right way without having to butt heads with anything, you buy a system from zareason / thinkpenguin / system76. You can / will run into the same "searching t…

Cheapest laptop on zareason: $699 Cheapest laptop on thinkpenguin: $599 Cheapest laptop on system76: $799 (unless, of course, I'm missing something) ...I'm running Ubuntu on an ASUS laptop that cost under $400, which worked almost seamlessly, and I installed Mint on my ma's laptop that cost under $400. (That incurred finding a new video driver to avoid running everything in 800x600) I would love to have a Linux-out-o…

I know this is a problem, that is why one of my side jobs is custom building Linux machines locally. I do tech support, and if the client doesn't need Windows specific software or it runs perfectly under Wine I'll set them up with Linux builds and notebooks. I have several Chromebooks I'm versed in reformatting and know they work flawlessly and on what kernel versions that happens.

That is not good UX for the average joe, or anyone you are just introducing to Linux. It is a UX fail and ruins impressions when people try to install Linux on arbitrary hardware and have a bad time of it. Yes, if you are a veteran and know what you are doing you can do better than the vendors, but to recommend anything else to a Linux newbie without absolute confidence in comprehensive hardware support is just ruining their first impression.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#103

Post by 4ydx »

cpncrunch wrote: post #93
johnny22 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No compelling reason? you should probably read the docs a bit more. If you don't have any philosophical concerns with systemd, then you will find a lot to love there.

I just re-read some docs, and I still can't see any compelling reasons. I'm not concerned about booting a few seconds faster (I only reboot my servers once every year at most). Regarding memory footprint: that has never been an issue. Binary logfiles are a disadvantage to me.

Binary logs and the amount of new code which these developers are incorrectly assuming will be stable. It is a total disaster in my opinion. I fell in love with using Linux because everything is text files. Binary approaches will only make using linux more cryptic.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#104

Post by SwellJoe »

SwellJoe wrote: post #84
EdwardDiego wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux doesn't dominate the mobile environment. A very specific port of it, by Google, does. Given that it's Google , that's hardly a compelling argument. They could've made Windows NT dominant if they'd so desired.

The comment I was replying to suggested that the diversity (the forks) of Linux were the reason Linux would never win the desktop. I made my comment to make two assertions: First, that the desktop is irrelevant today because more people use phones and tablets, and the spread will continue to grow. Second, that the forkability of Linux made it possible for Android to exist...and, to practically destroy every other com…

And, I feel like I should add:

"Make it on the desktop" always meant "the consumer desktop". There is no consumer desktop in the future. The consumer desktop is a tablet or a phone or a TV device or all three. I don't understand it, I don't necessarily like it (I like desktops with big monitors, big hard drives, big mouse and keyboard, and a nice chair to sit in), but it's the way things are. Computing isn't something consumers do sitting at a desk any more. So, Linux won what is currently the way consumers use computers. And, that's hella fascinating, and hella cool.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#105

Post by yuhong »

krylon wrote: post #30
seccess wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it." Doesn't this assume that this cost for commercial OSes is zero? In my experience, that hasn't been the case (as an OSX user, haven't used Windows for software development in a long time).

It is far from zero. On Windows, it is just not considered Microsoft's problem by most people - the blame is spread across lots of different software vendors/developers. Just as an example, at our company, we run a Windows Server 2008 R2 Terminal server, with Outlook 2003 installed for email. A while ago we decided to replace the aging Internet Explorer 8 installed on that machine ( shudder ) with IE11 (still shudder…

MS does seem to support Outlook 2003 with IE9 and even released a hotfix for an incompatibility. IE11 was released close to the end of support of Office 2003 though, I wonder what is the support policy in that case.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#106

Post by xorcist »

tormeh wrote: post #63
secfirstmd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I possibly would have agreed with you up until XP, when it was very very buggy and crash prone, but after that for the average user I really doubt that is the case. Thought I think we can agree to disagree depending on our respective experiences.

This. I'm not saying modern Windows is fault free. It may have an inconvenient user interface for some things, it may not always do the thing you want it to etc. but it never fails to boot, everything but Apple hardware runs it flawlessly and it has a massive third-party software selection. For me, though, Ubuntu's user interface is just so much more convenient for programming and the other things I do that I manage…

People have so varying experiences it's not even funny. I guess fail to boot means some update was required to initrd that didn't make it, but it's not something that would be common among the mainstream stable distributions. I've certainly never seen it on hundreds of machines.

Windows is a different story altogether. Not primarily because of some technical inferiority, but because people run all kinds of not-even-broken things with admin privs just because they got it in a box.

Just last week someone pushed a mobile broadband stick in their Windows box. It purred and whirred for a while, and hasn't booted since. I've seen similar things before.

(OT: I'd be grateful if anyone had any helpers on how to remove things selectively from the Windows boot process. There is a safe mode boot, which also hangs. Can I step through it, like on DOS? Can restore the boot related registry settings to an older version? Google doesn't help me at all here, and it seems like it should be a pretty common problem.)

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#107

Post by Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd »

frozenport wrote: post #94
eloff wrote: post #5

The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly thr…

Some things on Linux were broken from Day 1 like drivers and X because it they were easier. I doubt a coherent team could have fixed these without rewritting which taks too much time. It took MS 6 years to make XP into Vista, I doubt OSS people operate on that kind of timeframe.

XP to Vista took 6 years because MS had huge plans for Longhorn. It took some time to build these things, then some more time to decide they won't be ready any time soon and throw them all away.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#108

Post by Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd »

pekk wrote: post #77
fredoralive wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That site does seem to show an odd disconnect, it seems to mention "init-freedom" alongside "...the first goal of removing systemd...". Surely true "init-freedom" would be to give the end user a choice between sysvinit, bsd init, sysmtemd, launchd, android's init, and so on. Of course such true init-freedom would be near impossible. IMO people should just pick one, forking appropriately, and stop having such huge arg…

Removing coupling which effectively mandates the use of systemd is a prerequisite for "init-freedom". You can't offer a choice when everything requires systemd.

Compare to Gentoo. Gentoo defaults to their homegrown OpenRC. But Gentoo is all about choice and so systemd is an option and works perfectly well. That's "init-freedom". If someone doesn't like systemd and removes it from their distro, that's OK with me. But calling that "init-freedom" seems weird. Maybe they should call it something like "sysv-freedom", if that's what they mean.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#109

Post by krylon »

yuhong wrote: post #105
krylon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is far from zero. On Windows, it is just not considered Microsoft's problem by most people - the blame is spread across lots of different software vendors/developers. Just as an example, at our company, we run a Windows Server 2008 R2 Terminal server, with Outlook 2003 installed for email. A while ago we decided to replace the aging Internet Explorer 8 installed on that machine ( shudder ) with IE11 (still shudder…

MS does seem to support Outlook 2003 with IE9 and even released a hotfix for an incompatibility. IE11 was released close to the end of support of Office 2003 though, I wonder what is the support policy in that case.

Thanks for the info!

Now that Office 2003's support has ended, I don't think Mirosoft will do anything about the problem for newer versions of IE.

(If I could, I would also upgrade Outlook on that terminal server, but that is another story altogether.)

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#110

Post by mahouse »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #58
mahouse wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many problems with it that it's not possible to tl;dr them. But Google will help you. There are so many posts flaming it (for good reasons) that it will be easy for you to understand everything.

Could you recommend some? "Google it" is a non-answer.

THis was probably the one that started it all: http://monolight.cc/2011/05/the-systemd-fallacy/

The "official" points by developers can be read in WP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Reception

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