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Never update anything

blog.kronis.dev

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Re: Never update anything

#271

Post by kabes »

xcambar wrote: post #230
kabes wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't get reproducible builds the team doesn't know how to use lock files properly. Don't go blaming it on the stack.

What's your workflow with lock files? Do you force them in CI/prod only or also in dev? I'm tempted to enforce lockfiles at every stage of the product cycle, making upgrades an explicit action, rather than the side-effect/byproduct of another action. Does it make sense? What do you think?

Basically what TheAceOfHearts said. Always use them everywhere, except when explicitly upgrading dependencies. It's also much faster to do a 'npm ci' than an 'npm i'

Re: Never update anything

#272

Post by forgotmypw17 »

kouteiheika wrote: post #268
jart wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The forced changes to the init system and desktop gui are far more radical than anything Microsoft or Apple ever did. The init system change was also due to the GUI people. GNOME told everyone they must adopt SystemD or else you can't use GNOME anymore. It made people so unhappy there were forks, protests, and even suicides. If a system administrator woke up from a 15 year coma, they would have no clue how to use any…

I really don't understand the systemd hate. It's fine . It works. I never had any problems with it, neither on my desktop, nor on the servers I maintain. People I personally know also don't have any problems with it. > It made people so unhappy there were forks, protests, and even suicides. ...a suicide over a different init system? Seriously?

You could look it up on Wikipedia, as with most things one seeks to understand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Reception

Summary: It's overly complex, it has many interlocked dependencies, it takes control away from the sysadmin and puts it into a huge binary, it goes against the Unix philosophy of "do one thing well", it creates a pattern of homogenizing Linux architecture...

Re: Never update anything

#273

Post by kaba0 »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #264
kaba0 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying my previous answer to a similarly bad idea: “ Browsers run untrusted code 0-24, which get JIT compiled to machine code through a very complex and bug-prone process. Add to that that desktop OSs are quite lacking when it comes to sandboxes, so even with browser sandboxes, the potential for serious damage is quire big. So, staying ahead of bugs is a must.”

It's impossible to stay ahead of the bugs, because they appear ahead of the patches, and there are undoubtedly many unpatched bugs out there. But if I only visit sites where this is unlikely (and don't allow JavaScript, which you seem to have missed) I am much safer than when browsing willy-nilly with the latest patches.

Browsing the web with JS disabled on an up-to-date browser is still much safer. But you do you.

Re: Never update anything

#275

Post by forgotmypw17 »

kaba0 wrote: post #220
jart wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The forced changes to the init system and desktop gui are far more radical than anything Microsoft or Apple ever did. The init system change was also due to the GUI people. GNOME told everyone they must adopt SystemD or else you can't use GNOME anymore. It made people so unhappy there were forks, protests, and even suicides. If a system administrator woke up from a 15 year coma, they would have no clue how to use any…

Come on, let’s stop this bullshit about systemd. It was goddamn voted on multiple times by debian maintainers, in a system that is markedly more democratic than anything we have in a country, and won with huge margins. Also, previous incarnations were hard to maintain, had no logging before the mount of filesystems, had ill-defined service life cycle, etc. Booting is a hard problem. Having it all around the system in…

It's obvious you feel strongly about this from your language, but there is no need to call someone else's opinion bullshit.

The reality is that systemd's wide adoption has made many people unhappy, for many reasons, some outlined in the Wikipedia article[1]. Systemd is overly complex, to the point of being obfuscated; systemd has many interlocked dependencies; systemd takes control away from the sysadmin and puts it into a fat binary; systemd goes against the Unix philosophy of "do one thing well"; systemd creates a pattern of homogenizing Linux architecture, and so on.

Lucky for us, unlike with Windows and Mac, there is no "One And Only GNU/Linux Distribution", and instead there are many options and alternatives, many of which have not integrated systemd at all, or only ported small parts of it.

Every day I am ever so grateful for the miracle and gift of FOSS. Thank you. Gracias. Spasibo. Dyakuyu. Merci. Danke.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Reception

Re: Never update anything

#276

Post by forgotmypw17 »

kaba0 wrote: post #273
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to stay ahead of the bugs, because they appear ahead of the patches, and there are undoubtedly many unpatched bugs out there. But if I only visit sites where this is unlikely (and don't allow JavaScript, which you seem to have missed) I am much safer than when browsing willy-nilly with the latest patches.

Browsing the web with JS disabled on an up-to-date browser is still much safer. But you do you.

It's safer if it is an option.

Re: Never update anything

#277

Post by forgotmypw17 »

jart wrote: post #269
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH, both Ubuntu and Gnome have completely lost my trust as far as making stable and predictable environments. The Mac-like global menubar which they've grafted on without being able to adopt the applications is an atrocity IMO. I consider Windows 95 / NT4 / 2000 to be "peak desktop GUI" and use distros which allow me to emulate that look, feel, and behavior. I use it until it fails to deliver that experience and the…

Windows 2000 was a thing of beauty. It was Peak Gates. What do you think of SerenityOS? It's written by this guy from Apple who ended up leaving his job so he could do the same thing to Windows 2000 that Steve Jobs did to Mac OS 9. Now that's a dangerous idea.

I'm a huge fan of SerenityOS and Andreas, but I've not had a chance to try it yet.

I used Windows 2000 starting three betas before gold, downloading each build over dialup from AOL warez scene releases and didn't stop until a while after they stopped patching Pro, don't recall having any issues. What an amazingly solid OS.

My choice today is Xfce with the Chicago95 script, I can barely tell the difference.

I'd say Mint has the best default tuning for Xfce, with Manjaro I have to add the fewest additional packages on top of the base install, and Fedora is somewhere in between.

Thanks for the memories :)

Re: Never update anything

#278

Post by forgotmypw17 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #226
saghm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mac and Linux do the same thing The earlier responses in the thread were talking about forced upgrades. I'm not sure about MacOS since I don't use it much, but most Linux distros do not forcibly apply upgrades like Windows does; you can continue to use old packages and even reboot the machine indefinitely. Sure, you might not get security fixes or keep unrelated packages up to date beyond a certain point, but that'…

> I'm not sure about MacOS since I don't use it much, but most Linux distros do not forcibly apply upgrades like Windows does; Eh, not very accurate in my opinion. If you want to use the latest software you are very much forced to upgrade Linux because they have no concept of separating the platform from the applications that run on it. Either everything is bleeding edge or nothing is. Or you compile things from sour…

I just looked up what Karmic Koala is, and it is Ubuntu 9.x.

I have not tried to use that recently, but I am quite happy running 14.x today, and it runs everything I need.

I use IntelliJ 13.x for my Git stuff, Geany for most of my text editing, a dozen different browsers at whatever versions they are for my Web things, and whatever versions of mpv, mc, LibreOffice, etc. it came with for what those programs do.

With only 1GB of RAM it's not always as snappy as I'd like, but I use the periods of swapping to meditate.

I don't have to use programs released today, only ones which I need today.

Re: Never update anything

#279

Post by johnisgood »

shimonabi wrote: post #39

I upgraded my Ubuntu distribution last week and my old Xerox Phaser laser printer stopped working over the network. Something like this should never happen. I hate spending my weekends troubleshooting the Samba configuration. Maybe I will connect the printer to a Windows VM.

This sort of thing makes me want to give GNU Guix or NixOS a try. Not sure which yet though. Last time I checked both, they were limited with regarding to disk encryption and partitioning and such. I came up with a possible solution for GNU Guix, but I never put it to a test.

Re: Never update anything

#280

Post by 0xFluegel »

lwouis wrote: post #180
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #32

I literally never update anything unless it is not working. Quite happy here with Firefox 66.x on Ubuntu LXDE 14.x, which is what happened to come with this particular device. I have an iPad running iOS 8.x, which I'm also happy with, especially when I do testing on the clusterfucks that are later iOS and Firefox releases. Browsing a handful of reputable text-based websites from behind a NAT, I don't see the problem.…

I really appreciate people like you reminding most everyone that new != better. I live in Japan which people usually mock for still using fax machines, or keeping "the old ways" in many aspect of society. There are important positive things that people don't realize are lost as we "modernize" society. For example, these days the TV spies on my usage and sends that data back to the maker company; they will then sell i…

> I live in Japan which people usually mock for still using fax machines

Greetings from Germany as well...

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