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Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

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Re: Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

#91

Post by r3bl »

mwcampbell wrote: post #9

I have to admit I'm surprised to find that anyone is still trying to make desktop Linux work for normal people, i.e. non-programmers who aren't free-software fanatics. I think to myself, don't they realize that it's pointless, that the year of the Linux desktop will never come, that Linux will always be the distant third-place desktop OS? More constructively, I wonder if recent Linux distros and desktop environments…

I'm not a free software fanatic. I'm dual booting elementary OS with Windows. On my Windows installation, I have Office 365, Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server, etc. I also have 1TB of space on OneDrive. Everything completely legal of course.

But, I haven't booted to Windows since mid-April (and even then my Windows adventure lasted for like one hour or less, I just got bored and wanted to play one game I haven't played in a long time). elementary just gets the job done and it looks pretty damn sexy while doing it.

My laptop is currently running on 59 degrees Celsius. It's been up for 22 hours now and its running Firefox, Thunderbird, Spotify, Atom text editor, MEGA client, terminal emulator and a .pdf viewer ever since I booted my laptop. Of course, I didn't use it the whole time, but my laptop was still running while I did some other things. I can't even compare that to Windows (8.1) that jumps to 75 degrees as soon as I boot into it.

Plus, elementary looks like 10x as better and I don't have to search the web to find something like a freaking C compiler or a SSH client. I don't have to worry about the registry and I don't have to worry about junkware being bundled with some piece of legit program. I don't have to click on the freaking Next button for 15 times to install something. All I need to do is to enter one command and enter my password.

I don't really consider myself as a programmer.

Re: Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

#92

Post by yellowapple »

zxcvcxz wrote: post #87
yellowapple wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a "oh no, I upgraded and it broke". This is a case of "oh no, it simply stopped working properly without any perceptible cause". Yes, I'm fully aware how broken Windows' wifi implementation is. NetworkManager, however, tends to make the Windows equivalent look wonderful in comparison. And yes, every operating system has problems. That's not my point. My point is that we (the free-software-loving community)…

Well I've never had any of the problems you're experiencing on Linux in the past 3 years. Only issue I've had was a driver not being included by default. I've had issues on OS X and Windows though, and they put billions of dollars into their operating systems. So if they can't get it right, then maybe the problems go beyond the code and into the actual hardware?

Maybe you're just lucky. Or perhaps I'm just unlucky.

Whatever the case, I know it's not the hardware; wpa_supplicant (the underlying software that allows NetworkManager to function) has (in my experience) generally worked much better than NetworkManager, and OpenBSD's networking stack is also pretty flawless in my experience. So it's something about NetworkManager specifically that needs to be fixed or replaced.

And note that my criticisms about networking are not about Linux as a whole; on the contrary. My criticisms are strictly about NetworkManager. You probably understand this already, but your comment seems to be phrased in defense of GNU/Linux as a whole as if I consider the failings of NetworkManager I've experienced to be the fault of the kernel or somesuch - which is very much not the case - so I figure it's worth clarifying just in case.

Re: Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

#93

Post by yellowapple »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #89
yellowapple wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a buggy pile of shit, for starters. Constantly drops network connections, will frequently flood your network history with multiple duplicate entries for no apparent reason, will often mysteriously fail to connect to a wireless network for whatever reason even though others work fine (and other devices can connect to the wireless network in question without issue - even other NetworkManager-using ones)... that so…

OK I must be really lucky. I find NetworkManager just works. It does ask for my admin password when it doesn't need it but I find that if I just ignore that prompt then everything is fine.

Odd that it's asking for the admin password.

The more common issue with passwords is that it incessantly prompts for the user's password or for the wireless network passphrase due to some strange inability to talk to whatever keyring daemon is in use (and thus an inability to retrieve network passwords). I usually work around that by disabling the keyring (either globally or simply preventing NetworkManager from using it).

Re: Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

#94

Post by bdcravens »

bdcravens wrote: post #40
omarforgotpwd wrote: post #12

"Remember that shitty computer we got when we were first came to the US?" -- Kids, recounting this experience in 15 years

I'm typing on the highest end MBPr you can buy, but my first computer was a 286 with DOS and a handful of programs - this was just after Windows 95 came out, so it was quite shitty for the day. However, no computer has been quite as magical as that one. While I get paid good money to produce code every day, and I think it's damn good code, I don't feel nearly as productive as I did when I was learning to write QBasic…

I should also point out that I came from a dirt-poor family, and this was when I was 17, making it the more significant to me.

Re: Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

#95

Post by psykovsky »

pjmlp wrote: post #74
psykovsky wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That also, ofcourse. But on our own machines we can decide, and if you're like me, every computer in your house uses a flavour of Linux and you don't even think about pirated software or software licenses most of the time.

I hope that you at least think about donating back.

I donate my time to various open source projects, translating.

Re: Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

#96

Post by rconti »

lambda wrote: post #64
rconti wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5. NetworkManager

I have found NetworkManager to be no more difficult to use than setting up networking in Windows. For me, for simple cases, it tends to just work; for more complicated cases with multiple interfaces, it takes some fiddling but can be made to work as well; and pretty similar to the amount of fiddling on Windows. I've found OS X to require less fiddling for some of the simpler and moderately complex cases, but also hav…

I've been putting off learning it for years and years and years. Finally decided if I'm going to keep doing this as a career I'd better figure out how to use the new tools.

Have a new Cent7 install on a laptop at home.

I spent over an hour trying to get the wifi to simply connect to the network. Much of this was me trying to learn how to use the networkmanager syntax which is neigh-on-impossible to decipher. The help is useless, and apparently the syntax made a huge change from 0.9 to 1.0, and not knowing either means that 90% of the hits I found on Google were utterly and completely wrong and used deprecated flags.

I finally broke down and tried to use nmtui to solve my nmcli woes, but it only made things worse.

The installer was nice enough to create an ifcfg-, but when I try to ifup that interface, the system complains there is no DEVICE for it. So I added a DEVICE= line corresponding to my wireless adapter (which nmcli sees), but then the system complains that my wireless device (WHICH NMCLI SEES!) does not exist.

I believe I have traced the problem to a bug report I found on RedHat's bug tracker -- I needed NetworkManager-Wireless installed in order for it to use my wireless adapter. Why lspci sees my adapter, the OS names it, the firmware is installed and up to date, and nmcli even sees the adapter as a wifi adapter, but then can't use it, is beyond me. nmcli wireless scans constantly failed (which is what led me to the bug report).. the bug report says it's fixed and provides better guidance that you need NetworkManager-Wireless installed as of but that's probably wrong, since I have the latest Cent7.1 (unless the bug report is REALLY recent).

Regardless, after adding the EPEL repo and installing the wireless-utils package which provides the iwlist, I was able to scan for wireless networks.

NetworkManager still was unable to scan, so I did a network restart hoping I could solve the issue without rebooting the whole box. Sadly, I lost my wired connection to the system at that point, so I'll have to wait until I get home to play with it some more.

Oh, and by the way -- even though my wired i/f is set to "ONBOOT=true", it did not, in fact, come up on boot because the cable was disconnected. After I connected the cable it took me 5+ mins to realize I had to restart the network service to get the connection to function, which is not the way it works pre-NetworkManager.

Suffice it to say, the software is massively, massively, massively, massively sub-par, and far less user-friendly than the good 'ol "editing text files" way. I suspect I am soon to have many more similar headaches as I delve into the world of systemd head first (another thing I've been avoiding).

Fortunately, we get to do really exciting things now that NetworkManager has taken over. I can CD to things, and set properties and methods, and all kinds of shit that makes me feel like I'm using Fujitsu's deplorable ALOM:

nmcli> goto ipv4

nmcli ipv4> describe

Available properties: method, dns, dns-search, addresses, routes, ignore-auto-routes, ignore-auto-dns, dhcp-client-id, dhcp-send-hostname, dhcp-hostname, never-default, may-fail

Property name? method

nmcli ipv4> set method auto

nmcli> back

see how fun and intuitive it is?

Re: Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

#97

Post by mindslight »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #69
rconti wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5. NetworkManager

I see this mentioned a lot but what actually is the problem with NetworkManager that people complain about?

It tries to bite off a lot more than it can chew, and fails horribly for anything that isn't a simple wifi config.

1. Makes fixed wireless connections less reliable. I plugged an LTE modem into a server for a backup link, and network mangler set it as a default route and munged up resolv.conf. My mistake for not removing it when I installed the machine, but that's hardly an endorsement.

2. Makes complex config out of reach. On my laptop, I'd like wlan0/eth0 to be bridged by default so that I can easily switch existing connections to a wired connection by plugging in. But I'm not going to fight network mangler just to get this feature.

3. Furthermore lots of times I'll want to setup an ad-hoc config on the wired interface (say, configuring a new router). For which it's easier to kill -9 the mangler and setup manually, especially if I want to keep my Internet connection.

4. GUI is the preferred way to config/interact with it, which is completely un-unix. It's one of the few things I have to do manually when reinstalling a machine.

I played with Arch a while back, and wicd felt much simpler and more straightforward. Network Mangler feels like a hack someone came up with to setup a simple wifi connection, which then got adopted into a bigger role than it can handle.

Re: Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

#98

Post by digi_owl »

rconti wrote: post #96
lambda wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found NetworkManager to be no more difficult to use than setting up networking in Windows. For me, for simple cases, it tends to just work; for more complicated cases with multiple interfaces, it takes some fiddling but can be made to work as well; and pretty similar to the amount of fiddling on Windows. I've found OS X to require less fiddling for some of the simpler and moderately complex cases, but also hav…

I've been putting off learning it for years and years and years. Finally decided if I'm going to keep doing this as a career I'd better figure out how to use the new tools. Have a new Cent7 install on a laptop at home. I spent over an hour trying to get the wifi to simply connect to the network. Much of this was me trying to learn how to use the networkmanager syntax which is neigh-on-impossible to decipher. The help…

Like poking around inside a router via serial terminal...

Re: Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

#99

Post by digi_owl »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #33
kenrikm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~95% of the developers I know in the Bay Area use MacBook Pros. The underlying Unix base Apple runs on is nothing to scoff at and the majority of things someone learns about the command line on a linux machine will be the same on a OSX machine. I'm surprised you point out iDevices, what we should be worried about is keeping them away from the Windows ecosystem.

Apple is more dangerous to Unix culture than Microsoft ever was because the rate at which Apple screws it's own customers and developers is much, much higher than Microsoft. OS X is also a sickly sweet gateway drug to living their iDevice lockdown lifestyle. They are continually doing things to lock down OS X with secret APIs that only Apple can use and that 95% you're talking about will one day figure out who Apple…

Sadly it seems that those estranged devs are moving to Linux and attempting to recreate OSX there...

Re: Welcome to America: Here's Your Linux Computer

#100

Post by LukeShu »

mey wrote: post #46

If you are in the Portland OR metro area and need a computer or have old computers to donate, please check out http://www.freegeek.org/ They have programs for volunteer work in refurbishing (where you learn about computers) get your own system in return. http://www.freegeek.org/#volunteer

And if you are in the Taylor, Texas area, check out http://reglue.org/

Ken Starks gave a heart-touching presentation on Reglue at this year's LibrePlanet conference (and accepted the FSF's Award for Projects of Social Benefit on behalf of Reglue). Unfortunately, the recording of Ken's presentation doesn't seem to be up on the LibrePlanet site, but I'm fairly certain that mtjm.eu has it somewhere.

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