It makes sense to use the words that people are most used to, and bluescreen/BSOD has been the go-to lingua for describing a crash/error screen - even if not blue - since a while now.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux,
is in fact, systemd/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, systemd plus Linux.
Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component
of a fully functioning systemd system made useful by the systemd corelibs, shell
utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by IBM.
Many computer users run a modified version of the systemd system every day,
without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of systemd
which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are
not aware that it is basically the systemd system, developed by Lennart Poettering.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a
part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system
that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run.
The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself;
it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is
normally used in combination with the systemd operating system: the whole system
is basically systemd with Linux added, or systemd/Linux. All the so-called “Linux”
distributions are really distributions of systemd/Linux.
Although we’ll be hosting the repository on GitHub, our contribution workflow will remain unchanged and we will not be accepting Pull Requests at this time
Fair point. I would say on a personal level that GitHub actions is quite nice to use, especially with the marketplace. But I’d be surprised if switching version controls also entailed a CI/CD change for Mozilla, so I can’t think of a good reason.
In general, consider setting up any kind of rollback functionality; this will enable you to get right back to action without any downtime when you’re time-restricted. This can be achieved by configuring your system with (GRUB-)Btrfs+TImeshift/Snapper. Please bear in mind that it’s likely that you have to come back to solve it eventually, though*. (Perhaps it’s worth thinking about what can be done to ensure that you don’t end up with a broken system in the first place. cough‘immutable’distrocough)
If you feel absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of choice, then you should probably consider the bold ones; not because I think they’re necessarily better but:
openSUSE’s offerings are generally speaking very polished, therefore being highly suitable to replace Linux Mint or Ubuntu. It’s its own thing though, therefore you might not be able to access packages that are exclusively found in Debian’s/Ubuntu’s repos (though Distrobox solves that trivially). Tumbleweed if you like rolling release, Slowroll if you prefer updates only once every 1-2 months and finally Leap if you lean more towards Stable/LTS releases.
siduction for being based on Debian; but it’s strictly on the Unstable(/Sid) branch.
SpiralLinux for being based on Debian; this one -however- has proper support for switching branches.
Vanilla OS for being based on Debian; this one is very ambitious. But, because it’s an ‘immutable’ distro, it might require the biggest changes to your workflow.
nvidia drivers are absent
While any of the aforementioned distros do a decent job at ‘supporting’ Nvidia, perhaps you might be best off with uBlue’s Nvidia images. As these are images relying on the same technology that Fedora’s immutable distros do, rollback functionality and all the other good stuff we’ve come to love -like automatic upgrades in the background- are present as well. In case you’re interested to know how these actually provide improved Nvidia support:
“We’ve slipstreamed the Nvidia drivers right onto the operating system image. Steps that once took place on your local laptop are now done in a continuous integration system in GitHub. Once they are complete, the system stamps out an image which then makes its way to your PC.
No more building drivers on your laptop, dealing with signing, akmods, third party repo conflicts, or any of that. We’ve fully automated it so that if there’s an issue, we fix it in GitHub, for everyone.
But it’s not just installation and configuration: We provide Nvidia driver versions 525, 520, and 470 for each of these. You can atomically switch between any of these, so if your driver worked perfectly on a certain day and you find a regression you just rebase to that image.
Or switch to another desktop entirely.
No other desktop Linux does this, and we’re just getting started.”
It’s often used to describe a distro in which (at least some) parts of the system are read-only on runtime. Furthermore, features like atomicity (i.e. an upgrade either happens or doesn’t; no in-between state), reproducibility^[1]^ and improved security against certain types of attacks are its associated benefits that can (mostly) only exist due to said ‘immutability’. This allows higher degree of stability and (finally) rollback-functionality, which are functionalities that are often associated with ‘immutability’ but aren’t inherently/necessarily tied to it; as other means to gain these do exist.
The reason why I’ve been careful with the term “immutable” (which literally is a fancy word for “unchanging”), is because the term doesn’t quite apply to what the distros offer (most of these aren’t actually unchanging in absolute sense) and because people tend to import associations that come from other ecosystems that have their own rules regarding immutability (like Android, SteamOS etc). A more fitting term would be atomic (which has been used to some degree by distros in the past). The name actually applies to all distros that are currently referred to as ‘immutable’, it’s descriptive and is the actual differentiator between these and the so-called ‘mutable’ distros. Further differentiation can be had with descriptions like declarative, image-based, reproducible etc.
That is, two machines that have the exact same software installed should be identical even if one has been installed a few years ago, while the other has been freshly installed (besides content of home folder etc). So stuff like cruft, bitrot and (to a lesser degree) state are absent on so-called ‘immutable’ distros.
Initially I was typing out a very long answer, but it quickly got unwieldy 😅. So instead, this one will be oversimplified 😜.
Currently:
Package management on native system just takes considerably longer on most atomic^[1]^ distros. The exceptions would be Guix and NixOS, but unfortunately their associated learning curves are (very) steep compared to the other atomic distros.
The learning curve in general is steeper.
Documentation is lacking.
Big shifts occur more frequently^[2]^.
Some things simply don’t work (yet).
One might (perhaps correctly) point out that most of these are actually more related to the technology lacking maturity. And that atomic distros would actually (already) net positively otherwise. Therefore, I’d argue, the transition to atomic distros is perhaps more akin to a natural evolution. I believe (at least) Fedora has already mentioned the possibility to sunset the non-atomic variant in favor of the atomic one when the time is there (or at least switch focus). Which is why I believe that atomicity will probably leave a lasting impact to the Linux landscape, similarly to what systemd has done in years prior.
Besides that it’s probably a challenge to maintain…
If your use-case is supported and you’ve acquired the associated knowledge for setup/configuration and maintenance, then I’d argue it’s probably even easier than a non-atomic distro; simply by virtue of atomicity, increased stability and rollback-functionality. But, as has already been established previously, the learning curve is steeper in general, so getting there is probably harder. With the exception being those whose needs are satisfied easily by the accessible software found in the main package-‘storefront’. Which makes distros like Endless OS very suitable for people whose primary interaction with ‘computers’ has been mobile phones and tablets, as the transition is -perhaps surprising to some- near flawless.
Yes, that’s how I’ll be referring to them.
Fedora Silverblue switching to OCI container images for delivery of installations and upgrades. openSUSE’s offerings switching to image-based. Vanilla OS switching from Ubuntu to Debian and to a model that’s a lot more similar to where Silverblue is headed towards. NixOS switching to flakes. etc
NixOS has been around since 2003, thus making it older than Ubuntu (2004). Even Silverblue has been out since more than 5 years (October 2018). Finally, we can’t forget about Guix that had its first release over 10 years ago (January 2013).
Great post. However, I will add my opinion about Debian Sid and its lineage: just don’t use them for production. Sid is an unstable distribution that looks like a rolling release distribution and most of the time it’s fine, but it is fundamentally different since it’s okay if it gets broken.
I’m guessing the idea behind Siduction is to use this rollback functionality to counter its innate instability, but with solid alternatives like openSUSE or the already installed Linux Mint + Timeshift, I wouldn’t recommend Siduction. Also, Manjaro is unstable by design, wouldn’t recommend that one either.
I personally agree with your assessments regarding Debian Sid and Manjaro. However, I didn’t want to force my (potential) ‘bias’ in a comment that tries to be otherwise neutral. Thank you for bringing up the ‘asterisks’ associated with both of these!
Great piece of information. I personally don’t see the benefits with immutable distribution, or at least it (without any experience) feels like that I’ll spend more time setting it up and tinkering with it than actually recovering from a rare cases where things just break. Or at least that’s the way it’s used to be for a very long time and even if something would break it atleast used to be pretty much as fast as reverting a snapshot to fix the problem. Sure, you need to be able to work on a bare console and browse trough log files, but I’m old enough that it was the only option back in the day if you wanted to get X running.
However the case today was something that I just couldn’t easily fix as the boot partition just didn’t have enough space (since when 700MB isn’t enough…) even a rollback wouldn’t have helped to actually fix the installation. Potentially I might had an option to move LVM partition on the disk to grow boot partition, but that would’ve required shrinking filesystem first (which isn’t trivial on a LVM PV) and the experience ubuntu has lately provided I just took the longer route and installed mint with zfs. It should be pretty stable as there’s no snap packages which update at random intervals and it’s a familiar environment for me (dpkg > rpm).
Even if immutable distros might not be for my use case, your comment has spawned a good thread of discussion and that’s absolutely a good thing.
at least it (without any experience) feels like that I’ll spend more time setting it up and tinkering with it than actually recovering from a rare cases where things just break
That might be the case depending on your proficiency and to what degree the ‘immutable’ distro allows you to configure your distro declarative. On e.g. NixOS you can define (most of) your system declarative. As such, reinstalling your entire setup is done through some config files. You can even push this further with the (in)famous Impermanence module that has been popularized by the popular Erase your darlings blog-post, in which your system is wiped every time you shut off the machine and rebuild (basically from scratch) every time you boot into it.
Potentially I might had an option to move LVM partition on the disk to grow boot partition, but that would’ve required shrinking filesystem first (which isn’t trivial on a LVM PV)
I haven’t worked with LVM yet. Defaulting to Btrfs (as Fedora -amongst others- does) has so far provided me a reliable experience, even though I’m aware that I’m missing out on performance. Hopefully, Bcachefs will prove to be a vast improvement over Btrfs in a relatively short time-span. You’ve pointed out to have installed Linux Mint with ZFS. Would I be correct to assume that you’ve been hurt by Btrfs in its infancy and choose to not rely on it since? Or is it related to lacking proper support for RAID 5/6? Or perhaps something else? Please feel free to inform me as I don’t feel confident on this topic!
and the experience ubuntu has lately provided I just took the longer route and installed mint with zfs.
Understandable. Though, I can’t stop myself from being very interested in their upcoming Ubuntu Core Desktop. But I imagine you couldn’t care less 😜.
Would I be correct to assume that you’ve been hurt by Btrfs in its infancy and choose to not rely on it since?
I have absolutely zero experience with btrfs. Mint doesn’t offer it by default and I’m just starting to learn bits’n’bobs of zfs (and I like it so far) so I just chose it with an idea that I can learn it on a real world situation. I already have zfs pool on my proxmox host, but for that I hope I’d gone with something else as it’s pretty hungry for memory and my server doesn’t have a ton to spare. But reinstalling that with something else is a whole another can of worms as I’d need to dump couple terabytes worth of data to somewhere else in order to make a clean install. I suppose it might be an option to move data around on the disks and convert the whole stack to LVM one drive at the time, but it’s something for the future.
But I imagine you couldn’t care less 😜.
I was a debian only user for a long time but when woody/sarge (back in 2005-2006) had pretty old binaries compared to upstream and ubuntu started to gain popularity I switched over. Specially the PPA support was really nice back then (and has been pretty good for several years), so specially for a desktop it was pretty good and if I’m not mistaken you could even switch from debian to ubuntu only by editing sources list and running dist-upgrade with some manual fixes.
So, coming from a mindset that everything just works and switching from a release to another is just a bit longer and more complex update the current trend rubs me in a very much wrong way.
So, basically the tl;dr is that life is much more complex today than it was back in the day where I could just tinker with things for hours without any responsibilities (and there’s a ton more to tinker with, my home automation setup really needs some TLC to optimize electricity consumption) so I just want an OS which gets out of my way and allows me to do whatever I need to whenever I need it. Immutable distro might be an answer, but currently I don’t have spare hours to actually learn how they work. I just want my sysVinit back with distributions which can go on for a decade without any major hiccups.
Ah, I had misunderstood your /boot situation previously. There’s an easy way to fix it by backing up current content of boot, unmounting it, creating some dir somewhere where there’s space (/tempboot was my choice last time), bind mounting it to /boot and going through the apt process. Then unmount the bind, mount the real boot, delete everything except currently booted kernel stuff, copy all the things from /tempboot update the initrd and grub. Et voila!
Why I didn’t think of that. It whould have fixed the immediate problem pretty fast. I would still have the issue with too small boot partition, but it would’ve been faster to fix the issue at hand. But in either case, I’m pretty happy I got new distro installed and hopefully that’ll fulfil my needs better for years to come.
Broken computers aren’t really stressful to me anymore, but it sure plays a part that I kinda-sorta had waited for reason to wipe the whole thing anyways and as I could still access all the files on the system, so in the end it was somewhat convenient excuse to take the time to switch the distribution. Apparently I didn’t have backup for ~/.ssh/config even if I thoguht I did, but those dozen lines of configuration isn’t a big deal.
Thanks anyway, a good reminder that with linux there’s always options to work around the problem.
Still… There are anticheats that allow Linux, like EAC, Hyperion and many others… If they choose one that does not allow Linux, or choose one that allow Linux but block it, it’s a dev issue
Virtually no anticheat worked on Linux just a few years ago except maybe Valve and Blizzard in-house solutions. Games that are out and already committed to a specific anticheat can’t do much but to wait, so it is not really on them. Changing the anticheat solution mid-way on a released game would piss off so many people you can’t imagine. On a brand new game though, I would agree that this should be considered.
No, kernel immediately stops execution of all normal processes once it gets into a kernel panic, and there’s no way for processes to hook into this functionality. It is intended to be the emergency stop state when the kernel realizes it doesn’t know what’s going on and it would be dangerous to continue executing. So it does the bare minimum to report the issue and then stops even its own execution.
There’s also a softer variant of the kernel panic called kernel oops that should let the user choose to continue if they think the risk of data corruption doesn’t outweigh losing all data currently in memory. But just like the kernel panic, it is handled completely inside the kernel and userspace is frozen until the user chooses to continue.
This is intended for situations where systemd runs into an unrecoverable issue while booting (for example you have misconfigured fstab and a required disk is missing). Without this, you just get thrown into the terminal with some error messages that might not make much sense to you if you don’t have a decent understanding of Linux. Now, you get a more newbie friendly message and a QR code that should bring you somewhere you can learn more about possible causes and troubleshooting steps.
Yeah, that makes sense. So it’s for the situations where you end up in an emergency shell.
Some better presentation of kernel panic would be nice (which I think is the closest equivalent to a Windows BSoD), but I guess it would require kernel support.
I used an acer switch 12 convertible during uni until the battery started bloating up and I put it out of order. The pen wasn’t great, especially the palm rejection was pretty bad, but that wasn’t a Linux issue it wasn’t great on windows either, overall it was pretty much the same. Linux ran great though, given that it only had 3 or 4 gigs of ram and a low tier i3 (I think 3rd or 4th gen) processor. I ran mint with KDE and I’d recommend running something with KDE (or gnome haven’t tried that since I prefer kde if it has to be a full DE and not a lightweight WM) as well.
Well, no matter how I trust my photo editing app, it has no business accessing my thesis documents. Proper filesystem sandboxing does security properly.
The file picker API is there to allow apps to access and save files with the user’s consent, while bot having any filesystem access. So a properly sandboxed app would be able to open, edit, and save files wherever the user wants, while not having access to any other irrelevant files, such as your .bashrc or memes folder.
I’m using the HP Envy x360 convertible 15-eu[some numbers I don’t remember]. It’s working pretty good. Only things that don’t work are the fingerprint reader and it doesn’t detect when you flip it over automatically but I just use a GNOME extension that allows me to manually toggle the onscreen keyboard.
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.