But in reality, you really only recommend it to strangers. If you recommend any piece of tech to someone you know, you iust changed your status to tech support.
Yeah, same, stuff like why is Linux on my computer now, why are ads blocked, where is Chrome, etc - listen, I’m the only tech support you have, you get what you get, and you get FOSS.
Honestly it worked fairly perfectly for me over the decades.
Me being tech support is WHY i said that. I told my family either use Linux or leave me alone. Half of them let me install Linux and I’ve not needed to do anything in years. They are basic users aka open chrome and nothing else and unlike windows Linux doesn’t constantly kill itself over time.
I occasionally ssh in to make sure updates are still working and once to setup a new printer remotely but that’s it
The first desktop version, Mac OS X 10.0, was released on March 24, 2001. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and all releases from OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion to macOS 14 Sonoma are UNIX 03 certified
I don’t like MacOS, but it’s actually able to be called UNIX.
Well you still have to check all the boxes, you pay for the license the same way you can study and take certain exams but have to pay for the certificate.
I understand that this is a meme, but dismissing one of the best distro family because snaps are included is dumb. It is easy to uninstall snap entirely.
The only serious bummer is that the Firefox deb-package is now fake and only installs the snap version of Firefox. Go get Librewolf, which is basically a hardened Firefox, and use their repository.
It is fun to meme around when it is with people that are familiar with Linux. But some Windows/MacOS users who are interested in Linux might take you seriously. Ubuntu and Ubuntu-like distros are really good in terms of ease of use, support and compatibility. My first recommendation for a new Linux user is Ubuntu or variations thereof.
Tried Debian stable, kept not being able to get stuff to work because of the packages always being too old. Not advocating for Ubuntu either, but Debian? For a desktop? GTFO! I’d sooner start using emacs instead of vim.
A somewhat anecdotal comment here, but I’ve using Debian stable as a daily driver for years, both at work and at home. Haven’t had any issues yet. It’s so stable it’s almost boring. 😀 However, this is fine since I can focus on getting stuff done instead of messing about with the distro.
I wanted to, and did manage to figure the installer out once, but damn it’s user unfriendly… The os seems fine, installer was not. I had some other issues I was hoping would be fixed in Debian that weren’t, so unfortunately I did not stick with it
Does debian even exist? I’ve never seen it… I’ve used a dozen flavors of “debian” Linux professionally, as well as the headwear related branches and centos… Most recently I’ve gotten into nixos (I tried a half dozen distros, none of the “Nvidia friendly” distros would work with my graphics card outside safe mode, even after debugging and official docs listing it as compatible with Ubuntu… Five lines in the nix config, will nix again)
All this time, I’ve seen countless mentions of this mythical debian… at this point I’m pretty sure it’s just a meme, like Australia. I get Australia, someone mispronounced Austria and made up this wild story of a land full of deer who hop on two legs and kickbox (hilarious), but I don’t get the joke with debian. Is it just supposed to be the mythical Linux that works on any hardware configuration?
Honestly I don't know. I just know that desktop environments and a lot of other packages have hard dependencies on Systemd, at least on Arch and Debian based systems. Those packages include: base, flatpak, polkit, xdg-desktop-portals, and vulkan-intel. So yeah, it's nearly impossible to not break anything.
None of the others are as deeply integrated into everything as systemd, they pretty much just handle starting things up so dropping in a replacement should be fairly straightforward. At least, it was until everything switched to systemd. Which is probably my biggest issue with it: that it integrates to the point you can’t replace it anymore.
Debian lets you switch and AFAIK it mostly works fine. They provide both sysvinit and runit as alternatives. Packages are only required to provide systemd units now, however a lot of core packages still provide sysvinit scripts, and Debian provides a package orphan-sysvinit-scripts that contains all the legacy sysvinit scripts that package maintianers have chosen to remove from their packages.
That’s just in the official repository, of course. Third-party repos can do whatever they want.
I think it would not actually be easy to test this. The massive combinations of hardware and software configurations in use out in the world make it nearly impossible to conclusively say one way or the other.
For instance consider the hypothetical of a service with a bug that increases its startup in certain circumstances. If Systemd triggered this bug and OpenRC didn’t because of some default setting in each, perhaps a timeout setting, would you say OpenRC is conclusively better at start up time? Not really, they just got lucky that their default bypassed someone elses bug. Just off the top of my head other things that would probably cause hell in comparisons are disk access speeds, RAM bottlenecks, network load, CPU and GPU temp and performance etc.
You can perhaps test for specific use cases and sets of services, but I think this is more useful for improving each init system than it is as a comparison between them.
Is boot time that much of an issue besides for arbitrary competitive reasons? I haven’t tried any optimizations and boot time on my headless server is less than two seconds.
It comes in handy for people who wants to run Linux on their notebook without being an engineer and look at Mac users with envy because of their “ready to work” time on their macbooks of 1-2 seconds after they open the lid.
Fun. You can dick around with your init scripts without having to worry about the right triggers or spawn classes or anything. Your system is hackable with bash. Systemd: here are a list of approved keywords, don’t insert that there, why are using cron when you can use me?
oh, you haven’t seen nothing yet. you know the lisp-y, hackable goodness you get in emacs? what if an init system was that hackable, and configured with a lisp? go give GNU shepherd a try.
It’s not systemd doing all the things completely unrelated to system initialization that it does that I have a problem with. It’s systemd doing them worse than the existing tools that do those things that the systemd equivalents replace and Lennart Poettering being completely unable to fathom why anyone would ever want to use any piece of software other than his. systemd talks big game about being modular, but makes breaking changes to how those modules communicate without warning anyone, so if you dare to be a “systemd hater” as he calls them and replace one of those modules with an equivalent he isn’t involved with, Heaven help you when he breaks the API of systemd that they hook into and the developers of your equivalent scramble to implement the binary protocol he thought up yesterday so that their alternative continues to work.
I don’t want software on my system that is managed like that. It’s the same reason I prefer Firefox over anything Chromium based.
Lennart Poettering being completely unable to fathom why anyone would ever want to use any piece of software other than his
What’s behind this? I’m sure it’s definitely not 100 % a single guy working on systemd, and tbh hating software because of the person who wrote it seems rather silly.
And what about those API changes you mentioned? Genuinely curious, I thought it always at least mentions them in release notes during betas.
It appears I was mistaken – systemd does announce changes to internal interfaces on their mailing list although I can’t be bothered to find out how much warning they give – but I believe my point stands. Regardless of whether he gives adequate warning, he’s still very much a dick about it (“gentoo users, this is your wakeup call”) and he still seems to be doing the embrace-extend-extinguish thing. It used to be possible to run systemd-logind without systemd – it no longer is – and that mail I just linked is about making udev hard dependent as well.
Of course Poettering does not do all the development himself, but he does lead the project and it is his hubris and inability to accept that one size does not fit all that is responsible for the project being as hostile to outside implementations as it is.
Again, it’s not the systemd project making alternatives to widely used applications and daemons (or even bringing development of those applications under the systemd umbrella) that I mind. It’s Poettering’s “my way or the highway” attitude and apparent belief that if your system is not either 0% systemd or 100% systemd then you do not deserve to have a system that works.
You can look up Lennart Poettering yourself, but he was also involved in PulseAudio which if you learned Linux in the 00’s might give you pause, and has had some minor beef with Linus Torvalds before. His Wikipedia page has something like 5 paragraphs for controversies and 2 for his actual career.
I think focusing on him is a mistake, but I also understand people who were still mad about PulseAudio latching on to him if they also had issues with Systemd. This article goes into some of it, but I can’t vouch fully for its accuracy. I will say that the dates of 2008 for PulseAudio’s release and 2012ish for when it became actually fairly functional lines up pretty roughly with my own memory, and systemd was released in 2010 and adopted by Arch and Debian in early 2012, so PulseAudio was barely fixed before the same developer started pushing Systemd, and succeeded in getting the normally very conservative Debian developers on board.
Borderline impossible if you aren’t using a distro designed with that in mind. Pretty much everything that isn’t a program you directly start (e.g. sound system, desktop environment, bluetooth daemon etc.) either only provide a systemd unit to start them (which you’ll have to manually translate into e.g. a shell script if you want it to work with your new init system) or is entirely reliant on systemd to function.
Your choices of distro if you don’t want systemd are Debian, Void, Artix, and Gentoo, and afaik that’s about it.
Replacing components of the systemd suite (e.g. using connman or networkmanager instead of systemd-networkd) isn’t actually that bad as long as your DE has support for them, but replacing systemd itself is something you are building your entire system around.
It still leaves sysvinit as an option. Debian doesn’t lock you into systemd. Heck, it doesn’t even lock you into Linux – you can use Debian on top of the FreeBSD kernel if you so desire
Systemd, as a replacement init system, is fine-ish. It’s sometimes slow and when it decides a service is lost there’s not much to do aside from killing the thing and restarting it.
Systemd, the full blown ecosystem that wants to replace literally everything by systemd-thesamethingasbeforebutfromscratch however, invites scepticism, especially when there are no particular flaws in the existing versions of things. DNS resolution, DHCP clients, NTP sync, etc. worked perfectly well.
From reading all of these comments, I think I have to agree. It seems like systemd as “the tool” is ok (I know there’s some argument there too), but systemd as the project and ecosystem seems to go a bit against the soul of GNU and Unix.
Use systemd if you want. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. There are certainly good reasons to use systemd, including, but not limited to, that it’s the default on most distros and you don’t want to mess with init systems. My only complaint is that too much software and documentation is written with the expectation that you have systemd for no good reason, which makes it harder to leave, which makes more people stick with it, which is an excuse to neglect support for other init systems even more.
You get a lot more transparency with the other init systems. Systemd is a big system that does lots of things and it’s not always possible to see everything it’s doing, because it’s doing a lot.
It also likes to hide things behind port redirections and binary storage of things that have always been text before so you pretty much have to use their tools to even read them
I assume there’s an advantage to the binary formats though. More efficient in terms of storage size? Easier to quickly search by a particular field even in huge files? Maybe something like that. (I genuinely don’t know)
I can actually understand what’s going on with other init systems. They’re basically just a list of stuff that gets run before you even log in. I do not understand everything that systemd does. I like understanding what my computer is doing. Most people don’t care about that, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but systemd is not what I want. I feel forced into using it anyway though, because it can be a lot of work to avoid it, and there’s no reason for that beyond the fact that not enough people care.
I get it. I’m in a small niche within a small niche. Nobody owes me an easy alternative to systemd. I’d still like one though.
Yeah. That was my point. It’s a self fulfilling cycle of people using it because it’s all that’s supported, and it being all that’s supported because people use it. I think that is a problem. That’s the same reason most software is for Windows. I don’t think that’s a good reason.
Agreed. Was just looking at Podman’s documentation the other day, and even though it’ll run on distributions without systemd, for a second I thought cgroups might not even work without systemd. Glad that’s not the case though, but I’m predicting a few problems down the road simply because I plan to use Alpine.
X11 is already dead, and it will not become more or less usable it will always stay the way it’s and wayland will gwt better. that’s the difference and flatpak is just an option it doesn’t try to replace what’s already availible. spreading distrust and miainformation about these softwares doesn’t help
How do you mean that? I’ve been using X11 for like 17 years. i3 uses X11, and I will most likely not use another WM if I can help it. It’s perfect for me. X11 is available in the core repositories of all the big distros.
Just because they don’t do full releases doesn’t mean it isn’t developed anymore. They switched to updating modules individually, with three updates made this month. Doesn’t sound very abandoned to me.
I actually used Sway for a while. Can’t remember why I switched back though. What would X11 “going end-of-life” entail? Not being distributed/packaged anymore? Is there an official timeline for that or something?
Essentially they’re not doing feature work on the core codebase. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but the packaging of it wouldn’t be up to the developers but the distro maintainers.
I’ll say that while it still has features that Wayland doesn’t it’s not dead, it doesn’t get updates yes but it still used by a lot of people for the fact that Wayland just doesn’t support some stuff that x11 does. Great example I have is TeamViewer and Nvidia+KDE
While TeamViewer is definitely neglected I use it often on Wayland and it works well actually!
In the past year or so it doesn’t shut down correctly. But the core functionality works well.
I’ve been experimenting with Rustdesk as an alternative because I doubt they’ll update the Linux client anytime soon. The Windows version looks like an entirely different application at this point
In terms of feature parity. I believe the only thing left is global hotkeys, which hyprland proved it can be done.
ARM compatibility is still shit. All actually useful desktop apps are still primarily x86-64, the compatibility layer Rosetta is hit or miss, everything is proprietary and expensive, and Apple decided the Pro model should only have 8GB for a shit ton of money. Apple is overpriced trash in the '20s.
Worth every penny IMO, MacOS is super nice and so is the hardware.
Putting all my legitimate Apple/MacOS concerns/arguments aside, how can you declare a product as “Worth every penny” when you yourself have not used it for an extensive period of time? Attempted to integrate it into your workflow?
This email should have stayed in Draft for a few hours and then come back to remove all the expletives. At least Mauro has something to hang on the wall of his crapper.
Colleague:
“I need to use Linux and my boyfriend suggested I use Ubuntu, is that right?”
Me (screaming internally, deciding on whether to rant on bloatware, on Canonical, on reproducibility, on monetization, on many things wrong with the world, but not wanting to come off as an elitist, nor scare her off the idea altogether):
“… that, that should be fine.”
I would say use Mint, I think nowadays that’s the better beginner distro. Actually it’s also kind of the pro-user distro. Fiddling around to tweak everything and get it just right is fun in your 20s, but when you need to work, have kids and a wife mint is fine 😛
I seriously can’t make sense of this meme… What is it trying to say? Why is the train smashing “Linux adoption”? It seems like this meme contradicts itself at every opportunity lol
I think the mangled English there is suggesting that some people don’t care enough, and other people have enough money (to buy Windows).
Not that it matters because who the fuck pays for Windows anyway? OEMs do, but not normal people. Everything since like Windows 7 has been a free upgrade, and normies get a new PC more often than that so get a copy with it.
There have been Linux distributions certified as Unix in the past.
When people say “Unix”, they usually could care less about certification.
I’d still say that BSDs are Unix and Linux isn’t due to, say, kernels of Solaris and FreeBSD having some traces of similar architecture, while Linux is a completely different thing.
Mainly because Windows has more support. Software availability is the biggest draw to Windows. I would quite happily drop it in a heartbeat if Linux came close.
MacOS has no proper UI scaling for example. Something windows had for… I don’t know, ever? It was never an issue for me.
For MacOS you need a little extra tool you stumble upon after hours of debugging that teels your MacOS what resolutions your display actually supports so MacOS grants you the option of your desired HiDPI resolution.
It’s stuff like this that drives me mad when dealing with the fucking Mac I am forced to use at work.
There is always going to be pros and cons when it comes to UI. Since Mac comes with a set size monitor, I can understand why there is little support for it. Although, as someone who needs PC glasses, it is a big remiss to not cater for disabilities.
As in my other comment, the display menu in settings has options titled more/less space which increase or decrease the size of text and windows on screen, this is accounted for.
I was talking with a sysadmin once who intentionally removed nano and emacs from any system he was granted access to. His explanation was “if they can’t use vim I don’t want them on my machines”
As a VIM user, I don’t want you using VIM on my system unless you know how to use it. I don’t want you borking fstab or the passwd file or some other important config because you don’t know how to quit without saving.
True fact. It’s one page of directions on the archwiki and the only place you have to deviate is in selecting bootloader and network. Not exactly a 5D rubix cube.
I find vim quicker and easier for quick edits too, mostly because I’ve not bothered to learn anything but vim since it’s on everything (except, for some odd reason, the default build of Gentoo)
Brilliant! I don’t entirely disagree with that. I had vim forced on me at my old job, including actual vi on some of the more ancient systems. I got so used to it that I don’t really know how to use nano and definitely not emacs.
I never understood what the big deal was. Write. Quit. If you can’t remember that ‘w’ means write and ‘q’ means quit, I don’t know how else to help. Add in some decent options in your vimrc and it is pretty comfortable. I am in no way some guru who knows every shortcut and fancy command out there, but I like using it and it is the first thing I install on a new system.
I am not one to judge what text editor, OS, phone, car, or computer you like. You do you. If I was a sysadmin that had to deal with people who really shouldn’t be on those systems and that was an easy way to discourage people from screwing with it, then hell yeah.
Knowing VIM does not make one a better sys-admin. You can be an idiot, and still know how to drive Vi/Vim. There is FAR FAR FAR more to managing an OS and than that. If you think requiring VIM is enough to keep unknowledgeable people away from servers, you are probably the one who shouldn’t be managing servers.
Here’s the one reason why I decided to learn Vim rather than emacs: You will find Vim installed somewhere on basically any Unix-like system running in the world. It’s the one I can virtually guarantee is there, as part of busybox if nothing else.
Except for Gentoo, for some odd reason they’ve never included it in the stage tarball so it always has to be installed manually
Which is even weirder when you realize it is included on the live install iso, so you’ll be using it up until you chroot and all of a sudden find it’s not available anymore
That’s a bit like…at one point during Linux Mint’s installation, it removes gparted. gparted is included in the Live environment, but not in the standard install.
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