In a certain light, you could argue that Linus doesn’t really have any control at all. He doesn’t write any code for Linux (hasn’t in many years), doesn’t do any real planning or commanding or managing. “All” he does is coordinate merges and maintain his own personal git branch. (And he’s not alone in that: a lot of people maintain their own Linux branches). He has literally no formal authority at all in Linux development.
It just so happens that, by a very large margin, his own personal git branch is the most popular and trusted in the world. People trust his judgment for what goes in and doesn’t go in.
It’s not like Linux development is stopped because Linus goes offline (or goes on vacation or whatever). People keep writing code and discussing and testing and whatnot. It’s just that without Linus’s discerning eye casting judgment on their work, it doesn’t enter the mainstream.
Nothing will really get slowed down. Whether something officially gets labelled by Linus as “6.8” or “6.whatever” doesn’t really matter in the big picture of Linux development.
The stat command is using statx, which gives you a slightly different struct. statx is the cool new Linux-only system call for stat-ing. Not every filesystem will support the new btime field. (And, as you correctly say, many of those time fields are wrong, anyway)
I’m going to reframe the question as “Are computers good for someone tech illiterate?”
I think the answer is “yes, if you have someone that can help you”.
The problem with proprietary systems like Windows or OS X is that that “someone” is a large corporation. And, in fairness, they generally do a good job of looking after tech illiterate people. They ensure that their users don’t have to worry about how to do updates, or figure out what browser they should be using, or what have you.
But (and it’s a big but) they don’t actually care about you. Their interest making sure you have a good experience ends at a dollar sign. If they think what’s best for you is to show you ads and spy on you, that’s what they’ll do. And you’re in a tricky position with them because you kind of have to trust them.
So with Linux you don’t have a corporation looking after you. You do have a community (like this one) to some degree, but there’s a limit to how much we can help you. We’re not there on your computer with you (thankfully, for your privacy’s sake), so to a large degree, you are kind of on your own.
But Linux actually works very well if you have a trusted friend/partner/child/sibling/whoever who can help you out now and then. If you’ve got someone to help you out with it, Linux can actually work very very well for tech illiterate people. The general experience of browsing around, editing documents, editing photos, etc., works very much the same way as it does on Windows or OS X. You will probably be able to do all that without help.
But you might not know which software is best for editing photos. Or you might need help with a specific task (like getting a printer set up) and having someone to fall back on will give you much better experience.
I think for most people they won’t care either way.
Some people do legitimately occasionally need to poke around in GRUB before loading the kernel. Setting up certain kernel parameters or looking for something on the filesystem or something like that. For those people, booting directly into the kernel means your ability to “poke around” is now limited by how nice your motherboard’s firmware is. But even for those people, they should always at least have the option of setting up a 2-stage boot.
The principled “old” way of adding fancy features to your filesystem was through block-level technologies, like LVM and LUKS. Both of those are filesystem-agnostic, meaning you can use them with any filesystem. They just act as block devices, and you can put any filesystem on top of them.
You want to be able to dynamically grow and shrink partitions without moving them around? LVM has you covered! You want to do RAID? mdadm has you covered! You want to do encryption? LUKS has you covered? You want snapshotting? Uh, well…technically LVM can do that…it’s kind of awkward to manage, though.
Anyway, the point is, all of them can be mixed and matched in any configuration you want. You want a RAID6 where one device is encrypted split up into an ext4 and two XFS partitions where one of the XFS partitions is in RAID10 with another drive for some stupid reason? Do it up, man. Nothing stopping you.
For some reason (I’m actually not sure of the reason), this stagnated. Red Hat’s Strata project has tried to continue pushing in this direction, kind of, but in general, I guess developers just didn’t find this kind of work that sexy. I mentioned LVM can do snapshotting "kind of awkward"ly. Nobody’s done it in as sexy and easy way to do as the cool new COWs.
So, ZFS was an absolute bombshell when it landed in the mid 2000s. It did everything LVM did, but way way way better. It did everything mdadm did, but way way way better. It did everything XFS did, but way way way better. Okay it didn’t do LUKS stuff (yet), but that was promised to be coming. It was Copy-On-Write and B-tree-everywhere. It did everything that (almost) every other block-level and filesystem previously made had ever done, but better. It was just…the best. And it shit all over that block-layer stuff.
But…well…it needed a lot of RAM, and it was licensed in a way such that Linux couldn’t get it right away, and when it did get ZFS support, it wasn’t like native in-the-kernel kind of stuff that people were used to.
But it was so good that it inspired other people to copy it. They looked at ZFS and said “hey why don’t we throw away all this block-level layered stuff? Why don’t we just do every possible thing in one filesystem?”.
And so BtrFS was born. (I don’t know why it’s pronounced “butter” either).
And now we have bcachefs, too.
What’s the difference between them all? Honestly mostly licensing, developer energy, and maturity. ZFS has been around for ages and is the most mature. bcachefs is brand spanking new. BtrFS is in the middle. Technically speaking, all of them either do each other’s features or have each other’s features on their TODO list. LUKS in particular is still very commonly used because encryption is still missing in most (all?) of them, but will be done eventually.
Those instructions are from the official docs, and install.sh comes from the source repo. It’s an annoying script (it basically runs apt, npm, make, on your behalf…thanks, I can do that myself), but if you’re trusting the repo source to begin with, I don’t think it’s any less secure.
As @BCsven mentioned, the talk about stable distributions is not right at all.
Also, the commands you gave in “secure directories and dotfiles” are not doing anything. sudo chmod 755 ~/.bashrc doesn’t change the ownership of the file: it’s still owned by you. So setting the permissions 755 just makes it writeable by…you. You will still be able to modify it without sudo.
If you want to make your dotfile require root access to change, you would need to augment the chmod with a sudo chown root ~/.bashrc
Subscribed! My daughter is super into beavers. Though I don’t want to get into a conversation about what “fucking” means yet, so maybe I’ll be selective which posts I show her.
The last chip was manufactured 3.5 years ago and the last serious user was probably several years before that. Obviously no one’s running Itanium with modern hardware.
But just because the hardware isn’t modern, doesn’t mean the software can’t be modern. Tonnes of people run the most recent Linux kernels on 15 year-old laptops, so why not 10 year-old servers? Itanium is only for the hobbyists these days, but so what? Hobbyists have done a good job of ensuring modern Linux can run on 40 year-old 68k. Itanium can theoretically be done, too. It’s just a question of whether the hobbyist community has enough of the right people that can actually maintain it.