The biggest problem with Linux is the glut of old / outdated information and a lack of good curated documentation on simple system maintenance things.
The arch wiki is okay, but it has too many cross links and way too much info on each article. Reading man pages can be a pain and finding out fixes to obscure issues with dmenu and systemd can both be fairly difficult.
Finally, the community answers the same questions so much the real experts get bored / annoyed with doing it and eventually give up.
Our best solution is to put out documentation reasonably often and make sure it’s notated what version of linux it’s for.
Throw in logrotate to keep things civil maybe? I’d be more worried about all the Canonical spyware in Ubuntu though? hmm, not sure.
For the past year my development work has been on Mac (all data gets back to my FreeNAS box), and my current iMac is on it’s 7th-year death bed. Chances are I’m moving to a mix of Win10/Fedora for the time being; or alternatively Win10 + my actual code running in a VM on my Dell PowerEdge.
The latter would involve running vim/VSCode/RubyMine etc on the Win10 side, but the code/files would be executed upon via the VM-hosted linux instance, and the data will sit on my FreeNAS server. Need to ponder this one further though.
special interests infiltrating and overtaking various packages/libs/kernel dev
it sucks but, forking is always an option. as mentioned above It comes with the corporate interest , drivers, better hardware support, more interoperability with other stuff, and commercial software comes at the price of the politics and shenanigans of big companies being involved.
Hardware accelerated video acceleration is still a crapshoot in browsers
if you have the right hardware you can get hardware accelerated video playback with only a few hoops to jump through, but a unified way of handling hardware accelerated video would be awesome, especially for laptops when it can save a good bit of battery.
IIRC some devs from ffmpeg/wayland might be working on it.
All the bloated “it just works” universal packages
Flatpak, Snap, appimage. seems overkill for the sake of convenience, might make devs lives easier, so supporting linux is less of a problem?
differential package updates
its a thing, but almost no one seems to be doing it. instead of downloading 99% of the same application when updating, only download the 1% thats different.
I think the death of fglrx was hilarious. AMD realizes they’ve been making shitty graphics drivers for linux for years, kind of give up, hand out some specs/documentations, and in like 6 months the open source drivers kicked the ever loving shit out of their drivers.
I had a 5850 at the time, IIRC despite the card supporting opengl 4 i think the fglrx driver only seemed to support opengl 2.4, when bioshock infinite came out it only seemed to run on nvidia cards. I installed the open source radeon drivers, supports opengl4, bioshock infinite ran fine, and all my other games ran about 50% faster.
They also come with security implications since the dependencies included aren’t updated with the regular system updates so you’re dependant on whoever maintains the image. It just imports the docker base image issues into the package manager.
The more I think about it the more it just sounds like we’re heading back to the Win95 days, minus, hopefully, dll/rpm-hell, but with all the bloat of everything including varying versions everything, and the kitchen sink.
The whole things just seems like a pointless endeavour that solely caters to proprietary software. I really see no good reasons to use these for FLOSS software.
IMO the problem is the bloated and fragile machinery for generating and updating grub configurations.
I suggest taking control, by installing grub independent of any particular distro, in its own partition or subvolume, and editing by hand your own minimal grub.cfg. A working grub.cfg needs only a dozen lines, using labels and symbolic links to the kernels. Keep grubby hands off your boot by not mounting /boot/efi normally (“noauto” in /etc/fstab).
I’ve done this for over a decade on my main system, with far less trouble than I had before.
I might use systemd-boot if it supported iso booting, which I do a lot sometimes.
I’ve busted grub several times. Fixing it has been terrible. However, grub presents an interface through a rescue disk and commands to resolve busted conditions.
Additionally, I’ve busted systems with no root because grub.
Respect to grub as a sysadmin for keeping prod systems up.
EDIT
Despite the pain I’ve faced… God Bless the GNU GRand Unified Bootloader, despite the struggles we’ve seen.
Actually, it’s more like signing up for a job as a security guard at a warehouse, then after a few months breaking the locks and then going public saying “Hey, it’s so easy to break-in!”
UMN built-up trust with the kernel devs, then a few security researchers exploited and destroyed that UMN trust.
BTW, would you still say that EXT4 is better than NTFS? I’ve seen someone who hated EXT4 so much because of this that they preferred NTFS. Personally, I have no problem with EXT4; but maybe it’s because I do not know much about it. At any rate, I love LVM.
EXT4 is actually better for SSDs, because of the reserved 2.5% - you never want to fill your SSDs completely, as that leads to quick degradation of the SSD hardware.
As for most metrics, Ext4 is the better file system; better search, longer file paths, more files allowed, and so on. And should it prove insufficient someday in the far future, Ext5 most certainly will not be.
Furthermore, Ext4 has file permissions per-file level and native symlinks, both features NTFS still does not have. The only reason you want to run an NTFS drive over Ext4, pretty much, is if you want to share data locally between your Windows and Linux OSes, at which point NTFS is a great fit. So, for USB drives and other external drives, NTFS is the way to go, for everything else including network shares, go Ext4.
Oh yeah, what do you guys think of Flatpak and Snap? Personally, I don’t know much about them.
However, in general I try to avoid using them. I prefer using the repositories. I will even go out of my way to avoid compiling apps if I can because of how much I prefer the repositories; so it’s actually nothing personal aginst them. On Arch Linux, this is not a problem. The Arch Repositories are possibly the largest software repositories in the world - and that’s before considering the AUR. Yet as for Ubuntu and Debian I occasionally find myself using Flatpack. Sometimes, though this is for games like OpenRA or Warzone2100. There are inherent advantages to using the Flatpak for those games, even on Arch Linux. I choose Flatpak over snap, however, because I think that I know that it is a better implementation than Snaps are. To my understanding Flatpaks are similar to Appimages, but Snaps use proprietary backend technology and are bloated. Plus I also just do it to spite Canonical a little bit for trying to force Snaps on Ubuntu users. And generally, in my experience the Snaps aren’t as well maintained as Flatpaks. I have used a Snap once though, and that is to get the latest version of Certbot on my Debian Linode.
I see repositories as a convenience. I just find the name of the software I want, and I download it. And it updates with the rest of my system seamlessly. For the most part, I haven’t got to worry about software breakage unless I configure the package manager or a tool that the package manager uses wrong. To me, Snaps and Flatpaks are inherently less convenient. They just one more thing to make sure you keep up to date because their software doesn’t stay up to date when you run your package manager. The only exception I have ever given to this, is JetBrains Toolbox. But that’s because this convenience is built right into the Appimage. Plus, with the custom-bundled Java Runtime, it shouldn’t (and hasn’t) negatively affected the rest of my system.
If you are on a fixed release like the Ubuntus and Debians, and want the latest and greatest, flatpak and snap could bridge the new and the stable.
I really dont want to fault Canonical for pushing snaps. I mean they did develop it, it makes no sense to not push your own products vs the competition. At least they do community outreach better than flatpaks (but I do love flatpaks more).
Since I am on a rolling distro, I dont really have a use for them unless my repo doesnt have their particular set of software…
That was supposed to be Spotify but because of their weird shenanigans, I’ve stopped subscribing to them… Maybe I should try Deezer or something…
Encouraging users to do a particular behavior. Heck, I wouldn’t even mind if it had an opt-in functionality in setup with the ability to change your mind later. But no, Ubuntu just pushes snaps into its default installation. That’s the problem
It is opt-in by you choosing Ubuntu. It’s one of the main drivers as to why there’s so many Linux distro’s everyone’s got a preference of the default packages. However as a user you always have the freedom to just modify it as you see fit.
grub is not bad in itself and is a step in the os boot process
If you are the administrator you can configure grub and or make changes in grub configuration files any time you want, as in choosing which os to boot in a multi-boot scenario
If you don’t have admin access you can still choose the os you want to boot but you have to pay attention to the boot screen when the grub menu comes up.
It also allows you to boot into a safe or troubleshooting mode so you can review and or repair a configuration fault.
If you use one of the many iso re-spin programs you can build the os anyway you want, Including choosing the boot-loader of your choice
