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#501 Re: Installation » It's not just Wondows: apparently we have a problem » 2021-07-23 07:12:37

zapper wrote:

I really hope they don't have to go that far down just to learn a simple lesson.

TBH I don't think anyone is learning anything, at least as far as systemd development is concerned.
The katamari must roll on after all, how else are the devs going to keep their KPIs up?

I mean, everyone likes shiny new shit (especially shareholders and corporate sponsors), and we can just patch the bugs later, right? roll

Hell, in this day and age you don't even need a competent sysadmin (or distro maintainer) to test and deploy patches, you just sign up to Kaseya for all your cloud-based update ransomware management goodness...

All of this reminds me of a rather old adage, IIRC it had some wise words regarding eggs and baskets.

#502 Re: Installation » It's not just Wondows: apparently we have a problem » 2021-07-22 04:47:46

andyprough wrote:

Moral of the story - don't give rogue users direct access to your system.

...And if you must give untrusted users a shell, at least put sane limits on the system resources they can consume. There aren't many legitimate reasons an untrusted user process needs 5GB of RAM and a million inodes.

Dutch_Master wrote:

systemd

Funny you should mention that, as there's an example of the inevitable consequences of running such a large codebase as PID1 linked in that same Reg article.

Remember how us old-school *nix nerds said PID1 should be as simple as possible, since a crash there will bring the whole system down?

In some 20+ years I have never seen nor heard tell of an unprivileged process crashing sysv init, yet here we are again with systemd.
This one was at least patched quickly, but the core design fault isn't going away - on the contrary, systemd is getting fatter with every release and the potential attack surface just keeps on growing.

#503 Re: Off-topic » [SOLVED] Anyone with a 386 willing to satisfy a curiosity for me? » 2021-07-19 07:46:55

Here ya go. As I suspected the multiplier jumpers on this weird-ass IBM board do nothing at all, so 66 & 100MHz (in that order below) it will have to be.

                                    Results
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
       Test                                Seconds
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Floating Point Math                 4.015625 

 Integer Math                        4.1171875 

 Math IF/ELSE Logic                  3.8984375 

 String IF/ELSE Logic                3.3046875 

 String Select Case Logic            3.234375 

 Integer Array Sort                  3.1328125 

 Seq. Print Rate                     .8828125 

 Seq. Character Fill Rate            .65625 

 Rnd. Character Fill Rate            1.1015625 

 Rnd. Character FR, Rnd. Color       1.53125 

 Seq. Pixel Fill Rate                1.2109375 

 Seq. Pixel FR, Rnd. Color           6.703125 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Total Time: 33.7890625 
                                    Results
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
       Test                                Seconds
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Floating Point Math                 2.90625 

 Integer Math                        2.96875 

 Math IF/ELSE Logic                  2.6953125 

 String IF/ELSE Logic                2.3046875 

 String Select Case Logic            2.3046875 

 Integer Array Sort                  2.140625 

 Seq. Print Rate                     .765625 

 Seq. Character Fill Rate            .5 

 Rnd. Character Fill Rate            .7734375 

 Rnd. Character FR, Rnd. Color       .9765625 

 Seq. Pixel Fill Rate                .875 

 Seq. Pixel FR, Rnd. Color           4.671875 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Total Time: 23.8828125 

Not quite what I'd expect given the difference in clock, but it is what it is.

#504 Re: Devuan » Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot » 2021-07-18 13:41:18

blackhole wrote:

If you search the web for the advantages of UEFI, you will find a lot of hot air about a GUI using a mouse and of course "security". That latter claim is insane.

...And so is the former. Using a mouse in BIOS setup is a nightmare, and the very first thing I look for is an "advanced" or "classic" mode that is navigable with the keyboard.

blackhole wrote:

UEFI increases attack surfaces and introduces vectors which weren't there in legacy BIOS. For example: remote management / networked capability....

Don't forget auto-reinstalling the horrific ad-filled motherboard manufacturers shovelware. ASUS "Armoury Crate" springs to mind there, that thing is pretty much the modern take on a boot-sector virus.

#505 Re: Off-topic » [SOLVED] Anyone with a 386 willing to satisfy a curiosity for me? » 2021-07-18 07:09:53

I haven't forgotten about you Tatwi, I've just been a little distracted fighting the newfangled udev initrd madness in Debian Etch.
Now that I've given up and moved on to something far more appropriate (Slackware big_smile), yours is back on the agenda. Restoring DOS partition over FTP now, so it might even be... Soon(TM).

#506 Re: Devuan » Windows 11 will _enforce_ Secure Boot » 2021-07-16 11:31:36

zapper wrote:

some software that is being developed by people for linux, is meant to break freedom and force adoption by breaking backwards compatibility.  FSF/GNU doesn't seem to understand this is a huge threat

Of course it is. Just follow the money-trail, and you'll find the usual suspects with the usual motivations.
As for the FSF, it's kind of outside their mandate... And personally I don't think they have the balls for it.
Maybe we'll see a bigger, meaner brother to the anti-tivoization clause in the GPL one day, but I suspect such would be too much of a threat-to-revenue (again, the usual suspects are funding many projects) for anyone to actually use it. Even Linus rejected GPL3 over that one.

blackhole wrote:

While we're talking "beliefs" I have the firm conviction that the new Microsoft is far more dangerous to free software than the old.

Ahh, so somebody else sees this for what it is. Woot. tongue
Here I was thinking I was the only one with a feeling of creeping dread over the whole "Micro$oft/Google/Oracle etc. etc. loves Linux" thing... It smelled oh-so-fishy from day one, and IME leopards don't often change their spots so radically, least of all when there's fresh meat to be had.

Microsoft is Microsoft, and they're still in it for the money, nothing else. If making the last wild GNU bend over and get their kernel image signed waters the money-tree, that's what they'll do. Who's gonna stop them?

What irks me most is the number of people I know (some of them skilled and well-paid devs) who think WSL and all it's accompanying "embrace" bollocks is pure awesome sauce.
So many people drinking the convenience koolaid, and nobody asks why it's there in the first place. Dude, it's bait roll

blackhole wrote:

The root of of this evil is unfettered, bottomless greed and a super rich elite controlling 99% of the worlds wealth. Solve that and we can talk about details such as open hardware .

Yeah, that and 99% of the worlds other problems too.

I'm not anti-capitalist mind, but this has gone far too far for far too long, and the rot is deep. Personally I expect it'd take an apocalypse-level event (or that mass-uprising that'll never happen because everyone is so damn apathetic) to change it, at least in the "developed" world.
Hey, who knows, maybe this apocalypse-level anthropomorphic climate change thing we seem so hell bent on courting will do the trick?

I'm kinda blowing some of the dust off my old-tech low-level x86 foo at the moment, maybe It'll even come to hacking my BIOS and burning 'proms again to get around secure broken boot. That'd be proper full-circle that would. big_smile

#507 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Audacity and Musescore Spyware problem » 2021-07-16 06:52:00

brocashelm wrote:

Do you know what schizophrenia is?

Implying somebody you clearly don't know has a mental illness is... Kinda gross dude.
Please don't make claims like that unless you have some real evidence to back them up. Not only are such accusations irrelevant and useless, they're also exactly the kind of obnoxious comment commonly associated basement-dwelling sociopaths and alt-right wackos. We wouldn't want to think you're one of those, now would we?

Other than that, yeah. None of us have any real evidence either way...
So we should probably all shut up about it now lest we look like fools, no?

brocashelm wrote:

Even the Audacium developers admitted in an IRC conversation to borrowing code from Sneedacity for a commit.

Sure, that's how FOSS development is supposed to work. Projects nick code from each other all the time, and it's never implied that one or other was the "winner" before. When people share code everybody wins.

zapper wrote:

Given all people are created by the Lord.

I was with you right up until that little gem.
When questioning the beliefs and assumptions of others here, you might want to think twice about presenting your own beliefs and assumptions as fact. Just a suggestion.

The only "given" here so far is that audacity was forked, and several of those forks are now making progress. Everything else is noise or politics, and AFAICT there have been no code commits from deities at all.

All in all, if this thread is going to be nothing but mudslinging and petty tribalism (with a side of preaching), perhaps it's time it was closed?

#508 Re: Off-topic » [SOLVED] Anyone with a 386 willing to satisfy a curiosity for me? » 2021-07-14 05:33:04

Tatwi wrote:

results show that the emulators aren't entirely accurate (PCem Pentium 233MMX is 30% faster than my real Pentium 233MMX machine), so I'd like to get some accurate results from real hardware.

Those old boxes (particularly 486 and early Pentium) were extremely sensitive to motherboard chipset, bus speed, wait states, and cache and memory timings. IMO 30% variation isn't outside the realm of possibility, not knowing the exact system PCEM is targeting or the details of your benchmark.

Tatwi wrote:

That's a nice machine!

It sure is cute, and like most IBM hardware of the time it's built like a tank. Wish the BIOS had more (or more like _any_) configuration options though.
Documentation is pretty scarce too, and original software packages are apparently unobtainium as only the unicorn "no hard file" (HDD-less) models came with any install media.
Still, it can Doom, and it can Descent. Hell, it can even Fallout at a playable framerate, so that's a win.
One day I might even get around to seeing how well it can Warp, that being the only truly appropriate OS for an IBM 486 box and all.

Tatwi wrote:

Technically my first PC was a hand-me-down 486DX4 100 clone that I used for a bit in 1998. Getting it running taught me how to remove a Master Boot Sector virus, shortly after learning what a boot sector was!

Mine was a hand-me-down as well, a mighty 386 sx-16, with 4MB RAM, an 80MB HDD (what luxury!) and a hercules mono display.
It came with a copy of Borland Turbo Pascal, a couple of books... and an admonition to "not waste time with that awful language" (BASIC) tongue
As there was exactly zero entertainment available that would run on a Hercules MGA, the only option was writing my own, which I did with rather... mixed results. I still kinda miss the awesome compilation speed of turbo pascal, it put my current 5GHz Gentoo desktop to shame.

Tatwi wrote:

If you're able to down clock you 486 to 33MHz that would be great, but the results at 66MHz or 100MHz would be excellent as well, because I could compare them to my results from emulated systems (using PCem version 17)...

I can certainly get 66 and 100, 33 will be a bit more interesting. TBH I suspect many of the jumpers on this board are just for show, and the BIOS secretly does whatever it feels like on any given day.

Tatwi wrote:

Please don't feel obligated to help, especially if it means futzing with your hardware to do so. My burning curiosity is not that important. smile

Futzing with the hardware isn't a problem, that's kinda what the box is for. Just not today. Today is for installing Debian Etch, and yes, that will indeed take most of the day.

Now that I have a fully functional network stack I'll probably just FTP QBasic onto it, assuming running in FreeDOS won't bugger up the results.
I'll have a go sometime in the next couple of days, time permitting.

#509 Re: Off-topic » [SOLVED] Anyone with a 386 willing to satisfy a curiosity for me? » 2021-07-13 07:00:50

No 386 unfortunately, the oldest operational machine I have is an IBM PC 330 100-DX4 (AKA 6571-W5L).
Intel 486 DX4-100, 256k L2 (WT), 48MB 70ns FPM RAM, CL-GD5430 video (via VLB-PCI bridge).
I have a DX2-66 CPU I could drop in it for some extra slowness, and I could probably try underclocking it, if the IBM CrippleBIOS(TM) will let me of course.

It's running the latest FreeDOS, which I'm not overly keen to uproot, and the drive is a) FAT32 formatted, and b) a complete bastard to get at, so if you want such a data point you'll have to point me at a source for this QBasic whatsit. I was a Pascal nerd back when, so I never had need or desire to go near it.

#510 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Audacity and Musescore Spyware problem » 2021-07-09 18:45:10

brocashelm wrote:

It now has XDG support, which is essential from a technical point of view.

That's a nice start, but I'd hardly call it essential. Low-hanging fruit is what it is. (TBF that's more a dig at the audacity team for not dealing with it sooner).
Still, progress is progress, and progress is good. Shame it got buried under a torrent of noise and tired simpsons references, otherwise I might have noticed it sooner.

#511 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Audacity and Musescore Spyware problem » 2021-07-09 09:41:18

brocashelm wrote:

I think it's off to a solid start. Forks usually take a while to get the hang of, having just been launched.

Well, you do you and all that. I'll take sneedacity seriously when the volume of functional, constructive commits exceeds that of asinine juvenile memeing, "easter eggs", and changing the names of anything and everything to be as offensive as possible.
That kind of behaviour might fly on the 'chans, but it's a lousy way to run a software project.

brocashelm wrote:

Also, they have an IRC channel that's gaining traction.

...which is, unsurprisingly, full of the same.

mstrohm wrote:

I consider tenacity (https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity) the real fork.

Tenacity does indeed look more like a software project and less like a frat-party, but then activity on any of the forks is still largely just buggering about with documentation and naming.
Dealing with the trademark issues is a necessary evil, but it gives few real clues as to the committent, ability, or intent of the contributors. Any fool can shove a bunch of docs through sed.

Frankly I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, ya' know, the one that contains some technical merit. The politics and bickering is just a sideshow.
Right now what we have is several largely-unaltered copies of the original codebase, with varying levels of "hey look, I changed one line in README.md" contribution.

I'm sure one or other of the squabbling tribes will pull together (or even in vaguely the same direction) sooner or later, but as it stands the difference between sneedacity/tenacity/audacium/etc. etc. and me just pulling the audacity gpl code and patching out the the corporate insanity myself is effectively nil.

#512 Re: Off-topic » Presentation of LinuC » 2021-07-08 08:06:16

dice wrote:

Usually if a webpage has some html and css it will show even with noscript enabled, not sure why it doesnt for your website?

Because it's lazy-ass wordpress garbage, that's why. roll
It's also running a google-translate JS wrapper and doing a bunch of canvass fingerprinting (which my browser blocks), that's likely why it's so unbelievably slow.

@LinuxC, whoever wrote your website needs to be taken out behind the bikeshed and quietly shot. It's horrid.

#513 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Audacity and Musescore Spyware problem » 2021-07-08 04:20:52

brocashelm wrote:

Audacity has been officially forked. Its new name is Sneedacity

Personally I suggest waiting until the 4chan-powered clown-car pulls all the way out of the station before labelling anything "official".
While I do find both the name and the ongoing flamewar(s) somewhat amusing, right now picking out the competent developers from the trolls and small children is an exercise in futility. Time alone will tell which fork is in it for the long-game.

brocashelm wrote:

I'm also laughing my ass off at that "Cookie Engineer" kook crying over a poll

Arguing over a name is indeed funny, the doxxing and real-world harassment it lead to is not.

#514 Re: Documentation » HowTo - Install Ceres packages on a Beowulf system with Bedrock » 2021-07-08 04:13:19

While this is all very interesting, it does beg one obvious question... If the goal is to run "a few Ceres packages", why not just backport them locally?

#515 Re: Off-topic » Presentation of LinuC » 2021-07-08 04:05:36

LinuC wrote:

LinuC is back with a temporary html version

LOL, sure it is...

This site requires Javascript to work, please enable Javascript in your browser or use a browser with Javascript support

It also takes an age to load, even with javascript. I recommend you learn how to write HTML, you'll get better results.

In other news, please go away, and please desist from spamming this board with things nobody here is remotely interested in.

If at some point you decide to put some useful content on that website vapid blog, as opposed to the current religious claptrap, baseless accusations ("the LinuC website was attacked by Devuan hackers!", ROFL), and general paranoid rambling, I might have a look... But at this point it appears to contain nothing but drivel, vaporware, and a few links to distrowatch.

The door is just over there, and if this is all you have to share I suggest you use it post-haste.

#516 Re: Other Issues » How to get rid of Swap file during installation... » 2021-04-16 09:10:47

Sailor17 wrote:

Sorry for the google drive link. But it is to my personal folders. I don't want to open a "share picture account".

And I'm not going to open a google account just to view your log.
Pro tip: If you want people to spend their free time helping you, don't make it difficult for them. There are plenty of free no-signup imagehosts and pastebins.

Sailor17 wrote:

Or how to install devuan without that dam SWAP.

Pretty sure the netinstall iso still allows you to do that with manual partitioning.

Sailor17 wrote:

If this is going on, I will say goodbye linux and welcome windows. The actual development of linux is taking us back to the Middle Ages of Windos 3.

If that's your attitude, goodbye and good riddance.

Sailor17 wrote:

To my own surprise windows10 actually works fast, without any bad surprise under the hood.

If you like windows so much, nobody is preventing you from using it. vOv

#517 Re: Off-topic » Is this the future of Linux » 2021-04-09 20:22:51

Spock wrote:

after experimentation with bedrock and GUIX, I have come to the conclusion that they require so much of my time and energy that I just cannot afford to implement them

I came to much the same conclusion, and I run Gentoo on my desktop. tongue
There's effort, and then there's effort. Dealing with one packaging system at a time is enough for me.

#518 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Hard freeze on Cinnamon desktop » 2021-04-06 04:28:15

Micronaut wrote:

I'm at a loss how to 'fix' the problem

You and everyone else, unless you can gather more information on what is actually going wrong. Hence the suggestion to check logs and system responsiveness outside the GUI by dropping to a console or connecting over SSH when this happens.

#519 Re: Desktop and Multimedia » Hard freeze on Cinnamon desktop » 2021-04-05 19:50:03

Micronaut wrote:

I'll have to try Ctrl-Alt-F1 if it happens again. I hadn't heard of that hot-key combination.

On key combos, it might also be worth enabling magic sysrq (IIRC it's restricted by default), if all else fails that usually gets you a console (or at least a memory dump) so you can see what's going on.

But yeah, I'm with HoaS, I recon it's probably a video driver problem.

#520 Re: Off-topic » Is this the future of Linux » 2021-04-03 19:41:32

Spock wrote:

I tried it but sort of lost interest half way through. It's quite difficult to do.

Nah, it's a cakewalk these days. You should try LFS. tongue
Installing Gentoo just requires a bunch of patience and an ability to follow instructions... As well as a free afternoon and about 3 gallons of coffee.
Being comfortable doing everything from the CLI (including a web-browser/reading the wiki) sure helps though, I suspect the "GUI is optional and comes last" bit is what puts people off.

Spock wrote:

It is only now, after 4 or 5 years of trying to find an honest distro that I realise the full extent of the infiltration of the corporations into the organisation of linux based operating systems etc, and only in the last year or two just how devious they have been in doing that.

I've been suspicious of the goings on at many of the big "open source" organisations for a long time, but the full-scale red-alert sounded right about when Microsoft, of all organisations, started shovelling money at open source developers and claiming to "love Linux"... Leopards and spots and all that jazz.

Then there's the whole "open source inclusiveness" movement (not to mention the RMS controversy, which we're not allowed to discuss here for some reason), which looks lovely on the surface, but fair reeks of corporate image/social media manipulation and employee codes of conduct... *politics detected: aborting*

As for Google and Firefox, yeah. That one is a pretty bitter pill, since gecko is really the only remaining independent (i.e. not  chrome/blink/webengine) browser engine in the game right now.
I'll still support Mozilla, since Mozilla was so very good to us way back when Microsoft sunk nutscrape Netscape Navigator, and that was the only GUI browser on GNU/Linux. I miss pre-google KHTML/webkit too TBH.

Google will fund any browser that punts traffic their way of course, and Firefox is no exception, but it's concerning when that's near-enough the only thing keeping a project alive. Doubly so when Google is also the main competitor in the browser space.

Spock wrote:

sometimes I sit here in despair thinking what has been lost

All is by no means lost, and there will always be old-school distros of some kind... There's also the BSD escape-pod, that's still largely uncorrupted.
IMO the days of "it's FOSS, so it's all good, it's all run by volunteer hackers and you can chat with them on the mailinglist" are pretty much over though. One might just want to be a little more careful what software one uses and who one donates to.

Spock wrote:

since the Void maintainer (their main maintainer) died it hasnt been quite up to standard.

A shame that, Void is (or at least was, I haven't used it for many years) pretty dang cool and we need independent distros now more than ever. I don't have the time or the skill to stick my oar in in any meaningful way, but here's hoping people from the Void community will step up.

Spock wrote:

I'm here using Devuan as a refugee

Aren't we all?

I'm here because Gentoo is too maintenance-intensive to run on a server (like all rolling release distros), Debian has fallen to system-everything, and pretty much all the small distros are too niche to package the software I want.
When it comes to large repo + init system plumbing freedom + low maintenance + stable releases, Devuan is kinda the only game in town IMO.

#521 Re: Off-topic » Is this the future of Linux » 2021-04-03 16:45:55

Spock wrote:

I am just hoping that the non-systemd distros arent forced into submission by some means.

I don't think anyone can force them per-se, at least not yet. What will likely happen is that as more and more upstream projects are subsumed into systemd, the burden of maintaining them or writing alternatives will become a major problem.

That's one of the reasons I plug Gentoo pretty hard, they (by which I mean "we", it's still "we" with Gentoo) are actively forking, fixing, and maintaining upstream stuff to keep it working. Eudev and elogind are the most obvious examples, but Gentoo also led the charge with untangling gnome from systemd, among other things, and continues to do so.

As far as Devuan goes, I do love apt and the (old) Debian attitude, but I wonder how long we can keep things working without support from mainstream Debian. The team is small (and seems pretty remote TBH), and there's rather a lot that's going to need forking...

Spock wrote:

Debian has already gone under in my opinion.

Debian fell a long time ago, they've ceased to be a democracy (or a meritocracy), stopped listening to the users, and I expect the divide between "user" and "developer" is too wide now for that to change.

I've been in and out of the Debian community for several years, and the change there is pretty stark. Gone are most of the really knowledgable sysadmin types, and the "make linux popular"/"everything work OOTB"/"I just wanna click on stuff", CLI-phobic zoom-installing, "halp everything is borken" (AKA gnome didn't start), unwilling to learn help-vampires are proliferating like crazy.
The "You're crazy if you don't want systemd, systemd is the future" inquisition is out in full-force as well.
Admittedly systemd-free distros do tend to attract the odd conspiracy theory whackjob... but then what community doesn't have it's share of nutters... And as the man said, just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you. wink

Spock wrote:

I remember when the puritanism of the debian devs put me off

The "resist shiny new shit, don't fix it if it isn't broken" attitude and no non-free stuff by default policy were two major reasons I started running Debian to begin with (that and automation for headless machines). Then somebody fixed something that wasn't broken, split the community and the devs down the middle, and it all went to hell.
Now that Debian is squarely on the slippery slope, I expect we'll be seeing proprietary blob installation and snaps as an option in the installer soon as well.

Again, I'll plug Gentoo here - it's a magical land-of-olde where you can still openly argue with the developers on the forum (they are active on the forum) without fear of locks or bans, and becoming one of those developers yourself is just a matter of proving that you have the chops and the motivation.
I rejoined that community after over a decade away (pretty much when Debian fell), and it was delightful. All the same people doing the same stuff they were doing in 2003.
No "One-Linux" garbage, no arguments over how easy the installer isn't or how the CLI is obsolete, and no being dismissed as a nutter for trying to do something outside "the way". Real bright people with real advice that isn't the "just go with the flow, it's easier" attitude you seem to get everywhere else these days.
RTFM is still alive and well (and TFM is very good), as is "help me to help you". The facebook-generation help-vampires are non-existent, and the signal-to-noise ratio is still satisfyingly high.

Want to run without systemd? Ask a Gentoo user.
Don't like pulseaudio? Ask a Gentoo user.
Want to keep your split /usr setup? Hit up the Gentoo forum, we're arguing about it right now. tongue
Pining for a static /dev like the old days? Hey, you can do that on Gentoo as well.
No crapkit, no whatever-d? No problem (and probably no DE, but that's a preference). Just compile the system without it.

Spock wrote:

Are you aware of this absolute gem of a post
https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/8/12/459

I first read it long ago, when this "One-Linux" shitstorm was just getting started. I thought it was perhaps a little overexcited at the time (after all, surely intelligent people will see this for what it is and reject it), but looking back from ~6 years later all the predictions were spot on.

What we're dealing with now isn't some conspiracy theory or the ramblings of a revolutionary, it's reality. A reality where, in most large GNU/Linux distributions, "GNU" is being systematically replaced and the many small independent projects that used to make up the OS are being pushed to the curbside in favour of a few large all-consuming projects all developed by the same special few and funded by the same corporations.
A reality where devs are mythical, unapproachable beings who know what you want before you want it, and Linux is a "product" with an "image" and a social-media presence.

Systemd as init I could live with. Systemd as an optional init I would be happy with. Systemd the OS is another kettle of fish altogether.

It doesn't help one bit that those who are driving this are mostly holier-than-thou assholes either TBH, especially Lennart. You only have to read a few of his comments regarding Gentoo and Devuan to get the picture - we're all luddites and peasants, and the future is his way or the highway... But now I'm ranting, so I'll stop there.

#522 Re: Off-topic » systemd's new feature (wtf?) » 2021-04-02 22:01:19

dice wrote:

back in 2000 i was working at dhl using wyse terminals.

Back in 2000 I had rather more free time than I do now. wink I was also recovering from a very traumatic experience with RPM dependency hell and exploring a custom package management solution for LFS. Sadly that one was lost to the sands of time along with the hardware.

Spock wrote:

Am I wrong?

I doubt it. The truth will reveal itself soon enough, but it sure looks like a container system to me.

#523 Re: Off-topic » Is this the future of Linux » 2021-04-02 21:52:15

Spock wrote:

I happened to see a site for bedrock Linux, which is not, in and of itself, a distribution

Bedrock is kinda cool, but I'm far too attached to the old-school distro concept to pay too much attention to it... yet. Right now it's still a bit of an experiment IMO.

Spock wrote:

So my question is:
Is the future of linux going to be about choosing a base distro and adding on top of it features from other
distro's .

Perhaps. Personally I suspect that the "future of linux" (at least as far as the big players go) is that systemd + containers + snap/flatpack/appimage/whatever-silly-packaging-system-is-easy-for-proprietary-devs is going to take over. That's what corporate interests are pushing for, and many "open source" orgs are already thoroughly compromised.

Once this happens, a "distro" will just be cosmetic configuration on top of systemd + gnome. Big-tech will have successfully eliminated the independent maintainer, replaced all the critical GPL system infrastructure with LGPL systemd, and undermined Free Software to the point that the remaining old-school hackers will have to return to whatever holdout distros remain - which probably means Slackware, Gentoo, and maybe Devuan*... Or move to BSD.

Yes, it's a pessimistic prediction, and I do hope I'm wrong. It sure looks like "embrace, extend, extinguish" is in full swing though, and right now I'd say we're well into step 2. Even Microsoft has realised that they can't fight FLOSS directly, and they've been buying out projects and developers all over the place. Soon most of the important components of GNU/Linux will be open-source community efforts in name alone. It's not a bazaar any more if all the stalls are franchisees.

*Devuan is great and all, but we're still heavily dependent on upstream Debian... These days I don't trust the Debian devs to resist the smell of money any more than Redhat.

#524 Re: Off-topic » systemd's new feature (wtf?) » 2021-04-01 16:41:59

Altoid wrote:

For fuck's sake, does the shit never stop flowing?

Apparently not. At least not where corporate agendas are concerned, and shit always flows downhill.

fsmithred wrote:

This "new" implementation sounds like it might be a useful addition for a couple of specific cases.

By which we mean embedded systems integrators, which along with IBM, Microsoft, and the US military, is where the bulk of Redhat's funding is coming from at the moment.

dice wrote:

Ive only just discovered "immutable operating systems"

I was doing this sort of thing back in ~2000, when you could fit an entire GNU/Linux OS on a 1.44MB floppy disk. It's doesn't need to be complicated, it doesn't need containers, and it sure doesn't need systemd.
Of course you could do it with systemd + containers + whatever other bloated over-engineered garbage the shareholders are into at any given moment, but then you end up with something that's non-POSIX, non-portable, not even remotely Unix-like, and can't be reasoned about by a human sysadmin without 10 layers of abstraction and 30 management utilities... Not real surprising that's the approach the systemd devs are pushing, is it?

Then again. it could be a prank. If it is, it's a good one, because this is exactly the kind of "feature" I expect from the developers involved.

#525 Re: DIY » Minimalism Tips » 2021-03-26 08:30:20

andyprough wrote:

You should warn someone before sharing commands like that.

Or, someone should think before copy-pasting commands from a forum.

greenjeans wrote:
yad --calendar --undecorated --button=gtk-close:0 --skip-taskbar --borders=5 --posx=-1 --posy=-1 --width=300 --on-top

Bloat!

$ cal
     March 2021     
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    1  2  3  4  5  6
 7  8  9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31

See, I can play this silly game too tongue

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