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Has Microsoft set a new precedent that it's okay to..[suck]

It's definitely not a new precedent (people have tolerated that kind of nonsense on their videogame consoles, phones, video players, etc. and except for geeks, I haven't heard a lot of outcry.

Regardless of newness, the question of whether or not it's ok, depends on who you are and what your expectations are. Do you have one of these?

Obviously if you are a rational user without a lot of self-loathing and lack of dignity, then you'll at least implicitly have something like that. (Make my day, anyone: disagree with the previous sentence.)

Perhaps the time has come, for it to be less implicit. And that's up to you: you have to demand it.

Or alternatively, accept that we're in a post-social-contract society, whereby your own computer being your adversary is almost certainly one of the least of your problems. (But if you're that far out into nihilism, I don't know why we're still talking to each other. Enjoy your Crapple iProducts.)

Torrent link ;)

However, I used UNIX through a borrowed CSUF's remote shell account before I even went to college with dial-up modems. I used mostly to FTP (e.g., ftp.cdrom.com) and Z-modem (still use this old school BBS' file transfer protocol!). After I started going to college, then I learned about Linux in c(lass/ours)es and from (nerd/geek)s. They were mostly on their local machines (labs) and still remotely (mostly dial-up). And then, I finally installed Red Hat (RH) Linux (v5?) on my own box (dual boot with Windows) after I graduated. I kept using RH until v7.2(?) since v8 sucked until Mouse(y) told me about Debian which I still use today. :)

On the other hand, I keep hearing that systems administrators who use cloud services and are thus "administering" umpty-hojillions of "machines" enjoy systemd because reasons, but I never see a citation for that, either.

"Spotify", the music streaming service directly voiced their support for systemd on the Debian mailing list when they discussed switching to systemd.
https://lists.debian.org/debia...
Spotify have doubled the number of paying customers to 20 million (75 million users in total) since then.

Pantheon were running 500.000 systemd units in 2013:
https://pantheon.io/blog/panth...

Here is how they used systemd to patch Heartbleed without rebooting (they were running 5000 nginx instances on one box):
https://pantheon.io/blog/how-w...

And for people who don't follow every distribution's MLs, systemd sort of snuck up on us. We didn't imagine that debian would convert to systemd, for fuck's sake. Statistically nobody even imagined that until it was happening. Who would have ever thought that the one time Debian moved quickly on something, it would be something contentious?

Debian was an early systemd adopter, it just wasn't the default init-system.

I think it was pretty clear that SysVinit was dead years ago (last I looked they haven't released for 5 years, probably because the developers doesn't even have a build and test system, so only way to test a patch is to boot with it. RH and later Debian had been defacto Upstream for SysVinit for years).

Upstart was never going to be an option for Debian as long as Canonical insisted on the CLA. This left systemd as the only serious and mature init-system and Debian developers had long worked towards it being the new default init-system when some people suddenly started to make noise about it, which lead to the CTTE decision, which lead to the GR that showed how overwhelming the systemd support was among Debian Developers.

The point is that Debian had long been on its way to become a systemd distro, what the Debian Developers decided on the GR was to keep status quo and continue to work towards systemd. It was never a sudden decision, it had been years in the making.

This seems to say more than what you think were the reasons for adoption. https://wiki.debian.org/Debate...

systemd is in the stable release of Debian. That's why it's such a problem and why so many people are complaining about it!

From https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/:

Debian 8.1 was released June 6th, 2015. Debian 8.0 was initially released on April 26th, 2015.

From the Debian 8 release notes at https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/amd64/release-notes/ch-whats-new.en.html#systemd:

Introduced in Debian 7, systemd is now the default init system.

Remember, the stable releases of Debian have traditionally not just been stable, but they've been ultra reliable, to the point of even being somewhat outdated they're so robust and unwilling to include anything that hasn't been thoroughly tested.

systemd is in the stable release of Debian. That's why it's such a problem and why so many people are complaining about it!

From https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/:

Debian 8.1 was released June 6th, 2015. Debian 8.0 was initially released on April 26th, 2015.

From the Debian 8 release notes at https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/amd64/release-notes/ch-whats-new.en.html#systemd:

Introduced in Debian 7, systemd is now the default init system.

Remember, the stable releases of Debian have traditionally not just been stable, but they've been ultra reliable, to the point of even being somewhat outdated they're so robust and unwilling to include anything that hasn't been thoroughly tested.

Go here or here or here or here.

All have excellent upgrades available to any version of Windows.

Your trinity is entirely correct, so what is the business case for open source software? Clearly there is one: even Microsoft is getting in on the game.

Your examples of Linux software are a bit off base. In Debian's most popular packages, you have to go down to #259 to get to x11-common, and the first actual graphical program (iceweasel) comes in at #657. I understand that you're a desktop user and your business involves selling desktops, but I do wish that you would get past your myopic focus. Linux is a server OS, a development platform, an embedded and supercomputing platform, and while it can be used as a Desktop OS, there's really not much business interest in that.

I think you must be unaware that the majority of software is written to save money, not to make money. There's also a huge hidden cost to software: it doesn't exist in a vacuum. "Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained." The cost of maintaining software for which you don't have the source code tends to be "finitely large".

You're correct in what you say, up until you identify it as a flaw. Yes, it probably keeps Linux off the desktop. I'm sure that Mark Shuttleworth cries himself to sleep over that, but I'm sure Linus couldn't give a shit, and neither do the rest of the companies which have invested untold billions of dollars worth of developer time into the Linux ecosystem.

And yet they still support POWER. Odd.

https://www.debian.org/ports/p...

It's not odd at all.

It's dead Jim.

That's the debian verdict. Oracle may have other ideas, but if drinking that koolaid, caution is advised.

And yet they still support POWER. Odd.

https://www.debian.org/ports/p...

Tried in RFP 611660, did not went well so far https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...
Here is a debian/ packaging setup ready for Tomb, contributed by maintainers of the Freepto distro https://github.com/AvANa-BBS/T...
Arch has a package since long already.

From your website, I see that "make install" only installs two files, the executable and the manpage, but I prefer keeping my $PATH mostly filled with applications I can update with my package manager.

Assuming you use Debian or some derivative, you should consider using checkinstall, then. It tracks the install and then creates a .deb out of it that can be handled with the package manager for easy cleanup if you later uninstall.

Literally the first few words say they released it yesterday.

The project has been around for some years [looks through his records]. The oldest entry reference I have is to a post in a wishlist bug report dated 31 Jan 2011. Tomb was at 0.9.0 then. (I never did work out what Jaromil actually wanted - advertising?)

That's why its usage has dropped like a rock.

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gnome-shell
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xfce4

The Debian popcon statistics show a quite significant rise in popularity over the last couple of years. Not sure why the graph shows a dip at the very end though. Pretty much all packages have that dip from what it it looks like, vim, linux kernel etc. so that's probably just a data glitch.

That's why its usage has dropped like a rock.

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gnome-shell
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xfce4

The Debian popcon statistics show a quite significant rise in popularity over the last couple of years. Not sure why the graph shows a dip at the very end though. Pretty much all packages have that dip from what it it looks like, vim, linux kernel etc. so that's probably just a data glitch.

Unless you're running on sid you're fine: https://security-tracker.debia...

According to that page testing (stretch) is also vulnerable, and a few people might actually use that.

> https://packages.debian.org/je... is 31.x here and afaik built on the latest ESR release. you're using backports, that's a different deal (like ubuntu PPAs).

Apropos of what? I run the same version Iceweasel on oldstable, stable, testing and unstable. Identical features, functionality, and extension support - the difference is the external libraries they use.

And iirc backports have no guarantee for security patches, but just ship the new version (with new fixes and new bugs)

Guarantee no - at least not for ever (nor did I say there was). Security patches are provided on the basis of the version number - not whether it's a backport or not (see glandium.org, the debian security list and the sources I've provided previously for up-to-date details). Backports are different only in that they work with older (in this case oldstable) libraries.

If you want to get security patches for version Monsieur Hommey and crew no longer support (currently pre-3.5) it's not hard, just do the following and adjust until the error messages vanish:-

apt-get source iceweasel
# Install its build dependencies
apt-get build-dep iceweasel
#Build it
cd iceweasel-*
PRODUCT_NAME=firefox dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

For more information please re-read.

> https://packages.debian.org/je...
is 31.x here and afaik built on the latest ESR release. you're using backports, that's a different deal (like ubuntu PPAs).
And iirc backports have no guarantee for security patches, but just ship the new version (with new fixes and new bugs)

iceweasel is an older firefox and ESR release, currently both is an advantage

Actually Iceweasel is available in the same versioning as Firefox - the difference is that the Debian packagers backport security patches to older versions. i.e. I'm running v39.0 (39.0-1~bpo70+1 on Wheezy as I type)

If I chose the default version that comes with oldoldstable (squeeze) I'd be running 3.5.16-20.

Every release from oldoldstable to testing can make use of various releases. All releases except the latest get security patches backported - so if you don't like new features you can keep the older version without sacrificing security. (Thanks Monsieur Hommey and others)

iceweasel is an older firefox and ESR release, currently both is an advantage

Actually Iceweasel is available in the same versioning as Firefox - the difference is that the Debian packagers backport security patches to older versions. i.e. I'm running v39.0 (39.0-1~bpo70+1 on Wheezy as I type)

If I chose the default version that comes with oldoldstable (squeeze) I'd be running 3.5.16-20.

Every release from oldoldstable to testing can make use of various releases. All releases except the latest get security patches backported - so if you don't like new features you can keep the older version without sacrificing security. (Thanks Monsieur Hommey and others)

But you do have to be smarter than the average corporate drone.

http://www.debian.org/
http://www.linux.org/

I decided to take some more time to investigate this.

It turns out I'm a victim of this bug:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...

Sometimes (not always) the VPN /64 ends up assigned to the wrong interface on the client - leading to traffic apparently being sent out on the wrong interface for the source address that is supplied.

This gets doubly confusing because the source address is chosen based on the interface it _should_ be routed through. So if my route to 2001:db8:1:3::99 should be via the wifi interface then it will pick 2001:db8:1:2::20 as the source address even if you tell ping6 to use the LAN interface instead.

And you can have one client successfully connected via the VPN and all is well. Another client connects, radvd starts advertising via the wrong interface and suddenly the working client acquires another /64 on the wlan interface and stops working when it starts picking a different source address. Grrr. Oh well. At least I know what is wrong now.

I _think_ restarting radvd fixes the problem - so a quick fix might be to bounce radvd every time an interface comes up (and possibly goes down too)

JavaScript is not particularly slow or big compared to Java or Python - those complaints are largely a thing of the past.

V8 is from Google, but Google didn't invent JavaScript.

JavaScript is not particularly slow or big compared to Java or Python - those complaints are largely a thing of the past.

V8 is from Google, but Google didn't invent JavaScript.

Debian donations information page, for your reference:

https://www.debian.org/donatio...

Apparently not everything that Linux runs on:

http://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=mono&suite=sid

There are three compilers for Go, one based on the Plan 9 stuff, one a GCC front end, and one an LLVM front end. True, none of them use header files, but this is really something that doesn't affect C-family languages if you use precompiled headers. The Plan 9 implementation is fast because it does a tiny subset of the optimisations that GCC or LLVM would do.

This really isn't true. Watch the video I linked. Despite your claim today gccgo is slower than gc in compiled performance. Indeed Go 1.4 has begun to approach Java in microbenchmarks. Most of the C++ slowness comes from the amount of data the compiler has to process due to header files. The reason for this slowness is a well known thing. Try GCC's precompiled headers and be blown away by the difference.

As far as mutability goes, it is extremely easy to enforce... just use an interface. I mean being a clojure programmer I understand your objection, but its never really seemed that much of a problem to me.

An properly licensed opensource casino video game was
recently posted to the debian bug tracker as a request
for packaging, as is the standard method for pursuing
such things in debian.

The bug was quickly closed, tagged as "won't fix"
The reason given by one of the debian developers
alluded to the authors conservative views and his
advocacy of them:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...

The piece of software in question is licensed
under the GPL and is one of the only of it's
kind for linux (ascii-art console slot machine software)

Is professing progressive politics now a hard requirement
for being allowed to contribute to opensource?

Other links (FOSS software removed by SJWs, and rejected for non-SJW compliance)

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1310

http://whatwillweuse.com/fodde...

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...

something leaner and meaner, focused militantly on privacy and even going so far as to deliberately not support portions of HTML5 (e.g. DRM).

Pretty close to what Chromium is.

It stripped AAC, Flash, and other patent-encumbered parts.

I had hope for the dillo minimal browser, but not supporting javascript is getting pretty tough with many websites these days. Also hopeful that IceWeasel becomes the sane alternative if the Mozilla guys go crazy like this.

I am not saying JavaScript can't perform in some specific scenarios. Just like C isn't always fast (code can be badly written in any language). But globally, JavaScript isn't known as a performance language, unlike say C, C++, Fortran and of course assembly.
Also, according to these benchmarks, JavaScript is much slower than C: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.d...

Does it also download files to your TV without asking you for consent?

Like the Firefox webbrowser does ("libgmpopenh264.so"):

On first start, Firefox downloads the "OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems, Inc." plugin (which is a binary blob) and enables it automatically. This happens without asking the user for consent.

There is another class/type of software that also downloads and installs programs/libraries to your computer without asking the user for consent. You know what that is?

Malware and computer viruses.

Sysvinit [is] simply inadequate.... The model of fork and exit without clear synchronization points is inherently racy, the boot model encoded into sysvinit doesn't reflect a modern system boot, and maintaining large and complex init scripts as conffiles has been painful for years. Nearly every init script, including the ones in my own packages, have various edge-case bugs or problems because it's very hard to write robust service startup in shell, even with the excellent helper programs and shell libraries that Debian has available. A quick perusal of /etc/init.d/skeleton and the complex case statements and careful attention to status codes required for a proper init script makes this case clear.

perfectly

For idiotic values of perfectly.

Just one of many threads being discussed :
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...

A KDE discussion :
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug....

https://wiki.debian.org/system...

For the use case you have set forth, an Android stick would be a better deal.

If you crack one open though, how easy would it be to wire up additional hardware? The CHIP has 8 GPIOs, SPI, TWI, and UART on headers.

What about using one to create a portable device? The CHIP has a battery power and charging circuit already on board.

OS's that aren't as full featured.

The CHIP runs Debian.

runs a version of Debian.

What does that mean? From the official Debian wiki:

Porting to new platforms

Unlike x86, each and every arm platform boots in a slightly different way. Thus, most of work of getting Debian running will involve dealing with bootloader and Kernel. Which is not really debian-specific work. After that, people can start working porting debian-installer for the system in question.

Something tells me that we have another weirdo ARM board with its own "Debian" distro, joining the disarray ranks of dozen others: poorly supported, barely maintained, and soon forgotten.

Considering the total amount of effort invested (and wasted) by developers into building the custom distros, I'm surprised (and disappointed) that nobody has actually stepped up, organized and standardized booting/etc on the ARM SoC yet. (IMO ARM Ltd itself should have done that a decade ago, since IMO it is one of the major roadblocks to the broader adoption of the ARM.)

Did you understand that you compare a file manager based on a web browser to a login deamon???

Anyway systemd-logind uses the systemd API and Konqeror uses the KDE API (many of them actually) and Qt API. What's the problem? The dependency on the respective API is no more or less on the two example. Also, the two applications rely on D-bus and so indirectly depend on the services there expect to use on D-bus.

https://packages.debian.org/je...

The Gnome 3 windowing issues have nothing related to systemd architecture (and I personally prefer XFCE or MATE).

The fact that the initscripts package depend on sysv-rc package was true since squeeze and unfortunately for your claim, systemd is packaged into Debian only since wheezy, about two years later.

https://packages.debian.org/sq...
https://packages.debian.org/wh...

The cause was due to an other player: https://packages.debian.org/sq... Before upstart the order of the dependency was not important. The error in the order was only evident when the new player 'upstart' was able to replace sysvinit (unlike file-rc).

The fact that the initscripts package depend on sysv-rc package was true since squeeze and unfortunately for your claim, systemd is packaged into Debian only since wheezy, about two years later.

https://packages.debian.org/sq...
https://packages.debian.org/wh...

The cause was due to an other player: https://packages.debian.org/sq... Before upstart the order of the dependency was not important. The error in the order was only evident when the new player 'upstart' was able to replace sysvinit (unlike file-rc).

The fact that the initscripts package depend on sysv-rc package was true since squeeze and unfortunately for your claim, systemd is packaged into Debian only since wheezy, about two years later.

https://packages.debian.org/sq...
https://packages.debian.org/wh...

The cause was due to an other player: https://packages.debian.org/sq... Before upstart the order of the dependency was not important. The error in the order was only evident when the new player 'upstart' was able to replace sysvinit (unlike file-rc).

No, this is really initscripts that depend on something to make your machine boot. This other thing can be sysv-rc, file-rc or even systemd. sysv-rc, file-rc or event systemd without any unit file will not boot your machine to any useful state.

The point is that if you choose to use systemd units you depend on systemd to start them at boot, exactly the same way that if you choose to use initscripts you depend on sysv-rc or something like this to start the scripts at boot.

Take a look at the initscripts Debian package dependencies:
https://packages.debian.org/si...
Really, this is initscripts that depend on sysv-rc and not the other way around. This is pure logic.

This is simply true:

https://packages.debian.org/si...
"dep: sysv-rc"

There a so dependent that there are from the same source package:
https://packages.debian.org/so...

This is simply true:

https://packages.debian.org/si...
"dep: sysv-rc"

There a so dependent that there are from the same source package:
https://packages.debian.org/so...

https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install
HURD is here.

Debian rejects game due to authors opinion on women.

A properly licensed opensource casino video game was
recently posted to the debian bug tracker as a request
for packaging, as is the standard method for pursuing
such things in debian.

The bug was quickly closed, tagged as "won't fix"
The reason given by one of the debian developers
alluded to the authors past anti-feminist remarks:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...

The piece of software in question is licensed
under the GPL and is one of the only of it's
kind for linux (ascii-art console slot machine software)

Is professing progressive politics now a hard requirement
for being allowed to contribute to free software projects?

Debian developers also threatened author with lengthy imprisonment, denied existence of author's contributions

Previously a debian developer, Erich Schubert, claimed that the author of gpcslots had never
contributed anything to opensource, was corrected, replyed to the corrections,
and then deleted the corrections and left up his false claims.
Author has contributed gigabytes of media to opensource, years of programming
work, and has been involved in numerous projects.
http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/2...

Another debian developer, Josselin Mouette, (while bragging that he, JM, had successfuly
campaigned to ban prostitution in france, have Johns arrested, and had run
mafias out of the country) told the author that he was going to have him
arrested by the FBI (van'd) because the author suggested there was no sin
in marrying young girls (and cited a bible verse in support of that).
http://np237.livejournal.com/3...

Thanks for this useful information (where are my mod points when I need them ?)

Also, be careful of this bug: the "Standard system utilities" task now pulls 41 GTK-related packages because of a new dependency on pinentry-gtk2 from gnupg2. After a server installation, if you selected the "Standard system utilities" task, be sure to "apt-get remove --purge pinentry-gtk2" (which will install pinentry-curses to satisfy dependencies) and then "apt-get --purge autoremove" to get rid of all those useless packages. Or (didn't test it yet but it should work), install without the Standard task, prevent pinentry-gtk2 from being installed by pinning it to priority -1 in a preferences file (man apt_preferences), and then run "tasksel --new-install" to select the Standard task.

1) What's wrong calling a helper script a script that help you to do something in a more simple way? Now if it's not from you the script came from something else. In the context of this discussion this is from the distribution.

2) It's not the central part of system V init. The most obvious prof of this is that each distribution family have a different set of helpers scripts. Just take a look at the reality:
https://packages.debian.org/je...
https://packages.debian.org/je...
https://packages.debian.org/je...
If you list the source patch archive http://http.debian.net/debian/... you will see that ALL the initscripts are Debian specific and not part of the original sysvinit http://http.debian.net/debian/... .
Configuring the network is not the same in Fedora an in Debian. On of the long term goal of systemd is to normalize the situation.

3) The problem is to configure an interface automatically when the system boot. In most distribution the users don't even have to use the real command to setup the interface to do this. And you are completely wrong about your ifconfig and script theory: the vast majority of network interfaces are today setup by a dhcp client, or an application like NetworkManager according to DBUS messages coming for example from a GUI application, all written in C or C++, or maybe something other, but for certain shell scripts play a marginal role here. The shell is NOT the primary interface for the vast majority of the users, sysadmin is not the dominant specie in the Linux world.

4) Systemd is really simpler to learn that shell script. I switched some months ago to systemd and found all the documentation is needed in the usual man pages. I took me less than 1 hour to learn the basic commands and I was able to convert the custom part of the system less than one day.

5) You can laugh as you want, this will not change the reality:
* Sysadmins are a minority of Linux users.
* Distributions like Debian support /etc/network/interfaces with systemd.
* There are sysadmin already using systemd.
* To date there is no enough maintainers against systemd to have successfully make an serious alternative available and ready to use by the distribution.
* Systemd transition is now done by Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian and there are still there.
* Still, a lot of forum get post from 'sysadmin' complaining.