Linux Kernel 4.6 Officially Released (softpedia.com)

An anonymous coward writes: Just like clockwork, the Linux 4.6 kernel was officially released today. Details on the kernel changes for Linux 4.6 can be found via Phoronix and KernelNewbies.org. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 Maxwell support and Dell XPS 13 Skylake support are among the many hardware changes for 4.6. For Linux 4.7 there are already several new features to look forward to from new DRM display drivers to a new CPU scaling governor expected.
prisoninmate also writes: Linus Torvalds announced the final release of the anticipated Linux 4.6 kernel, which, after seven Release Candidate builds introduces features like "the OrangeFS distributed file system, support for the USB 3.1 SuperSpeed Plus (SSP) protocol, offering transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps, improvements to the reliability of the Out Of Memory task killer, as well as support for Intel Memory protection keys," [according to Softpedia].

"Moreover, Linux kernel 4.6 ships with Kernel Connection Multiplexor, a new component designed for accelerating application layer protocols, 802.1AE MAC-level encryption (MACsec) support, online inode checker for the OCFS2 file system, support for the BATMAN V protocol, and support for the pNFS SCSI layout."

Comments

I hope it is almost time

[pablo_max]

Just this morning, as I was reading an article on MS 10's latest update, which includes more adds, I was pondering; is it finally time to give linux another chance?

I give it a shot every couple years in hopes that I can finally ditch Windows, but invariably, I format the drive and go back to windows.

Now, to be honest, I did try Mint a couple weeks ago running on a live USB disk. It was reasonably snappy and looks "ok". However, there are definitely still big issues with High resolution displays, so that the scaling looks all wonky. Some elements look ok, but the icons on the launcher bar are so tiny I could hardly see them.
But... I could live with that.
What I cannot live with is the lack of games. Real games. New release titles.
I am hoping that can and will change with the release a Vulcan, though only time will tell.
As I get old though, the biggest issue for me is the lack of MS office. Yes I know there are open source alternatives, but these are not the same. I know people who are not big office users same it can be a one to one swap, but it cant.
If MS released a linux version of office, I would switch to Linux as my main OS and just boot to windows when gaming.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Office isn't a 3D real-time action multimedia adventure game, isn't it easy to use with WINE?

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

WINE supports some "real games"' right now, including the Blizzard suite. Vulkan will at some point add to this list a small amount, as many Windows games will have a Vulkan option.

More relevantly, depending on what your favorite "real games" are, Linux is already there with native games. Is dota2 your moba of choice? Click and install, just like Windows. Vulkan will definitely mean there will be more of these, as cross compilation becomes more common.

So, it is better than ever and getting better- but remember, the issue is the games not supporting Linux. Linux supports games just fine.

Office is a real bear, though. Microsoft earned their postion there almost fairly, and deliver a product with features that competitors cannot or will not match. I can make due with the free and open source alternatives, which are excellent in their own right, but not everyone can. Obviously, Microsoft will never make a Linux version unless amd until Windows is dead.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[hcs_$reboot]

is it finally time to give linux another chance?

If MS released a linux version of office, I would switch to Linux as my main OS and just boot to windows when gaming.

This is one of the reasons MS is not likely to release an Office for Linux. Office is MS' milk cow. Many users stick to windows just to ensure there won't be any compatibility issue.
On Linux and Mac, Open/Libre office did an awesome job at fixing bugs and ergonomics the past couple of years. Plus, a growing number of administrations choose the open solution to save costs. Meaning, you'll have a growing number of people pushing to work with open/"standard" stuff (Complex Excel sheets are not compatible though). Google docs still stands way behind Libre/Open office.
As for most games, unfortunately, windows is still the usable only platform (Steam on Linux has a few games).

Re:I hope it is almost time

[hcs_$reboot]

Wine is a huge effort to get something windozy running on Linux. Didn't try MS Office, but judging how Wine struggles to get much simpler programs to run successfully, without tons of "cannot do this/that", or crashing, I seriously doubt it would work.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[dbIII]

If MS released a linux version of office

The older versions of MS Office from back when it had a usable interface work very well on linux via WINE and Libreoffice in many ways is better than MS Office. No Outlook? Outlook not so good. There are dozens of decent cross-platform email clients out there that do not lock you in to an obfiscated and slow email storage format.
I don't even want to use MS Office on machines with MS Windows - I'd rather get things done quickly with a menu than click between panes of pretty pictures until I find the correct one.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[sg_oneill]

But theres an MS Office for the mac and always has been, and it works just fine. I'm not sure how that reconciles with your theory? Wouldnt the mac be the bigger threat to windows desktops, being that its a significantly larger portion of the desktop market?

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Kjella]

But theres an MS Office for the mac and always has been, and it works just fine. I'm not sure how that reconciles with your theory? Wouldnt the mac be the bigger threat to windows desktops, being that its a significantly larger portion of the desktop market?

Office for Mac exists because of a deal/settlement between Microsoft and Apple, not because Microsoft wanted to. Nobody is in position to do the same for Linux. And Macs are a limited threat because you need Mac hardware and there's no centralized infrastructure like AD, they have a larger market share in that segment but got much less potential. If you could spin up corporate desktops with Linux/MS Office it'd start to threaten all their corporate efforts like Exchange, Sharepoint, Azure and so on. Sure, Microsoft will sell a home and student version but they know most people don't really need it at home, it's either so you can "graduate" to use MS Office at work or it's a home version because you already know how to use it from work.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Opportunist]

I recently installed Mint with the intent to migrate over. For real this time. Funny enough, the problem was not games.

Many recent games work in Linux. Well, at least Steam claims they do, and ... somehow, they do. Or might. I didn't get that far. The problem isn't so much games even. The problem already starts with hardware. Gaming hardware to be exact.

Mint had a problem with my mouse. And of course its maker did not provide a driver for it. Neither do keyboard or flight sticks. There are even no dedicated drivers for the mainboard or the sound card. The "nouveau" open source nVidia drivers that Mint insists in using don't work and I had to use command line options to disable hardware acceleration 'til I could install nVidia's own drivers.

That doesn't solve the other problems, though. Sound is a huge issue, and I'm not talking about having no 5.1 capability because, as I said before, no sound drivers. Two programs "competing" for using the sound card can well lead to one of them hogging it and not allowing anything else to use it. TeamSpeak, I'm looking at you there! Once there was even some sound related error that fubar'd xwindow badly enough that I had to kill and restart it. Which of course led to more problems where rebooting the system was actually the fastest option.

While the sound at least works most of the time, I did not manage to get the mouse to work correctly, I had to plug in a different one. And yes, I have tried whatever some people suggested on various boards. Forget it. No chance. Clicks don't get registered, sometimes it seems that only clicks to the current foreground window do, or to make things completely insane the keyboard ceases to work for some reason. Due to the mouse, no kidding.

Games are a completely unique matter anyway. Some work, more or less, some go apeshit when you try to adjust the resolution or they frizz out with some wonky sound errors. It seems that a lot of them go by "it compiles, ship it" when it comes to offering Linux support, like it's something that looks nice on the box but nobody will really ever use it so a token nod to it will do.

So I'm back to Windows for my gaming needs, as much as I'd love to move away. The problem is, as far as I can tell now, not the games themselves. Ok, yes, some more love and testing would go a long way, but the problem Linux has today when it comes to gaming is hardware support. Manufacturers of gaming hardware don't give a shit about Linux. And OSS drivers, where existent at all in the first place, suck.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[hcs_$reboot]

Take a MS Excel macro made on Windows, and run it in MS Excel on a Mac... The MS folks, instead of maintaining a unique version compilable on both platforms, did a fork, Windows<>Mac, maintained by different teams. Expect incompatibilities and the like, even different bugs on both platforms!

Re:I hope it is almost time

[silentcoder]

PlayOnLinux has had an automated install wizard for MS-Office for many years now. Zero effort required.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[silentcoder]

Actually - your entire description of wine is several years out of date. Wine today, especially when combined with PlayOnLinux runs just about everything I throw at it not only well - but better than windows does.

I'm sure there are edge-case exceptions but they are extraordinarily rare these days. In fact, Wine is MORE compatible with pre-vista versions of windows than windows itself is (that is to say - there are more windows programs that run fully-supported under wine than there are older windows programs that work on newer versions of windows).

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Your experience has been different than mine. I run Ubuntu 14.04 and installed wine. I've never had much luck with running applications under wine, and my experience with this setup hasn't been better. One thing I tried to run is pcsx2, which is a PS2 emulator. I can get it to run, but it's not particularly stable. More inportantly, the performance suffers greatly, as it runs at about 20% of the proper speed. I've also tried installing Adobe Reader because the Linux version isn't supported; the latest version is 9.5.5, which is outdated and almost certainly vulnerable. I have yet to succeed in getting either Adobe Reader X or XI to install and properly run under wine. And yes, PDFs with certain types of content such as some forms can't be opened properly with evince. Undoubtedly some things do work well in wine, but I've also found that many things don't run well or at all.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same graphics problem but was able to fix it.

As for the mouse/keyboard click problem, I'm having that too and thought it was just me. The symptoms are hard to describe since the behavior is erratic. Any clues the culprit, solution, workaround?

Re:I hope it is almost time

[gweihir]

Currently, the only thing that makes me maintain a Win7 installation is gaming. For MS Office (needed for part of my work), I have a laptop from work. Everything else (coding, data-processing, etc.) is and has been Linux for me since 1995. I do hope that the gaming-situation on Linux will get much better with Vulcan, but it is going to take some time.

In principle, most modern games are cross-platform, and as soon as there is solid Vulcan support in the mainstream-engines, making an additional Linux-release is not really a cost factor anymore. I think the chances are good that by end-of-support for Win7, I can finally become MS-free again for my own computing.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[gweihir]

What stops me is that I do not want insecure MS Office to run on Linux. I would rather jail it in a Windows VM. Maybe I could jail it in a Linux VM (running under Linux) with Wine though. Has anybody tried that? Should work in principle just as well as Linux native.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand the desire to run Office in a VM, though I doubt there's much of a risk in wine if you follow reasonable security practices. That said, I don't understand why you would run a Linux VM on Linux, run wine in the VM, and run Office on wine that way. That seems horribly inefficient and unlikely to increase security in any significant way.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[silentcoder]

Fair point but not really relevant to GPs misinformed statements about wine. Personally I dont even use lbreoffice anymore. I do little that requires office software that browser apps more than suffice.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[silentcoder]

Indeed. What little you may gain from a VM you will likewise gain with windows around. I still keep an xp VM around for rare one in a million times I want to run a windows app and dont want to set up a whole install for it. For example I used it to get MGSO installed on morrowind but I actually play morrowind using openmw.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[aliquis]

Just this morning, as I was reading an article on MS 10's latest update, which includes more adds

Where are the ads?

I have one picture for Candy Crush Soda Saga in the start menu, is that the one? Haven't it been there always? It doesn't really bother me. Is there anything more?

Re:I hope it is almost time

[aliquis]

What I cannot live with is the lack of games. Real games. New release titles.
I am hoping that can and will change with the release a Vulcan, though only time will tell.

Isn't over 2000 of the games on Steam available for Linux now?
What specific titles do you mean? I don't know why Blizzard doesn't support Linux.

CS:GO, Civ V, Dota2, X-Com 2, GarryÂs mod, Terraria, Portal 2, Payday 2, Medieval II: Total war, Borderlands 2, Divinity: Original sins, Bioshock Infinite, Tomb raider, Serious Sam 3, Torchlight II, Company of heroes 2, Total war: Attilia, The Talos Principle, SaintÂs Row: The third (and the newer ones I guess?), Half life 1 and 2, Legend of Grimrock 1 and 2, Rust, so on so on run on Linux.

GTA V, Starcraft II and Overwatch doesn't.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[drinkypoo]

Virtually nothing I want to run in Wine actually works. none of my ancient (15 years old or better) automotive manual software works on it, and that's just displaying text and images. When I do get something working, they are sure to break it in the next version with a regression. I had to give up on Wine because I didn't want to manually mantain 23082387 versions of it so that I could keep various programs running.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[silentcoder]

Thats why I said use PlayOnLinux. Automated installs in containers and importantly: wine versions locked for containers. Regressions dont affect you as each program uses whatever wine version it works best with. Wine provided an incredibly powerful feature to prevent ongoing dev from impacting usability and PoL uses that feature by default with no manual effort required. Even if you build a custom container for somethinf without a script that feature is built-in the PoL container wizard.
Wine is a developers tool. PlayOnLinux is a user tool built on top of it and I recommend it for anybody who is not avtively porting software with wine.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a MS Excel macro made on Windows, and run it in MS Excel on another Window machine...

Excel is horribly broken to the extent where macros stop working if you try to use them on a machine with a different language.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Opportunist]

Well, it would be great if you fixed it to post HOW. Maybe someone could use that tidbit of info, ya know...

And no, I have no idea what causes the mouse problem. Most (nonworking) solutions claim it has something to do with the resolution of the mouse, so far I have no working solution. Maybe for you the "reduce resolution 'til you have to move the mouse for a mile to have the cursor move an inch" tip works for you. Didn't for me (not to mention that I am one of those people that prefer to move the mouse about an inch in total to get once across the screen).

Re: I hope it is almost time

[RabidReindeer]

I don't understand the desire to run Office, period. Maybe I don't do enough obscure spreadsheet stuff, and I'll admit I'm not big into PowerPoint, but I can do everything I need and more in LibreOffice.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine is a huge effort to get something windozy running on Linux. Didn't try MS Office,

If you can double click setup.exe under Windows, you can double click setup.exe under linux for wine. Both are literally identical.

MS office 2007 runs flawlessly in wine.

MS office 2013 seemed to run just as well, although in 2013 I only used word and excel for a short few months (I really really hate the 2013 interface) before going back to 2007.
I very well may have not used a feature that would work differently in wine than native.

But I've used mso 2007 professional in wine for 6-7 years now, very heavily in fact, and have never run into a single issue that wasn't an identical problem under Windows xp or 7.

You may want to give office in wine another shot.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[drinkypoo]

Well, last time I tried to use PoL it didn't work worth beans either, but that was a long time ago. Regardless, it's the reason I haven't tried it in the interim. Next time I want to run Windows software under Linux and don't want it in one of my VMs for some reason, I'll give it another go around.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[silentcoder]

It works great for me. Every non native game I play is in a PoL container.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Opportunist]

And if the person who voted this "troll" could inform me what's "trollish" about it, I would be happy to hear it. Post as AC so you don't threaten that mod. I would like to know what's trollish about pointing out what goes wrong about our attempt to finally replace Windows. Because simply silencing it is not going to aid us in any way. If anything, it helps MS to retain users it should not.

What this was supposed to illustrate is why the whole "year of Linux on the Desktop" spiel is not going to take off. Not today, not ever. Unless we finally get our act together and realize what goes wrong here. I have been using Linux for a while now. Mostly on the CLI, mostly in a server environment where you often don't even have any kind of graphics adapter, let alone one with 3d acceleration. Where you often have some token mouse / keyboard attached, and they usually are SO grime and dust covered that you don't want to touch them, because nobody uses them for ages since everyone just SSHs to the servers. I myself have been wondering for a while what's the problem.

Now it's obvious, at least to me, what's keeping "Linux on the Desktop" from happening: It's us, and it's hardware makers. Hardware that is made "for Windows" with zero support for Linux, hardware that simply does not work on Linux and with the Linux community also obviously more interested in server oriented hardware, it's unlikely that we'll get any such drivers soon unless there is someone who not only has the skills to create such drivers but also the personal need for one. Proof? There is a driver for even the most esoteric, unknown SCSI-RAID controller out there, support for file systems nobody has heard of outside of very specialized server farm admins, support for network adapters and protocols nobody uses outside of backbone providers, but no support for gaming mice, keyboards or flight simulator pedals.

And the makers of those peripherals have no interest in catering to the Linux gaming crowd for the same reason it took ages for some game developers to do it: Insignificant returns. Why bother investing time and money into something that might change sales by a fraction of a portion of a percent?

And the other thing that's in the way is we ourselves, our hubris and our religious investment in OSS. Here's something to ponder: The average user doesn't care about OSS or CSS, he cares about whether his shit works. Look at Apple for proof. Apple took Linux and walled it in, and people are happy with it because it does what they want. Here I was sitting with a Linux distri that had this religious clinging to OSS drivers that pretty much would have kept someone without a clue from installing the OS. Because without some googling and trial and error, and manipulation of boot loader lines and whatnot, the screen was blank. Yes, OSS is wonderful and it would be great if we could just rely on it, but it simply doesn't work yet. And as long as this is the case it is better to use CSS, because the average Joe out there doesn't give a shit about it. Yes, OSS drivers would be better than CSS drivers, but if Joe can't install the OS it's going to be neither and there's one less user of Linux who will return to Windows or Apple instead. And then you don't have CSS drivers, you have a CSS system!

Is that better? Honestly?

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had issues with interoperability between Office and Libreoffice. Most people use Office. In my experience, collaborative editing of a document can result in issues. For example, I've seen sections of a document getting set read-only for no apparent reason, and there's no easy way to fix that in Libreoffice. It is easier if everyone uses Office or if everyone uses Libreoffice. I think it is a little easier to find some settings in Office to change the properties of content in documents. Libreoffice isn't bad in that regard but it doesn't seem as simple to me.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[dunkelfalke]

I personally have given up on Linux at home. It has been almost usable about a decade ago (ugly fonts notwithstanding), but then Windows got progressively better and Linux desktop environments seemed to go absolutely mental. I blame all those UX hipsters for destroying all the usability of KDE and Gnome.

At work I develop for Linux, but I actually cross-compile from Windows 7. It is just far more comfortable. The only reason why I boot into Linux every now and then is to cross-compile some quirky libraries that absolutely refuse to compile under Win32 CodeSourcery.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, "collaborative editing of a document can result in issues", is just as true for people who try to collaborate and when everyone is using Microsoft office... Especially if they are not all on the exactly same version.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Personal experience is that ~50% of Windows Steam games don't run well (ie, horribly broken if technically can start up) or at all. Currently on 1.9.9-staging from PlayOnLinux (because it's actually the best, AFAICT). Note, this is after a ton of tweaking to try to get games to work. Without that, the success rate would be ~30%.

As much as I like WINE, no, it's far from a "runs just about everything" except perhaps in your specific use case.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[hcs_$reboot]

Ok thanks, I'm not using much windows stuff, so not much using Wine. But anyway, even though MS office would be available on Linux via POL/Wine, you still have to pay the MS license for Office, right?

Re:I hope it is almost time

[danomac]

Some time ago I helped my brother install Mint.

He got a new laptop a little while ago and was having nothing but troubles. He read online Ubuntu had better support. So he installed Ubuntu on his own and he said everything works with it now. This was a gaming laptop. And one of the troubles he was having was with the display card.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[armanox]

Maybe I just run boring setups, but I haven't had any recent issues on the systems I've tried.

First off, I tend to stay away from fringe distros like Mint. Most of my systems currently run Ubuntu (except for servers), migrated from Fedora/Cent. Laptop1 (Inspiron) has Intel HD Graphics, laptop 2 (Precision) has a Quadro FX 880m, desktops run various cards (GTX 770 in my main desktop, R9 370X in one desktop, Radeon HD 7870 in another, GTX 580 in a third). I have a couple of really old Logitech Keyboards that I've been using for the past eleven years or so, plus a Sun Type V. No issues with any of them (okay, some of the keys on the Logitech don't work in Linux, but they don't work in newer then WinXP either). Mouse-wise I have a few different Microsoft Mice around (Microsoft "Standard Wireless Optical Mouse" it says on the bottom). On board sound for all machines.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[silentcoder]

Yep

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I bought a laptop yesterday with Win 10 and I can confirm that there was only one ad on the start menu and it was Candy Crush.

It doesn't really bother me but so far what annoys me most of windows 10 is that they divided system settings and control panel and which setting is where is like playing whack-a-mole.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[fbobraga]

I can do everything I need and more in LibreOffice.

I second this. I've worked on a centralized government IT enterprise (serpro.gov.br), that kind of "guides" helpdesks of other government sectors, and see/understood it: the "need" of MS-Office is generally based into fear

Re:I hope it is almost time

[hairyfeet]

Informative? Really mods? I'm sorry to burst your bubble but on both OpenGL and Vulkan Linux loses to Windows. This makes sense as more than 95% of the budget on Linux is spent on server development and servers? Really don't have much of a need for 3D acceleration.

Wish it weren't so but you are throwing away a good chunk of your hardware performance if you choose Linux for gaming.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Robert Goatse]

Wait until someone sends you a MS Office created PowerPoint document. I've been down that road and the OpenOffice (I know not LibreOffice as you said) formatting was all jacked up. I gave up on *nix related office suites soon after.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably mod troll because many of the things you say are issues are impossible, shitty, non-compliant hardware, or completely inaccurate representation of Linux.

Hell, most of the "issues" in this post haven't actually been issues for Linux for well over a decade, or more. So yes, it absolutely seems like many are trolling for the sole purpose of attacking Linux. Many of your complaints are right out of the trolling Linux 101 bag of FUD. Which is also, most definitely, in Microsoft's bag of dirty tricks. Are you a shill? I don't know, but your post is inaccurate and misleading. Is it intentionally or you just don't know what you're talking about. Either way, your post, like many here do a disservice to Linux.

Now then, if your issues are legitimate and you just don't know what you're talking about, there are many ways to get help.

As a side note, I've used gaming mice, keyboards, flight sim pedals and joysticks for years, all without issue under Linux. So if you actually are having issues, perhaps you should write your hardware manufacturer and ask them they they sold you shitty, low quality, non-compliant hardware. Or, perhaps you should ask why you bought poor quality hardware. Or again, perhaps you simply don't understand what's going on and are making wild assumptions and issues.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a legitimate complaint. The Entitled Generation came in, decided that all the shitty stuff from Windows was needed to break Linux desktops. A decade later and Linux desktops are just now getting back to what was available a decade ago. Which is tragic, because a decade ago Linux offered one of the best desktops available for desktop users which still shines today.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The gaming situation is getting better every day. The biggest issue Linux has right now is that may developers are creating minimal effort ports which provide for less than ideal FPS. This is then used to point a finger at Linux as a sub-par platform. The reality is, Linux with OpenGL is already providing performance on par or better than Window. It's just that few developers are spending the time to invest into Linux's performance like they do Windows. To some degree, you can't really blame them. For most developers, Windows still represents the lion share of their profits. That said, it's important we point out that when games perform poorly we blame the developer and not Linux, OpenGL, or Valve. Linux is not the problem.

Vulkan is going to shift things considerably into Linux's favor. DX12 already requires entirely new tooling which means for the first time, since Microsoft bribed companies to only develop for DX, in an effort to destroy OpenGL (they almost succeeded), Linux has equal footing to compete.

Now, if only we can get Apple to stop their idiocy, drop Metal, and embrace Vulkan. Doing so would be a win-win for everyone - except Microsoft. Honestly, Apple's reluctance to drop Metal and embrace Vulkan makes me wonder if Apple and Microsoft have a back room deal. Keep in mind, Apple is the primary player who kept OpenGL from dying years ago. So it's not reach in any way to believe it's plausible for Microsoft to quietly buy them off this time around.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[silentcoder]

>Wish it weren't so but you are throwing away a good chunk of your hardware performance if you choose Linux for gaming.

Valve has staked their entire business model on you being wrong... and I'm prepared to bet they know more than you about the topic at hand.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[EmperorArthur]

I mean, pcsx2 might not be the best example when saying 'wine sucks' for regular programs. If you're using it in DirectX mode then you're essentially comparing a high end game for modern systems that also has a built in re-compiler that's constantly running. While I'll grant Adobe support isn't great either, both your examples of programs which will max modern systems out, or from companies who are known to write shit code. I'd like both of them to work, but I recognize that both of them are probably the hardest problems for the Wine team.

Summary: Both examples are the hardest pieces of software for Wine to work with. Try a non-Adobe product that also isn't a game. You'll be surprised.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Shinobi]

Yes, the contempt for ordinary users is a massive factor in why Windows is still in a dominant position for desktop use. Just look at how people contemptuously assume that noone other than computer geeks need powerful CPU's, GPU's or lots of RAM. How flight sims, those doing 3D(both VFX and CAD), music creation, video compositing/effects etc are all brushed off, despite those being far more common now. Part of that contempt is also displayed in the whole "you should learn to code" sentiment many voice, because that's the only way your opinions etc will be considered without any contempt.

In fact, with many of the Linux proponents on this site and others, I feel sorry for their relatives, when the one who could really show them what they could do with a computer, instead decides for them that "you only need to watch youtube and read mail" when setting up a computer for them.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[HiThere]

There are a lot of unpleasant interactions between, I think, wine and 64-bit linux. To be honest, I'm not certain the interactions aren't with systemD, but now whenever I try to restart the system that has wine installed, it nearly hangs on a process that didn't shut down, and I end up needing to do a shutdown reboot.

I haven't traced these problems in detail, but they started when I installed wine. However, it's also true that I hadn't restarted for a long while prior to that, so the problem could be with something else, with systemd being my "most likely candidate".

Re: I hope it is almost time

[RabidReindeer]

Fortunately, no one hates me enough to inflict PowerPoint presentations on me.

Word documents are not a problem for me. Most people use Word like it's a glorified typewriter, jamming in lots of manual page breaks and hard carriage returns, and that breaks even when you move to another Windows computer with a different set of fonts installed, so I make allowances. Word isn't a page layout program, after all. If I demand precision formatting, I expect something designed for it, like a PDF.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[ncc74656]

I don't understand the desire to run Office, period.

One word that's the bane of my existence:

Access.

At work, we have stuff that even has to be kept within Access 2003 because it won't run right on newer versions. (Don't blame me; it predates my time here.) What do you suppose are the odds these will work with whatever equivalent tool (if any) [Open|Libre]Office provides?

At least the data for most of these relics lives in SQL Server, so there's some job security in porting the UI out of Access and into something more modern. If only my predecessor had had a clue about things like normalization, relationships between tables, choosing appropriate data types, and not allowing null inputs everywhere...

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Opportunist]

The point is that where I go online and search for solutions, the average user will simply drop it and return to Windows. They will not google around 'til they find out that they have to replace "quiet" with "nomodeset" in the options line of what is supposed to be nothing but a click-through install screen. They will not accept that their hardware cannot be used in Linux (besides, if you scroll down a few comments you'll notice I was not the only one who had issues with his mouse, so please spare me the "shill" argument whose problems "have not been an issue for a decade". I'd invite you over here and let you have a whirl with the machine I'm tinkering with. If it's inaccurate and misleading, then I have to inform you that I happen to have an inaccurate and misleading computer standing here right next to me that manages to have decade old issues with barely a year old hardware.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Opportunist]

Tried Ubuntu, too. But insisting in installing it on a second HD while keeping the Windows HD in seems to displease Ubuntu enough to come back with a UUID error during boot.

But at least Ubuntu managed to work fine with the graphics card during setup.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Opportunist]

I guess me insisting in using some non-boring mice and a dedicated sound card wasn't that good an idea. Sometimes it seems less is more...

Re:I hope it is almost time

[ncc74656]

My demands for Wine aren't particularly tough, and it seems to have no trouble with them: Kindle for PC (the Linux-native version of Calibre can even grab DRM keys out of it), Picasa, and ProMash (a fairly old program for managing homebrew recipes). If anything, ProMash might be easier to get up and running under Wine than under newer versions of Windows. (I think most of the complaints are about getting it to run on 64-bit Windows...that, and nobody's imported the 2015 BJCP guidelines into it.)

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? If Valve dropped Linux support the company would crumble, no one else uses it but Linux users... It's a piece of the pie and they are betting on it but it's far from a majority and definitely not the entire valve model.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[F.Ultra]

First of all Vulkan support in the drivers are in a very early stage so things might change, AND the benchmark that you posted where for AMD GPUs, the nVIDIA ones painted a completely different picture: https://www.phoronix.com/scan....

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hope I'm misreading and you weren't trying to run PCSX2 under Wine. There's a Linux version that works just fine. There's also featureful PDF readers for Linux; evince is lightweight and what I usually use, but if it's missing some fetaure, then either Okular or Adobe Reader has always worked for me.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[cnettel]

Take a MS Excel macro made on Windows, and run it in MS Excel on another Window machine...

Excel is horribly broken to the extent where macros stop working if you try to use them on a machine with a different language.

Not anymore than saying that a bash script breaks if you run it on a non-C locale. It MIGHT be true, if you actively rely on other stuff behaving in certain ways. And, if you're completely blind to the issues involved, it might very well happen. I've seen Java and C# code generate invalid SVG files etc by using decimal comma (taken from the current locale), rather than a decimal point. But, again, that doesn't mean that the software itself is broken. The author of Excel macros might, on the other hand, be far more likely than either of these groups to just cobble something together based on what seems to work.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[gweihir]

I do not understand it either. Unfortunately, some of our customers require a document they can edit, so I have to use MS Office for that. For other things we have a LeTeX Template that produces documents that look almost the same.

Re: I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

You already answered the solution (workaround perhaps) to the graphics problem, which essentially was to install the nvidia drivers, so I thought it redundant. I was just surprised that the default software display failsafe, was basically a fail in itself. Thanks for the tidbit on the mouse issue.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Blaskowicz]

I like the fonts under linux actually. Spent a long time under Windows 9x and then XP with no anti-aliasing, I liked it that way back then. Then I migrated to Ubuntu Gnome 2 then Mint Mate mostly. Now there's anti-aliasing on the "light" setting I believe, without Cleartype (subpixel), as I see fit. Windows 7 and up only have Cleartype or no anti-aliasing, and that's perhaps the thing I hate most with Windows. You don't get a choice although it looks like ass on CRT monitor, non native res or now low dpi apps scaled on high dpi displays.

Otherwise the ability to run almost any binary and not from the command line, the fast graphics drivers even for crappy graphics cards etc., these are things to be missed from Windows.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Blaskowicz]

The tragic thing : we're still waiting for Wayland so that these 3D desktops will properly run as does the window manager in Vista/7. And when it comes out I don't think the driver support will be stellar.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Same either/or cunt argument.

Anybody can multi-boot both, albeit Microsoft tried to fuck this up. You still can easily.

You can also run virtual machines. Virtualbox is free. VMWare is free/paid. They are cross-platform.

distrowatch.com

If you wonder if any of the Linuxes are dickwarez like Microsoft... avoid Ubuntu and Redhat/Fedora. They are advertised as some big deal and louder than the rest. So was Microsoft. Those are the ones poised to fuck up.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi HiThere,

the problem is certainly a mistake on your side. Reboot shutdowns are a sign that you do not understand what you are doing.

Yours,
systemP

Re:I hope it is almost time

[HiThere]

While it's true that I do not understand everything in detail, the purpose of the reboot shutdown was to switch between systems installed on different partitions. Do you know of a better way to do this?

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

> Not anymore than saying that a bash script breaks if you run it on a non-C locale.

Yes and no. The platform can nudge the programmers in this or in that direction (by providing or not a system abstraction, by documentation and so on). And the Microsoft products always nudge in this one direction: make people as dependent on the platform as possible.

This is what I was trying to say with "plausible deniability": you don't really see it, but the effect is there. It looks like chaos and incompetence, yet there is method in it.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[hairyfeet]

ROFL guess what? Games run far worse on SteamOS than Windows so I guess their business model don't mean shit,huh?

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a straight up lie. Game developers on Linux are doing a shit job. It's entirely inaccurate to say, "Linux loses to Windows." It's entirely accurate to say developers porting to Linux are doing a shit job. And to the contrary, developers who do their job are meet or beating performance of their own games on Windows. As a platform, Steam and Linux are proving superior to that of Windows.

Re:I hope it is almost time

[Anonymous Coward]

They already do exactly this with Windows. People are delusion when they believe Window's just works. The fact is, Linux and Windows work roughly equally well as a desktop. In fact, for many corner cases, Windows is a huge pain in the ass whereas Linux just works. The biggest issue Linux has isn't that it doesn't work, it does work, but that new users don't know how to do the same thing and get frustrated. That's an entirely different issue.

Run Away!

[jandersen]

Just like clockwork... ... introduces features like "the OrangeFS distributed file system, ...

Just as I thought! I think we all has our suspicions, that Linux was an evil plot by the government, but here we see the proof: "Clockwork Orange"!!! Soon we will be forced to submit to the Ludovico Technique! Run for the hills.

Re:Run Away!

[hcs_$reboot]

My dear and only friend,

you should remember that the Ludovico Technique can be rollbacked!

Alex

Re:Run Away!

[TheGratefulNet]

"quite a bit of nastiness, yessss?"

"no time for the in/out, love; just come to read the changelog"

Skylake P-states

[cerberusss]

One bit is very interesting to me:

A significant redesign to CPUFreq and P-State for allowing the kernel's scheduler to better communicate changes to the CPU frequency scaling drivers

Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

It used to take some 30 ms for Intel CPUs to turbo-boost from a power-saving state (P-state). For CPUs in laptops, like the Core M series, this was noticeable when gaming. The latest-gen CPUs (Skylake) support very quick (1 ms) switching between P-states, and from what I gather, this kernel version now supports this. This means slight power savings and quick reaction from-and-to powersaving ("race to sleep").

Apparently it's very hard to get this right, because from what I read, the Microsoft surface tablets had a lot of trouble in this area.

Re:Skylake P-states

[thegarbz]

Everything I've read about the Surface Tablets issue hasn't been so much trying to get the CPU to change states, but rather some hardware interrupts preventing the CPU from getting to lower states in the first place. Drivers and buggy software consuming just enough CPU resources just enough of the time to prevent thermal throttling. That's a real PITA and in many cases reduces my battery life from 10 hours to 3 hours even when the device is asleep.

Or is there some other thing you're talking about? If so can you link?

Re:Skylake P-states

[Anonymous Coward]

You keep using that phrase ("thermal throttling"). I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Skylake P-states

[thegarbz]

Keep using implies I used it more than once, and a typo from the phone does not mean a lack of understanding, but rather simply not giving a shit.

power throttling.

Re:Skylake P-states

[cerberusss]

but rather some hardware interrupts preventing the CPU from getting to lower states in the first place

Ah, thanks for clarifying that!

Re:Skylake P-states

[thegarbz]

but rather some hardware interrupts preventing the CPU from getting to lower states in the first place

Ah, thanks for clarifying that!

At least that was one problem. You may have heard something different. This is Microsoft we're talking about, having more than one bug in their software is definitely not outside the realm of possibility :-)

Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because allowing random userspace processes to mess with DMA capable hardware and PCI configuration space is a recipe for disaster.

Re:Do these things need to be in the kernel?

[hcs_$reboot]

A lot of hardware support is added in a new kernel. That's why sometimes, simply installing or upgrading to a new kernel gets rid of a number of problems, or improve performance. No wrong in this.

Re: Do these things need to be in the kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't. You get a binary from Windows Update, or if you're lucky a setup.exe from the vendor.

Re:Ob

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU/Systemd, you mean.

Re:OrangeFS distributed fs....uhh ok

[Anonymous Coward]

OrangeFS is a fork/continuation of PVFS, a filesystem for high performance computing clusters. I understand it's rather popular in that world, as is Linux itself.

Ubuntu 16.04

[ebonum]

When, if ever, will this kernel make it to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS? Ubuntu 16.04 LTS uses Linux kernel 4.4.

Re:Ubuntu 16.04

[Anonymous Coward]

When, if ever, will this kernel make it to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS? Ubuntu 16.04 LTS uses Linux kernel 4.4.

You can already install the deb package yourself

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.6-yakkety/

Re:Ubuntu 16.04

[gweihir]

Compile your own? Putting in 4.6 instead of 4.4 should be pretty painless. And Ubuntu, like any halfway usable distro, should have a clean way to do this via creation of a custom kernel package.

Re:Ubuntu 16.04

[somenickname]

Whatever kernel version ends up being in 16.10 will be available for older Ubuntu versions in the backports repo. For 16.04 the meta-package will probably be called something like linux-generic-lts-yakkety.

Re:Ubuntu 16.04

[steamraven]

Kernel Mainline. Use at your own risk.
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kern...

I would bet this will end up in the proposed soon and land in the official repositories in a few weeks. The LTS usually get new kernels as they are released, but you have to select the appropriate LTS kernel meta-packages.

Re:Ubuntu 16.04

[squiggleslash]

As a default from the default installation repos? No. LTS is meant to be stable, as in updates from the default repositories do not install newer (ie, security and bug fixes only) versions of anything. As an option? It's rare that installing a recent kernel breaks older distributions and from time to time when I've looked there's usually been several people providing easily installable new kernels for older Ubuntus.

So I wouldn't worry about it. If you truly need something from a new version it'll be available.

Re:Ubuntu 16.04

[Blaskowicz]

The LTS have re-releases that often come with a newer kernel (16.04.1, 16.04.2,...). There's even a schedule for that. It overall brings better support for newer laptops etc. but you can install an older point version and apt-get upgrade it to ignore or avoid the changes.

Ticked off

[garryknight]

Just like clockwork, the Linux 4.6 kernel was officially released today.

Clockwork was also released today? Damn! I missed that...

The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[ras]

Please, for the love of $deity, lets this be true. We've been putting up with broken video on, well, just about every Intel GPU since they stated their driver update for Gen9 (Skylake). And that includes older hardware that used to work before this effort was started. I can understand the occasional glitch in a new kernel, but "doesn't boot into X, at all, ever" isn't just a glitch - and it's been going on for 5 kernels so far. Currently in 4.5 I can't reliably attach a second monitor.

What amazes me is this isn't just Linux. The net was full of people complaining the video their brand new Windows laptop ranges from slow to utterly unusable. Naturally they said are going to get it fixed under warranty. Ha! It infests everything. The BIOS on my laptop can't initialise a second monitor either.

It is getting better. 4.2 didn't boot for me. 4.5 works acceptably on one screen. The i915's bugzilla reports my current two monitor problem is fixed. Hell, maybe I'll be able switch on full GPU power saving in 4.7! But is it really this hard?

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[gweihir]

Sounds like badly designed/documented hardware on Intel's part. Not that much of a surprise.

Incidentally, you cannot boot into X, that is just some userspace-stuff your distro is doing to fake it. Boot is long over at that time.

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[ras]

Incidentally, you cannot boot into X, that is just some userspace-stuff your distro is doing to fake it. Boot is long over at that time.

If you are going to play that game, I've written BIOS's. Grub was my userspace. By your standards the kernel is so far removed from where the real action is, it could hardly be considered relevant to booting.

(I'm sort of hoping Intel's microcode guys pop up here, and tell us both we are so far away from the real metal we may as well be discussing how Kubernetes gets it's config from etcd. They'd be wrong of course. The machine ain't up until I can Google something.)

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[Anonymous Coward]

Still no fix for this one though: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051
If you have the bad luck of owning a BayTrail, you're still fucked.

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[Anonymous Coward]

Update your firmware. Really. If your Skylake-H or Skylake-S (i.e. desktop) microcode is older than revision 0x84, it has some extremely nasty issues re. power management, GPU interconnect/coherency, and EDRAM interconnect/coherency. The results are ultra-nasty, starts with weird screen tearing or flicker, and ends with unpredictable behavior and crashes. Oh, and Intel TSX is also broken unless your microcode is new enough, resulting in unpredictable behavior. And if you are actually insane enough to be on microcode older than 0x74, AVX is also broken (and Linux glibc can use AVX to accelerate memory-to-memory copies, etc)...

Let's not even go into the fixes to the PCH firmware (Intel ME and friends), and for the Intel SGX stuff (since it is not used by Linux yet, but since it *is* used by the firmware, it *can* matter) which are also deployed as "BIOS updates".

So, yeah, if your Skylake BIOS is older than "last month", it will have broken components inside and is likely to misbehave every so often. Really. And that means it is unsupported by Intel and the Linux distros. So there... the only people which will claim to support your outdated Skylake system (because you did not get a BIOS update two weeks ago) is the motherboard vendor that did not issue that firmware update in the first place... and they will be lying.

Oh, and this *also* applies to Skylake-Y/U (the mobile version found on laptops), not the exact defects as the desktop version, but still many of them are common to both, and so is the need to keep that BIOS very, very fresh...

References:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/core/desktop-6th-gen-core-family-spec-update.html

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that Moore's is slowing, temporarily if we get those diamond chips going, perhaps Intel could use the extra lag time for some additional verification.

And if you are actually insane enough to be on microcode older than 0x74, AVX is also broken

Was the AVX problem the one with the low performance after returning from a low power state?

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two AVX issues, one causes the AVX core to, basically, go out of sync and return crap. The other results in the processor getting stuck in a lower P-state than it should. The first one is only going to hit a few chips, and as far as I know, won't cause a mess on non-floating point uses of AVX. On floating point, it causes what got called the "prime95" bug. The second one is the larger issue.

But the really nasty ones are the Intel TSX ones (there's more than one), and the GPU and EDRAM ones, which trigger often enough to be a really big problem. Almost every Linux distro enables Intel TSX on Skylake+ (Debian and Ubuntu certainly do).

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Why can't I retro-port a modern distro onto a old laptop or PC? Ubuntu 10.0.4 works just fine, but anything else just gets all uppity with nouveau.

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[Blaskowicz]

You might be able to do something like install ubuntu 12.04 or mint 13 and downgrade Xorg.
Beware of point updates like 12.04.5, 14.04.4, 17.2 and 17.3 if you specifically want older kernel/xorg. Perhaps Ubuntu 14.04.0 would even work. Mint 13 Xfce was great, ditto Mate, that's still a current LTS

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[gweihir]

And then there are people that just refer to the definition of what "booting an OS" means, instead of doing silly games.

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[ras]

And then there are people that just refer to the definition of what "booting an OS" means, instead of doing silly games.

I suspect we are from the same generation. When the term OS was owned by computer programmers, you had a point. We studied books on how to write operating systems. They sat at a very specific place in the software stack.

That meaning was subsumed when popular culture conscripted the term OS to mean Windows, Android, iOS or whatever. Even Wikipedia uses it in this way. In todays nomenclature after the OS boots, you use it to run "apps" - usually by clicking or tapping things. When you upgrade the OS, you upgrade the entire stack. Nowadays OS could reasonably be defined as the software waiting for you to do something after you power the the device on. If your laptop boots into X and then waits - running X is most definitely part of the boot process. If it doesn't run X, then obviously X isn't part of the boot process - but userspace programs that configure the network, run ssh deamons and display login prompts most definitely are.

Today we use terms like "kernel" where we would have used OS years ago. I thought you were playing word games - but maybe you haven't caught onto how popular culture has re-purposed a term we used to consider our own.

Re:The Intel 1915 GPU Gen9 driver finally works!

[gweihir]

Well, you have a point. To me the kernel boot-process ends when "init" is called and the OS boot ends when all the init-scripts have been executed. As this is a story about the kernel, that definition still makes sense even today.

Of course, in pop-culture "booting" always meant "when it is ready so I can do my stuff". In that sense, you can "boot" into X, but if it does not come up, the kernel may not actually be the place to search for the error as quite a few other things need to happen after it has done its thing.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

That'd be sooo Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Juicy details? Do you have some links/further reading for that?

I'd be genuinely interested: I collect those muddy things which, taken as a whole seem to be a "chaotic strategy" to keep real competition off (decommoditizing protocols et al).

Having slightly incompatible versions of very complex software "out there" and letting the (captive) market sort out the intersection of (unwritten) specs looks like a very smart way of keeping a compatible market from evolving

Plus: plausible deniability! ("your honor, we're just too stupid to come up with a clean design document and following through"). And the developers "in the trenches" even don't have to be aware of it!

Re:That'd be sooo Microsoft

[hcs_$reboot]

Not so juicy. I helped a friend to get an XL macro developed on Windows working on his Mac... and had to dig into most of that pile of code to find out why the heck the macro wouldn't run on a Mac MS Office...
Here we go: internal functions having different names, file functions behaving differently, newer Office update on Mac had less features than the Windows one, and no active-X emulation ; that last one requires a number of expensive workarounds (time wise!).

Re:That'd be sooo Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, thanks. For someone not "in" that world (my last "deep" experiences with Windows date back to 3.1 -- go figure [1]) the details are juicy enough!

[1] Since then, I've been watching in awe from the sidelines how Microseft can get away with all the nonsense it imposes upon his customers.

Re:That'd be sooo Microsoft

[zyzko]

You are not then dealing with Excel only, file systems functions and tons of other stuff people use are Windows features exposed to the VBA scripting engine through ActiveX / COM. If your macro involves CreateObject() you are quite likely using something else than just Excel features.

I've seen my fair share of very crazy stuff done from withing Excel VBA engine, including commanding AutoCAD. It can be quite powerful "scripting tool" but it really should lack "save" feature so those horrible hacks do not live on...

Re: Do these things need to be in the kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which loads a driver into the kernel.

Re:OrangeFS distributed fs....uhh ok

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you didn't know you don't have to compile *everything* in to the kernel? That's bad, mate.

Re:Do these things need to be in the kernel?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Most of the driver-related stuff is in modules by the time it makes it to being installed on your system; but those drivers that are developed in cooperation with the rest of the kernel development process are referred to as 'in-kernel'. There are devices for which the drivers are handled out-of-kernel; but that's usually a world of pain.

lol v4.6

[Anonymous Coward]

Barely on version 4.6? He'll Microsoft was on version 2000 sixteen years ago!!! The lunix will never catch up at this pace.

Re:OrangeFS distributed fs....uhh ok

[gweihir]

Compile your own kernel, have only in there what you want. Be a luser (yes, this is the correct spelling) and have everything in there. As the kernel in in practice very modular, having this stuff as an option does not slow the rest down or cause problems. So far, this model has proven far superior to what MS does with their user-installed drivers.

Re:Ob

[gweihir]

Systemd is not required by the kernel and, for example, Debian still runs well without it, and I expect it will stay that way. The push-back if they tried to make it unusable without systemd would probably fracture the project and making it the default init-system was hopefully a bad enough experience for the systemd-mafia. It is really advisable to not use systemd on anything needing stability or security and I doubt it will ever mature to the degree needed to fix that. The design is just not clean enough and its main designers do not even begin to understand why KISS is critical in solid engineering.

4.7??

[110010001000]

OSX is already up to version 10.11.5. These Linux people better start producing in order to catch up with the quality that is OSX and iTunes. They probably aren't even Agile. I'll mention it at the next stand up.

Re:4.7??

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome OS is already up to: 50.0.2661.91, and didn't exist until 2009. Isn't it about time you Apple zealots got with the times, too?

Re:4.7??

[inode_buddha]

Just owning all the Abble products isn't enough to make one completely ghey; you have to actually use them as intended. Even if you DID jack off while wearing the iWatch, it wouldn't give them your pulse correctly since Abble has such a closed ecosystem, its not like GNU is gonna help them. HOWEVER Abble users switching to teh lunis is *PROOF* that homosexuality is a *choice* and IT CAN BE CURED The one time I went to the Abble store at the mall, the resident ghey Socialst came up to me in his Speedos and offered me a tiny cup of Froot Loops; he explained that sadly, they had to cut back on the portion size because they were running out of money. I politely turned them down because I wasn't sure what they were glazed with. And his iWatch had the wrong time. At least they're not stealing ideas from xerox anymore....

Re:4.7??

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever looked at the version number in xterm? Debian has version 324 in unstable...

Re:4.7??

[colinrichardday]

Some people's intranets are up to 192.168.0.1!

Powerpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

From uni users had guest lectures slides display different, crash the program, and have even had missing/non playing embedded elements(yes different person for each) ,but this is from ~3-5 years ago so who knows for the latest version. Fonts are still an issue (different ones on each system) and even if you take care to choose a cross platform font positioning will change due to different Kerning[1], this is an issue for most cross platform programs that rely on system font layout engines, but it is a design feature and so will not be corrected, if it was open source we would describe the bug as "closed wontfix".

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning

Re:Ob

[thegarbz]

It is really advisable to not use systemd on anything needing stability or security and I doubt it will ever mature to the degree needed to fix that.

Advisable by whom? And can I expect a well thought out and real reason for it other than "OMG systemd is big!"?

Meanwhile RHEL is still on 2.6

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile RHEL, CentOS, and such are still on 2.6 (eg from 2003, more specificly 2.6.32 from 2009)

Re:Meanwhile RHEL is still on 2.6

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there something wrong with using a 2.6 kernel? They still get security updates, without all the new features. People want a well known and tested kernel for production servers. That's sort of the target market for RHEL.

Re: Meanwhile RHEL is still on 2.6

[Anonymous Coward]

This is clearly a troll, but what the hell. CentOS and RHEL current releases run 3.10. Still old, but not that ancient.

Re:Ob

[Anonymous Coward]

The Authors clear lack of understanding regarding UIDs and TTYs (and the function of su et al).

Binary logging and interfaces with no explicit compatibility between versions.

Massive attack surface, scope creep and "single point of failure/pwnage."

Keeping EFI storage mounted read/write for the entire duration of the boot.

Now, Give us a well thought out explanation of why its BETTER than existing init.

Re:Do these things need to be in the kernel?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they're referred to as "in-tree".

Kernel modules load into the kernel whether they are developed, tested, and distributed in-tree or not.

Kernel changes do not mpact "looks"

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not time.

Re:OrangeFS distributed fs....uhh ok

[ArchieBunker]

The OrangeFS page is so shitty they can't even explain what the filesystem is used for. Go ahead and see for yourself.

DRM display drivers

[iamacat]

Is it as bad as it sounds, or something completely different?

Re:DRM display drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Something completely different: Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Rights Management.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

Re:DRM display drivers

[Cajun Hell]

It's something different. But this is basically why, no matter who you are and what you do, you don't want your last name to be Hitler.

Re:OrangeFS distributed fs....uhh ok

[inode_buddha]

Or, you could just do make localmodconfig; this only builds the modules you currently have loaded. You could make local yes config and simply do away with modules altogether, if you are sure that your HW setup isn't gonna change much. My experience is that most situations with USB are covered pretty well by the usb-storage modules and everything else can be builtin. Just to give more options to keep it lean-n-mean

Re:Ob

[Anonymous Coward]

Could somebody mod parent up?

Re: OrangeFS distributed fs....uhh ok

[Anonymous Coward]

Orange was a lemon for my workload, but it's fast if you can adapt your IO to use larger reads.

Orange also ate my data twice, making it useable mostly as a Job specific high GB/s fast scratch.

support for the BATMAN V protocol

[JustNiz]

OK so this is just so Batman can remotely control the batcave from his Nexus 7?

More DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

YAY! I always wanted more DRM.

Dell XPS 13 support

[King_TJ]

I have to admit that I haven't really spent a lot of time delving into the details ... but I recently bought a Dell XPS 13 9350 (Skylake core i7 CPU) with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. Got a really good deal on it during a sale for Costco members and couldn't turn it down.

I'm wondering if there's a Linux distro that really works well with this yet, or do I need to give it more time?

I assume this new kernel was a piece of the puzzle for it, but I also heard there were issues with support for some of the features on the laptop. Is the built-in webcam working yet? Any audio issues? How is the 4K display w/touchscreen support?

The reason I moved away from Linux on any of my laptops was the common situation where "It works great except X, Y, and Z are broken." I don't want surprises like it not waking from sleep properly or the wi-fi not working or what have you. To me, those are deal-breakers vs. just using Windows on it instead and having everything function as intended.

Re:OrangeFS distributed fs....uhh ok

[gweihir]

I do non-module kernels with only the needed stuff for all production machines, because there have been module-loading related vulnerabilities in the past and this way I am not dependent on the user-space or an initrd for booting. I also do not use an initrd, and with systemd-free Debian that works still well and has for the last 15 years. Just do not do a kernel-package, but make it directly and boot it yourself. Reduces complexity considerably.

Re:Ob

[gweihir]

You are free to use an inferior solution any time you want to. Just do not try to push me to do so. The technical aspects have been discussed to death and that you even ask means you are posting in bad faith.

Re:Ob

[gweihir]

Good list. However the systemd-fanatics cannot give you that explanation, they must attack what came before (and worked well), because they have no valid arguments why their way is better. That is why they universally use this tactics.

Re:Ob

[thegarbz]

Actually the reason I ask is because the technical aspects have stacked in favour of systemd and much of that list is covered in a standard "idiots guide to clueless systemd complaints".

Also I'm not forcing you to use systemd. No one is forcing you to use anything. That's the lovely part about Linux. It's not like there's only 2 distributions out there. Go use whatever you want.

Also the way you automatically say inferior solution without understanding remotely my application or requirements means you are posting in bad faith.

Re:Ob

[thegarbz]

Crap list which has been debunked. There are plenty of valid arguments for a change in init system. I mean it's not like there haven't been 10+ project who have done so, and it's not like the most popular Unix based distribution in the world changed its init system to be something very similar to what systemd is now with it's very first released version.... oh wait that's exactly what happened.

But hey I got exactly what I expected:
"Author bad and dumb mkay."
"OMG my logs and I can't read the manual to re-enable text logging" - cries
"OMG systemd is big!" - something which I specifically asked not to be included because the actual attack surface that is system critical is actually tiny. But the AC would know about this if he bothered looking into it.
"systemd mounts something that should be rw as rw and some vendor had a bug that once caused a problem on their machine, oh noes!"

Yep this is exactly why no one gives a shit about the anti-systemd community. I thought I was going to get something new or relevant. Alas.

It's fast and simple

[NewYork]

It's fast and simple
http://linux-hacks.blogspot.in...
https://linuxconfig.org/buildi...