Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu 16.10 To Be Powered By Linux Kernel 4.8 (softpedia.com)
Reader prisoninmate shares a Softpedia report: We've been monitoring the Ubuntu 16.10 development cycle for quite some time now to see what Linux kernel version the upcoming GNU/Linux operating system will be based on, and for now, it remains powered by the same kernel packages as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). Also, it looks like Ubuntu 16.10 has been switched to a universal local DNS resolver service. However, the Ubuntu Kernel Team published the other day a new installation of their weekly newsletter, informing the community that Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) would soon be rebased on the latest stable Linux 4.6 kernels. Then, it will move to the Release Candidate builds of Linux kernel 4.7, and after that, the operating system will finally be switched to Linux kernel 4.8.
why is this news?
Be or ben't
Just told my Grandmother the great news. She can't wait to try this out!
The parent comment were probably get modded down merely for mentioning systemd, but it does bring up an important point: GNU/Linux is no longer just GNU/Linux. As time goes on, it's becoming more and more a case of GNU/systemd/Linux.
What worries me about this situation is that we're seeing the "GNU" and the "Linux" portions shrink, with systemd subsuming more and more of their functionality on an ongoing basis.
The centralization that's now happening is really concerning to me and others. It's not in the spirit of open source software, and it's not in the spirit of the UNIX philosophy.
The GNU (and other open source) software that has traditionally made up Linux distros was developed in a far more open, collaborative way than systemd has been developed. GNU and other open source software typically supports many UNIX-like OSes, and even some not-so-UNIX-like OSes, too. But systemd supports Linux, and only Linux (which may not necessarily be a bad thing, to keep it from spreading). GNU and other open source software is typically developed in cooperation, rather than in a dictatorial fashion like we've seen with systemd, where the wider user community has little to no impact on its direction. Additionally, the GNU and other open source software is typically more isolated and modular, so individual components can easily be swapped out with alternatives, which isn't really an option when using systemd.
While some people might welcome this change, I think it will just be a huge problem in the long run. GNU/Linux has become GNU/systemd/Linux today. But soon it will become just systemd/Linux, as systemd subsumes the userland software. And if the trend continues, it will just become systemd as systemd subsumes the kernel, too. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and the other mainstream Linux distros won't be Linux distros any longer, but rather they'll just be systemd distros.
It's simple enough for me. I just looked at my system this weekend and realized I'm not even running LVM, and that it's a holy hell of stuff that just kind of fell into place because I haven't been picking it apart with tweezers. I've been running as a regular old user, using the software center and GUI tools for a long time; I even used the Software Center to install Steam by clicking the "Software" icon and typing "Steam".
At the same time, I'm designing a new swap daemon to manage swap on Linux. That whole swap partition thing is dumb now, because the installer on various distributions (notably Debian-ites) frequently allocates hundreds of gigabytes of swap when you have 64 or 96 gigabytes of RAM. The right solution would be an automatic swap manager using various strategies; my primary strategy is a zram swap strategy (allocate more zram devices, coalesce them, and otherwise increase zram as memory pressure increases until a fixed limit--say half of RAM is holding compressed data), and other workloads may need alternates such as zswap (uses swap files, and caches them in compressed memory--less than 100% of swap is in RAM), swap files, or LVM swap partitions created out of free volume group space on-the-fly.
A swap daemon like that would free the user from worrying about what the installer automatically does (e.g. eat 110GB of your 128GB SSD for a single swap partition), how much swap space they need up-front, and so forth. The extended configuration allows reconfiguration for specialized workloads (notably, scientific computing). In normal function, the computer would just behave better by default, OOMing less, struggling less when memory usage is high, and not consuming disk space for memory swap space; the user wouldn't even know about the new swap daemon unless someone told him.
That's what all this complex esoterism is: a bunch of shit that goes under the hood. Nerds care about it and we talk about it; end users only know that their graphics card actually works in this release.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I don't know the rest of you, but I have a somewhat complicated dns configuration here, and every ubuntu upgrade breaks my config. I wish they stop messing with dns resolvers. resolvconf is already shit, I hope this "universal local DNS resolver service" is better, if not, I will upgrade ... to something else.
You picked a revision number, why add a really stupid moniker to it?
Yeah, they should follow Apple's lead. Everyone knows they have the best marketing.
OK, I'll bite.
Version 16.10
That's not a decimal number. You like your Windows 1 don't you?
Non-linux people look at the wide quagmire of distros
My feeling is that they're not even looking. If it's not sold in Superstore-is-us, they don't even know it exists.
many interested people who would like a desktop alternative get turned off by the impenetrable complexity and holy wars of the community (systemd, whatever the hell that is, I don't give a crap, vi, emacs, etc)
How the fuck did they even learn about the holy wars? Install the ISO, see if it works for you and your Facebook. You can Facebook, Youtube, Porntube, Libreoffice without know WTF emacs is.
Xenial Xerus?
And normal people are confused by that why? I mean, Windows has a code name too: "Piece o'Piss" and nobody seems confused by that...
"We have a GUI as good as Windows/OSX!" But then GUI users are mocked, and frankly the GUI is only half heartedly implemented, sort of a facade.
I'll quote from the IT Crowd: "Excuse me! Are you from the past?!"
important settings are only available by knowing where esoteric files in a variety of scripting languages live that then must be modified using an editor the proudly user surly.
Here's a challenge for you: enable the ability of a Windows 8 or newer computer to respond to pings. It's all in the GUI. Go on, try it.
I recently switched to Gentoo, and I'm probably not going back.
I got fed up with Debian and derivatives never having updated versions of packages that I needed (sometimes packages are YEARS old) and I also don't like the way systemd is being deployed (it is WAY too immature and buggy, and developers are cowboys), and plenty of other nagging issues (like pulseaudio dying for no reason at all).
With Gentoo, I have a system that is customized to my needs, while still being relatively easy to manage. The initial setup was painful, but it is more or less smooth sailing once you get networking, X and Firefox up and running (it'll just be "emerge this" and "emerge that" until you have the system you want).
In case anyone is wondering, having to compile things every time you install a package, surprisingly, doesn't take THAT much time if you have a decent-ish cpu (core i5) and memory, and set the global compile flags appropriately.
I strongly recommend trying Gentoo, if you haven't already. Try it in a virtual machine at first, and see how you like it. You might love it or hate it, but it won't be a waste of time, since there is a good chance you will learn a few things just from installing Gentoo.
Linux is tribal.
The parent comment should not be modded flamebait. It obviously isn't. It makes numerous true, although painful, observations about the sorry state of Linux distros today. Instead of trying to censor that description of reality, the Linux community should take it to heart.
The fact that Linux is at maybe 1% or 2% of the desktop/laptop market, with Windows at about 85% and OS X taking the rest, completely backs up what the parent wrote. This is even after the Windows 8, and to a lesser extent Windows 10, disasters, which gave Linux a perfect opportunity to take some of Windows' market share.
Some fool will probably come along and bring up Android at this point, but the reality is that it is nothing like traditional Linux distros. Android is basically just the kernel, with what's essentially a proprietary software stack running on top of it. This backs up what the parent is saying: Linux is only successful when all of the traditional software running on top of it (the GNU tools, systemd, X, GNOME/KDE/Xfce/etc) are thrown away and replaced, and the typical user has no idea at all that the Linux kernel is even present.
I was a Linux user for many years. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s I believed it really had a chance at becoming a viable alternative to Windows. But then it's like the Linux community decided to collectively go stupid and ruin their offering with shit like systemd, GNOME 3 and Unity. Linux became unusable for me. Now I use OS X, even if it is proprietary and costs more. At least it works.
wat ... no. With mint and ubuntu you dont need to open a terminal. Ever. For a normal every day use ofc. Stop spreading lies, we're on a technical site for techies.
I wish Ubuntu would get with the times and drop this release crap.
Fancy name for yet another systemd warez that replaces a popular non systemd warez project. http://fullcirclemagazine.org/...
The non-linux folks that use Ubuntu have presumably had it set up by their kids and never concern themselves with whether the code name for the system is Xenial Xerus - or anything else. Y'know, Windows versions have code names too - nobody pays attention to them, and they're only used during the development process. Hell, MacOS uses silly can and mountain names for their official releases.
Linux can make a fine newby system - for users who aren't going to set it up for themselves and who have a friend or relative to show them how to use it. But most of those users are probably better served by ChromeOS - especially once Android apps become available there. In any case, the least of the issues is the (yes, silly) code name associated with a release - and the fact that Slashdot users see an article noting what kernel version will be used...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
> That's not a decimal number. You like your Windows 1 don't you?
> > And normal people are confused by that why? I mean, Windows has a code name too: "Piece o'Piss" and nobody seems confused by that...
Avoiding the issue. Simple version schemes is a good idea for mass market appeal.
> My feeling is that they're not even looking. If it's not sold in Superstore-is-us, they don't even know it exists.
That's besides the point. There are several desktop-ready linux distros. The average layman won't be able to figure out which one is which.
> How the fuck did they even learn about the holy wars? Install the ISO, see if it works for you and your Facebook. You can Facebook, Youtube, Porntube, Libreoffice without know WTF emacs is.
That's besides the point. If they want to look for help, they will encounter the holy wars.
> I'll quote from the IT Crowd: "Excuse me! Are you from the past?!"
This doesn't address the complaint in any sensible way.
> Here's a challenge for you: enable the ability of a Windows 8 or newer computer to respond to pings. It's all in the GUI. Go on, try it.
Saying Windows 10 has a difficult UI as a counter argument to the difficulties of configuring a linux system is a logical fallacy.
Basically, you are an idiot with no valid points at all. Why you even bothered to contribute to this this is probably beyond anyone's imagination, unless they imagined an idiot, because that's what you are, an idiot.
Those distros you mention are not replacements for modern, mainstream distros like Debian or Ubuntu in any way.
Slackware is ancient, and requires far too much work to get it reasonably usable. Maybe it's good if you're a hobbyist Linux user who likes to tinker on the weekend, but Slackware is just not an option for anyone who needs to get real work done quickly.
Gentoo isn't much better than Slackware. Its compilation approach isn't an option for most people, too. They don't want to wait minutes, hours or even days before they can start using software. They don't want to pay for the electricity needed to power the compilation. They don't want the extra wear-and-tear on their hardware.
CRUX is a niche distro. Niche distros aren't an option because they can be much harder to get support from when things go wrong, there's much less of a guarantee that security issues will be found and fixed promptly, and the long-term viability of these distros is very questionable. When there are only one to three people working on a distro, it's a huge risk to use it for anything serious.
Devuan is a fucking joke. I followed its early development, and the first few months were a lot of infighting. Certain factions would accuse others of being "systemd trolls" and nonsense like that. Debian, even with systemd, is still far better than Devuan is. Of the options you listed, Devuan is by far the worst.
While the shitty niche distros you mention aren't viable replacements for real Linux distros, it turns out that FreeBSD is actually an excellent replacement. It has a large user community. It has responsible and responsive developers, and frequent maintenance and releases.
We aren't seeing Linux users moving the shitty alternatives that you proposed. We're seeing them abandon Linux altogether, and moving their systems over to FreeBSD! That should scare the living hell out of the Linux community. It's losing some of its best users, administrators and developers to FreeBSD. Over the long run, this can be a disaster. These are the kinds of users that the Linux community needs to keep if it wishes to remain viable.
Wouldn't it be easier to send in a patch fixing the dumb default swap partition size or just click the "manual" button when it asks about setting up partitions if you know your system is a couple standard deviations away from the norm?
We already suffer from too many daemons running (monolithically controlled or not).
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
I hate to break it to you, but the code-naming convention is nothing specific to Ubuntu, they just get slightly more silly about it with their alliteration, and the names are more user-visible, which isn't surprising considering there's a whole lot more overlap between the user and development base. I do wish fewer people would use them though, the version number is far more concise and informative. But then I wish the same thing about OS X and its silly cat names - Is Panther newer or older than Leopard, and where does Lion fit into things? At least with Ubuntu the code names are in alphabetical order.
It's not limited to the "cute" OSes either. Perhaps you've used a few of: Sparta, Snowball, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, Millenium, Razzle, Wolfpack, Whistler, Freestyle, Longhorn, Blackcomb, Blue, and Threshold. All versions of Windows, though at least they have the good taste not to put the name on the box.
As for the configuration files - I hate to break it to you, but Windows and OS X do the same thing. They just don't publicize it, so if you don't see an option you tend to assume it doesn't exist. There's a LOT of extra options in both that you can only modify by directly editing configuration files or the registry. If you've never run into a problem that can only be solved by serious registry editing consider yourself lucky. Or unlucky, if you resorted to reinstalling windows from scratch instead.
Where the command line is concerned, it's usually not that common settings can't be changed through the GUI, it's just that when someone asks for help, it's much easier for an expert to tell them "type these two lines into the terminal and paste the output back here if it doesn't solve the problem" than trying to hand-hold them through navigating the GUI alternative and then try to extract useful information from them afterwards. Just the initial "try this" post will probably be 10x as long, and require walking through the GUI yourself to make sure you don't skip any windows or tab-changes that will confuse the asker. Believe me, that's a headache worth avoiding whenever possible, especially since most askers are terrible at following directions perfectly, just want their problem solved, and won't learn anything useful from the process regardless. If Windows had a similarly powerful and convenient command line you'd see the exact same thing in Windows help forums. That you don't is far more a symptom of Window's anemic command line than a lack of Linux GUI options.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Version 16.1 (Xenial Xerus) kernel 4.8. Non-linux people look at the wide quagmire of distros and are baffled, many interested people who would like a desktop alternative get turned off by the impenetrable complexity
No they don't. They get told Ubuntu or Mint are good and go download it. Then they maybe do or maybe don't. No one sees Linux complexity except for the mythical super ASD who insists that his first foray into Linux should be to google for a list of all distributions.
and holy wars of the community (systemd, whatever the hell that is, I don't give a crap, vi, emacs, etc).
No one outside of Slashdot and the admin forums of a few distros gives a shit about this. You don't see mention of this in the community you got to for help because LibreOffice isn't doing something right.
Then you get to Ubuntu as the one targeting non-linux folks to join up, and are confronted with this BS. Xenial Xerus? Really? You picked a revision number, why add a really stupid moniker to it?
Keep it simple stupid.
I'm going to go with no again. Go to Ubuntu homepage, there's no mention of the version name. Not on their home page, not on the desktop sub page, not on the download page, not during installation, and not when booting.
Linux a pool of contradiction. "We have a GUI as good as Windows/OSX!" But then GUI users are mocked, and frankly the GUI is only half heartedly implemented, sort of a facade. Real work is done at the command line, and important settings are only available by knowing where esoteric files in a variety of scripting languages live that then must be modified using an editor the proudly user surly.
There's nothing contradictory about Linux. No one praises it's GUI. They praise its customisability but that's as far as it goes. As for the "real work". Who's real work? Let me see you use a WYSIWYG word processor on the command line. ... Wait you don't think grandma is trying to setup a LAMP stack on her system do you?
blah blah blah, systemd pissed in my fiber one flakes and now im constipated, waaah, gnome developers shaved their neckbeards. boohoo, my ED medication isn't effective anymore, only gay pron gets me hard now, lol losers....
Hey, my IP address is 127.0.0.1 too!
News at 11. It still uses systemd so I have no interest.
Multiply by 10 and then kernel.org can compete with likes of Chrome (v 51.0) and Mozilla (v.47.0)
Easier? Yes. Better? No.
How much swap should we set up? How much swap is optimal? How much swap do you need? Does your usage differ from my usage?
I originally worked out a management daemon because I wanted to use up to a certain amount of memory for compressed paging *without* using a fixed-sized on-disk backend (zswap), and that's not currently possible. Much of the time, my RAM compresses to 25% of its original size; often it's compressed to 33%; and large workloads including difficult-to-compress data (e.g. video) will come out of LZO at 90% of their original size. I can't just create swap of a given size and say that fits.
In short: setting up swap is an incredibly complex task requiring a high degree of knowledge about unpredictable workloads. You can only guess with a reasonable accuracy in terms of best-case, and will then get burned by corner cases.
Imagine if you had to select a hard disk based on "how much disk space I will use eventually," and having unused disk space had serious consequences up to and including system instability. That's what selecting a swap size is like.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
How could the Ubuntu version schema be any more simple that what it already is? 16.10 as in released in 2016-10.
Not to mention the problem with GUI guides when the user is using a completely different language on their desktop than you do.
Holy shit! Somehow I've been using Ubuntu for 4 or 5 years and never noticed that. No sarcasm, seriously, thanks for pointing that out. I agree with OP, no need to complicate it with cutesy alliterative name.
Going to go turn in my geek card now.
Version 16.1 (Xenial Xerus) kernel 4.8. Non-linux people look at the wide quagmire of distros and are baffled, many interested people who would like a desktop alternative get turned off by the impenetrable complexity and holy wars of the community (systemd, whatever the hell that is, I don't give a crap, vi, emacs, etc). Then you get to Ubuntu as the one targeting non-linux folks to join up, and are confronted with this BS. Xenial Xerus? Really? You picked a revision number, why add a really stupid moniker to it?
You're right. Users could never deal with names like Microsoft Windows 10 Pro Build 14361.rs1_release "Redstone", Apple Mac OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" (Darwin Kernel Version 15.5.0, xnu-3248.50.21~8/RELEASE_X86_64), or Solaris 10 (SunOS 5.10). Oh wait, they don't really care. If they are installing Linux they go to Ubuntu's, Fedora's, or whatever distribution's website, and click download and install it. Or, if they aren't tech savvy, they don't change the OS period. Vi vs EMACS? User doesn't care. Average people don't aren't using them (though Vi is included in Mac OS X).
Linux a pool of contradiction. "We have a GUI as good as Windows/OSX!" But then GUI users are mocked, and frankly the GUI is only half heartedly implemented, sort of a facade. Real work is done at the command line, and important settings are only available by knowing where esoteric files in a variety of scripting languages live that then must be modified using an editor the proudly user surly.
Define "real work." Are you talking word processing, desktop publishing, CAD, accounting, etc; or are you talking systems/network administration? Because you need to use the command line to do sys admin work in any OS. And that's not something that average people are doing, nor is it something that people who have no clue what they are doing should be messing around with anyway. But let's face it - the average home user can use any operating system as long as they have full access to a modern web browser (Chrome, Firefox, etc) and to a small handful of websites (FaceBook, YouTube, GMail). Then the next tier of users needs to have a WYSISYG Word Processor, a spread sheet program, and an email client, and the ability to print. Neither one of those categories matters what OS you are in. Then we have the gamers, that are going to use whatever OS the game publishers target. But none of those categories actually deals with anything that touches a command line in any OS.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Oh, I do. I love the GUI. At least I love my GUI, centered around Openbox. It's the main reason I use Linux by choice instead of Windows or OS X. It's easy enough to get much the same command line on both of them, and with OS X it's basically already there, embedded in the dumbed-down OS X GUI. My GUI got like it is because I could customize it, so customisability is certainly part of the appeal. I have my own themes and I can move the themes and settings from one machine to another by copying a few text files. Openbox also gives me sloppy focus, multiple workspaces, keyboard control, and command line integration without much effort, and it's fast and runs on old hardware.
A lot of this can be done with Windows and OS X. All of it, technically, because you can install Openbox with an X server. And that's how I ended up working (even where I started using Openbox) but it's easier to install Linux and be done with it if you want a Linux GUI (like I do).
It's a shame Gnome was always reluctant to support other Window managers, and dropped them completely with Gnome3. It means the GUI I use is lacking a few features, like configuration screens for monitors and keyboard mappings. So if you want that you're back to Gnome or KDE or Unity. I assume somebody must praise them or they wouldn't have got to be the defaults.
Gnome2 was getting quite good, so it's possible MATE would do what I want. But I haven't tried it because, as a Linux user, I'm more interested in getting things done.