There is a perception that it is a "borg" which keeps taking over more functionality and becoming a dependency for so many things that there is no choice but to use it, an example being Gnome. I don't know if this is fair or not.
This is effectively the crux of it. Everything else is just a symptom of this. People will make detailed technical analysis of the inner workings of systemd and that's cool and some of them are correct. But, bad technical decisions aren't that big of a deal until they start spreading across the system like a virus. Once systemd has infected everything (and, we are rapidly approaching that), it will be difficult or maybe impossible to cut out that cancer. We are right on the verge of being stuck with systemd and that's a very bad situation to be in.
I will note that maintainers of several unrelated distributions independently chose to adopt it, including Arch Linux. I mention Arch because A) they are famously in favour of a simple base system which you customise the way you want, B) I don't believe have anything to do with Red Hat (where the systemd creators come from), and C) they haven't been forced to switch by e.g. gnome because they don't require gnome or any other desktop. Comments from an Arch developer on their forum: https://bbs.archlinux.org/view...
This is the second problem with systemd. It has polarized people to such an extent that it resembles a religion or US politics. You must pick a side and you must rabidly defend that side no matter what. To be fair, it's an issue worth having an opinion on but, your opinion definitely doesn't matter. You have distros with very finite resources (like Arch) and distros with effectively unlimited resources (RedHat). The smaller distros kinda have to eat whatever shit sandwich the larger distros serve up because they don't have the resources to do anything else.
It prevents it. The init part of systemd is just a small part of it. It has started to replace many (and a growing number) of core Linux userspace subsystems. It has gotten to the point where you may not be able to run the desktop environment you want without systemd. The generic, modular bits that systemd has consumed are now components that more and more pieces of software are depending on. In the very near future, it may not be possible to run a modern Linux desktop without systemd.
And, for what benefit? None that I've ever seen. There is nothing that I can now do with my laptop that I couldn't do before. But, there are plenty of things that I can no longer do since the introduction of systemd.
What I will say, however, is that after spending the time reading up on systemd and learning how to use it, how to write unit files and all that jazz, I really fail to understand what the furore over it is. My systemd machines are ready to go much faster than any bash-script based init system and writing a new unit file for some daemon that lacks one already is easy peasy.
The init capabilities of systemd aren't too bad. The "scripts" look pretty similar to many other init system alternatives and, for basic stuff, are fine. The problem is that systemd isn't an init system anymore. It has become a layer between the kernel and traditional userspace. *That* is why people hate it. Basically, RedHat has gained too much control over the Linux ecosystem and so has started ramming their agenda down the throats of all Linux users. If the systemd/PulseAudio/etc abominations were just confined to RedHat, no one would even vaguely care (except RedHat users). But, it's become increasingly difficult to avoid the garbage coming out of RedHat because, as I stated before, they have gained too much control and influence over Linux.
Maybe. But, it's very dishonest. A simple matrix multiply is a triple nested loop and when the compiler detects that loop with a certain stride through memory, it drops in the fast stuff. The exact same loop with a different stride through memory didn't trigger any special optimization and, as expected, the performance dropped by at least an order of magnitude. So, in the context of benchmarks, it's cheating: The benchmark does not represent the capabilities of the machine or compiler on any workload that doesn't look like the benchmark (not even on workloads that are almost identical to the benchmark). It represents the compiler writers ability to detect the benchmark.
Yes, benchmarks do a good job of comparing two pieces of hardware, especially tests which involve the entire system.
No, they usually don't. Doing a "full system test" is almost certainly not going to give you useful information. How do you weigh individual results into a final result? How do you know the vendor hasn't included special cheat modes into the hardware/software to skew the benchmark? How do you know the benchmark is even testing what it claims to be testing?
Without benchmark tools we couldn't effectively compare changes to setting or in hardware speed specifically raw CPU, raw GPU, raw RAM, and raw DISK I/O speeds.
Comparing "raw" anything is probably not useful either. Discovering that increasing the CPU speed by 10% increases a benchmark score by 10% is almost certainly meaningless unless the benchmark is the intended workload of the machine. And, that's the key: A benchmark only has meaning if it accurately represents the intended workload of the machine. Most benchmarks do not.
Benchmark tools also help determine system stability by pushing the hardware to the limit and taking it to it's thermal throttling speed.
So does "while(true);". That doesn't make it a useful benchmark.
Keep the data in a table for all to view. Benchmarks keep everyone honest in the end.
Actually, when a benchmark becomes popular, it does the opposite of "keep everyone honest". Vendors start to design towards a benchmark and, in many cases, detect the benchmark and enter into a special mode of operation (or emit canned benchmark assembly) to cheat the benchmark. This is a very common thing to do and quickly turns benchmark results into, "Who can cheat the benchmark in the most clever way" instead of giving meaningful information about what you are trying to benchmark.
Companies have been known to take this even further. You can probably find plenty of compilers that have something like, "if(this_looks_like_benchmark_x) emit_special_code_for_benchmark_x". I know for a fact that the old Sun compiler could detect a matrix multiply and would emit hand tuned, parallelized assembly when it detected it.
Vendors will always play games with benchmarks and customers will always read things into benchmarks that aren't true. That's not to say that benchmarks aren't useful but, if you are making decisions based on benchmarks, you really need to understand what is being benchmarked, who did the benchmarking and what (if anything) the benchmark results mean.
Worse, using something like "shred" on a disk might make it look encrypted. It's not possible to "decrypt" the disk because the disk doesn't contain any data. So, if you decide to securely dispose of your old disks by running "shred" on them and someone merely accuses you of having child porn, be prepared to spend the rest of your life in jail.
Beyond a certain point, "thin" stops being a feature. We reached that point long ago. The sacrifices that laptop developers are making to create these ultra-thin laptops are a huge step backwards for computing. User replaceable disks/ram/keyboard/motherboards/anything was a fairly common feature of many laptops until this ultra-thin craze started. I've physically broken every laptop I've ever owned at least once. A laptop with everything soldered onto the motherboard and practically hermetically sealed, will be a paperweight in a year for a heavy use laptop user. But, maybe that's the plan. Sell people easily destroyed, non-fixable but very fancy looking junk and hope you can sell them even fancier looking junk next year when their laptop stops working.
This is excellent advice. In my mind, the X220 is the quintessential ultraportable workhorse laptop. Light, fast, good battery life and everything is easily replaceable. I've replace the screen twice, the keyboard once a year, the palm rest, etc. After unsuccessfully trying to "upgrade" from the X220 I just decided to spend a fraction of that money and stock up on extra parts. I imagine I'll continue to use it until I can't get replacement parts anymore.
They didn't use a third party to hack the phone. They had the ability the entire time and invented this narrative when they realized that they weren't going to get the court precedent that they wanted.
RAID is only as reliable as the person administering it. I keep a fairly large (well, large for home use) RAID array and every disk runs SMART tests daily. If a disk fails a self test, within hours, I drop it from the array, let the hot spare pick up the data, and replace the dropped disk with a cold spare (that becomes the new hot spare) and then order a new cold spare. It doesn't matter if the disk that failed the self test could be salvaged. It's going to die at some point so, if it shows any signs of flakiness at all, you might as well replace it. Using this method, I've never had a live disk actually fail out of an array and I've never lost any data.
RAID is an awesome tool but, I think most people who use it don't really understand how to wield it.
You might want to consider something like a Synology and use the cloud storage as part of your backup plan. They are simple, low maintenance devices that have a good reputation for reliability. It sounds like you have properly irreplaceable data and, personally, I wouldn't trust a third party to be the sole owner of that data.
They are no longer your photos, music, etc. Now they belong to Microsoft and they can revoke your ability to use them whenever they want and for whatever reason they want. "The cloud" is not a long term storage medium.
The difference is that there wasn't a global economy during those times (at least not on the scale we have today). During those times, If a company in Germany developed a very robust widget and an American company directly copied it, the impact wasn't catastrophic to the German company. Now, with R&D done in one country and manufacturing done in another, if your manufacturer goes rogue, he can cause real and potentially fatal harm to your business.
My initial thought as well. Reading the article, what they've actually created is a single atom piston with insanely complex machinery to drive the piston. Still pretty cool but, pretty far from a "single atom working heat engine".
I can 100% respect this post. It's dead on. Debian takes a bit of love to be usable. But, once you've got Debian into your personal Nirvana State, nothing else really compares.
I wouldn't say that Ubuntu is a broken flavor of Debian. I know that's a long standing joke but, I don't think it's true anymore. I run Debian with XFCE and I actually grab some data/packages from Ubuntu because they are leaps and bounds better than the Debian versions. In particular, if you run Debian and you aren't stealing the/etc/fonts directory from Ubuntu, you are doing yourself a massive disservice. Debian has the font rendering capabilities of Ubuntu, just not the configuration to take advantage of it. In this case, I'd say Debian is broken and Ubuntu fixes the brokenness. And, "unreadable fonts" is a pretty fucking big deal.
I was actually a moderator for the Ubuntu forums for the first few years of Ubuntu (I had an @ubuntu.org e-mail address and everything). In those days, Ubuntu had a massive impact on the accessibility of Linux to the average computer user. I could genuinely recommend it to anyone I knew. But, when KDE/Gnome went off the fucking rails and Ubuntu went the direction of Unity, it was almost like a mini dark ages for the Linux desktop. Basically, all the traction, all the trust, all the familiarity was struck down from upon high by people wielding job descriptions like User Experience Engineer.
Yes, assholes wearing skinny jeans destroyed the Linux desktop. And Canonical didn't help the situation when it started shipping Amazon connected desktop searches. However, having said all that, I decided to try vanilla Ubuntu recently, and, frankly, it's not that bad. It's actually really nice. In fact, I had a moment of terror when I wondered if my drunken ramblings had directly influenced the interface because it mostly worked how I wanted it to work. A power user will need to tweak it a bit but, in general, Unity might fit a power users workflow better than it might seem at first glance.
Now, that's just desktop stuff. On a server/VM/container/whatever, Ubuntu is the go to flavor. Without hesitation. If you don't use it, people will give you the stink eye and ask you to justify why you didn't. It's easy to use, it works and it's so widely used that when you say "apt-get", no one will give you a funny look. In a sense, Ubuntu started out as Linux for Humans and ended up being Linux for the Cloud. I doubt that Canonical even expected that but, frankly, I'm very much OK with that situation and I wish them the best.
P.S. I still love you, Debian. You'll always have a place on my laptop.
Even beyond that, average users aren't using desktop/laptop type devices as much these days. Gone are the days of your mother calling you every 6 months and saying, "My laptop is acting funny". I think once home users started relying less on Windows as a platform to browse the web, a lot of the motivation for converting friends and family to Linux died as well: These days I don't really care what they run as long as they aren't constantly getting infected and bugging me for support.
We also don't know if the device *needed* to be hacked by a third party. To me it looked like the FBI wanted a precedent, realized it might not get the one it wanted and then decided to back down with a, "Oh, wait, we found another way" story.
You know it's scary times when the guy wearing the tinfoil hat is starting to seem like the most sane person in the room.
Whose freedom is more important? The transgendered man who wants to use a woman's restroom or the women who don't want to share their restroom with a transgendered man?
The womans freedom is not in any way threatened here. You are confusing "freedom" with "conforms with my very narrow values".
Therefore he is doing precisely what we ordinarily value which is letting the majority rule.
We don't value this at all. In fact, our country was specifically created as a constitutional republic to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
This is flat wrong. Any modern OS will use non-allocated memory for things like disk cache. An SSD is fast but getting the information straight from memory is still about 10x faster on a laptop. 8GB is sufficient for the general usage of a computer. 16GB+ is very helpful for performance if you are measuring uptime in units greater than hours.
Because vendors have convinced customers that they need pretty computers and not useful computers. It doesn't matter if the specs are good, the keyboard is usable, the touchpad doesn't prevent you from typing, etc. It just needs to be pretty enough to impress other people.
I've twice tried to replace my X220 with thin, pretty laptops. Once with a Chromebook Pixel and once with a new XPS 13. Both machines lasted a few days before I breathed a sigh of relief and booted the X220 back up. The only thing newer laptops have going for them is high resolution displays and, on small ultra-portables, it's not as useful as one might hope. There might be very subtle improvements in font rendering but, certainly not enough to make a nearly unusable laptop more appealing than something like an X220.
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There is a perception that it is a "borg" which keeps taking over more functionality and becoming a dependency for so many things that there is no choice but to use it, an example being Gnome. I don't know if this is fair or not.
This is effectively the crux of it. Everything else is just a symptom of this. People will make detailed technical analysis of the inner workings of systemd and that's cool and some of them are correct. But, bad technical decisions aren't that big of a deal until they start spreading across the system like a virus. Once systemd has infected everything (and, we are rapidly approaching that), it will be difficult or maybe impossible to cut out that cancer. We are right on the verge of being stuck with systemd and that's a very bad situation to be in.
I will note that maintainers of several unrelated distributions independently chose to adopt it, including Arch Linux. I mention Arch because A) they are famously in favour of a simple base system which you customise the way you want, B) I don't believe have anything to do with Red Hat (where the systemd creators come from), and C) they haven't been forced to switch by e.g. gnome because they don't require gnome or any other desktop.
Comments from an Arch developer on their forum: https://bbs.archlinux.org/view...
This is the second problem with systemd. It has polarized people to such an extent that it resembles a religion or US politics. You must pick a side and you must rabidly defend that side no matter what. To be fair, it's an issue worth having an opinion on but, your opinion definitely doesn't matter. You have distros with very finite resources (like Arch) and distros with effectively unlimited resources (RedHat). The smaller distros kinda have to eat whatever shit sandwich the larger distros serve up because they don't have the resources to do anything else.
It prevents it. The init part of systemd is just a small part of it. It has started to replace many (and a growing number) of core Linux userspace subsystems. It has gotten to the point where you may not be able to run the desktop environment you want without systemd. The generic, modular bits that systemd has consumed are now components that more and more pieces of software are depending on. In the very near future, it may not be possible to run a modern Linux desktop without systemd.
And, for what benefit? None that I've ever seen. There is nothing that I can now do with my laptop that I couldn't do before. But, there are plenty of things that I can no longer do since the introduction of systemd.
What I will say, however, is that after spending the time reading up on systemd and learning how to use it, how to write unit files and all that jazz, I really fail to understand what the furore over it is. My systemd machines are ready to go much faster than any bash-script based init system and writing a new unit file for some daemon that lacks one already is easy peasy.
The init capabilities of systemd aren't too bad. The "scripts" look pretty similar to many other init system alternatives and, for basic stuff, are fine. The problem is that systemd isn't an init system anymore. It has become a layer between the kernel and traditional userspace. *That* is why people hate it. Basically, RedHat has gained too much control over the Linux ecosystem and so has started ramming their agenda down the throats of all Linux users. If the systemd/PulseAudio/etc abominations were just confined to RedHat, no one would even vaguely care (except RedHat users). But, it's become increasingly difficult to avoid the garbage coming out of RedHat because, as I stated before, they have gained too much control and influence over Linux.
Maybe. But, it's very dishonest. A simple matrix multiply is a triple nested loop and when the compiler detects that loop with a certain stride through memory, it drops in the fast stuff. The exact same loop with a different stride through memory didn't trigger any special optimization and, as expected, the performance dropped by at least an order of magnitude. So, in the context of benchmarks, it's cheating: The benchmark does not represent the capabilities of the machine or compiler on any workload that doesn't look like the benchmark (not even on workloads that are almost identical to the benchmark). It represents the compiler writers ability to detect the benchmark.
Yes, benchmarks do a good job of comparing two pieces of hardware, especially tests which involve the entire system.
No, they usually don't. Doing a "full system test" is almost certainly not going to give you useful information. How do you weigh individual results into a final result? How do you know the vendor hasn't included special cheat modes into the hardware/software to skew the benchmark? How do you know the benchmark is even testing what it claims to be testing?
Without benchmark tools we couldn't effectively compare changes to setting or in hardware speed specifically raw CPU, raw GPU, raw RAM, and raw DISK I/O speeds.
Comparing "raw" anything is probably not useful either. Discovering that increasing the CPU speed by 10% increases a benchmark score by 10% is almost certainly meaningless unless the benchmark is the intended workload of the machine. And, that's the key: A benchmark only has meaning if it accurately represents the intended workload of the machine. Most benchmarks do not.
Benchmark tools also help determine system stability by pushing the hardware to the limit and taking it to it's thermal throttling speed.
So does "while(true);". That doesn't make it a useful benchmark.
Keep the data in a table for all to view. Benchmarks keep everyone honest in the end.
Actually, when a benchmark becomes popular, it does the opposite of "keep everyone honest". Vendors start to design towards a benchmark and, in many cases, detect the benchmark and enter into a special mode of operation (or emit canned benchmark assembly) to cheat the benchmark. This is a very common thing to do and quickly turns benchmark results into, "Who can cheat the benchmark in the most clever way" instead of giving meaningful information about what you are trying to benchmark.
Companies have been known to take this even further. You can probably find plenty of compilers that have something like, "if(this_looks_like_benchmark_x) emit_special_code_for_benchmark_x". I know for a fact that the old Sun compiler could detect a matrix multiply and would emit hand tuned, parallelized assembly when it detected it.
Vendors will always play games with benchmarks and customers will always read things into benchmarks that aren't true. That's not to say that benchmarks aren't useful but, if you are making decisions based on benchmarks, you really need to understand what is being benchmarked, who did the benchmarking and what (if anything) the benchmark results mean.
Worse, using something like "shred" on a disk might make it look encrypted. It's not possible to "decrypt" the disk because the disk doesn't contain any data. So, if you decide to securely dispose of your old disks by running "shred" on them and someone merely accuses you of having child porn, be prepared to spend the rest of your life in jail.
Beyond a certain point, "thin" stops being a feature. We reached that point long ago. The sacrifices that laptop developers are making to create these ultra-thin laptops are a huge step backwards for computing. User replaceable disks/ram/keyboard/motherboards/anything was a fairly common feature of many laptops until this ultra-thin craze started. I've physically broken every laptop I've ever owned at least once. A laptop with everything soldered onto the motherboard and practically hermetically sealed, will be a paperweight in a year for a heavy use laptop user. But, maybe that's the plan. Sell people easily destroyed, non-fixable but very fancy looking junk and hope you can sell them even fancier looking junk next year when their laptop stops working.
This is excellent advice. In my mind, the X220 is the quintessential ultraportable workhorse laptop. Light, fast, good battery life and everything is easily replaceable. I've replace the screen twice, the keyboard once a year, the palm rest, etc. After unsuccessfully trying to "upgrade" from the X220 I just decided to spend a fraction of that money and stock up on extra parts. I imagine I'll continue to use it until I can't get replacement parts anymore.
They didn't use a third party to hack the phone. They had the ability the entire time and invented this narrative when they realized that they weren't going to get the court precedent that they wanted.
RAID is only as reliable as the person administering it. I keep a fairly large (well, large for home use) RAID array and every disk runs SMART tests daily. If a disk fails a self test, within hours, I drop it from the array, let the hot spare pick up the data, and replace the dropped disk with a cold spare (that becomes the new hot spare) and then order a new cold spare. It doesn't matter if the disk that failed the self test could be salvaged. It's going to die at some point so, if it shows any signs of flakiness at all, you might as well replace it. Using this method, I've never had a live disk actually fail out of an array and I've never lost any data.
RAID is an awesome tool but, I think most people who use it don't really understand how to wield it.
You might want to consider something like a Synology and use the cloud storage as part of your backup plan. They are simple, low maintenance devices that have a good reputation for reliability. It sounds like you have properly irreplaceable data and, personally, I wouldn't trust a third party to be the sole owner of that data.
They are no longer your photos, music, etc. Now they belong to Microsoft and they can revoke your ability to use them whenever they want and for whatever reason they want. "The cloud" is not a long term storage medium.
Yeah, I hate physicists too.
The difference is that there wasn't a global economy during those times (at least not on the scale we have today). During those times, If a company in Germany developed a very robust widget and an American company directly copied it, the impact wasn't catastrophic to the German company. Now, with R&D done in one country and manufacturing done in another, if your manufacturer goes rogue, he can cause real and potentially fatal harm to your business.
My initial thought as well. Reading the article, what they've actually created is a single atom piston with insanely complex machinery to drive the piston. Still pretty cool but, pretty far from a "single atom working heat engine".
I can 100% respect this post. It's dead on. Debian takes a bit of love to be usable. But, once you've got Debian into your personal Nirvana State, nothing else really compares.
I wouldn't say that Ubuntu is a broken flavor of Debian. I know that's a long standing joke but, I don't think it's true anymore. I run Debian with XFCE and I actually grab some data/packages from Ubuntu because they are leaps and bounds better than the Debian versions. In particular, if you run Debian and you aren't stealing the /etc/fonts directory from Ubuntu, you are doing yourself a massive disservice. Debian has the font rendering capabilities of Ubuntu, just not the configuration to take advantage of it. In this case, I'd say Debian is broken and Ubuntu fixes the brokenness. And, "unreadable fonts" is a pretty fucking big deal.
I was actually a moderator for the Ubuntu forums for the first few years of Ubuntu (I had an @ubuntu.org e-mail address and everything). In those days, Ubuntu had a massive impact on the accessibility of Linux to the average computer user. I could genuinely recommend it to anyone I knew. But, when KDE/Gnome went off the fucking rails and Ubuntu went the direction of Unity, it was almost like a mini dark ages for the Linux desktop. Basically, all the traction, all the trust, all the familiarity was struck down from upon high by people wielding job descriptions like User Experience Engineer.
Yes, assholes wearing skinny jeans destroyed the Linux desktop. And Canonical didn't help the situation when it started shipping Amazon connected desktop searches. However, having said all that, I decided to try vanilla Ubuntu recently, and, frankly, it's not that bad. It's actually really nice. In fact, I had a moment of terror when I wondered if my drunken ramblings had directly influenced the interface because it mostly worked how I wanted it to work. A power user will need to tweak it a bit but, in general, Unity might fit a power users workflow better than it might seem at first glance.
Now, that's just desktop stuff. On a server/VM/container/whatever, Ubuntu is the go to flavor. Without hesitation. If you don't use it, people will give you the stink eye and ask you to justify why you didn't. It's easy to use, it works and it's so widely used that when you say "apt-get", no one will give you a funny look. In a sense, Ubuntu started out as Linux for Humans and ended up being Linux for the Cloud. I doubt that Canonical even expected that but, frankly, I'm very much OK with that situation and I wish them the best.
P.S. I still love you, Debian. You'll always have a place on my laptop.
It's always a good day when a buzzword dies before I ever get the chance to learn what it means.
Even beyond that, average users aren't using desktop/laptop type devices as much these days. Gone are the days of your mother calling you every 6 months and saying, "My laptop is acting funny". I think once home users started relying less on Windows as a platform to browse the web, a lot of the motivation for converting friends and family to Linux died as well: These days I don't really care what they run as long as they aren't constantly getting infected and bugging me for support.
We also don't know if the device *needed* to be hacked by a third party. To me it looked like the FBI wanted a precedent, realized it might not get the one it wanted and then decided to back down with a, "Oh, wait, we found another way" story.
You know it's scary times when the guy wearing the tinfoil hat is starting to seem like the most sane person in the room.
Whose freedom is more important? The transgendered man who wants to use a woman's restroom or the women who don't want to share their restroom with a transgendered man?
The womans freedom is not in any way threatened here. You are confusing "freedom" with "conforms with my very narrow values".
Therefore he is doing precisely what we ordinarily value which is letting the majority rule.
We don't value this at all. In fact, our country was specifically created as a constitutional republic to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
This is flat wrong. Any modern OS will use non-allocated memory for things like disk cache. An SSD is fast but getting the information straight from memory is still about 10x faster on a laptop. 8GB is sufficient for the general usage of a computer. 16GB+ is very helpful for performance if you are measuring uptime in units greater than hours.
Because vendors have convinced customers that they need pretty computers and not useful computers. It doesn't matter if the specs are good, the keyboard is usable, the touchpad doesn't prevent you from typing, etc. It just needs to be pretty enough to impress other people.
I've twice tried to replace my X220 with thin, pretty laptops. Once with a Chromebook Pixel and once with a new XPS 13. Both machines lasted a few days before I breathed a sigh of relief and booted the X220 back up. The only thing newer laptops have going for them is high resolution displays and, on small ultra-portables, it's not as useful as one might hope. There might be very subtle improvements in font rendering but, certainly not enough to make a nearly unusable laptop more appealing than something like an X220.