Yepp, Some package managers are on crack too often.
Debian Stable removes the network stack by default if you uninstall the Gnome GUI. Fucked up my day when I was doing a server-install and just wanted to ditch the GUI as a last move. Since then I always leave the GUI installed - even though that's actually pretty retarded for a Linux Server Host.... But that's Debian for you.
That's because the network stack is built into GNOME, considering it's meant to be manipulated through its GUI. You could've prevented this by (1) checking what you were removing before you went through with it [as apt will clearly warn you of], (2) keep a secondary network stack installed in fact the first malfunctions, and (3) using system snapshots as something to rollback to if you're displeased with some changes you make.
Windows and OS X on the desktop are also jokes because when I accidentally (read: recklessly type shit into the command line) remove software, I get all sorts of problems.
Also, trucks aren't ready for the road because when I tear out pieces of the engine nondiscriminately, sometimes it doesn't turn on anymore.
Well I gotta tell you I've seen programs removed and suddenly the system would not boot on Win7. Seems the uninstaller took a few system files with it. Shitty developers can fuck up absolutely anything.
A particular example of this is some nasty rootkit that comes (came? Not sure if they still do this) with Adobe Acrobat for Windows. The purpose of the rootkit is (was) to prevent people from pirating the software, but if it was tampered with or improperly deactivated, it had a tendency to throw a wrench into the entire booting process.
Having come up during the advent of computers, this is PRECISELY why we separated hardware bootstrap firmware from user-accessible code in the first place, and did not make provisions for user-space access to change it. The hardware had to continue to operate and boot regardless of the stupid things users and developers did.
That all went out the window the moment we started with this "update your BIOS from the O/S" bullshit. And now, apparently, "let's give userspace read/write access to the bootstrap firmware willy nilly," which is complete and utter stupidity.
People shouldn't be executing rm -rf / to begin with. As a user that doesn't wipe out his whole system by accident, I would like to protest your argument by saying that I like that the boot files are easily accessible, it allows me to learn more about how my OS works and how to debug errors in the booting process.
Oh yeah, heaven forbid you want to uninstall the built-in crappy calendar orage. It's a required of the xfce desktop. You kill it, your desktop is GONE.
I'm just curious what OS you think *isn't* guilty of this. Guess what happens if I try to uninstall the taskbar from Windows or the Apple menu from OS X? Oops, my whole GUI is wiped out; the OS probably wouldn't even boot at that point.
so for now there is no good solution to avoid potentially bricking your system
Have you tried not running rm -rf/?
Shit happens. I once saw a guy accidentally type:
rm -rf / some/random/directory #Note the space after the '/' character.... just a slip of his thumb but he did it in a root shell and unfortunately for him he was such a fast typer that nobody present could intervene quickly enough.
So your complaint appears to be that when one recklessly uses root commands, it should only wipe out all their data, not all their data plus their motherboard? That's not terribly urgent. It'd be like complaining that handguns are too powerful, when I shoot somebody in the head it should only kill them, not kill them and also leave a hole in the wall.
There is no reason to suppose that removing a game should remove much more than the game (maybe a library or two used only by the game, but that's it).
No sane package management system would do things this way.
This has bit me too, but I noticed that the list of things to remove was way longer than it should have been and stopped it, but it wa something like remove a small application and have it want to remove things that were fairly important.
The very first distro I used was Xubuntu. And like our GP, I wanted to remove some of the unnecessary games that came with the distro, so I too used sudo apt-get remove in order to do so. And I have absolutely no recollection of the entire DE being dependent upon sudoku. So it sounds like the GP is just making shit up. Even if he wasn't, he was still a numbskull, but he probably did make it up.
No, he's not an idiot. He's a normal person. Normal people click uninstall and expect their game to be uninstalled, not their OS's GUI. Linux package managers are well overdue for redesign. Making hardware brick able by software is also bad design. Mounting firmware as ordinary rw files, ditto.
Well, there's two problems with that. One is that he explicitly stated he was using Ubuntu, which comes with a GUI software center. However, he decided to use the terminal anyway, which leads to our second problem: apt will explicitly tell you what you're going to remove whenever you run sudo apt-get remove foobar, and he ignored it and ran it anyway. Which is his right, but one should be aware that anybody can do the same thing in OS X and Windows, so this isn't a problem with Linux so much as stupidity.
It has nothing to do with elegance. Turning UEFI variables into ROM is the equivalent of locking the hardware down. systemd isn't in the wrong here. But judging by your posting history, I guess you would never admit that even when it's blindingly obvious.
You could've avoided it by carefully using apt flags, but again, you're a fucking idiot.
A user shouldn't need to do that. It should be smart enough to know that other things are using it as a dependency and be smart enough not to remove those things.
It's a shitty design.
A newbie user shouldn't be fiddling with their packages from the terminal either. Ubuntu comes with a software center that allows one to easily add and remove software without this happening to you.
There are too many imbeciles that will brick their system by typing in random terminal commands they found on the Internet, like fork bombs or using wget to download a trojan. rm -rf / is only the most famous of this kind of command. Then they will complain that Linux is too fragile and dangerous to use for new users, blah blah blah.
I was thinking of a possible solution to this. Perhaps the distros meant for newbies (Ubuntu, Mint, elementary, Zorin, etc.) could lock by default the most well known terminal commands that fuck your system up. When trying to execute them (even with root privileges), they will get something like "ERROR: This command is extremely dangerous. To execute, go to [distro's website].org/foobar." This page will have the password in order to bypass the lock, but only at the bottom of some text that explains exactly what will happen, and if you do anyway, that the distro has absolutely 0% liability to what will happen to your system.
for example last night I removed the soduku game that came with my distro, thanks to its dependency tree and debian / ubuntu's package management removing this one stupid game took half of XFCE with it, and I was left with a command prompt
say what you want about windows, it doesnt fuck the entire system if I uninstall solitaire
You're a fucking idiot. Whenever you install or remove something with apt, it tells you exactly what's going to be removed with it. So you chose to blindly ignore the warning prompts and wiped out your DE in spite of it. The exact same thing happens if you randomly delete folders in your Win32 folder as well.
You could've avoided it by carefully using apt flags, but again, you're a fucking idiot.
Full disclosure: I'm not a Microsoft fan. Yes, Windows phone sales have been abysmal. We've known this for.... decades, actually. Whatever Microsoft renames or redesigns the phone, it's never done well. Microsoft doesn't appear to "get it" at a fundamental level.
But, so far, Microsoft continues to pour money into it. And Microsoft still has a lot of money. So realistically, the Windows phone isn't dead until Microsoft says it's dead.
The "windows phone dead" meme, like "the year of linux on the desktop" meme, is one of those wishful-thinking things that may actually be true someday. But not today.
They've always had pitiful market share, but it's disintegrating pretty rapidly now. This along with the fact that they're starting to put adware in their phones should indicate that they're probably throwing in the towel now.
iPhone sucks from a power user perspective. I could never stand the small screen even if that's fixed with the new generation devices, and then the software itself is crippled because Apple forces power user features to be disabled.
Android versions of identical software tends to have more features as such, but the problem I have is the platform is stale. It doesn't improve generation after generation. It's also slow and glitchy. Estimates are the software is about 10 times slower thanks to Java. I like my Android phone but wish it were faster and smoother as a result.
The only alternative on the market would of been Windows 10 Phone but it's been announced as dead.
Only issue I had with Windows is Microsoft killed off the head end devices and device choice became scarce. I tried out a low-end phone and while it wasn't terribly bad, it could have been better. Only problem I had software wise with the platform was the lack of Google Apps such as YouTube. I upload and view plenty of YouTube, and Windows Phone is limited to using a web browser to use the site currently, which is not as nice.
The potential of Windows Phone is nice- by having a full version of Windows, you could potentially run all your Windows Apps including traditional Windows 32 ones wherever you went.
Incompetent competition is worse than no competition. You should cheer for the Ubuntu Phone or some other underdog long before you hope Microsoft can ejaculate their slimy business all over the phone market.
This guy is an idiot. The platform is mature, and arguably, the best out there. Everybody I know who uses one likes theirs, as well. MS isn't going to walk away from this because of current fashion trends.
You could replace "MS [phone division]" with "Palm Inc", "BlackBerry", "Nokia", "Sega", and a million other companies.
Correct, Tor does not usually hide the fact that you are using it. There are some obscuring gateways into Tor, but those only work if you know about them and your adversary doesn't. I wouldn't trust that, and assume if I am using Tor, anyone who wants to know that fact can get it.
The bomb threat made at Harvard (via Tor) a while back was traced to the only person who was on Tor when it was sent. That was the primary thing that lead to his suspicion.
Right. The reason the Tor Browser works is because everyone using it is indistinguishable. What this means is that the less people using it, the weaker its obfuscation of its users becomes.
Heck, mask your Mac address and go to starbucks....this isn't complex stuff here.
All that would obscure is which computer at the Starbucks is doing whatever shady thing is being done online. If you used TAILS, there would be no proof that it ever booted on your computer at all.
Google is the company that can be least trusted. They are the only company which has the primary business model of collecting as much information from you as possible and selling it to the highest bidder.
Apple, BB and Microsoft collect info too, but at least it's not the basis of their business model.
Google and Apple don't sell your info. Google's cash cow is the fact that they exclusively hold certain information about their customers, and they leverage it by allowing targeted advertisements--they would lose their broker status by giving out all that customer info (that's why they very carefully anonymize advertisements on their products, so they don't let their customers spill the beans to anybody else BUT Google.) Apple's cash cow is customer loyalty and huge margins on their premium devices, so they would be foolish to squander their customer loyalty by selling their info out
"the fact that Windows Phone OS has such a low market share helps ensure its security "
Whoa - did I just flash back to 1998?
"Security by obscurity" is universally lambasted as a terrible protocol by security experts. But even so, the argument is full of shit because the Windows Store has been filled with malware for years now.
MS has already stated that they will continue to develop and support Windows Phone OS. This article is just fear mongering. The platform is not going anywhere.
They really have no other choice anyway. It would be foolish to give up on the platform because it can be used for IoT and tablets as well and it is also allows them to be more agile if things ever change. Not that I see them changing in the short term, but who knows, the pendulum may swing back into MS's favor in time and if it does, they will have the OS and infrastructure ready for it.
Anyway, I will continue to use a Windows Phone because I like the interface. The lack of apps is not a concern for me.
In addition, the fact that Windows Phone OS has such a low market share helps ensure its security as well since most malicious software and exploits will be developed for Android and iOS.
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guess what, I used the little ubuntu software center to uninstall it
And what version of Xubuntu was this?
Yepp, Some package managers are on crack too often.
Debian Stable removes the network stack by default if you uninstall the Gnome GUI. Fucked up my day when I was doing a server-install and just wanted to ditch the GUI as a last move. Since then I always leave the GUI installed - even though that's actually pretty retarded for a Linux Server Host. ... But that's Debian for you.
That's because the network stack is built into GNOME, considering it's meant to be manipulated through its GUI. You could've prevented this by (1) checking what you were removing before you went through with it [as apt will clearly warn you of], (2) keep a secondary network stack installed in fact the first malfunctions, and (3) using system snapshots as something to rollback to if you're displeased with some changes you make.
Sorry, but the package manager's behavior in this instance is indefensible. It absolutely positively shouldn't fuck with XFCE just to remove an app.
Rest assured that the GP is probably full of shit.
Windows and OS X on the desktop are also jokes because when I accidentally (read: recklessly type shit into the command line) remove software, I get all sorts of problems.
Also, trucks aren't ready for the road because when I tear out pieces of the engine nondiscriminately, sometimes it doesn't turn on anymore.
Well I gotta tell you I've seen programs removed and suddenly the system would not boot on Win7. Seems the uninstaller took a few system files with it. Shitty developers can fuck up absolutely anything.
A particular example of this is some nasty rootkit that comes (came? Not sure if they still do this) with Adobe Acrobat for Windows. The purpose of the rootkit is (was) to prevent people from pirating the software, but if it was tampered with or improperly deactivated, it had a tendency to throw a wrench into the entire booting process.
Having come up during the advent of computers, this is PRECISELY why we separated hardware bootstrap firmware from user-accessible code in the first place, and did not make provisions for user-space access to change it. The hardware had to continue to operate and boot regardless of the stupid things users and developers did.
That all went out the window the moment we started with this "update your BIOS from the O/S" bullshit. And now, apparently, "let's give userspace read/write access to the bootstrap firmware willy nilly," which is complete and utter stupidity.
People shouldn't be executing rm -rf / to begin with. As a user that doesn't wipe out his whole system by accident, I would like to protest your argument by saying that I like that the boot files are easily accessible, it allows me to learn more about how my OS works and how to debug errors in the booting process.
Oh yeah, heaven forbid you want to uninstall the built-in crappy calendar orage. It's a required of the xfce desktop. You kill it, your desktop is GONE.
I'm just curious what OS you think *isn't* guilty of this. Guess what happens if I try to uninstall the taskbar from Windows or the Apple menu from OS X? Oops, my whole GUI is wiped out; the OS probably wouldn't even boot at that point.
and yet every single "how to do X in linux" tutorial starts by telling you to open a terminal and type sudo XYZ
Are you sure you want to say every single? Because that leaves you open to a lot of counter-examples wrecking your case.
Have you tried not running rm -rf /?
Shit happens. I once saw a guy accidentally type: rm -rf / some/random/directory #Note the space after the '/' character. ... just a slip of his thumb but he did it in a root shell and unfortunately for him he was such a fast typer that nobody present could intervene quickly enough.
So your complaint appears to be that when one recklessly uses root commands, it should only wipe out all their data, not all their data plus their motherboard? That's not terribly urgent. It'd be like complaining that handguns are too powerful, when I shoot somebody in the head it should only kill them, not kill them and also leave a hole in the wall.
And you're more of a fucking idiot.
There is no reason to suppose that removing a game should remove much more than the game (maybe a library or two used only by the game, but that's it).
No sane package management system would do things this way.
This has bit me too, but I noticed that the list of things to remove was way longer than it should have been and stopped it, but it wa something like remove a small application and have it want to remove things that were fairly important.
The very first distro I used was Xubuntu. And like our GP, I wanted to remove some of the unnecessary games that came with the distro, so I too used sudo apt-get remove in order to do so. And I have absolutely no recollection of the entire DE being dependent upon sudoku. So it sounds like the GP is just making shit up. Even if he wasn't, he was still a numbskull, but he probably did make it up.
No, he's not an idiot. He's a normal person. Normal people click uninstall and expect their game to be uninstalled, not their OS's GUI. Linux package managers are well overdue for redesign. Making hardware brick able by software is also bad design. Mounting firmware as ordinary rw files, ditto.
Well, there's two problems with that. One is that he explicitly stated he was using Ubuntu, which comes with a GUI software center. However, he decided to use the terminal anyway, which leads to our second problem: apt will explicitly tell you what you're going to remove whenever you run sudo apt-get remove foobar, and he ignored it and ran it anyway. Which is his right, but one should be aware that anybody can do the same thing in OS X and Windows, so this isn't a problem with Linux so much as stupidity.
It has nothing to do with elegance. Turning UEFI variables into ROM is the equivalent of locking the hardware down. systemd isn't in the wrong here. But judging by your posting history, I guess you would never admit that even when it's blindingly obvious.
You could've avoided it by carefully using apt flags, but again, you're a fucking idiot.
A user shouldn't need to do that. It should be smart enough to know that other things are using it as a dependency and be smart enough not to remove those things.
It's a shitty design.
A newbie user shouldn't be fiddling with their packages from the terminal either. Ubuntu comes with a software center that allows one to easily add and remove software without this happening to you.
There are too many imbeciles that will brick their system by typing in random terminal commands they found on the Internet, like fork bombs or using wget to download a trojan. rm -rf / is only the most famous of this kind of command. Then they will complain that Linux is too fragile and dangerous to use for new users, blah blah blah.
I was thinking of a possible solution to this. Perhaps the distros meant for newbies (Ubuntu, Mint, elementary, Zorin, etc.) could lock by default the most well known terminal commands that fuck your system up. When trying to execute them (even with root privileges), they will get something like "ERROR: This command is extremely dangerous. To execute, go to [distro's website].org/foobar." This page will have the password in order to bypass the lock, but only at the bottom of some text that explains exactly what will happen, and if you do anyway, that the distro has absolutely 0% liability to what will happen to your system.
And its by ignorant design mostly
for example last night I removed the soduku game that came with my distro, thanks to its dependency tree and debian / ubuntu's package management removing this one stupid game took half of XFCE with it, and I was left with a command prompt
say what you want about windows, it doesnt fuck the entire system if I uninstall solitaire
You're a fucking idiot. Whenever you install or remove something with apt, it tells you exactly what's going to be removed with it. So you chose to blindly ignore the warning prompts and wiped out your DE in spite of it. The exact same thing happens if you randomly delete folders in your Win32 folder as well.
You could've avoided it by carefully using apt flags, but again, you're a fucking idiot.
...Systemd developers have rejected mounting the EFI variables as read-only...
So the sane solution is rejected because the underlying design is bad?
systemd isn't in the wrong here. If you make the UEFI variables read-only, you lock down the hardware.
No, because the problem isn't systemd, it's UEFI.
Full disclosure: I'm not a Microsoft fan. Yes, Windows phone sales have been abysmal. We've known this for.... decades, actually. Whatever Microsoft renames or redesigns the phone, it's never done well. Microsoft doesn't appear to "get it" at a fundamental level.
But, so far, Microsoft continues to pour money into it. And Microsoft still has a lot of money. So realistically, the Windows phone isn't dead until Microsoft says it's dead.
The "windows phone dead" meme, like "the year of linux on the desktop" meme, is one of those wishful-thinking things that may actually be true someday. But not today.
They've always had pitiful market share, but it's disintegrating pretty rapidly now. This along with the fact that they're starting to put adware in their phones should indicate that they're probably throwing in the towel now.
iPhone sucks from a power user perspective. I could never stand the small screen even if that's fixed with the new generation devices, and then the software itself is crippled because Apple forces power user features to be disabled. Android versions of identical software tends to have more features as such, but the problem I have is the platform is stale. It doesn't improve generation after generation. It's also slow and glitchy. Estimates are the software is about 10 times slower thanks to Java. I like my Android phone but wish it were faster and smoother as a result. The only alternative on the market would of been Windows 10 Phone but it's been announced as dead. Only issue I had with Windows is Microsoft killed off the head end devices and device choice became scarce. I tried out a low-end phone and while it wasn't terribly bad, it could have been better. Only problem I had software wise with the platform was the lack of Google Apps such as YouTube. I upload and view plenty of YouTube, and Windows Phone is limited to using a web browser to use the site currently, which is not as nice.
The potential of Windows Phone is nice- by having a full version of Windows, you could potentially run all your Windows Apps including traditional Windows 32 ones wherever you went.
obamasweapon.com
Incompetent competition is worse than no competition. You should cheer for the Ubuntu Phone or some other underdog long before you hope Microsoft can ejaculate their slimy business all over the phone market.
This guy is an idiot. The platform is mature, and arguably, the best out there. Everybody I know who uses one likes theirs, as well. MS isn't going to walk away from this because of current fashion trends.
You could replace "MS [phone division]" with "Palm Inc", "BlackBerry", "Nokia", "Sega", and a million other companies.
Correct, Tor does not usually hide the fact that you are using it. There are some obscuring gateways into Tor, but those only work if you know about them and your adversary doesn't. I wouldn't trust that, and assume if I am using Tor, anyone who wants to know that fact can get it.
The bomb threat made at Harvard (via Tor) a while back was traced to the only person who was on Tor when it was sent. That was the primary thing that lead to his suspicion.
Right. The reason the Tor Browser works is because everyone using it is indistinguishable. What this means is that the less people using it, the weaker its obfuscation of its users becomes.
Heck, mask your Mac address and go to starbucks....this isn't complex stuff here.
All that would obscure is which computer at the Starbucks is doing whatever shady thing is being done online. If you used TAILS, there would be no proof that it ever booted on your computer at all.
Google is the company that can be least trusted. They are the only company which has the primary business model of collecting as much information from you as possible and selling it to the highest bidder.
Apple, BB and Microsoft collect info too, but at least it's not the basis of their business model.
Google and Apple don't sell your info. Google's cash cow is the fact that they exclusively hold certain information about their customers, and they leverage it by allowing targeted advertisements--they would lose their broker status by giving out all that customer info (that's why they very carefully anonymize advertisements on their products, so they don't let their customers spill the beans to anybody else BUT Google.) Apple's cash cow is customer loyalty and huge margins on their premium devices, so they would be foolish to squander their customer loyalty by selling their info out
"the fact that Windows Phone OS has such a low market share helps ensure its security "
Whoa - did I just flash back to 1998?
"Security by obscurity" is universally lambasted as a terrible protocol by security experts. But even so, the argument is full of shit because the Windows Store has been filled with malware for years now.
MS has already stated that they will continue to develop and support Windows Phone OS. This article is just fear mongering. The platform is not going anywhere.
They really have no other choice anyway. It would be foolish to give up on the platform because it can be used for IoT and tablets as well and it is also allows them to be more agile if things ever change. Not that I see them changing in the short term, but who knows, the pendulum may swing back into MS's favor in time and if it does, they will have the OS and infrastructure ready for it.
Anyway, I will continue to use a Windows Phone because I like the interface. The lack of apps is not a concern for me.
In addition, the fact that Windows Phone OS has such a low market share helps ensure its security as well since most malicious software and exploits will be developed for Android and iOS.
I bet you loved Windows RT too.