The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[DavidS877]

My man. MergerFS is what RAID 0 should have been. How much of the big disks are media?
View attachment 5891773
The disks sure eat a lot of power even though I'm half your size

I'm a fan of never backing up things in the same way they're usually stored. So the big drives are RAID 1 and RAID 6. Backups are mergerfs+dual parity snapraid, which is handy when I just chuck spare drives in it.

The largest drive is almost all video and vr media, sure it could all be replaced but it would be a pain. Also some archives of things like TOSEC, MAME, etc.

The smaller drive is 'my' stuff, including created videos/photos and copies of AI checkpoints and similar.

This is all a pair of Linux systems doing NAS duties. I call the 20 drive one 'tiny'.

 

[Slav Power]

Well it's not really the same shit. The difference is that you don't notice a slowdown.

You just paraphrased me. Yes, SATA SSD is not the same as NVMe, but the flash memory in both is the same, and it's that element that slows down when it's filled up. However SATA is so limiting that this slowdown is significantly noticeable, and with NVMe it's a much more direct connection with a vastly higher bandwidth, so that effect isn't nearly as significant. The point still stands, flash memory slows down as it gets filled up.

Wrong.

Okay, here. If Windows is not Linux and Linux is not Windows, then stop drawing comparisons between the two. In this thread you've been comparing Windows to Linux and Linux to Windows, be it that Linux did something better or Windows did something better. You're treating them as competitors and so will I.

This whole shitfest started with me saying "good contender for a Windows replacement", because clearly Linux users treat this as a competition, yet when I bring the topic up, a Windows user, now it's absolutely not like that.

Take a stance. Either Linux is competing with Windows or it's something completely else. You can't have it both ways.

What I do notice is Windows users not seeing that the Windows that once was THE os for the consumers has now become an ANTI-consumer OS. You all cry about being spied on by daddy Microsoft and yet most of you (because some people do make effort to fight back but that's a minority) don't do jackshit about it. And Microsoft has a fuckton of money to potentially fix Windows's problems but it doesn't. Until Microsoft stops being anti-consumer and delivers a quality product (it will never happen) then I will rightfully shit on (modern) Windows, a husk of what once was.

You know why? Because Linux is shit because of the grievances you've mentioned. There is a debacle about the init system, a debacle about the window compositor, core OS components that never were an issue on Windows, because it was always one element that worked.

When I install Windows 10 or Windows 11, it works out of the box, I don't have to worry about any underlying OS components because they just work. The real issue is the amount of bloat Microsoft added on top of. With Linux, I don't get the bloat, however I do get issues with those underlying things that just work on Windows.

That's why I put up with Microsoft's bullshit, because the other option is even worse. I don't want to worry about which init system I should use, which window compositor I should use, all of that underlying shit should've been solved years ago so that I, the end user, only cares about what software I want to run on this operating system, and that I won't have to worry that something won't work because it needs Wayland and I'm on X11, or that something refuses to work with systemd and I'm using systemd, and the project maintainer will tell me to fuck off if I use systemd.

I see that there's talks about corporate sabotage in the Linux community, but at the same time it clashes with the rhetoric that this openness of Linux is it's biggest strength. If it was, then the Linux community would notice Red Hat fucking with shit, tell them to fuck off and keep things tidy, right? To me it's a cop out, or at the very least acknowledging an issue and then doing nothing to fight it. You know, the same thing you said about Windows users.

I would love to switch to Linux, however this is a choice between which flavor of shit I'd like to eat, and I'd prefer to not eat any shit. And right now, both Windows and Linux are shit, they're not superior to one another in any way, they're both shitheaps plagued with issues.

Which rolls back to the core of the issue: all operating systems are shit and Linux elitism at it's core is fucking retarded. I can write paragraphs of issues about Linux and Windows that would be of equal length, however if those were two separate threads on this board, one would get Agree, Informative and Winner stickers, and the other would get Dumb, MATI and Autistic stickers. Can you guess which one would be which?

 

[Sperg Coalition]

all operating systems are shit

That is for sure: sadly when I do also point this out people tend to go apeshit. This thread is the exception to the rule since we are not so autistic about it (pretty ironic considering where we are and the OS in question). I really do want to use Windows but I know that the stable experience of Windows 7 will never come back. In a way I guess I got lucky to experience Windows before it got to absolute shit and permanently switched to Linux. Or maybe that is just the nostalgia googles talking for me, who knows.

EDIT: I wanted to talk about the Linux etilism part. On one part it does filter out people that endlessly ask for help in retarded ways and are incapable of using a computer (that is also true on Windows as I saw online) but on the other hand makes the whole Linux stuff less (or not) accessible to normies that might want to try Linux but get turned off by people that can go full scorced earth on newbies and what not.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I built a storage server with about 42 TB of capacity and after downloading everything I just found remotely interesting to download I think I got it up to about 15%. If I mirrored the AI stuff from my GPU server (which got a bigger drive before I decided to get that storage one, which really was just poor future planning on my part, I will probably decomission the drive there and make permanent network shares, but I am lazy) to the storage server I'd get it up another 10% maybe?! I'm personally post storage capacity. Think the whole thing wouldn't even have crossed my mind if everything AI wouldn't need such huge amounts of data.

 

[Slav Power]

Or maybe that is just the nostalgia googles, who knows.

I think Windows 7 was simply better. The Vista-7 UI glue-on iteration was the last one that felt right, and was sensibly designed, there weren't bajillion useless addons installed by default, and it got out of your way to serve as an OS, and not an integrated suite of bullshit. It was a true "just works" OS you didn't have to fight with.

Then Windows 8 happened which was a UI mess that obviously Windows could never be recovered from due to the way it's designed, so when 10 happened there was still bullshit from 8, and now bullshit from 10, like the Settings app. Windows 11 turned up this idiocy to 11 ( [-: ) with the new WinUI3 elements.

It's like Microsoft was desperate for a UI refresh, but had no idea how to make a good one, so now you have 11 UI slapped on top of 10 UI slapped on top of 8 UI slapped on top of all the other Windows NT UI's all the way down to Windows NT 3.1. Windows was never future proofed for those types of iterations so they just made a complete mess of it.

Now, you have a choice to go with Windows and fight it from the top by debloating it and curbing Microsoft's idiocy with 3rd party software, or go with Linux and fight it from the bottom, with which specific OS components you should/shouldn't have and other weird shit.

The OS that you didn't have to fight is gone, and there is no alternative, and you have to fight your computer in some way to use it. The type of fight you're willing to put up with is up to you. macOS doesn't count because we're talking about OS' that aren't hardware exclusive.

 

[Sperg Coalition]

The OS that you didn't have to fight is gone, and there is no alternative, and you have to fight your computer in some way to use it.

I will be honest, I never thinked about this part when it came when using Linux and Windows but I did had to fight in both OSes, just in different ways as you said for different purposes altogether. In the end what matters is that I manage to reach my point of perfection. Of course, your mileage may vary.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

This is not a valid thing to do in any OS. There is absolutely no way for the OS to know when you are done with a hotswappable drive. It cannot read your mind. I know nothing about Windows but my assumption is that it is quicker to commit to USB drives because Microsoft knows it's knuckle-dragging customer base. Unmounting the drive in windows is still the correct way to do it last time I checked and everything else can cause data loss.

It depends on what filesystem you're using. If you're using FAT, as you probably are on Windows, surprise removals shouldn't be able to fuck up anything but the files currently in use. I've not heard of surprise removals bricking a device before.

 

[Betonhaus]

My man. MergerFS is what RAID 0 should have been.

RAID0 was also intended to increase read/write speed when drives were much slower. So if you had four drives in a RAID0 setup you could write 25% of a file to each drive and quadruple your read/write speed, at the cost of having ALL files in the data pool corrupted if a drive is lost. However if you're dealing with extremely important data then its equally bad if you just lose a portion of the files so you'll be using backups anyways. Plus if done right then restoring from the backup only has to restore the part of the file that's missing, so you aren't wasting bandwidth downloading whole files only to restore the missing part of the files

Mergerfs sticks with one drive per file so there is no read/write speed improvements from multiple drives. however it's far more useful when a partial file loss is acceptable as long as the remaining files are intact, or in situations where restoring lost and corrupted files would be redownloading the whole file anyways. There is no significant benefit for a corporation that has a fully redundant storage pool, but it's fine for home use or working environments where lost files can be recreated or downloaded as needed.

That being said I got 16tb in my data pool and got two 8tb drives to add to it, but I'm waiting for a new raid card to come in the mail because my old one is incompatible with 4k drives.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I've not heard of surprise removals bricking a device before.

My fat is a bit rusty but if you do a few rapid changes to a fat file system and then just tear the drive out mid-commit that could lead to directory tree desyncronization and a screwy FAT table. (reading some files will be fine but trying to open a particular directory or reading a particular file will cause errors) Even though the FAT table is mirrored, it wouldn't 100% protect from corruption here very well because the way the inconsistencies happened might make hard to tell which is actually the correct one. (if any, in this scenario it is probably always safest to use the second FAT because that's least likely to be screwy, you'll probably still lose some data but I couldn't tell you how the OSes suss their pick out) If you deleted/copy/grew/modified you could also end up with files being crosslinked/pointing to the same clusters which will defintively lead to corruption and data loss. Just don't do it, IMO. Even in Windows, even though I'm almost certain Windows doesn't buffer writes to minimize these dangers. That said, if all you did was copy from the drive, it should not lead to data loss. If you just copy to a drive (and don't modify or delete) you'll probably get away with it too, sans some stuff you copy end up being truncated. Most people probably don't corrupt their FAT formatted usb sticks as they're mostly used as bulk data transfer ("sneaker net") not interactively, if that makes sense.

 

[Slav Power]

I've not heard of surprise removals bricking a device before.

That's the main issue isn't it. About the worst thing that can happen on Windows is you get some file corrupted if it was in use, and it's what you're warned about if you yoink it out without safely removing it first. Not getting your device bricked over it. That's a pretty egregious issue assuming that it's something that only Linux does.

Why does this sudden removal can result in a pendrive getting bricked? This is the type of issue you should report somewhere so that it can get fixed, not just shrug it off as "oh I guess I shouldn't do it again". Data corruption on used files? Yeah shit happens on Windows, so what. Device bricking? This shit needs to be addressed ASAP. If it's related to a specific partition format, add warnings about it. If it's an issue in how the OS handles USB drives, find it and fix it.

Don't do this "it's a me problem" spiel because that's how you get bug-ridden software. The user never points out any issues to the developers because "it's my fault", and even worse, the developers won't address the issue when raised because they'll say "it's your fault". That's not how software development works, it's counterintuitive to what software is.

Though developers are developers, both commercial and FOSS ones can say "it's your fault". Why is it that Linux users are the ones that downplay issues like these the most? Oh I did something wrong, it's not the software's fault. Oh it's the software's fault but I found a workaround.

No, the very first thing you should blame is the software, it's meant to serve you, the end user, not the other way around. Doesn't matter if it's code written by paid employees or volunteers, without bug reports software can't improve, so it is your duty to raise any issues you encounter to the developers, and then their duty is to see if this was reported before, and if not, is it an issue with the code.

Without the push from the end user to report these issues, they won't get fixed, and without fixes, software will stay broken, and no one should be expected to tolerate software with bugs that could be patched out in an open ecosystem that by design is meant to solve the issue of maintenance.

My fat is a bit rusty but if you do a few rapid changes to a fat file system and then just tear the drive out mid-commit that could lead to directory tree desyncronization and a screwy FAT table. (reading some files will be fine but trying to open a particular directory or reading a particular file will cause errors) Even though the FAT table is mirrored, it wouldn't 100% protect from corruption here very well because the way the inconsistencies happened might make hard to tell which is actually the correct one. (if any, in this scenario it is probably always safest to use the second FAT because that's least likely to be screwy, you'll probably still lose some data but I couldn't tell you how the OSes suss their pick out) If you deleted/copy/grew/modified you could also end up with files being crosslinked/pointing to the same clusters which will defintively lead to corruption and data loss. Just don't do it, IMO. Even in Windows, even though I'm almost certain Windows doesn't buffer writes to minimize these dangers. That said, if all you did was copy from the drive, it should not lead to data loss. If you just copy to a drive (and don't modify or delete) you'll probably get away with it too, sans some stuff you copy end up being truncated. Most people probably don't corrupt their FAT formatted usb sticks as they're mostly used as bulk data transfer ("sneaker net") not interactively, if that makes sense.

Do you know what the difference between a filesystem corruption and a device brick is? One leads to your data being rendered unusable, the other leads to your device being unusable. With one you still have a working device you can reformat, with the other you don't.

The responses that I was referring to were a post saying "always remove your pendrive or it'll get bricked", and a response of "oh yeah that happens, good thing you learn to not do that". How the fuck is this acceptable? Normal people should go "wait, why the fuck can this cause a device brick?" and seek to solve the issue.

It's like if a bicycle manufacturer designed a bicycle in a way where it's very easy for you to cut your leg on the chain when it doesn't happen on other manufacturer's bicycles and going "oh I guess I'll just have to be careful to not cut my leg" instead of "why the fuck is this bicycle cutting my leg when the other manufacturer's one doesn't"? That's the Stockholm syndrome I was talking about, it's insane and I don't know why people keep defending it. Complete lunacy.

 

[DavidS877]

"always remove your pendrive or it'll get bricked"

You honestly think the retards on the Internet know the difference between bricked and corrupted?

We just need to go back to the Mac days, your USB Stick will be inserted and locked into the system, when you're done you can click the eject button and have it back.

Or, better yet, just don't use a Unix-like operating system if you don't understand unmounting devices before removing them.

 

[Slav Power]

You honestly think the retards on the Internet know the difference between bricked and corrupted?

Jesus fucking Christ it's like you want me to have a deep hatred of Linux users. Yeah, let's move the goalpost now and assume that whoever said "bricked" didn't knew what it meant just to disprove me. Not look into whether or not it's an actual issue that has been reported, no, let's play fucking word games now as an argument, and wrap it back to "you're stupid and don't know how to use Unix".

Yeah, thanks for reassuring me that Linux users are all delusional. I was this close to agreeing that maybe I'm too harsh, and even got to some form of agreement, but here you are reminding me that there are no exceptions, and the number one reason why Linux sucks dick is still it's self-unaware community.

Even if a professional psychologist managed to point out every single point of your denialist mentality as a basic bitch block algorithm that it is, you'd still find a way to refute that block algorithm with some blabber that's exactly what's on that block algorithm. It's honestly amazing that you're still capable of breathing with such a limited brain.

 

[Sperg Coalition]

Why does this sudden removal can result in a pendrive getting bricked?

Does it though? The only time I got a USB device bricked was when I had a power outage and I was using Windows at the time so I do not think its an OS problem. Even searching on the internet reveals that people got devices bricked because they used some weird programs.
Edited for spelling.

 

[DavidS877]

Yeah, let's move the goalpost now and assume that whoever said "bricked" didn't knew what it meant just to disprove me.

I just searched on Google(tm) and the first entire page of "flash drive bricked" was all about corrupted filesystems and drives that worked just fine once you convinced Windows to repartition and format them.

If I searched for "linux flash drive bricked" All that I saw were caused by people writing Linux to the flash drive to use it as install media and the wondering why Windows no longer recognized the drive. Solved with partitioning and formatting.

So, no, I don't think the average Internet user knows what bricked really means.

 

[Kosher Dill]

We just need to go back to the Mac days, your USB Stick will be inserted and locked into the system, when you're done you can click the eject button and have it back.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

 

[Sperg Coalition]

It depends on what filesystem you're using. If you're using FAT, as you probably are on Windows, surprise removals shouldn't be able to fuck up anything but the files currently in use. I've not heard of surprise removals bricking a device before.

I think that the only reason why a device would brick (as in, become completely unusable) is if there's an hardware failure, especially if its a USB device, or there's a power outage as it happened with me.

 

[Slav Power]

Does it though? The only time I got a USB device bricked was when I had a power outage and I was using Windows at the time so I do not think its an OS problem. Even searching on the internet reveals that people got devices bricked becuase they used some weird programs.

Okay, let's retrack:

Always manually eject a pendrive. If you don't and just yank the thing out, Linux might screw its file descriptor and it's bricked.

Oh yes, it happens!
And it really sucks sweaty balls.
The only good thing that comes from it is that if you've done it once and lost data you'll never do it again.

These are the two posts I was referring to. How I understood it that Linux can brick your pendrive if you yoink it out, because that's the only way I can interpret that post and I'm assuming that user knows computers well if he's posting this here, it happened to another user that brushed it off as a me problem and that's what I criticized. But of course it had to devolve into a shitstorm, becasue *gasp* a Windows user came into the sacred Linux thread to criticize Linux users. This can only work the other way around on this forum!

Now, if anyone here wants to actually prove me wrong, then tell me if what demicolon said is wrong and I misinterpreted it, with proper examples. Or, I don't know, maybe demicolon and cipheranarchist should clarify if it's me that misunderstood what they're saying, not someone who just now joined into the argument that has no way of telling that the users that are capable of replying in this thread assuming that what they said was wrong to disprove me.

And you especially won't make me change my mind and admitting that I misunderstood something by insulting me, telling that I shouldn't use Unix systems because I'm a retarded Windows user, and all this bullshit that is the very reason I hold this animosity towards Linux users that led to this shitstorm. If you want to act like shit flinging apes, so be it, I'll make sure to derail this thread from time to time with the most bullshit baits if that's how you want it.

 

[DavidS877]

I think that the only reason why a device would brick (as in, become completely unusable) is if there's an hardware failure, especially if its a USB device, or there's a power outage as it happened with me.

In the early days of the Raspberry Pi there were quite a number of people reporting dead SD/MicroSD cards. Usually some mix of: crappy power supply, yanking power, crappy card, too many writes. Now, of course, the hardware has improved and cards are much more reliable.
Even today people still bring it up every time Pis are mentioned.

demicolon said is wrong and I misinterpreted it,

They said "bricked" as in dead, fini, gone.

Their data is indeed corrupted but nothing in that statement implies that the flash drive can not be reused, thus not "bricked". It almost certainly can be wiped and reused. And there are probably plenty of tools that could recover some of the data off it.

This is the same as if you pulled a floppy out of a PC while it was being written. Is your data gone, probably. Can you simply reformat and re-use the floppy, yes.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

That's the main issue isn't it. About the worst thing that can happen on Windows is you get some file corrupted if it was in use, and it's what you're warned about if you yoink it out without safely removing it first. Not getting your device bricked over it. That's a pretty egregious issue assuming that it's something that only Linux does.

Obviously I was being a bit too subtle here. By, "I've not heard of surprise removals bricking a device before", I actually meant that I was sceptical that this was what had happened. I suspect that what actually happened was someone corrupted a flash drive because they suddenly removed a device with a funny filesystem.

The only reason this isn't an issue on Windows is because Windows only supports two-ish filesystems. That's not an improvement.

 

[Sperg Coalition]

I think that @demicolon and @cipheranarchist misunderstood the meaning of having a bricked device: if you yank out a device without unmounting it first it's pretty rare that it can get bricked and if it does it's usually suspected to be an hardware failure (especially if USB hubs are involved for some reason) or catastrophic external causes (like power outages, so not related to the OS) because both Windows and Linux do whatever it takes to not screw up when it comes to having connected devices and processes reading from and writing to them. If you yank out a device without unmounting it you can have corrupted files, not the entire drive bricked to my experience.
EDIT: For clarity.