The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Susanna]

But mixing UEFI garbage in where things just randomly get loaded from some weird hidden partition just makes things too confusing.

It’s only hidden on Windows and MacOS though. In Linux it’s a partition like any other.

 

[DavidS877]

Nah, it's just not safe. This was sufficient 100% of the time when we had normal, sensible MBR partitions, and all the bootloader shit just went at the start of a primary partition. But mixing UEFI garbage in where things just randomly get loaded from some weird hidden partition just makes things too confusing. Things PROBABLY won't get broken at least 90% of the time but if they do then you are going to be dealing with a whole lot of problems and it's easy to fuck up and make mistakes that could lead to irreversible data loss- especially if it's the first time that you're dealing with Linux. Not a problem if you back everything up and don't need anything in Windows to work for a day or two, but it's not safe like it used to be prior to 'progress'.

You need to be especially careful (and back up your Bitlocker recovery keys) if you're using Windows with Bitlocker (which is now the default for new installs).

I've literally never had this happen in years and years of UEFI. But you should always back up your system and your Bitlocker keys anyway.
Worst case was a period when an update turned off OS_PROBER by default and I had to use the BIOS Boot menu to choose "Windows" instead of "Linux" until I found the /etc/default/grub setting to add the Windows entries back to the Grub menu.

With MBR it was a constant battle to reinstall Grub whenever Windows felt like wiping the boot sector because it got bored.

 

[std::string]

Can this also not be mitigated by installing Windows first, followed by Linux, to prevent Windows from cockmangling the partition?

Windows creates a 100 MiB EFI partition by default. If you're dual booting both the Windows kernel and the Linux kernel need to live here, so that's not good.

And then you have stuff like Windows Update deciding to eat Linux for some reason. It's honestly pretty difficult to dual boot these days.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

I've literally never had this happen in years and years of UEFI. But you should always back up your system and your Bitlocker keys anyway.
Worst case was a period when an update turned off OS_PROBER by default and I had to use the BIOS Boot menu to choose "Windows" instead of "Linux" until I found the /etc/default/grub setting to add the Windows entries back to the Grub menu.

With MBR it was a constant battle to reinstall Grub whenever Windows felt like wiping the boot sector because it got bored.

I use EFISTUB rather than Grub, disable Windows Update, and disable Glowlocker. No problems here.

 

[SCV]

Only as long as this is separate from any hardware that he really needs to be able to use.

We are discussing a computer to be bought explicitly for fucking around costing less than 60$:

what's a good "fuck you" laptop I can get so I can install Linux and dick around on, knowing that if anything bad happens then I wasted less than $60, if its a thing?

This isn't even some long chain of replies. It is a single post and one reply. The entire thing is visible in my post with the quote so it's not like you have to go back in the thread to find the context. The original post is even on the same fucking page. Your entire post is a non-sequitur that will just confuse the poor guy.

 

[DavidS877]

Windows creates a 100 MiB EFI partition by default. If you're dual booting both the Windows kernel and the Linux kernel need to live here, so that's not good.

What? No?
Why on earth would the Linux kernel be on the EFI parition. Your kernel should come from your root partition just like it always has(Except when /boot was a different partition since it had to be on a specific spot on the disk due to BIOS addressing limits, but that was like the 1990s)
Microsoft apparently includes some recovery goo but it's still only 26MB

 

[std::string]

Why on earth would the Linux kernel be on the EFI parition.

Have you tried dual booting since like fucking 1993?

 

[DavidS877]

Have you tried dual booting since like fucking 1993?

Dual boot, triple boot. None of them have the Kernel on the EFI partition. Unless you're using one of the 3 meme-FSes that Grub doesn't support there's no reason to do it that way.

Support multiple filesystem types transparently, plus a useful explicit blocklist notation. The currently supported filesystem types are Amiga Fast FileSystem (AFFS), AtheOS fs, BeFS, BtrFS (including raid0, raid1, raid10, gzip and lzo), cpio (little- and big-endian bin, odc and newc variants), Linux ext2/ext3/ext4, DOS FAT12/FAT16/FAT32, exFAT, F2FS, HFS, HFS+, ISO9660 (including Joliet, Rock-ridge and multi-chunk files), JFS, Minix fs (versions 1, 2 and 3), nilfs2, NTFS (including compression), ReiserFS, ROMFS, Amiga Smart FileSystem (SFS), Squash4, tar, UDF, BSD UFS/UFS2, XFS, and ZFS (including lzjb, gzip, zle, mirror, stripe, raidz1/2/3 and encryption in AES-CCM and AES-GCM). See Filesystem, for more information.

It's also LVM and MD aware in addition to the integrated RAID FS like ZFS and BtrFS.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

But why would you use GRUB at all when you can just boot directly to Linux? You're making things more complicated for no good reason.

 

[DavidS877]

But why would you use GRUB at all when you can just boot directly to Linux? You're making things more complicated for no good reason.

Dual
Boot

Yes, my bios has a menu. Yes I have to press a random key within a specified period of time to get to that menu. Usually my monitor isn't awake yet on half my systems by the time it starts booting Grub. Many BIOSes don't have a delay adjustment. Grub I can set the delay as long as needed along with using saved default and grub-reboot where it takes some work if you set Windows default in BIOS and want to switch back to Linux.

And I can have as many Kernels as my 1TB drive will fit.

Also, this is horrible:

With the help of systemd-stub, it's also possible to create a Unified Kernel Image, combining the kernel, cmdline, initrd, and an optional splash screen into one single EFI binary, convenient for SecureBoot signing.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Many BIOSes don't have a delay adjustment.

efibootmgr -t

 

[SCV]

But why would you use GRUB at all when you can just boot directly to Linux? You're making things more complicated for no good reason.

Because you aren't a niggercattle and use full disk encryption including /boot and because motherboard vendors are know for their quality software and UEFI implementations. I bet you use Opal too.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

What's the simplest way, if any, to simulate not supporting an ABI level? There's one maintainer who autistically insists on conforming to Debian architecture baselines. I'm not convinced that the packaged binary will work on less than x86-64-V2 machines even with his patches, but I don't have a 20+ year old CPU to test it. I don't want to email him about it unless I'm sure.

 

[DavidS877]

What's the simplest way, if any, to simulate not supporting an ABI level? There's one maintainer who autistically insists on conforming to Debian architecture baselines. I'm not convinced that the packaged binary will work on less than x86-64-V2 machines even with his patches, but I don't have a 20+ year old CPU to test it. I don't want to email him about it unless I'm sure.

Probably qemu, maybe with KVM, may have to use raw software emulation. Note, I haven't tried this but that's where I'd start.

https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/i386/cpu.html

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Because you aren't a niggercattle and use full disk encryption including /boot and because motherboard vendors are know for their quality software and UEFI implementations. I bet you use Opal too.

I've no idea what the fuck that is. Why would I use encryption on a desktop?

Probably qemu, maybe with KVM, may have to use raw software emulation. Note, I haven't tried this but that's where I'd start.

https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/i386/cpu.html

Qemu is the answer, but NOT with KVM. KVM passes through your CPU's capabilities.

 

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We are discussing a computer to be bought explicitly for fucking around costing less than 60$

We are discussing a situation in which it may be relatively difficult to acquire appropriate hardware for less than $60, and at that point, discouraging people from trying to dual boot with their primary working hardware is sensible, because it isn't easy like it used to be. Not going to get a reasonable used ThinkPad for that money, the 10yo SFF Dell suggestion is about as good as it gets.

At which point anyone with any common sense who wants people to use Linux as opposed to having a bad experience and ditching it immediately will discourage one obvious alternative, which is beginners trying to dual boot with Windows in the year 2024- something that is fine only if a) people don't actually need to use their main computer for anything important (most people do) b) they actually back things up when they're told to (most people don't) or c) they manage to successfully follow through some unusual setup process the first time they install Linux (probably not going to happen).

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

poorfag here.
what's a good "fuck you" laptop I can get so I can install Linux and dick around on, knowing that if anything bad happens then I wasted less than $60, if its a thing?

Search YouTube for "ham radio $60 laptop".

 

[SCV]

I've no idea what the fuck that is. Why would I use encryption on a desktop?

Opal is a feature on some newer SSDs. You'll see them marketed as "self encrypting" sometimes. Theoretically it's a good idea: Fixed function hardware for AES encryption is added to the SSD controller (which are computers unto themselves now) and everything written to the drive is encrypted using that. To actually use it you only need to take control of the key on the drive and a secure erase just needs to wipe the key.

Practically it means you need to trust phison/samsung/whoever the fuck to implement things in a cryptographically secure manner which is a pipe dream https://archive.ph/latrt even if they aren't backdoored. I was trying to connect relying on Opal and the quality of those implementations to quality of motherboard UEFI you're using to directly boot linux. That didn't land obviously but motherboard UEFI implementation really are shit, just recently there were different issues killing both AMD and Intel cpus.

As to why you would want to encrypt your disks on a desktop I would ask why wouldn't you? If you need to send a drive back for warranty you don't need to worry about losing your data. It's less likely that your desktop gets stolen but not impossible and if you live with people do you really want them to be able to just pop out your drive and read everything? And if you're unlucky enough to have the police target you you'd want it. I'm not aware of any downsides of putting your stuff on top of luks so like I said: why wouldn't you?

Edit to add:
In case it wasn't clear I think everyone should encrypt all their data with open source software encryption as a matter of course. Using bitlocker or the rdrand instruction from your intelAviv cpu is worthless. Also iirc I think windows at some point would automatically use Opal but they gave up on it because it was shit.

 

[Another Char Clone]

Windows creates a 100 MiB EFI partition by default. If you're dual booting both the Windows kernel and the Linux kernel need to live here, so that's not good.

And then you have stuff like Windows Update deciding to eat Linux for some reason. It's honestly pretty difficult to dual boot these days.

Not necessarily, with Grub, it can access whatever /boot drive is at, even if its EXT4, so your partitions end up as /, /boot and /boot/efi. Ubuntu does this all the time.
In case of the Windows, grub can just pass control to winload.efi and Windows will continue off from there.

Edit: There's also stuff like https://github.com/pbatard/EfiFs
In case you need to mess around with EXT4 from the EFI shell.

 

[Betonhaus]

What distro with a DE has the fewest regular updates on a base install? So they don't start demanding you update packages every day or two?