The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[code123]

can someone explain the systemd hate? i think i understand it but i want to make sure i have a good understanding.

i use linux all of the time, but more as a sysadmin, i never see a gui, ssh into everything, so i dont have much of the desktop perspective.
i work on a few legacy systems so i have to deal with init scripts and i do like the simplicity, but i have used some systemd features that make some stuff so much more reliable, mainly restarting a service after the process crashes.

i could write a script to check if my service is running and restart it if it is not, link it into cron and get a similar affect, but i just add one line to the service file and systemd takes care of it for me, and starts it back up without delay.

i just allways see people rabid over the systemd discussion.

 

[Zeftax]

I think it's mainly that it tries to do everything, not just init stuff. Slowly gobbling services up like a computer cancer.

 

[Dread First]

can someone explain the systemd hate? i think i understand it but i want to make sure i have a good understanding.

The biggest problem with systemd is the feature creep beyond its original purpose of being a replacement to sysvinit. Contrary to popular belief, it's not like sysvinit's shortcomings were ignored by people prior to systemd's launch. Basically, parallelisation was sorely lacking and orphaned processes were a nightmare to manage. There were other init systems like upstart and OpenRC that were in use for X amount of time (I think RHEL6 used upstart), but systemd was the first huge leap forward in that respect. There's just one huge problem: systemd began subsuming other, once independent modules like udev, dbus, and so on. It just kept going and going and going, and to this day, systemd exists in this weird limbo where it's both "monolithic" insofar as being one gigantic thing that does a billion other things, and also "modular" because all that billion other things it can do is the result of subsuming other services and modules that used to be managed independently.

Due to the feature creep that systemd has going on, what often happens is that there's an assload of bugs, regressions, and accompanying CVEs with every new release of systemd that Red Hat deems fit to push out. Do they get patched fairly quickly? Sure. Is this something that wouldn't have happened if systemd remained constrained within its original scope? Also yes. Making matters for systemd all the more irksome is how GNOME is now joined at the fucking hip with systemd when it damn well didn't need to be in the first place. It used to be that GNOME as a desktop environment could operate wholly independently of the init framework that you chose; that proposition went tits-up when the GNOME team decided to dig their heels in and marry features for basic functionality intimately with systemd. It's getting to a point where even workarounds with elogind are no longer feasible because the GNOME team, starting with 3.49 (it's still GNOME 3 to me, even if they drop the 3) decided "yeah, fuck your workarounds, we're gonna make it impossible for a non-systemd distro to even remotely use our crap without systemd as a hard dependency."

Complicating matters further is how Lennart Poettering, the author of systemd, is (and I must emphasise this): a self-righteous cunt. To be absolutely fair here: he had some pretty damn good ideas. Why should Linux distributions be beholden to POSIX compliance when there ain't a damn Linux distro that shelled out the money for the certification? Why shouldn't Linux distributions leverage wholly novel features and system calls the Linux kernel itself is capable of, yet remained wholly unutilised or underutilised due to fears of breaking with POSIX? Where he went horribly, horribly wrong was how smug and self-righteous he became. Any problems that emerge from the design and ethos surrounding systemd as a project are immediately WONTFIXed, his own fixes whenever systemd gets borked super bad weren't always up to snuff, and on top of that, he gets a shield from criticism because he allegedly received death threats. Notice how no one ever brings up whether or not those "death threats" were indeed actionable according to law; highly likely that he just got told "KYS faggot" and he decided to make a mountain out of a molehill.

I'm sure there are other areas where systemd is woefully inadequate, but to that end? I just know how it impacts me as an average, everyday jack-off who's highly accustomed to a GTK-based environment. People who intimately know systemd's woes from a sysadmin perspective can elucidate this better than I can.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

can someone explain the systemd hate? i think i understand it but i want to make sure i have a good understanding.

i use linux all of the time, but more as a sysadmin, i never see a gui, ssh into everything, so i dont have much of the desktop perspective.
i work on a few legacy systems so i have to deal with init scripts and i do like the simplicity, but i have used some systemd features that make some stuff so much more reliable, mainly restarting a service after the process crashes.

i could write a script to check if my service is running and restart it if it is not, link it into cron and get a similar affect, but i just add one line to the service file and systemd takes care of it for me, and starts it back up without delay.

i just allways see people rabid over the systemd discussion.

People don't like its monolithic nature (kind of). And something that goes along with that is not following the unix philosophy, though i feel like they are 2 slightly different critiques.

The way it took over linux, and has taken away the user choice of what they want to use to run their system. And it has creeped its way outside of being an init system into other components that other programs have adopted in order function. Which means you have to either cut out chunks of system, and use them on even non-systemd distros, or just use systemd.

Those are the arguments I personally think are the most valid. Then we have some arguments that I think are either misguided, purely opinion, or sometimes just wrong, and based off an already existing hatred of systemd.

Like people that used it when it first started getting adopted had issues with it that later put a bad taste in their mouth.

Some people I see blaming problems on systemd that have nothing to do with systemd.

Other times I see people complaining about what ends up just being a skill issue on their part, or at least a complete unwillingness to read the documentation and change the behaviour to fix their complaint.

I'm by no means a systemd fan, but I'm not someone that hates it completely either. It does actually work well. Things almost always just work. A lot of the tools built around it can make your life a lot easier if you take advantage of them. And honestly there are some things that are trivial on systemd, and are a huge pain in the ass to get working properly on other init systems.

 

[GNU Abyss]

In the case of window managers particularly in the case of hyprland. That design decision ended up being what allowed hyprland to do all of the things it does so well. Having the effects, and animations tied into the window manager has allowed it to get really smooth animations, and smooth compositing. Something I have never been able to fully replicate with a picom fork, and usually then its way less efficient. For instance moving workspaces. It will have a little animation that moved in the direction of the workspace. On xorg with a picom fork, its just the same direction everytime and if anything it makes movement more disorienting than if there were no animations at all.

I never saw the need for any animations and other smooth transitions. My picom is purely a transparency machine for terminal windows. Even that's a novelty that I feel like keeping for now. If I could completely disable them on my phone, I would as well. Sadly, Android still needs some transition effects or shit breaks.

i use linux all of the time, but more as a sysadmin, i never see a gui, ssh into everything, so i dont have much of the desktop perspective.
i work on a few legacy systems so i have to deal with init scripts and i do like the simplicity, but i have used some systemd features that make some stuff so much more reliable, mainly restarting a service after the process crashes.

I don't like systemd on my desktop because I don't get any benefits from using it. Changing things and then telling me that it's optimal, the future and I need to deal with it is a great way to make me want to murder you. Windows used to be the best at that, now it's the loathsome niggers that continue to develop Poettering's shit after he left for Microsoft.

My little VPS box is running standard Debian with systemd and things are fine there.

 

[Zeftax]

I never saw the need for any animations and other smooth transitions.

I find them actually obstructive. I want to see the current state of my machine, these hangups feel more like limitations than anything, but that is just my opinion. Thankfully, in Hyprland, it was just a question of changing one line in the config file (and then another for the rounded corners - who thought of that?), so no big deal.
I guess I understand why some people might like it, and I very much respect the old adage we have here, literally translated as "every village, different dog" - people can have differing opinions. I don't like having an anime girl wallpaper and animated transitions as the default, but as long as I can change it I don't care.
I still don't use Wayland on the on the basis that it just does not, and can not, work with the way I want to use my computer.

Changing things and then telling me that it's optimal, the future and I need to deal with it is a great way to make me want to murder you.

I wish for the legalization of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear payload so fucking much.

 

[Eternal Gopnik]

Yes and no. Red Hat employees use Fedora and work on it in their free time, sure, but I think the project leader is the only paid position.

Nah that's definitely not true, there are plenty of Fedora-first or even Fedora-exclusive positions at Red Hat, e.g. the entire infrastructure team, release engineering, most of Fedora's QA, design (logos, backgrounds, conference flyers etc.), ... - and even devs employed by RH often work on Fedora packages in their day jobs with full knowledge and approval from their managers.

 

[Dead Lion]

I upgraded to fedora 43 today and apparently some bright soul over at the GNOME project decided that no stalker child, pageup and pagedown in the default pdf app should not move page up or down. That should be the N and P keys obviously.



Troonshine hit hard when they thought this garbage up.

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

I upgraded to fedora 43 today and apparently some bright soul over at the GNOME project decided that no stalker child, pageup and pagedown in the default pdf app should not move page up or down. That should be the N and P keys obviously.

View attachment 8153098

Troonshine hit hard when they thought this garbage up.

Exactly the kinds of stupid decisions that Gnome is known for.
I'm amazed that anyone actually uses it. 5 minutes was more then enough for me to never want to touch it again.

 

[cigint]

pageup and pagedown move several lines at once

Heh you're welcome... kid...

 

[Dead Lion]

You are not getting my money fuck off.

Exactly the kinds of stupid decisions that Gnome is known for.
I'm amazed that anyone actually uses it. 5 minutes was more then enough for me to never want to touch it again.

I like the general idea of gnome 4 as a less autistic tiling window manager but they make it really annoying sometimes. One of these days when i have the time I will learn an actual TWM but for now all my time is taken up by reading PDF's and shitposting.

View attachment 8153233
Heh you're welcome... kid...

You wanna know the best part? From my research of actually pressing those keys they do NOTHING.

 

[GoysGoneWild]

can someone explain the systemd hate? i think i understand it but i want to make sure i have a good understanding.

From the point of view of someone who was using Linux on the desktop already for several years back in 2014-15 when the systemd debate was reaching its crescendo:

There's two things to keep in mind. There's systemd: the software. And there's systemd: the software social movement. The social movement includes the software as a component.

systemd, the software, purely by itself, is more of an overall "system manager" than an init system. An init system is at its core, yes. But really its more a suite of tightly integrated software that is supposed to startup and then manage as much of the system as possible. So in addition to things like init, this will integrate things like networking, logging, daemon management and monitoring. A lot of these things were formerly more or less independent things which worked well together due to the "Unix philosophy" of doing one thing (more or less) and doing it well. But the people behind systemd (Red Hat/Freedesktop/Lennaert Poettering) starting taking over projects and subsuming them into the overall systemd ecosystem.

IMO as a system manager suite, its....fine. Not great, not terrible. Also IMO there are better ways to approach this, and other solutions. But systemd isnt the worst.

Now on the other hand, systemd the social movement is pure fucking cancer and the prototype for a lot of the struggles FOSS is seeing today. These corporate fuckers at Red Hat, of which Lennaert was the foremost, tip of the spear, rammed this bullshit up every Linux distros pozhole one by one until the last major holdout was Debian. They used and prototyped every method of consensus-cracking, coercion, gaslighting, poisoning the well, and sometimes even thinly-veiled threats to get these distros, and finally Debian, to adopt their cancer. Wiping their ass with software design methods which had proven their worth over decades and giving the finger to everyone on the way out.

PulseAudio. Freedesktop garbage rammed down people's throats. GNOME. Anti-user, hostile garbage propped up through reddit consensus. Wayland. FdO again gaslighting other people into doing desktop work for them by refusing to work on functional solutions (Xorg).

Its all the same corpo faggots doing corpo faggot shit.

 

[Andy Soying Out]

The Linux Kernel Looks To "Bite The Bullet" In Enabling Microsoft C Extensions​

Spoiler: Full article text

Two patches queued into the Linux kernel's build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the -fms-extensions compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this change.

The -fms-extensions compiler option honored by the GNU Compiler Collection and LLVM/Clang allow enabling some non-standard C/C++ constructs used within Microsoft header files and honored by the the Microsoft Visual C/C++ compiler. For Linux kernel development purposes, enabling the Microsoft C Extensions would allow including a tagged struct or union anonymously in another struct/union.

Going back many years there have been patches floated to unconditionally enable -fms-extensions for the Linux kernel but they haven't made it past the Linux kernel mailing list. But now with these two patches being in kbuild-next mean that it will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window barring any objections from prominent Linux kernel developers or Linus Torvalds himself.

Rasmus Villemoes argued with Kbuild: enable -fms-extensions that would allow for "prettier code" and others have noted in the past the potential for saving stack space and all around being beneficial in being able to leverage the Microsoft C behavior:

"Once in a while, it turns out that enabling -fms-extensions could allow some slightly prettier code. But every time it has come up, the code that had to be used instead has been deemed "not too awful" and not worth introducing another compiler flag for.

That's probably true for each individual case, but then it's somewhat of a chicken/egg situation.

If we just "bite the bullet" as Linus says and enable it once and for all, it is available whenever a use case turns up, and no individual case has to justify it.

A lore.kernel.org search provides these examples:

- https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/200706301813.58435.agruen@suse.de/
- https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20180419152817.GD25406@bombadil.infradead.org/
- https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/170622208395.21664.2510213291504081000@noble.neil.brown.name/
- https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/87h6475w9q.fsf@prevas.dk/
- https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjeZwww6Zswn6F_iZTpUihTSNKYppLqj36iQDDhfntuEw@mail.gmail.com/

Undoubtedly, there are more places in the code where this could also be used but where -fms-extensions just didn't come up in any discussion."

The second patch is kbuild: Add '-fms-extensions' to areas with dedicated CFLAGS to ensure -fms-extensions is passed for the CPU architectures that rely on their own CFLAGS being set rather than the main KBUILD_CFLAGS.

Linus Torvalds chimed in on the prior mailing list discussion and doesn't appear to be against enabling -fms-extensions beginning with the Linux 6.19 kernel.

Enabling -fms-extensions will allow for some better looking C code though some may feel the wrong way around Microsoft C behavior being permitted for the mainline Linux kernel coding.

link (archive)

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I upgraded to fedora 43 today and apparently some bright soul over at the GNOME project decided that no stalker child, pageup and pagedown in the default pdf app should not move page up or down. That should be the N and P keys obviously.

View attachment 8153098

Troonshine hit hard when they thought this garbage up.

Is there any other bullshit in Fedora 43? Haven't migrated from 42 yet.

 

[Dead Lion]

Is there any other bullshit in Fedora 43? Haven't migrated from 42 yet.

The big ticket item is that they're completely dropping X11. Other that it's really nothing groundbreaking. Some apps got a facelift for better or worse and software can now display a page without shitting itself 12 times and dying.

 

[Judge Dredd]

How is Linux and the community doing after the whole Win 10 end of support situation?

I saw the post that Linux users are now 3% of steam users, but that could include the steam deck. Has the community been inundated with beginner questions (and getting the usual response)?

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

How is Linux and the community doing after the whole Win 10 end of support situation?

I saw the post that Linux users are now 3% of steam users, but that could include the steam deck. Has the community been inundated with beginner questions (and getting the usual response)?

Like always. It's nothing huge. I've seen a few new to linux people around. But it wasn't like swarms of new users from what I can tell.

 

[Dread First]

How is Linux and the community doing after the whole Win 10 end of support situation?

I saw the post that Linux users are now 3% of steam users, but that could include the steam deck. Has the community been inundated with beginner questions (and getting the usual response)?

It ain’t a huge dent in the market share, but it’s becoming more and more “acceptable” as a talking point among tech slop creators. Linux Mint wins most by its reputation preceding itself. Arch users most negatively impacted because some retard will inevitably recommend Arch via archinstall and the normie in question won’t have any clue what to do once they boot into X11, much less how to resolve problems.

 

[Slav Power]

but that could include the steam deck

"Could" is an understatement. If you switch the Steam Survey stats to Linux only this is the average that you get.

The two most popular GPU's are "AMD AMD Custom GPU 0405" which is Deck's APU and "AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV VANGOGH)" which is a different identification for, again, Deck's APU. Together they make up for 26.81% of Linux GPU's, which corelates with the 27.18% share of "SteamOS Holo" 64 bit. Keep in mind that this iteration of SteamOS is exclusive to handhelds like the Steam Deck or the ROG Ally and rarely do people choose to use the modified version of it meant to run on other systems, so these numbers are very close to the reality that 1/4th of Linux users on Steam come from the Steam Deck.

If anyone feels like this is something to be proud of, all it means is that a corporation released a product that's selling in the millions and making them ridiculous amounts of money with them using Linux as means to achieve this product and sales. Any and all code contributions that trickle down to the masses are merely a side effect. Not to mention that if someone brings this up to show that people move away from Windows to Linux, they are lying to you. All that happened is more people are using a Linux based device, but it did not make a dent in the total amount of people using Windows. Because desktop Linux is still a steaming pile of shit, worse than Windows 11, and you need a company like Valve to tailor a distro to dedicated hardware to make Linux viable.

 

[Susanna]

If anyone feels like this is something to be proud of, all it means is that a corporation released a product that's selling in the millions and making them ridiculous amounts of money with them using Linux as means to achieve this product and sales. Any and all code contributions that trickle down to the masses are merely a side effect.

Yet the end result is the same, Valve puts effort into making the Steam Deck a viable product, and because Valve aren't total asshats, their efforts also benefit non-Deck Linux users.
You might not be ready or want to switch, but if I, a relative novice coming from MacOS, was able to switch over a decade ago, others surely can also. Linux isn't perfect, but it's by no means unusable or even particularly difficult nowadays. Just because you couldn't figure out how to install Arch doesn't mean some random gamer can't figure out a normie distro like Fedora or Mint. I've used Windows computers, and my experience is they break all the time. Linux, once set up, will keep running, as long as you don't go poking around in config files just because some idiot on Quora said that a custom kernel will improve your framerate or something. The issues come when you do dumb things like not update a rolling release distro for half a year, and then try to install basically an entirely new distro all at once, easily solved by just running a stable distro and letting it autoupdate (which, by the way, doesn't forcibly auto-reboot your computer every day like on Windows).
The Steam Deck was a great thing for Linux. Yeah most Deck users won't be switching their desktops to Linux just because they like their Deck so much, but they don't have to, the fact that the Linux userbase is growing means publishers will be more inclined to ask their studios to make Linux native builds or at least make sure their Windows builds work with Proton. Even if 100% of that 3% was the Steam Deck, this would still benefit desktop Linux.
This is the Linux thread, of course Linux users are going to be negative about Windows, they switched for a reason. If it really bothers you so much, just go make a Windows thread to complain about Linux in instead.

 

[Penne Dreadful]

If anyone feels like this is something to be proud of, all it means is that a corporation released a product that's selling in the millions and making them ridiculous amounts of money with them using Linux as means to achieve this product and sales. Any and all code contributions that trickle down to the masses are merely a side effect.

Android's 1.0 release was 17 years ago and it's a substantially better fit for what you're saying here (except in that it is outright the most popular consumer OS; the desktop, Linux or otherwise, is for the workplace and old fossils like us).
That aside, regardless of Valve's intentions, they've made plenty of useful contributions to the kernel and userspace alike. For a non-communist, the fact that said contributions were made out of self-interest doesn't detract from them.