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from the it's-already-perfect-is-not-the-right-answer dept.
We all know about Microsoft's latest OS, so I won't rehash. A lot of us intensely dislike it, to put it politely. Those of us who can, use other operating systems. This is Soylent, so let's focus on the one that is the most important to us: Linux.
I have been using Windows as my OS since right after Atari times. A few years ago I bought an ARM (ARMHF/ARMv7) netbook and put Lubuntu on it. I had problems with my first Linux experience, mainly in the area of installing software: missing packages in Synaptic, small dependency hells, installing a package at a time by hand, some broken stuff. I put it down mainly to the architecture I have been using, which can't be supported as well as x86-64.
Now, we all know that no software is perfect, and neither is Linux, even though it is now my main OS. We support it in spirit and financially, but there is always room for improvement.
So, the question is: What are your problems with Linux and how can we fix them? How do we better it? Maybe it's filesystems, maybe it's the famous/infamous systemd. Let's have at it.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:24PM
evince-thumbnailer
It's actually worse, because thumb drives contain untrusted data and the image parsing libraries that are used to produce these thumbnails have a pretty poor security record (lots of arbitrary code execution from malformed images). This isn't such a problem if it's properly sandboxed, but I don't believe that this one is.
One of the biggest advantages of Linux was IMO that you can get nearly everywhere using grep and find in /var/log and /etc. Having a binary format for logfiles is IMO the most stupid idea for a long time
There are lots of things I don't like about systemd, but this isn't a criticism I understand. Binary-only logs let you do things like use block chain or Merkel tree ideas, so that you can validate an append-only structure. For any file on disk, you need some program to be able to parse it and a structured format can give better searches than a simple grep. As long as you have statically linked tools for doing the inspection on your root partition, this shouldn't be a problem.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:24AM
As long as you have statically linked tools for doing the inspection on your root partition, this shouldn't be a problem.
And therein lies my main problem with SystemD: it all works as long as you have all the dependencies all in a row. It is a terrible design due to its complex web of dependencies, and inherently fragile.
People! Don't build dependencies into fundamentally independent processes. This makes sense, it always has made sense. It always will make sense (no matter what Windows developers think).