SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 q.kontinuum on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:22PM
I agree partially regarding Linux desktop distributions degenerating. But unfortunately I still have to log in to Windows once in a while, and it still is a far worse pain in the ass. Maybe some products like a bluetooth mouse work out of the box, but I'm working in test-automation on a cross-platform product, and still I see issues with
I really hate any work I have to do for that platform. Current linux desktops are often a pain in the ass as well, but usually can be fixed. By Xfce also slightly degenerated, the "switch user" feature doesn't work (but "alt-ctrl-F2, text terminal login., startx" works), sometimes I have to disable wifi and enable it again to get it working because it is somehow stuck, recently the computer often doesn't wake up properly from hibernate and needs to be restarted, and all that is quite annoying. But still much easier than more stable than Windows 7/8/10. Even our on-site-support finally told me 2014 to just banish Windows 8 into a VM, take snapshots once in a while and recover from there, when the system breaks. They were not able to get MS Office running again without a full wipe/re-install...
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:38PM
Two notes for people who run into similar situations. The path length limit can be avoided by prepending \\?\ to the path. UNC doesn't have the same limit. I, sadly, have to use that workaround in Explorer a little too often, usually to delete files put there by some program or another.
Also, I think that case-preserving file systems make more sense. The prevent situations of having two items in the same directory with the same name except for the case. They also prevent typos from causing weird issues. I can't really see the use case for two things with the same name but different capitalization in a folder.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:07AM
The path length limit can be avoided by prepending \\?\ to the path.
Thanks, we saw that as well. But I don't think Jenkins [jenkins-ci.org] supports this mechanism.
I can't really see the use case for two things with the same name but different capitalization in a folder.
Compatibility to other relevant systems (Android, Linux, iOS, QNX to name some we work with). We use repo with manifest files, teams add their git repositories there, and are not always checking for similar names. Also I just expect software to distinguish different names, it's just common in any programming language I used for the past decade, iirc. So why should bash or bat act differently?
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday February 23 2017, @03:19AM
This only works if you're directly passing UNC paths to OpenFile()/etc, and you still have an upper limit of 32k kilobytes to command line arguments (a hardcoded constrain on CreateProcess as far as I can tell) which causes headaches when compiling extremely large software packages. As for case-sensitive vs not, I personally agree with you, but the problem is when you have to work with a system that does preserve case, you're going to be in for a world of hurt (the Linux kernel has several files that only vary in case). Fortunately, it IS possible to get case-sensitive behavior on Windows if you enable it, but your application has to specifically be enabled to use it (it has to do CreateFile with POSIX_ACCESS_ATTRIBUTE, else its undefined which file you'll get). You can however tell cygwin to wrap all API calls with that flag and get a case-preserving cygwin environment.
A bigger issue is the fact that symlinks are badly borked on Windows since UAC became a thing. SymLinks by default require admin permissions to create on Windows, but this can be changed with a GPO/registry tweak. So far so good. However, when logged in as an Administrator, UAC will drop the symlink permission unconditionally, so you get the absurd situation where you have to "Run As Administrator" if you're an admin, or you can just make symlinks if you're an unprivileged user. As far as I can tell, there's no way to change the security profiles used by UAC.
Still always moving