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from the 640k-is-more-memory-than-anyone-will-ever-need dept.
Linux x86/x86_64 Will Now Always Reserve The First 1MB Of RAM - Phoronix:
The Linux x86/x86_64 kernel code already had logic in place for reserving portions of the first 1MB of RAM to avoid the BIOS or kernel potentially clobbering that space among other reasons while now Linux 5.13 is doing away with that "wankery" and will just unconditionally always reserve the first 1MB of RAM.
[...] The motivation now for Linux 5.13 in getting that 1MB unconditional reservation in place for Linux x86/x86_64 stems from a bug report around an AMD Ryzen system being unbootable on Linux 5.13 since the change to consolidate their early memory reservations handling. Just unconditionally doing the first 1MB makes things much simpler to handle.
The change was sent in this morning as part of x86/urgent. "Do away with all the wankery of reserving X amount of memory in the first megabyte to prevent BIOS corrupting it and simply and unconditionally reserve the whole first megabyte."
no more wankery
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday June 08 2021, @04:54PM (2 children)
I predict that when (not if) consumer Windows becomes entirely a cloud OS, it will become basically such an OS plus desktop. They've been trying to achieve cloud-everything for over 20 years (I first heard the idea broached at the Win2k launch event in Los Angeles. The audience of some 1000 pro IT types all developed identical angry frowns.) When it comes to software, renting is always more lucrative than outright sales.
Unlike yourself, I hate the launcher. It annoys me, it wastes my time, it gives me a burning desire to choke the developer with my bare hands; if I wanted my desktop to behave like a cellphone, I'd use a damned cellphone. I *hate* swiping around to find shit. First thing I always do is switch to cascading menus (with Windows, meaning Classic Shell), and if the desktop won't allow that, it goes on down the road. I've run into distros with KDE unswitchably set to the launcher (what the hell happened to "choice"??) The lack of a normal menu was much of why I don't use Cinnamon; it's just too persistently annoying.
Another thing that annoys me with post-XP Windows are the many changes to Explorer's interface. I live in the file manager; it has to work how I want and can't continually annoy me. Unfortunately none of the 3rd party substitutes for Windows Explorer quite does it for me; they're either unstable (an absolute NO in a file manager) or have their own annoyances. Dolphin has finally got to where it doesn't drive me mad, but that's not useful with Win10.
And then there's how utterly and deliberately UGLY Win10 is. Glaring whitespace competing with near-invisible, one-pixel controls, and no good way to fix that. Win7 could just barely be beaten into a usable look that doesn't hurt my eyes, and 8.1 Enterprise can be sort of (only have this because it came on a laptop and so far it hasn't misbehaved), but Win10 remains eye-burning ugly, and applications built for it often entirely ignore system settings and you're stuck with a glaring white workspace (I'm lookin' at you, Office 2016). It's Brutalism for computers.
If I can't stand looking at it (and I spend a lot of hours with my desktop) it doesn't matter how much better the underpinnings are.
I've had the opposite experience with Win10 respecting other OSs. Firstoff, it bothers me that multiboots now apparently rewrite the boot sector with every restart; this strikes me as disaster-in-waiting. Second, now they insist that whatever booted up is C: and if you don't like your drive letters moving around, tough. (In days of yore, I'd put DOS on C, WinOld on F, and WinCurrent on I. And there they stayed no matter which booted up.) Third... one day I needed an x64 app to briefly run on a box that normally runs XP32. Since my boot drives now live in hotswap bays (in part due to my lost faith in multiboots), easy enough, just swap HDs for one with Win10 installed (cuz it was handy and doesn't mind this abuse, while Win7 will sometimes throw up). So all seemed to be fine until I swapped back, and noticed that ... Win10 had nuked the partition table on the USB-attached HD. Which had been working normally not five minutes before. Best guess is that because the drive is quite old, and was formatted with an old version of NTFS.... Win10 decided it needed updating to current NTFS, and proceeded to attempt it.... entirely in the background and with no notice. Fortunately it's been backed up, but to say I was annoyed is to opine that the ocean is 'damp'. Never again will Win10 touch my systems without everything external being disconnected first. (And this accelerated my "Meh, I can have my customized PCLinuxOS installed in five minutes, why do I care about Win10?")
/rant :D
Type the obvious:
http://www.blackviper.com/ [blackviper.com]
He's been pretty thorough on analyzing services, and has some Handy Scripts available so you don't need to DIY.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Wednesday June 09 2021, @10:56AM (1 child)
From what you've said it sounds like it's because you still want to use it like the start menu and it is (correctly) disappointing at doing that. The reason I'm okay with it is they finally added decent search-and-run type functionality to it, which is my primary interaction aside from setting a few "favourites". Like in KDE for example, the default launcher has good type-to-find and you can set a few oft-used things as favourites, so I primarily interact with the GUI via those or KDE's win+r equivalent (krunner) which is super powerful in comparison to the windows equivalent. Smart search, calculator, translator, currency conerter, and a bunch of other things that are all plugins that you can configure, enable, or disable based on needs. (Basically what MS wanted that Cortana shit to be, but krunner actually works and isn't invasive seeming.) Outside of those three interactions I largely ignore the desktop environment GUI; everything else is either terminal emulators or other applications I care about.
I've been non-Windows for a long time; at first I configured things to act like a start menu because it seemed convenient, but over time I found other ways I liked better, and eventually got along with KDE's fancier launchers. Now admittedly the Windows 10 launcher isn't quite as convenient because, in typical MS fashion, it's not nearly as flexible, but it's close enough. Most-used stuff as tiles to work like the KDE launcher favourites, meta + type to search for anything that isn't already pinned. And credit where it's due, being able to group the tiles is actually one area (maybe the only one) that Windows is better than the KDE equivalent. (But fuck live tiles, those obnoxious fuckers get disabled ASAP and whoever thought they were a good idea should be slapped.)
Not sure what distro and what they did but that isn't even possible. Maybe they locked the panels by default? Or shipped with some wonk ass custom panel thing like Latte Dock that used a weird launcher. KDE panels are completely configurable and you can add/remove whatever the fuck you want with on way to permanently lock them. It's one of the things I like about it.
Can't say much about Cinnamon, I refuse to use it because, while they and MATE were sane enough to fork away from the GNOME 3 abomination, they're still tied to the same toolkit which means they have to march to the GNOME drummer. If GNOME wants something done Gtk does it, even if it fucks over everybody else. The toolkit is poison now because they just don't care about anything outside the GNOME bubble.
I guess you're not (or weren't, at least) using UEFI? I don't know what it does there but prior to going passthrough I had Win10 on a GPT partition with UEFI and it behaved really well in that configuration. Part of that is because that configuration is explicitly made to support multiboot better, with a special small partition intended to hold each OS's bootloder and let you select it at startup. Totally bypasses the need for the kind of kludges that used to be necessary, which means Windows behaves a lot better because MS always sucked at respecting the boot sector. I used to have to always keep Linux on a separate disk and physically disconnect it to avoid problems, but with UEFI+GPT I had the two coexisting for a few years and many updates with no issue, even on the same physical disk.
Can't say much about the drive issues, my experience with it was entirely with fairly persistent drive configuration used for dual boot to another non-Windows OS. I wouldn't be surprised that it does stupid things with other Windows OSes and drives to be "helpful" though, a lot of stupid things the OS does comes from "let us help you, you're just a stupid user" logic.
I try to just keep it short and sweet: "Windows will not touch bare metal hardware". Though I'm going to have to relax that soon on a laptop for work purposes. Planning on setting up a partition specifically for that, making it as small as absolutely possible for needs, and then using the rest of the space for personal use. I don't trust BYOD policy and the insane software used with an OS that's not intentionally sanitised to be as empty as possible :P
I glanced at it already, though only briefly. I did notice it said the Win10 stuff was listed as unmaintained as of a few years ago, though.
also lol, SN mangled the bare URL portion of that quote when inside quote tags, at least in the preview. I'm going to leave that because it's funny.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday June 09 2021, @05:39PM
Yeah, I gotta have my start menu, or I'm not happy. There's been search since ?Win7? and it includes everything on the path, but in Windows I never use it. I have a quicklaunch item for the start menu, and am accustomed to having my way with the contents, so it's all sorted exactly as I wish. Of course, with Windows I'm starting with buck-naked and install everything myself, exactly where I want it. (Except for the crap I've been dragging from one system to the next for 25 years without troubling to reinstall it. Did you know that some versions of MSOffice will put up with this abuse?)
In KDE, tho... its logic for which submenu something belongs in, and whether it'll be displayed at all, is occasionally a bit lacking, and there I do sometimes have to resort to search, usually for whatever I've just installed and now can't find. I suppose I could use the menu editor but I never get around to it, partly because my preferred install already comes with the kitchen sink, and I'm leery of disturbing it. Linux DEs have some peculiar fragilities, often cosmetic but when they blow you can't get back where you started. Well, at least now there's Timeshift.
My only box that currently has a multiboot, and then only because it was intended as experimental and just stuck that way (with Win10, Win10Lite, and Server 2008R2, and an old Hackintosh on the other HD... there's nothing so permanent as a temporary camp!) without bothering to look, I think it only knows UEFI. Can't just pick the desired boot; have to pick it, then watch it reboot again into whichever I picked ... which was how I figured it's rewriting stuff, not just pick-an-OS and off we go, like in the Olden Days of multiple Windows on the same HD.
I stopped doing mutilboot across species lines a long long time ago, after observing numerous and consistent howls of pain in a forum devoted to such things: Windows usually kept to itself, but GRUB liked to nuke Windows. Way back when but the lesson stuck. In any case I generally prefer metal to VM, which is why there are 9 PCs in sight (6 being frankenputers), hotswap bays in every box, a stack of laptop HDs, and a bunch more PCs in the Closet. This is where old computers go to die. :D
I've run into set-in-stone KDE a bunch of times; didn't bother to keep track of which ones, but it's proved a fair marker for "everything else set up exactly how I don't want it". Sometimes stuck with the launcher and the option to switch nowhere to be found,.. and then most recently a rolling KDE-bleeding-edge distro that sounded interesting, but had the panel at the right edge of the screen (which caused numerous annoyances), and Unlock just flat did not work.
Gnome... ugh (there's the ultimate in "you're just a stupid user, do as you're told"). Everything I dislike about Android and MacOS, all in one handy interface; it makes Win10 seem pleasant by comparison. Observed a long time ago that KDE had better user-logic, and Qt apps generally were better-mannered than Gtk apps. And I'm past where I'm willing to spend assloads of effort fixing and tweaking; at this point shit had better work pretty much as I wish out of the box, or it goes on down the road and I try another. I tested around 150 distros and variants before I found one I can live with for everyday, and we still have arguments about the local network.
Yeah, I don't like the idea of being at the mercy of your upstream and whatever weird ideas may come down the pike; dunno how dependent Cinnamon is on Gnome but it kinda disturbs me that Mint is dependent on the whims of Ubuntu. If I liked it enough to want to use it, I might have to stick with LMDE instead. -- Then again, my preferred distro is a one-man-band, and what happens when he hangs it up?
[shaking head at weird paste bug] That's just strange :D Yeah, BlackViper's Windows stuff is sort of retired, but still useful enough. Oh, speaking of funnies... he and I both lived in SoCal, both moved out to the desert about the same time (lived about 10 miles apart as the crow flies) and both departed the Granola State about the same time. Great minds? :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.