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A number of users have reported that running "rm --no-preserve-root -rf /" not only deletes all their files (as expected), but also permanently bricks their computers (which is not). Tracing the issue revealed that the ultimate cause was that SystemD mounted the EFI pseudo-fs as read-write even when this FS was not listed in fstab, and deleting certain files in this pseudo-fs causes certain buggy, but very common, firmware not to POST anymore. A user reported this bug on SystemD's GitHub issue tracker, asking that the FS be mounted read-only instead of read-write, and said bug was immediately closed as invalid. The comment thread for the bug was locked shortly after. Discuss.
Links:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/02/01/running-a-single-delete-command-can-permanently-brick-laptops-from-inside-linux/
(Score: 5, Informative) by jmorris on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:20AM
GTK
Wrong. While the first gtk might not quite predate RedHat, it certainly predates RH being a post IPO monster that funds development of an entire OS. Hint: gtk stands for Gimp ToolKit and dates to 1995.
Xorg
Child, Xorg was ported TO linux.
Wayland
From the people who gave us X11 (not Xorg, you do know the difference?) itself, and guess how old that is? Yea, about that.
SELinux
That comes courtesy of the United States Government, specifically the National Security Agency.
1 out of every 6 lines of code in the Linux kernel
Granted. Nobody said they were bad Open Source citizens, only that what they are using their muscle to transform the whole ecosystem atop that kernel into something that bears no resemblance to UNIX. Considering Poettering's very public statements on his hatred of UNIX and everything it stands for this should not be a shock.
PulseAudio
You mean the turd that kept audio playback unreliable on Linux for over five years as they rammed down a replacement for perfectly working software because of NIH and a BS 'need' to be able to drag a stream in progress from the internal speakers to a BT headset? And notice Android, which really can use that sort of functionality, doesn't use it.
NetworkManager
You mean the other total rewrite that has had any networking beyond a single wired ethernet or the developer's Macbooks connecting via WiFi dodgy for five plus years? That turd, the software that never got to a working state before systemd just tossed it and replaced it?
Plymouth
Wow, some stupid eyecandy to keep newbs from seeing the bootup messages.
Gnome
Ok, I will give them GNOME3 since it is a turd that caused the first schism between RH and the users. But GNOME 1 and 2 had a lot of help, which is probably why they were more usable. SUN Microsystems, IBM, etc. all contributed parts of that code.
ext3/4
Redhat wrote that? Where did all those IBM and Lustre names come from on that paper Google found when I asked it who did it? Yea I know RH has done a lot of heavy lifting there, just pointing out there aren't the only ones in the game. Besides, some of us kinda like xfs.
systemd is not Red Hat's attempt to take over Linux.
No, systemd is the first part of a push to remake it into it into something alien to a UNIX user. Something more amendable to their support model.
Red Hat doesn't mind.
If that were true I'd wish them luck, there probably is a use case for their new OS in the cloud where they are focusing. But they are using every trick in the book to make adopting the whole New Tech stack the easy path and sticking to the UNIX Way increasingly difficult.
you are slamming the only ally that the open source community has been able to consistently rely on for two decades.
I have ran RedHat products since the earliest days. I know about their contributions. But they have made wrong moves before. They closed RHEL and they did it with little advance warning. I know, I was there and one of the ones who worked on the forks, I put up the first pages showing how to do a rebuild from scratch including ending the Anaconda game. For years the shipped packages had a very subtle bug in them that made it impossible to actually respin a bootable set of media, kept in as a sort of "your Kung Fu must be this strong to do this" thing to keep the number of unauthorized spins down. A fiendish bash quoting bug intended as a rite of passage, nobody who found it ever posted a fix because we all apparently instantly saw the purpose. But since we now HAD to respin keeping that secret was no longer worthwhile so I spilled those beans in a patched package so others could easily validate my work. I wanted anyone to be able to take RH's SRPMS, validate my fairly small patches and be able to build for themselves so they wouldn't have to trust me.
But I haven't installed a new RH based physical or virtual machine in several years. And since adopting systemd, the Debian based systems I have been using have been frozen at 7 for servers and 6 (no GNOME3) for machines with a GUI. As soon as Devuan announces itself as production ready everything will begin to move there.
This machine I'm typing on is still on Fedora but I now wait until the support ends before upgrading and fighting the issues, by then they are actually pretty managable. On my work Thinkpad though, new things break and others start working again with every update. Whether it docks, suspends, connects to the wired and/or WiFi, plays music out both external speakers, etc. are all hit or miss. Thank you RedHat, you have made Linux just as good as Windows! Next hardware cycle I will be picking a new OS of course, just not enough breaks that I can't fix to drive me to lose a day or two of getting useful things done.
(Score: 3, Touché) by dyingtolive on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:36AM
At this point I prefer OSX to most linux distros, and that's not something I thought I would find myself saying 10 years ago. :(
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:02AM
Have run. "Have ran" is illiterate and makes you look stupid.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:23AM
Claiming that a small error makes you look stupid makes you look stupid. Especially when you cannot know whether he is even a native speaker. How well are your foreign language skills? Not to mention that it might just be a typo anyway. Or a classic editing error (where you significantly change the sentence structure and forget to adapt some word).
To be clear, there's IMHO nothing wrong in pointing out errors. It is, however, wrong to claim (or even just to think) that someone is stupid just because he doesn't always use the language exactly according to the rules. Especially if anyone with normal intelligence and minimal language knowledge can without doubt infer what exactly he meant.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @07:47AM
+Don't harsh on the grammar natz, dude! Chill!
Maybe he meant "I have ran from Redhat products", a simple typo ellipsis. Otherwise it was an defective perfect, or an imperfect perfect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @12:58PM
This is an increasingly common grammatical error that I've been hearing in the past few years, and from native English speakers in the US.
The compound verb tense "have/had (main verb)" is being misconjugated. They use the simple past tense of the main verb after "have/had" instead of the proper tense.
Examples:
Incorrect: I had ate enough.
Correct: I had eaten enough.
Incorrect: I have ran 5 miles on a treadmill.
Correct: I have run 5 miles on a treadmill.
I agree, it's basic English, and it does make the person sound stupid-- except to all his friends who speak the same way!
(Score: 1) by mechanicjay on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:07AM
This machine I'm typing on is still on Fedora but I now wait until the support ends before upgrading and fighting the issues, by then they are actually pretty managable. On my work Thinkpad though, new things break and others start working again with every update. Whether it docks, suspends, connects to the wired and/or WiFi, plays music out both external speakers, etc. are all hit or miss. Thank you RedHat, you have made Linux just as good as Windows!
Seriously, I've been running OpenSuse on my Thinkpads exclusively since 2008. I don't have these issues and everything just works "out of the box". Give the Green Lizard a try.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by Bill Dimm on Tuesday February 09 2016, @02:53PM
I've been using OpenSUSE for several years, and I've been mostly happy with it, but they did start using systemd a while ago. I have 12.2 on one machine and 12.3 on another (both are systemd) and they both sometimes fail to shut down cleanly (12.2 more so than 12.3). I don't know if that's related to systemd, but it's something that I've never seen before (using Linux since 1995).
(Score: 2, Informative) by mechanicjay on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:29PM
Yes, the 12.x series was their transition to Systemd. 12.1 was completely borked, leaving you with a damn near unmanageable system, services that wouldn't start (or shutdown), disks that would change their UID at every reboot... 12.2 was a bit better, 12.3 a little better still. For the 13.x series they completed the transition and I've had no systemd related troubles since. 12.x was really a shit show.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @06:24PM
I've used Windows for longer than that and those problems kinda went out some time into Windows XP. And Windows 2000 was not that bad either (other than the slow boot time on old hardware of that time and some resource limits which supposedly could be worked-around: http://weblogs.asp.net/mikedopp/increasing-user-handle-and-gdi-handle-limits [asp.net] ). Windows 8.x and 10 on the other hand are abominations. And Vista never happened ;).
I did use Linux for desktop purposes too at work for a few years starting from about 2005, and it was an inferior experience for much basic desktop stuff (clipboard management, sound handling, the general way the GUI should work) and only better in other more esoteric ways (e.g. kio slaves). I used KDE because it was less of a joke than GNOME (if you don't think so go look up what Linus said about GNOME around that time). Sad to say the desktop stuff today is still crap (I've reported bugs years ago that were closed with WONTFIX). The server stuff is still OK but I haven't moved to the SystemD crap yet.
You bunch can keep saying desktop Linux is fine but, if things were really that great why have there been so many major forks along with lots of people saying others are screwing stuff up? Are they all wrong and stuff is great? It's almost as if Microsoft is paying Linux developers to screw stuff up every time Microsoft releases crap.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:47PM
PulseAudio
TBH, Pulse Audio source code is poorly documented, difficult to understand. But what it does is work the way audio on linux is suppose to work under ALSA. The problem with ALSA is ALSA had NO USABLE DOCUMENTATION. For a project that important, WTF?? To write .asoundrc config files, you needed a PHD in brainfuck and half the time something was broken anyway because device detection order changed. At least with Pulse Audio there is pavucontrol allowing people to switch stuff around and for audio to work out of the box.
I love command line, but audio on Linux definitely was a PITA before Pulse Audio came around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2016, @07:48PM
There was already JACK if you needed more than controlling the speaker volume on your motherboard DAC.