[HN Gopher] A Linux Evening
___________________________________________________________________
A Linux Evening
Author : ingve
Score : 571 points
Date : 2022-12-16 11:09 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fabiensanglard.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (fabiensanglard.net)
| markus_zhang wrote:
| This occcurs every time I decided to dab into Linux. Usually I
| got the answer from a random search on stackoverflow and never
| managed to understand what happened.
|
| But I think it's OK. I have always had an interest in system
| programming and that's why I wanted to dab into Linux. But system
| programming is not a shiny, whole smooth thing one may imagine,
| but is quite messy all the time. I simply got what I wanted.
| buserror wrote:
| Not _entirely_ sure we are going the right way tho. In the last 3
| months or so (aka 2 major kernel versions), I had to add stuff to
| my command line to make my perfectly working workstation work
| again. X99 motherboard, worked for _years_.
|
| GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="mitigations=off
| acpi_enforce_resources=lax pci=noaer intel_iommu=off"
|
| All of them due to various problems I had to 'google and cut
| paste bits and see if it works'. I'm considered a bit of an
| expert, and I only understand fully _one_ of the added parameter,
| and why it 's needed.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| Nvidia drivers, signed kernel modules, and Nvidia signed kernel
| modules are my own most common sources of 'Linux evenings.'
| SecureBoot is quite possible on Linux until you need to reach for
| these, then it becomes a headache.
| DerSaidin wrote:
| Take away 0:
|
| Good error messages are important pointers. Make sure you include
| good, unique, descriptive errors in software you write.
|
| When you figure out a solution, post it online with the error
| message so others can search it to make the connection and get to
| the solution more easily.
| rg111 wrote:
| I started using Linux with Linux Mint. Then moved to Pop OS
| NVIDIA edition 2/3 years ago.
|
| I _NEVER HAD_ a Linux Evening.
|
| I only faced problems for my noobness in my earlier years, and
| help was always a reddit visit away.
| jckahn wrote:
| I'm a proud and happy Linux desktop user and rarely have
| significant issues like the one described here. I attribute that
| to using a "boring" distro (latest Ubuntu LTS's only), and
| "boring" hardware (a Dell XPS 13 which is known to have good
| Ubuntu support). I just don't have the spare hours to throw at
| getting basic system functionality to work, so I make
| software/hardware choices accordingly.
|
| Occasionally I will have a Linux Evening, and I attribute it to
| the fact that I didn't pay for my OS and can therefore only
| expect so much. After all, you only get what you pay for.
|
| That being said, I will never leave Linux because using an open
| source operating system is completely worth the occasional
| hassles it brings me.
| greatgib wrote:
| I have also a XPS13, it is quite good, and I never
| shutdown/reboot it. Only let it in sleep mode when needed. For
| months.
|
| There is still a recurring issue that I was encountering, that
| is similar to the one reported by Fabien Sanglard. It is with
| the small usb-c to usb-3 thunderbolt accessory. It is working
| perfectly, and suddenly, after months, it will not work anymore
| with anyhting plugged to it, without reason.
|
| In that case, in the syslog I can also see that the "memory
| space" is exhausting, with something "BAR" and it looks like
| that it is not able to allocate ports anymore.
|
| Before, in such a case, I was forced to reboot and that was a
| lot of frustration for me, to lose all my contexts. And most
| often at the wrong time when you are in a hurry.
|
| But, recently,in a Linux Evening, I found a command that
| "magically" resolve my issue when it is happening, without
| having to reboot: for i in
| /sys/bus/pci/drivers/[uoex]hci_hcd/*:*; do [ -e "$i" ] ||
| continue; echo "${i##*/}" > "${i%/*}/unbind"; echo
| "${i##*/}" > "${i%/*}/bind"; done
|
| This will deinit/deallocate all the usb internal hubs
| (usb2/usb3/...) freeing the ports that were allocated (leaked?)
| for them. And then reset them. Then everything is working
| correctly again.
|
| Even if it is not great to have this issue, this is the case
| when I like Linux, when there is always a way to fix your
| issues without having to reboot.
| vehemenz wrote:
| 1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving GNU/Linux,
| that is actually a sign of _inexperience_. That or you 're doing
| nothing interesting.
|
| 2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux users
| would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux. Either
| follow your arguments to their conclusions, or understand that
| Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as you--making
| practical tradeoffs.
|
| 3. Unless you are doing tons of system administration on your
| daily driver, most of your time is spent in applications, and the
| choice of operating system doesn't matter too much.
| S0und wrote:
| > 1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving
| GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience. That or
| you're doing nothing interesting.
|
| There are 3 type of person who knows a lot about cars:
|
| 1. A Car mechanic 2. People who love cars, and tinker them
| constantly 3. People who have a shitty car and something always
| breaks.
|
| Personally I'm not a car guy, I treat them as tools. I can do
| this because I always had a reliable car. I have a friend who
| once mocked me for my inexperience. I had to reminding him why
| he knew so much about cars. He was a Type 3 guy. No a shitty
| car tho, but something always broke on it anyway.
|
| So getting back to you, can we just have something Works? Is
| that a high bar?
| vehemenz wrote:
| My point here is that if you use Linux enough, then you will
| encounter issues, period, regardless of your technical level.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The same thing is true if you use a pencil enough. The
| question is whether you run into issues significantly more
| often than the commercial alternatives.
| bashZorina_09 wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree with your first point.
|
| When I (and many others) first started out using Linux, this
| was when the most trouble was likely to crop up. Over time, one
| learns and adapts to certain intricacies, hardware or
| methodologies used, and hopefully good practises, such as
| avoiding utterly rubbish or quaint distributions. Of course no
| scenario is bound to be 100% trouble free, but this is a far
| cry from an inexperienced user.
|
| Even if I were to accept the premise that the other users are
| simply "doing nothing interesting", what would your idea of
| interesting be? Is it heavily exotic in nature (which I do
| agree in this case), or things that fall outside the purview of
| web browsing, document editing and leisurely activities? These
| things can also cause trouble outside the fault of a user for
| any reason, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they are
| inexperienced or do nothing interesting.
|
| If you can elaborate more, I'd be interested to gauge if I
| agree in a new context.
| bscphil wrote:
| > If principles mattered more than convenience
|
| What principles? Is this another BSD vs GPL licensing turf war
| you're trying to start here? I think there are obviously
| coherent sets of principles on which it makes sense to prefer
| the latter.
| nortonham wrote:
| Point 2: What makes you say that, and what principles
| specifically are you assuming every gnu/linux user has that
| would lead them to Free/OpenBSD (and not dragonfly or net)?
| seanw444 wrote:
| This is an important list.
| ryanmentor wrote:
| You conclusion for your second point seems to include a lot of
| unstated assumptions.
|
| Which principles do you think are at play?
| nortonham wrote:
| 1) Yes for quite some time I only do fairly basic/uninteresting
| things. That being said, gnu/linux has become far easier to use
| than it was, say 20 years ago.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux
| users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux.
| Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or
| understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as
| you--making practical tradeoffs.
|
| I'm chiming in with everybody else here, but why do you think
| that my principles are better served by licensing that is less
| supportive of my principles?
| dm319 wrote:
| I'm gonna disagree on everything here...
|
| > 1. If you don't encounter any trouble daily driving
| GNU/Linux, that is actually a sign of inexperience. That or
| you're doing nothing interesting.
|
| I do loads of interesting stuff on linux, I use it for
| research, numerical computing, biology etc. None of these
| things cause linux to skip a beat.
|
| > 2. If principles mattered more than convenience, most Linux
| users would be on FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of GNU/Linux.
| Either follow your arguments to their conclusions, or
| understand that Windows/macOS users are doing the same thing as
| you--making practical tradeoffs.
|
| The world is not black and white! There are degrees to which
| people behave, and there is a spectrum of behaviour that abides
| by certain principals and doesn't. I had someone say to me
| recently that they didn't believe there are 'ethical people',
| instead people make use of the opportunities presented to them.
| This isn't true and is more a sign of how they've justified
| their own life choices.
|
| > 3. Unless you are doing tons of system administration on your
| daily driver, most of your time is spent in applications, and
| the choice of operating system doesn't matter too much.
|
| I, like many people, tend to use more than one application, so
| I find the OS does matter. On Windows 10, when I hit the start
| bar, and start typing the name of an application I want to
| launch, I really do care when the bar sits there loading up,
| scraping internet data to show me its suggested apps and
| adverts.
| timvisee wrote:
| I must admit, I love 'Linux evenings'. I learn so so much in
| them.
| mkl95 wrote:
| I have had my share of Linux Evenings. They built my confidence
| when it comes to troubleshooting system stuff, and they eroded my
| confidence in Linux for a while. Things are incredibly stable
| these days compared to even half a decade ago.
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| Which do you think is more clear? Half a decade ago? Or, 5
| years ago?
| prmoustache wrote:
| The good thing is after an evening you usually find a solution.
|
| While one some proprietary systems the solution is usually "you
| are fucked deal with it".
|
| Having said that it has been litterally years since I had this
| kind of problem. Checking if people have issues with devices on
| linux distros before buying actually works really well. I just
| don't buy the things that don't work. Kind of like checking at
| the back of the box if it is <insert os of choice> compatible.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > > Out of curiosity, how did you come up with this solution?
|
| > The author, dkozel, never came back to answer. I imagine they
| typed the solution on a 40% keyboard featuring unmarked keys and
| then rolled into the sunset on a Segway for which they had
| compiled the kernel themselves. Completely oblivious of their
| awesomeness and of how many people would later find solace in
| their prose.
|
| Here's how I would have started to find the answer:
| 1. Open https://lxr.linux.no/, search for "No bus number
| available for hot-added bridge" 2. Open the three files it
| finds. 3. ^F that same string in each file, then notice
| that
| https://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v6.0.9/drivers/pci/probe.c#L3336
| is it. 4. Chase down `dev->bus->busn_ref->end`.
| Er, well, this step is hard because `end` is so generic.
| 5. git clone linux and use cscope to index it. 6. Search
| for assignments to `end`, filtering with egrep for bus
| and pci. 7. Weed through it all until I find
| https://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v6.0.9/drivers/pci/probe.c#L2964
| 8. Search for assignments to `pci_hotplug_bus_size`, find
| https://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v6.0.9/drivers/pci/pci.c#L6882
| 9. Search for `pci_hotplug_bus_size` and also find
| https://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v6.0.9/Documentation/admin-
| guide/kernel-parameters.txt#L4267 which says:
| hpbussize=nn The minimum amount of additional bus numbers
| reserved for buses below a hotplug bridge.
| Default is 1.
|
| But @dkozel probably just knew the answer.
|
| I do find it hard to believe that the default for this setting is
| 1 though!
| mmastrac wrote:
| Does this just mean that they added 51 additional bus numbers?
|
| I am curious if the kernel could just bump this number up,
| especially if Thunderbolt is getting more popular.
| swayvil wrote:
| In my experience Linux is easy.
|
| Easy to install. Easy to upgrade. Never breaks. Never gets
| "infected". Fast.
|
| The absence of commercial bullshit is extremely nice too.
|
| (I like Debian)
|
| (Is it just me or is there a lot of FUD in this thread?)
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| There is always fear, uncertainty, doubt on HN when speaking
| about the benefits of Linux, Firefox, Brave, or Musk.
|
| My propositions, which aren't in vogue on this site:
|
| My Kubuntu system is rock solid and never crashes. Firefox is
| still a performant world-class browser. Brave's crypto can be
| disabled and the browser is world-class. And Elon Musk isn't
| the devil.
| pxc wrote:
| > (Is it just me or is there a lot of FUD in this thread?)
|
| Lots and lots of 'this is why I haven't used Linux for N years
| (and thus don't know what it's like)'.
|
| I have to use Windows at work, and the system is way, way less
| predictable and reliable then any Linux system I've run for a
| decade. Shit changes out from underneath me (Windows Update,
| policy changes) in breaking ways _all the time_ , and there's
| often no rest to inspect or reverse what causes breakage. For
| every 'evening of Linux' I've had on my life, I have a few
| 'afternoons of Windows' (mostly hopelessly, blindly turning
| things off and on again) every week.
|
| When I ask colleagues who are my more accustomed to Windows
| than I am about how to solve issues, how to achieve particular
| configurations, or how Windows does certain things, it becomes
| clear that actually managing their workstations like
| comprehensible devices which are substantially under their own
| control is a foregone conclusion to them.
|
| The reality for Windows users is not a system that actually
| 'just works', but a deeply internalized helplessness that
| manifests as conservatism (attempting little, assuming many
| reasonable configurations are not possible), superstition
| (attempting and advising reboots, constantly, without being
| able to articulate a real reason), and blindness to the
| outrageousness of the situation (e.g., thinking it's perfectly
| acceptable that their laptop can't handle an uptime of 4 days
| before it starts falling apart, or 'I always shut my laptop all
| the way down at the end of the day so it'll run better').
|
| It's no wonder that people conditioned by this kind of usage
| pattern don't have a sense of what reliability or mastery look
| like in the Linux world, how frequently issues like this do or
| don't occur, how easy or hard they are to avoid, etc. They live
| on a different planet, where mastery in desktop computing is
| worthless because there's just no hope for a predictable,
| transparent system that doesn't change out from under your
| feet. It'll just break tomorrow anyway. And on their planet, it
| doesn't occur to anyone to research hardware compatibility
| ahead of time; they never need to. So of course the thought of
| spending an evening rooting out a hardware incompatibility
| issue strikes them as some mixture of futile, extremely
| burdensome, and unavoidable/common for those poor Linux users--
| even when _none_ of those things are true.
| ZekeSulastin wrote:
| I kind of feel like there's more replies that can be distilled
| down to "If you prefer anything over Linux for any reason
| you're just dumb", honestly.
| Arainach wrote:
| >When I emerge from these "Linux evenings", I wonder if the real
| problem is my attitude
|
| Put another way, "after I'm done being abused, I wonder if it's
| my fault".
| postit wrote:
| That's where Linux burned all the bridges on being my main
| machine.
|
| Nowadays, I cannot afford to take a day off to fix obscure
| incompatibilities like this.
|
| The last straw to me was when I stored my closed lid xps in a bag
| and 3 hours later everything was smelling like burning plastic
| because the computer suspend suddenly stoped working. To get
| things worst, it happened during a long haul flight.
| eythian wrote:
| I seem to recall Dell saying that you should never store a
| suspended laptop in a laptop bag, because there are situations
| where it might wake up and overheat.
| velox_neb wrote:
| > I seem to recall Dell saying that you should never store a
| suspended laptop in a laptop bag, because there are
| situations where it might wake up and overheat.
|
| Which is the stupidest thing ever. I want to see Apple use
| this to shame Dell in ad.
| vq wrote:
| You recall correctly.
|
| https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/FAQ-Modern-
| Standby/td-p/7...
| JW_00000 wrote:
| Suspend on my MacBook Pro also didn't work for >1 year, but
| seems to be magically fixed now. All OSes have annoying bugs in
| my experience.
| blmayer wrote:
| I am getting a 500 status code.
| npteljes wrote:
| If OP used Windows exclusively, he'd have Windows evenings.
| There's tools that people complain about, and tools that people
| don't use.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| Windows just works without a hassle far more often than any
| linux distro I've installed.
| kingboss wrote:
| Shhh... don't tell that to the rabid fanbois. They will tear
| you apart. LINUX IS THE BEST GO LINUX GO!
|
| Hopefully this will calm them down.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| This reasoning implies that every OS is equally buggy in ways
| that impact usability. I think this is likely untrue.
|
| I don't think it really matters if windows bugs exist, but how
| often they occur and impact use of the tool.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That implication would be a bad one, but in the specific case
| of a bland Linux distro (let's say Debian) vs. Windows I
| haven't ever seen much difference between the number of
| problems you run into.
|
| The major difference for me is that Linux problems are always
| theoretically operator-fixable i.e. the information needed to
| fix your problem is available to you, even if you're not
| technical enough to understand it. The means to fix Windows
| problems are frequently not accessible at all, anywhere.
|
| While I've had plenty of Linux evenings, I've had stuff
| broken on Windows that stretched into _weeks_ until I finally
| gave up and reinstalled.
| nearlyepic wrote:
| Yeah. Anecdotally I once spent a "Windows Evening" trying to
| figure out why a game would freeze at the controls remapping
| menu. Found out that Windows' own game controllers menu was
| experiencing the same freeze. I went so far as to reinstall
| Windows entirely, only to find that the issue wasn't resolved.
| Started disconnecting devices out of desperation, only to find
| out that the issue was caused by the driver of a USB DAC I had
| connected...
|
| Computers suck, in general. I have a hard time seeing an
| attempt to leverage blame on Windows or Linux as anything but
| an excuse to start a flame war.
| nicoco wrote:
| > I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to
| nothing in the process.
|
| This is probably true for this specific case here, but my
| experience with fixing stuff in Linux is actually the opposite. I
| learnt a lot doing so, and learnt stuff that turned out to be
| later useful in very unexpected spots.
|
| Back when I was a teen and using Windows, I've spent countless
| hours fiddling in stuff in regedit and other atrocities and it
| feels like I never learnt anything useful in the long run.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| > but my experience with fixing stuff in Linux is actually the
| opposite. I learnt a lot doing so, and learnt stuff that turned
| out to be later useful in very unexpected spots.
|
| Same, in fact it's how I fell ass-backwards into my career
| path.
| [deleted]
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Usually my go-to for "Linux problems" is "tear down the VM and
| start a new one", but a few days ago my Manjaro rig at home
| lost power, and bluetooth wouldn't work upon restart. I wracked
| my brain, pored through forum threads, man pages, and LFS, but
| nothing really helped. It looked like several different
| problems at once, but none of the individual fixes worked, or
| only worked for minutes at a time. I stepped away from the
| problem for a while, as one does, while I mused about the way
| troubleshooting works, and how my early life with Windows and
| now modern containerization has predisposed me to certain types
| of solu-- wait, I've got it! rmmod the bluetooth modules,
| modprobe 'em back in. Everything worked flawlessly. I'm not
| sure what I learned.
|
| *sigh*
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >I'm not sure what I learned.
|
| "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
| ectopod wrote:
| Exactly. My tendency is to jump in and try to root cause
| problems but nowadays the most productive solution is
| almost always some kind of a restart.
| [deleted]
| ragingrobot wrote:
| I've done this enough, but don't stop there as it's likely
| to happen again. When I resort to such a solution, I take a
| look at the syslogs. More often than not, something there
| will tell me why a simple restart of a service, module,
| whatever was the answer.
|
| I had a similar problem as the article with a standard USB
| 3 enclosure. Two PCs, identical OS (oS Tumbleweed), same
| kernel version even. modprobe -r then modprobe usbstorage
| and it worked. An obscure error in the logs pointed to the
| uas module which for some reason failed to reload, enabling
| the enclosure to work.
|
| Oddly, the other PC on which it worked was loading uas.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| I always refer to this as Computer Science 101.
| dm319 wrote:
| Yes, I remember, even up until very recently, having to google
| help on Windows. You'd get webpages full of adverts with a
| heading '12 ways to fix Win10 freezing during upgrade bug!'.
| And the first two would be something like 'switch it off and on
| again', 'try again', 'reconnect to your wifi'.
|
| I always felt I could dive deeper with linux problems _if I
| wanted to_, and that weirdly gives me some confidence that I
| can fix it.
| harywilke wrote:
| And after you scroll past the obvious solutions, "Install our
| Fix-O-Matic software for $29.99!" because the page is
| actually an advertisement cloaked as a help page.
| antihero wrote:
| Linux is like driving a car with your hands in the engine
| swayvil wrote:
| This contradicts my experience.
|
| I use Linux every day and I never touch the engine.
|
| I also set up Linux for computer-illiterate old ladies. They
| love it.
| freeplay wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what distro do you use and what is your
| distro of choice for the old ladies?
| ronjouch wrote:
| Not OP, but chiming in nevertheless, as I do also _" set
| up Linux for computer-illiterate old ladies"_.
|
| They all roll Debian stable with unattended_upgrades and
| it's an absolute joy of stability.
|
| Not that I would use Debian stable for _my_ personal
| machines: _I_ want the latest shiniest and I want to be
| close to upstream to report bugs when they 're fresh and
| easy to fix by the maintainer (yes, "I use arch btw"
| indeed), but for "computer-illiterate" people, stability
| trumps everything else.
|
| The "computer illiterate" isn't amused by constant
| breaking behavior / visual changes. They want the thing
| to work reliably and unsurprisingly. Debian delivers this
| and never breaks. Once every major dist-upgrade I review
| changes with them, and they're good to go until next
| time.
| bradwood wrote:
| what about Fedora workstation for the old-lady use case?
| I'm about to give my 12 year old non-technical daughter a
| linux laptop, and wondering on distro. I'm thinking
| Fedora but open to be convinced otherwise?
| chungy wrote:
| Pick something you're willing to maintain. Stable
| releases tend to reduce maintenance and surprises.
| ronjouch wrote:
| For your daughter tinkering with a distro, yeah Fedora
| sounds awesome :)
|
| For the old ladies, no: Fedora has a short release cycle,
| and no LTS; not great for maximal stability. _" a version
| of Fedora is usually supported for at least 13 months"_ (
| https://endoflife.date/fedora ), while Debian is
| security-supported at least 5 years! (
| https://endoflife.date/debian )
|
| Debian's whole project architecture & release cycle is
| built towards being stable bedrock, I see virtually no
| reason to use anything else if you aim at max. stability
| and don't care about running old (but still secure!)
| software.
| freeplay wrote:
| Nice. What is your go to desktop environment for them?
| swayvil wrote:
| Mate
| ronjouch wrote:
| - Generally, GNOME with the dash-to-panel/dash-to-dock
| extension-du-jour to have a left-side panel with app
| buttons (so, a "Ubuntu/Unity"-like look). It baffles me
| how stock GNOME still insists not to provide a
| left/bottom "dock" / task switcher as a built-in option,
| and force you to go to the menu every time you want to
| access / switch to an app, but here we are with
| extensions oO.
|
| - That being said, a well-configured/simplified Plasma
| these would certainly be all well (or not, see my final
| paragraph below about locking things down; GNOME is less
| infinitely configurable than KDE/Plasma, so there's less
| room for user fuckup). Also I'm certainly biased towards
| GNOME because that's what I choose to use for my
| machines. Also also, I go where there are the most
| eyeballs (again, for stability & maximal guarantee that
| bugs are seen), and for now it's GNOME.
|
| - Exception: one grandma has a particularly old laptop
| (x86-32 old :D) with meager RAM, so for her setup I went
| with MATE. I hesitated between LxQt and MATE, tried both,
| and MATE (at the time) seemed a tad more polished.
|
| Finally, since I have your interest and GUIs are a
| subject I love ranting about, one more thing you need to
| do when setting up an old ladies machine, is to LOCK DOWN
| ALL THE THINGS YOU CAN:
|
| - LibreOffice toolbars that can be accidentally dragged,
| then maybe dragged offscreen or closed? LOCK THEM.
|
| - Thunderbird folder column titles that will change email
| ordering if accidentally clicked? HIDE THEM with
| userChrome.css until
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237051 is
| fixed.
|
| - Etc etc, when I'm done provisioning such a machine, I
| spend an hour playing with it and wondering _" How could
| someone haphazardly clicking and dragging everywhere
| break/mismanage this?"_ , and I disable/lock/hide
| everything I can. There is a million configurable /
| breakable things that we power users don't imagine being
| confusing to a user, because we know the features and
| we're precise at clicking on stuff. But to non-
| computerists, these things are veeeeery confusing!
| They'll email you with a gibberish issue description when
| invoked accidentally, and when it happens too often they
| get scared. There's potential to build a whole
| distribution aimed at such users, with everything
| properly locked down.
| nephanth wrote:
| For thunderbird column header, there is an extension that
| locks them (unless you're ctrl+clicking them)
|
| Might be more intuitive than locking them?
| ronjouch wrote:
| Thanks! Yup, if you look at the bugzilla link I shared
| above, you'll see I mention this extension in the last
| comment:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237051#c11 .
|
| I couldn't check it as I run Tb _beta_ (which the
| extension doesn 't support last time I check), but I
| might give it a try next time I maintain one of these
| machines ..... or not:
|
| 0. They never ever need to click it to re-order. Why
| bother with an unneeded feature?
|
| 1. Extensions break! UserChrome.css too, but maybe less
| so :) , and a CSS rule is simpler/smaller in added
| complexity & potential for bugs than an extension.
|
| 2. Also, hiding the columns means one less bit of chrome
| to read/parse. Hiding stuff avoids misclicks, but also
| increases GUI legibility for people with bad eyesight.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Honestly if you have older hardware, like a couple years
| old most of the most popular distros are pretty stable.
|
| Ubuntu on hardware a few years old will chug along
| without issues more often than not especially if you are
| just using it as a glorified thin client for Chrome which
| is an increasingly large base of users.
|
| There are of course some gotchas with things like
| integrated graphics and dedicated graphics in laptops or
| some device drivers for peripherals like printers (it is
| still linux after all, year of the linux desktop any year
| now aha)
| lrvick wrote:
| I have been setting up Ubuntu for non-technical folks for
| a decade. Chromebooks work great too, but I cannot
| justify recommending them given the proprietary Google
| bits included. De-Googled chromeos would probably suffice
| for most people though.
| swayvil wrote:
| Debian and Debian.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Contradicts my experience as well.
|
| I started out using DOS in the mid 90's to play games, used
| Windows 3.1, skipped over to 98SE then XP and 7.
|
| I have used Macs before, not enough to make an impression.
|
| I tried Linux back when I was in collage during the XP days
| but it always seemed to need more tweaking than my XP
| install and the lack of gaming kept me on Windows.
|
| Currently I am running Linux Mint. I install the OS and go.
| No need to tweak or mess with command line.
|
| I am not that interested in which OS I am running aside
| from the fact that I dislike telemetry and forced updates.
| I want the OS to get our of the way so that I can do
| whatever I am trying to do, Linux seems to be there now. It
| feels like Windows has regressed, with setting pages buried
| in 5 different places.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Some people just don't like the Linux (or Unix) way of
| doing things. I personally can't understand the
| predisposition against it, but hey, whatever works for them
| I guess.
| swayvil wrote:
| For your average user it's exactly the same desktop as
| windows and mac : there's menus and icons, you click on
| stuff, there's a browser... What's this "way" that they
| don't like?
|
| They don't like free, stable and fast? They don't like
| how it isn't going after your wallet every 5 minutes?
|
| It's gotta be propaganda at work. It's the only
| explanation.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > I also set up Linux for computer-illiterate old ladies.
| They love it.
|
| I think you're trying to say that they don't have problems
| with the browser, and maybe an email client. If they're
| computer-illiterate, they don't know enough about an
| operating system to have an opinion at all, other than
| being happy about it turning on and off when they want.
|
| Don't mistake that for loving Linux, because it is not
| really praise of Linux, it is praise for a computer that
| works well enough to run a web browser, which is an
| extremely low bar.
| lrvick wrote:
| Linux can manage a browser, and email client, and a word
| processor, on a early 2000s computer found for $50 at a
| thrift store.
|
| Meanwhile the latest supported versions of MacOS or
| Windows will not work on such a machine. Those ecosystems
| demand you continually buy new hardware.
|
| I think is -is- Linux they love here.
| nicoco wrote:
| Can I steal this? I just started a microblogging career and
| it's too good.
| JP_Watts wrote:
| And thinking "why doesn't everybody want to do this?"
| lrvick wrote:
| Windows is like driving a car that is actually a city bus
| full of hostile randos that take a lot of effort to
| constantly remove.
|
| MacOS is like driving a car by yelling at the driver from the
| kids seat in the back.
|
| In the end, learning how an engine works to maintain one
| myself is not so bad.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| I think the issue is that frequently the problem is with a
| small part of a complex subsystem that you don't understand (or
| perhaps didn't even know existed) before something went wrong.
| This sort of problem is extremely time consuming to debug via
| "properly" learning about the system, so you end up (much like
| Fabien) taking a fix from somewhere without fully understanding
| it.
|
| There's also a timing issue. Often when something goes wrong
| it's at a random time when I'm probably intending to do
| something else. I don't want to put off that other thing even
| more by taking a "slower" route to fixing the issue.
|
| You can of course still learn a lot along the way, as you say.
| So, it's not all lost, but it does seem sub-optimal.
| fragmede wrote:
| Part of it is the binary config nature of Regedit though. I
| can't, from first or second principles, reason about which
| binary key to flip in order to change the behavior I'm
| looking for. Was it HKLM/ffebdcaaf, or HKLM/afbedccfh?
| Meanwhile if, eg dns got broken on my Linux box, there's a
| series of config files and daemons to check in order to
| figure out what's broken and then to get it working again.
| There's no way to learn anything with Regedit other than
| knowing you can just Google for the name of the key to set by
| looking up the problem.
| ddulaney wrote:
| Eh, having worked with both systems, I'd say they're
| roughly equally impenetrable. For sure, the registry sucks.
| But at least it's uniform and scriptable. Once you know
| what needs to be changed, you can write a .reg file and be
| reasonably confident it will at least change the registry
| in a valid way.
|
| On the other hand, if the solution to a problem on Linux is
| to change some dotfile controlling some daemon, reliably
| scripting it can be difficult to impossible. Did the distro
| put the config file somewhere weird? Is awk good enough
| here? What if the key I'm looking to update is found in a
| comment, and what is the commenting structure for this file
| anyway? What if the daemon rewrites its config file on exit
| [0]? Or has a config file with an extremely complex format
| [1]? Or I need to poke several /sys files in a particular
| order [2]?
|
| Both systems are hard to reason about, especially if you
| don't know them. But Linux isn't easy to approach for the
| first time, and there are advantages to the way Windows
| does things.
|
| [0]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/251797/transmission-
| daemon-k... [1]: https://www.sudo.ws/docs/man/1.8.15/sudoer
| s.man/#SUDOERS_FIL... [2]:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM
| m463 wrote:
| I think the two problem spaces are slightly different.
|
| - for windows, the problem is solved by: 1)
| common sense troubleshooting 2) web search for the
| problem 3) ask the developer
|
| - for linux, you also get: 4) break out the
| source 5) push an update
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think unless one uses Linux on daily basis it's really
| difficult to sink in the knowledge. I decided to install an
| Archlinux VM and see what happens.
|
| I'm kinda disappointed to myself as I found out I didn't like
| too much trouble so I'll probably never be a good/great
| programmer.
| bombcar wrote:
| Installing Arch is much closer to system administration than
| programming - they may be related somewhat and attractive to
| similar people; but you can be a quite successful programmer
| and barely be able to install Ubuntu.
|
| I know people who have written _kernel-level Linux drivers_
| who have difficulty upgrading macOS. They 're separate
| skillsets.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I'm a bit surprised about the second
| paragraph but then I realize it is indeed two skillsets.
|
| I think I'm split between career growth and hobby. My
| career is much closer to a sys admin/devops than a low
| level programmer, but my hobby probably is closer to the
| later. Of course it could be just my fancy about low level
| programming that fascinates me as after all I have never
| done any low level programming except some entry level MCU
| programming.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >I'm a bit surprised about the second paragraph but then
| I realize it is indeed two skillsets.
|
| I started out my career on the sysadmin side of things
| before becoming a developer and that doesn't surprise me
| at all. Most devs I work with have little to no
| understanding of things like file permissions, how
| networking works beyond making HTTP calls with
| $SomeRequestLibrary in their programming language of
| choice, or how services/daemons work in Windows/Linux.
| channel_t wrote:
| I was going to say, I know a lot of programmers, maybe even
| most, who avoid Linux like the plague because they don't
| want to waste cognitive cycles on fixing their broken
| machines. I have found myself in this same place after a
| solid 12 years or so of Linux use for pretty much
| everything, home, work, etc. I honestly kinda want to get
| back into it, but there are other priorities. As long as I
| have access to some kind of unix-y command line from
| somewhere I'm good.
| miloignis wrote:
| I wouldn't write it off just yet, at least if you want to be
| a good programmer! While there might be some correlation,
| there's plenty of fantastic programmers who don't want the
| hassle and want to focus on a specific problem and just use
| Windows/macOS and an easy to setup/low configuration editor.
| One particularly great TA I had in college comes to mind...
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks, but I actually wanted to learn low level stuffs, or
| I thought I wanted. Anyway I'll see what happens. So far
| nothing really clicks for me but if that's it then that's
| it.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| People say "Arch makes you learn how Linux really works",
| but I don't think that's a good way to put it.
|
| Arch teaches you about the most boring parts of how linux
| works: the specific idiosyncrasies and configuration
| minutiae of a ton of libraries and programs (GNU
| coreutils, systemd, udev, mesa, glib, X11, Xlib, xdg,
| dbus, etc.)
|
| Arch will usually not teach you the really interesting
| "low level" things about Linux: How the kernel works, how
| threads are created, etc.
| tehnub wrote:
| I'd say it teaches you how to use Linux. It's not the
| particular details of each config file, but the fact that
| there _are_ config files, and where to look for them. By
| the end of an Arch install, you know at least 85% of how
| to manage your system, and wiki will take you to let 's
| say 98%.
| reshie wrote:
| gentoo gets pretty close for a full OS system.
| tmtvl wrote:
| No it doesn't. But that's fine, it's not the point of a
| distro to teach you about interrupts and syscalls and all
| that nonsense, the point of a distro is to give you
| software to install. That said, Gentoo does do a good job
| of teaching you how annoying it is to try and figure out
| exactly which kernel options you need to activate to get
| a working system. I always run out of patience before I
| get it working, though (yes, I know about _make
| localmodconfig_ ).
| nequo wrote:
| What types of low-level things did you want to learn?
|
| A lot of what seem low-level in Linux are implementation-
| specific things. For example, how you set up wifi or how
| you manage your firewall. Knowledge of these things gives
| you less long-lived and less transferable skills than
| knowledge of protocols like TCP/IP which is shared by
| everything that is plugged to the internet. It doesn't
| make you a better programmer, unless these daemons and
| tools are what you want to write software for.
|
| Also, your options are not only Arch Linux and
| Windows/Mac. There are more desktop-ready distributions,
| too, like Ubuntu or Fedora. Linux lets you still inspect
| the plumbing if you install one of those.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| > What types of low-level things did you want to learn?
|
| To be honest, I've dabbed in a lot of low level stuffs
| but never went deep enough to make any impact, career-
| wise at least. For example I completed a full course on
| MCU programming, completed the first half of nand2tetris,
| read the first few hundreds of pages of "Beginner Reverse
| Engineering" (basically the part that teaches one to
| recognize C from decompiled assembly code), and many
| others. My most recent low level adventure was the book
| "Practical Binary Analysis" which I planned to use the
| whole holiday to push maybe a few chapters.
|
| But I never drilled deep enough into any of the topics. I
| believe I have the brain to drill at least a few more
| chapters deeper for any of them, but I don't have the
| mental power to do it. I secretly want someone to put me
| into some sort of prison and keep me from getting out
| until I completed all previous projects and learnings.
| But of course I need to figure out a way to deal with the
| problem.
|
| Anyway, really appreciate your answer, and probably I'll
| still install Archlinux, play with it a few days and then
| lose interest -- just another failed project to spend
| time.
| nektro wrote:
| and this article will now be much more higher in Google results
| for the next person searching :)
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| I would title the article "A thunderbolt evening". I haven't had
| great experiences with Thunderbolt even on Windows. ^_^
| bombcar wrote:
| Many people don't realize thunderbolt is an incredibly low-
| level and complex protocol/setup. It's not like USB or
| firewire, it's an entire additional PCI bus thing.
|
| It's surprising it works anywhere near as well as it does.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| This is prototypical of the standard Linux experience, but I'd
| like to remark on just how much less common this sort of thing
| is. Modern Linux and modern Linux distributions have a much
| larger "just work" factor and it's getting better every year in
| my experience. Slowly and asymptotically, but it is improvement.
|
| This was driven home recently by my experience switching to
| NixOS. NixOS is brilliant in many ways, but boy are there
| papercuts everywhere. It's all soluble but it is annoying. 25
| years ago this sort of fiddling was fun, but now it's just
| tedious.
| makz wrote:
| Been hearing "modern Linux is much better" since the 00s
| asoneth wrote:
| In my experience this is true and Linux has come a long way.
| But given how far it has yet to go it may continue to be true
| for the next couple decades as well.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| When you're comparing against Linux from 1995, it's not a
| high bar to hurdle.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I too am 100% burnt from a quarter of a century of random
| "Linux evenings". I've concluded that GNU Linux will always be
| a great CLI server OS, however those past 25 years has soured
| me into calling the Linux Desktop a toy. I'm 100% done
| investing my time solving issues just like this one. The
| biggest lesson I've learned is to simply not trust it to be a
| daily driver.
| ho_schi wrote:
| As user I would just return the device back and purchase a
| reliable USB based device.
|
| As a Mac-user would do?
|
| I guess a Windows-User would just rate [1/5] stars and don't
| even research.
|
| We should keep in mind:
|
| Linux users care a lot and do research. Most other will just
| say "nope" and leave it a issue for the manufacturer or keep
| turning it off and on again. What I don't know is if the
| initial situation is to blame upon Linux, Intel (Thunderbolt),
| device manufacturer or all of them. We have valuable post a the
| top explaining PCIe-Pause on MacOS and that Linux tries to
| apply a similar mitigation?
|
| Apple: Because Thunderbolt allows the
| addition and removal of arbitrary numbers of peripherals
| connected in arbitrary topologies, the task of dividing up the
| PCI tree's address space can be challenging. Sometimes,
| particularly when large numbers of devices are attached, it is
| possible to exhaust portions of that address space. When this
| happens, a new device cannot be enabled without moving existing
| devices. To solve this problem, OS X v10.9
| supports PCIe Pause--a special power management state in which
| all driver and device operations are temporarily suspended.
| Whenever address space exhaustion occurs, OS X may ask drivers
| to pause operations. After the drivers are paused, OS X changes
| the address space layout of the paused devices to make room for
| new devices, and then tells the drivers to resume normal
| operation
|
| Oh. If your driver does not explicitly
| declare support for pausing, your driver will never receive
| pause requests. As a result, devices may fail to appear when
| the user plugs in additional devices, particularly on hardware
| with multiple Thunderbolt ports. For this reason, you are
| strongly encouraged to support this functionality as soon as
| possible.
|
| Ouch. On Linux this shouldn't be an big issue because the
| kernel provides them.
|
| From the mentioned Linux patches: Currently
| PCI hotplug works on top of resources which are usually
| reserved: by BIOS, bootloader, firmware, or by the
| kernel (pci=hpmemsize=XM). These resources are gaps in the
| address space where BARs of new devices may fit, and extra bus
| number per port, so bridges can be hot-added. This series aim
| the BARs problem: it shows the kernel how to redistribute them
| on the run, so the hotplug becomes predictable and cross-
| platform.
|
| Fits into what Apple describes. The patch for Linux would be
| helpful. And I've the feeling that the approach Intel has
| chosen to add TB upon PCIE isn't bulletproof?
| oneplane wrote:
| I don't think that really fits together. PCIe (and PCI)
| hotplug has existed for a while and topology changes aren't
| new either. ExpressCard for example has done this, as has
| PCMCIA. Older RDMA buses did this too, as do backplane-based
| industrial PCs of which there are a really large amount.
|
| I suspect that end-user smoothness based on 'the user is not
| required to know everything' that makes the likes of Apple
| implement bus pausing for dynamic topology assignment and BAR
| adjustment is not available in Linux land because there
| simply isn't a big enough overlap of people to make this a
| hot topic.
|
| You need: 1. A person who understands how
| this works 2. A person who understands what they want
| to use it for 3. A person who understands what person 1
| has to do so person 2 can use it
|
| Usually you get 1 or 2, sometimes both, but almost never 3
| except at places like Canonical, RedHat, SuSE etc. because
| it's too much of an analyst role and not enough of a "I need
| it for myself and I can build it" role.
|
| Similar but different problems exist in other software areas
| like when person "3" is split in "business", "end-user" and
| "licensing" with competing interests. That's where you get
| the NT kernel which gets split into arbitrary partitions
| where based on an integer configuration it may or may not
| want to address your RAM.
|
| Same goes for the old "aperture size" for GPU memory
| transfers, and later on the BAR resize support. It was never
| 'hard' to implement, it's just that IBV's didn't bother and
| mainboard manufacturers didn't care. Yet it was always
| available and even Tianocore EDK2, Apple's own EFI and (for
| some reason) BIOS and UEFI from Quanta and Supermicro all did
| support it just fine. Same goes for KMS and non-blink GPU
| switchovers where AMD, NVDA and Intel used to constantly sell
| it as 'impossible' and we all just accepted that. Yet KMS,
| the MobileFramebuffer (and the old AppleTV Gen 1) and even
| VesaFB showed that it's totally possible and it's just
| everyone using the same joke sample implementation from the
| vendor that's causing it.
|
| Another example would be VESA where DisplayPort topology
| changes on the control channel side do similar things to PCIe
| bus pausing. The display controllers and bus drivers should
| pause on hot plug to let the host decide on the new topology,
| but implementing that costs time and effort, and you need to
| have some in-depth knowledge on both the hardware and
| software side, so lots of companies don't bother. Result:
| some host+display combinations only work after restarting
| either end to force it to re-discover the current topology.
| This even happens in 1:1 topology scenarios where a simple
| GPU driver update might restart the host bus and the display
| ignores it and simply stops receiving data until the watchdog
| timer restarts the embedded processor causing the screen to
| blink. I'd just dumb low-quality choices and corner-cutting
| that causes this.
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder if this is why some of my monitors don't come back
| on after sleep. Is there a way to tell if macOS did the pause
| via the logs?
| sequoia wrote:
| This post resonates strongly with me. I love the term "a linux
| evening." This was precisely my experience when I used Linux full
| time: mostly it worked great, but then occasionally something
| wouldn't work (some personal examples: touchpad doesn't work
| after OS update, wifi card stops working etc.) and then I have to
| spend a few frustrating hours debugging the issue. All I can
| think in these moments is "you don't get this time back. Is this
| really how I want to spend three precious hours of my life, when,
| if I used a different platform, I could avoid this hassle
| completely?"
|
| I know it's a tradeoff and I sacrifice a lot to live in my
| current Macintosh rut, but I just don't have the motivation to be
| my own DIY tech support wiz after a full day on computers for
| work.
|
| EDIT: as pointed out by others, one headline takeaway from this
| is that the author was able to fix the problem _at all_ , which
| s/he may not have been able to do on Mac/Windows (though it's
| much less likely the issue would occur in the first place).
| pessimizer wrote:
| > if I used a different platform, I could avoid this hassle
| completely?
|
| Where is this mythical platform?
|
| If something like this happened on Windows, you'd just end up
| clicking around arbitrary settings, googling desperately, and
| rebooting over and over again, until you reinstalled the entire
| OS. That option is also available with Linux.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| I was reminded of this XKCD:
|
| https://xkcd.com/349/
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| I recently had a Linux evening trying to enable a swap file for
| pop os that was inexplicably lacking one by default leading to
| hard locks when I ran out of ram. I eventually fucked the install
| badly enough that I needed to wipe the boot drive and start
| fresh. Really disappointing because until then everything was
| Just Working.
| goosedragons wrote:
| I had a similar problem on Windows where it suddenly refused to
| work with any of my USB C ports. Linux could still detect them
| however. I did manage to get it working by doing a BIOs update on
| my motherboard since I noticed that the BIOs update notes
| mentioned "Improved USB compatibility". The weird thing is it
| worked in the past but I guess some Windows update changed
| something somewhere.
|
| I think all OSs can experience these kinds of weird problems from
| time to time.
| kyrofa wrote:
| > I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to
| nothing in the process.
|
| This seems like the wrong attitude to me. It's the perfect
| opportunity to dig into what those kernel params do! Understand
| _why_ that fixed the problem.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Yes, sometimes you land in these situations in Linux, but many
| times are self inflicted by unnecesary tinkering. I cannot see
| why dealing with all the ... unwanted things from windows can
| ever be better. With mac if it is too new it will not be
| supported and after a few years you need to upgrade your hardware
| or are left to die. Apart from being an exclusive system for the
| rich.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > I cannot see why dealing with all the ... unwanted things
| from windows can ever be better.
|
| Because the amount of time spent on unwanted Windows things is
| radically less than the amount of time spent on Linux evenings.
|
| Windows does by and large just work. Every OS has warts and
| bugs. I want to spend the absolute minimum time on them.
|
| Linux is getting better and may not require too many Linux
| evenings these days. But that's really only true if you've
| burned hundreds of hours dealing with increasingly obscure
| Linux errors.
|
| It's not too hard to understand why different people prefer
| Linux, Mac, or even Windows. They all have pros and cons.
| komali2 wrote:
| Nail in the coffin for me yesterday when I restarted my
| computer to boot into windows and it had a _splash screen_
| begging me to "upgrade" to windows 11. I click no, another
| splash screen begging me in other terms. I click "no"
| (actually, no, it was probably more like "some other time" or
| "remind me again in the future"), ANOTHER SPLASH SCREEN.
|
| Mind you I have my grub set to boot into windows by default so
| that if there's a power outage, my game streaming and backup
| setup, which is on my windows partition for now, will relaunch
| if I'm traveling or something. Yet if it had booted into that
| stupid splash screen, Steam and etc won't have been able to
| launch, and I'd have been SOL!
|
| I hate windows!!!!! I can't wait to get EVERYTHING onto linux.
| I have a todo to see about using proton compatibility for
| desktop gaming, it works great on steam deck. After that the
| only remaining thing is ableton, and I'll have been completely
| freed from windows forever!
| sph wrote:
| This is why I run Fedora Silverblue. My Linux is now an
| appliance that upgrades atomically. If something breaks, I
| rollback. Once in a while, I pin a version that is known to
| work so it never gets garbage collected.
|
| The other day I changed /etc/ld.so.conf and the system would
| not boot--my fault. I choose the previous deployment in GRUB
| and I had a working system back.
| rvdca wrote:
| NixOS feels the same but somehow... I still end up in those
| Linux evenings but for different reasons...
| badrabbit wrote:
| A lot of my problems are from tinkering as well but that's why
| I am using linux, to control it better and tinker with it. Why
| won't I just use macos if I wanted something I can't tinker
| with? I think people lose sight if why Linux even exists to
| begin with, it is all about user control and ability to
| tinker/hack it.
|
| I think better UX and more configurability would solve this
| stuff (from a friendly interface). The reason desktop/distro
| people won't do that is because it is considered bad UX
| practice to have too many decisions for the user. But imo, a
| Linux user would be an exception. In an ideal world, whoever
| decided to disable the boot flag in this case should have
| provided an easy to access distro/de setting to flip it back
| on.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Yes, a lot of times when i have <<Linux problems>> is because
| i am installing it in hardware that was not made for it. For
| example, old Macs, but usually after an evening i get decent
| results. Have few old macs with Lunux that work nicely. :)
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I almost prepped myself up this Friday evening for a solo Debian
| reinstall party to solve an extremely slow reading/writing on
| internal hdd/sdd problem until I accidentally realized the
| problem disappeared once I had removed my external disk from the
| docking station. Went from 2mb/s to 2gb/s r. and 800mb/s w.
|
| > I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to
| nothing in the process. This trick is unlikely to be useful
| again. By the time I encounter something similar, it is likely I
| will have forgotten about the solution.
|
| So much this.
| pedrocr wrote:
| I've been trying for a week now to get Windows to properly
| suspend and stay suspended on a Thinkpad X1. Even after changing
| the BIOS to "Linux" mode (S3 Sleep), fiddling with drivers and
| the registry, and issuing powercfg commands it's still flaky. The
| function keys to change audio settings also work poorly
| sometimes. These are the kinds of issues we used to have when
| trying to bring up Linux on a laptop. But now it's flipped. Linux
| on Thinkpads works great for me out of the box and I even get to
| set it up just like I want it (e.g., tiling WM).
|
| For my own use I'd have just given up and installed Linux on this
| machine as well but I have to dogfood this for everyone else in
| the company. I'm starting to try out using web versions of
| everything, particularly Microsoft Office, in the hope that
| ChromeOS is actually a hope for a usable desktop for
| unsophisticated corporate users.
| npteljes wrote:
| Yeah, I manage Windows and Linux computers at the same time,
| and Win machines have their fair share of WTFs too. Update is
| horrible for example, I had two cases over the years where it
| just borked itself, on systems that have the least amount of
| tinkering possible - one was even a preinstall by the
| manufacturer. After many hours or struggle, I found and
| downloaded the Windows Update Troubleshooter, which fixed the
| first PC in a short time. But the second time I had this issue,
| even the troubleshooter gave up, and the system just wouldn't
| update. Tough luck. Linux at least doesn't treat me like a
| child that broke a vase in the living room.
| dkozel wrote:
| Hi folks. :)
|
| I'm so glad that my hit-and-run post has been so useful. After
| seeing Fabien's blog post I did a quick search and it turns out
| that the solution has spread fairly broadly to other forums. My
| choice of 0x33 was arbitrary so makes a nice canary for seeing it
| spread out. I'm thrilled. Sharing experiences and solutions is so
| essential to learning. I've benefited enormously from the
| generosity of open source developers and communities and from
| individuals documenting pieces of their projects, glad to have
| raised the ocean a little in return.
|
| My use case was (and remains) having a Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA in an
| external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for testing the development of
| DSP accelerators using open source tooling. I didn't want to have
| the FPGA board inside the PC to be able to swap it to my laptop
| easily, because it produces a lot of heat, and so when I misused
| the PCIe soft core (litePCIe: https://github.com/enjoy-
| digital/litepcie/) it doesn't take down the OS. Being able to
| reload the FPGA and effectively hotplug the device has been very
| helpful.
|
| Since I knew my issue was around hotplugging I searched for
| information around PCIe hotplugging and I think (it was two years
| ago...) that I found the answer from one of these two threads.
| Both mention the option of reserving PCIe addresses for hotplug
| busses as a workaround, and a workaround was all I needed.
|
| https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-pci/msg64841.html
|
| https://review.coreboot.org/c/coreboot/+/35946
|
| dmesg and the various kernel logs are my first stop for any odd
| behavior on Linux. Especially with any state change to a device
| (plugging in, turning on, removing, reconfiguring etc) the kernel
| logs tend to give invaluable info.
|
| I had already been looking at eGPU forums to choose the
| Thunderbolt 3 enclosure (ended up with the ORI-SCM2T3-G40-GY) and
| there were various discussions of hotplugging issues there, but I
| don't think I found the specific kernel options to fix it there.
|
| Check out this docs page for the kernel parameters:
| https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.html
|
| For the string "pci=realloc,assign-busses,hpbussize=0x33"
|
| `realloc` Enable/disable reallocating PCI bridge resources if
| allocations done by BIOS are too small to accommodate resources
| required by all child devices.
|
| assign-busses [X86] Always assign all PCI bus numbers ourselves,
| overriding whatever the firmware may have done.
|
| `hpbussize=nn` The minimum amount of additional bus numbers
| reserved for buses below a hotplug bridge. Default is 1.
|
| 0x33 (decimal 51) is arbitrary, but large enough that I was
| unlikely to ever exhaust that address range even with a large
| number of devices chained together on the Thunderbolt bus. I
| think (though would have to check) that the address space does
| get exhausted with multiple hotplug cycles. I haven't hit that
| issue since I shutdown the computer close to daily to save power.
|
| Sadly, there's no Segway, those things are expensive and I have a
| long wish list before reaching that point. Currently I'm saving
| up to get a microscope, I have a large box of RF integrated
| circuits that I'd like to do some show and tell with on Twitch.
| :) Also no unmarked 40% keyboard, RSI means I'm a total fanboy of
| the Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard and the Anker vertical mouse.
| Cheap and so comfortable. I have done some kernel compiling,
| mostly to learn more about kernel modules as I've been trying to
| make the learning curve and user experience of experimenting with
| FPGAs over PCIe easier. If anyone has some experience with DKMS
| and creating Debs I'd welcome a chance to chat. Ditto if there's
| any Debian maintainer with experience packaging kernel modules, I
| made some headway a while back to repackage linux-gpib but got
| stalled out on a few of the details of maintaining patches
| against the upstream.
|
| Cheers and Happy Holidays!
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| The internet is amazing! The way it allows people to connect,
| help each other and sometimes also reconnect is heartwarming.
|
| If you have a PayPal account, I will gladly contribute to your
| microscope fund!
|
| Thank you again, and happy end of year!
| elteto wrote:
| This has got to be one of the greatest exchanges on the
| internet, ever! Kudos to you both! And thanks to HN for
| connecting all of us.
| dkozel wrote:
| Thanks Fabien!
|
| Also I love all your retro work. I have a NeXTStation Turbo
| Color that's my retro pride and joy. Have you seen or been
| involved in any of the Demoscene activities? It's amazing the
| graphics that people are able to squeeze and abuse out of
| older hardware.
|
| Off topic, but folks might enjoy Poems for Bugs, a talk where
| Linus Akesson talks about cycle accurate coding to exploit
| GPU bugs in the C64.
| https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/poems-for-
| bugs/inde...
| ur-whale wrote:
| > When I emerge from these "Linux evenings", I wonder if the real
| problem is my attitude.
|
| It isn't. I mostly use Linux and sometimes (work) have to use
| windows.
|
| The _exact_ same thing happens with windows if you try to do
| anything remotely techy on it.
|
| The difference though is that "Windows evening" often end in
| failure because at some point, you hit the wall of a binary blob
| whose source code isn't online.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Couldn't agree more with the takeaways. Especially #3 - and it is
| exacerbated if you are a finicky person who wants everything
| exactly the way you want it + loves to customize and tinker.
| Linux basically keeps me hooked by virtue of catering to those
| needs even though I have to deal with these Linux evenings (which
| are thankfully getting rarer over time). In time too because my
| tolerance is depleting as I age and have decreasing bandwidth to
| deal with all that. Also the reason I always dual boot with
| Windows.
|
| I also have a somewhat interesting usecase that doesn't let me
| switch to Mac (not that I am keen to). If I buy a Mac, I will
| have to switch my phone to iPhone too because integration with
| Android isn't nearly as good. However I _must_ have a dual sim
| phone (which is fairly easy with Android) and there aren't any
| dual sim models of iPhone.
| kace91 wrote:
| What kind of android integration do you require, out of
| curiosity?
|
| I use iPhone + Mac, but I don't remember any hiccups when it
| was android + Mac. Most of my interaction between the devices
| is pretty indirect anyway (photos are shared through google
| cloud, etc).
| noisy_boy wrote:
| The main one I have is Syncthing[0]. I have a fairly involved
| file sync setup across several Android and Linux devices and
| it works beautifully; I like that I can use the space
| available on my devices instead of having to depend on/pay
| money for cloud (I know that it is not much for most of us).
| However, to best of my knowledge, Syncthing doesn't run on
| iPhone (it is possible that jailbreaking etc can make that
| work but that is a whole different area).
|
| [0]: https://syncthing.net/
| danobi wrote:
| I use stock ios and mobius sync works pretty well. No
| issues so far over 1y+ of use.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Thanks - I'll check it out.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > and there aren't any dual sim models of iPhone.
|
| Aren't phones with an eSIM + regular SIM effectively dual-SIM?
| I'm pretty sure iphones have those.
| robin_reala wrote:
| There're also real dual-SIM iPhones, but they're market
| restricted (typically to China).
|
| Docs for SIM + eSIM: https://support.apple.com/en-
| gb/guide/iphone/iph9c5776d3c/io...
|
| Docs for dual physical SIM: https://support.apple.com/en-
| us/HT209086
| nneonneo wrote:
| I used to have a dual physical SIM iPhone X from China!
| However, when I sent it in to get (warranty) a local Apple
| repair shop screwed up and replaced it with a North
| American model. After much gnashing of teeth with Apple
| Support, I wound up with a new iPhone 12...but no dual
| physical SIM.
|
| Now my phone is still confused after restoring from backup
| and cannot see the eSIM. I've been filing feedbacks and
| radars to no avail. If I was on Android I'd have just
| rooted it and deleted the offending (mis)configuration file
| already!
| drbawb wrote:
| Not sure if this would help, but I recently learned about
| a product called iMazing[1] that lets you browse _and
| edit_ iTunes backups.
|
| You can't access the whole filesystem of a running
| iDevice with it, but you can access the whole filesystem
| of the backup. So I suspect it might be possible for you
| to clean-up the backup offline & then restore it. (At a
| minimum it should enable you to extract the valuable
| contents out of the backup and manually restore it on top
| of a clean iOS install.)
|
| I've used it with some success to extract info from the
| photos database. I just wish they had a consumer-facing
| (read: more affordable/perpetually licensed) version of
| their CLI tool.
|
| [1]: https://imazing.com/
| muststopmyths wrote:
| Yep, my SE2020 is like that, and was sold in the US
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I cannot recall the specifics but I remember that there were
| some issues with eSIMs for certain use cases (possible that
| those were teething troubles that have been resolved).
|
| Also, I like the flexibility of using the physical SIM
| because I can easily use them with both smart and feature
| phones without issues.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| The saddest thing of all (I think there's some XKCD referencing
| this) is when you have a technical problem like this and you find
| some post from a year or two years ago exactly describing the
| problem. And there's no reply.
|
| Empathy isn't the word. It's feeling like you're trapped on a
| deserted island in a vast empty sea - suddenly realizing that
| there's another S.O.B. who's been right next to you the whole
| time and also knowing that neither of you has the faintest idea
| how to get off the island.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/979/
|
| I swore that this one was about the finding only person who had
| the same issue but who then had posted 'fixed it' soon after.
| That's even worse, it's like being stuck on the island and
| watching the S.O.B. walk on water into the distance.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Side note: I've been working on creating a new blog now that I've
| completed my name change (and whatever other aspects of my
| transition affect my public persona). This blog's minimalism is
| still distinctively styled and I'd like to do something visually
| similar. The choice to make it black-on-light-gray is somewhat
| pleasing. Has a consensus been reached on dark styling affecting
| readability?
| sph wrote:
| Some like it, some overdo it. Apparently many live in darkened
| caves and use dark mode all day. And for me too much contrast
| in dark mode means harder to read because the white bleeds into
| the background. YMMV.
| [deleted]
| seanwilson wrote:
| > I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to
| nothing in the process. This trick is unlikely to be useful
| again. By the time I encounter something similar, it is likely I
| will have forgotten about the solution.
|
| So much of modern programming in general is like this because of
| the always changing languages, libraries, tools, software,
| hardware etc. such that when you're coding you have to accept it
| will keep happening occasionally no matter how experienced you
| get so you don't get too wound up about it. It's especially
| discouraging when you're starting out too and don't know this
| yet.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| I mean it's obviously a kernel bug. Now I wonder if it's nice to
| have a way to work around them, or if these work arounds are
| detrimental to them ever getting fixed properly.
| Sugimot0 wrote:
| Been using arch as my first and only *nix for about 4 years now,
| most of the pain points have been smoothed out, usually you can
| find answers by searching whatever errors you see or checking
| dmesg. If you're a CS person, it really isn't hard to solve most
| issues and reason about, it's just normal debugging / docs /
| forums. In the event that you're doing something weird and niche,
| or you really cant find your info, you might reach out to the
| community and it's likely some linux wizard will solve your
| issue, like this post.
|
| I was much more frustrated on windows when i ran into issues and
| your best bet was some incompetent support, and watching blue
| screens til you come to the conclusion that your system is
| scrapped, who knows why, and you need to reinstall and start over
| from scratch.
|
| On arch you can save your dotfiles, make snapshots, chroot to fix
| things, and so on, there's tons of safeguards you can put in
| place, and tons of options for remediation. You really just need
| to RTM.
|
| On top of that if you have a gripe about some software not
| working how you think it should, you can usually hack it or
| replace it. If you have an idea for some new functionality you
| want you can usually find/install some existing software for your
| needs in like 2 seconds, or you can find the repo of your
| software and submit an issue or PR.
|
| Alternatively you can also just string together existing tools in
| a script in order to fulfill your needs. I did this recently to
| create an OCR screenshot to clipboard tool using tesseract and
| flameshot, something I wouldn't have even considered possible on
| windows.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| diydsp wrote:
| >This trick is unlikely to be useful again.
|
| Ahh, but now others can benefit from your work :) It's a _system_
| or a _community_. The wizards hand off to the communicators and
| enable more users.
|
| >In the meantime, the best I can think of is to pay for my
| distro, report bugs, and email manufacturers for Linux support.
|
| Hell yeah! and keep posting technical solutions. Even the little
| things you do like keeping your site very readable, posting the
| text instead of screenshots so it's searchable, etc. all help.
|
| >dkozel and your kind, whoever you are, wherever you are, and
| whatever you are doing right now, you are legend.
|
| You too, man. Remember Gandi's quote: "Whatever you do will be
| insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
| blueflow wrote:
| I didn't knew PCIe hotplug works at all!
| l1k wrote:
| You'd be surprised. Here's an article I wrote on the
| modernization of PCIe hotplug in Linux:
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/767885/
| l1k wrote:
| Thunderbolt devices appear in the OS as a PCIe switch, so you
| need two additional bus numbers (one for the Switch Upstream Port
| and one for the Switch Downstream Port). If the device is
| hotplugged to a port which has run out of bus numbers, you'll get
| this error message.
|
| Mika Westerberg is constantly fine-tuning the allocation of PCI
| resources in the Linux kernel to avoid such scenarios. Some
| recent patches:
|
| https://lore.kernel.org/linux-pci/20220905080232.36087-1-mik...
|
| https://lore.kernel.org/linux-pci/20221130112221.66612-1-mik...
|
| On macOS, it's possible to pause the PCI bus, reallocate
| resources and unpause the bus:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ha...
| (search for "Supporting PCIe Pause")
|
| We don't have that on Linux unfortunately, so we depend on
| getting the initial resource allocation right.
|
| Sergei Miroshnichenko has worked on such a reallocation feature
| for Linux but it hasn't been accepted into mainline yet and he
| hasn't posted a new version of his patches for almost two years,
| so the effort seems stalled:
|
| https://lore.kernel.org/linux-pci/20201218174011.340514-1-s....
| nneonneo wrote:
| It sounds like the pause/unpause might be the way to fix this
| properly, since trying to be heuristically smarter sounds like
| a recipe for never-ending corner case bugs like the OP's issue.
|
| The patch for pausing and unpausing seems quite reasonable,
| except that it does require driver support (unsurprising -
| you're literally reallocating the resources used by the
| driver!). I suppose if you had at least a few movable devices
| then you should be ok in the event of a hotplug event, so you'd
| have to hope that enough drivers bother to support the feature.
|
| I wonder what is necessary to get people to care about the
| patch enough to fix it up and mainline it? I suppose the
| problem it fixes is still niche enough that not so many people
| are clamoring for the fix.
| planede wrote:
| Maybe it can be introduced gradually, making the reallocation
| an optional feature that a driver might support. Then drivers
| can independently implement the resource reallocation
| feature.
|
| Mainline drivers can move gradually. If they want to be nice
| for out-of-tree drivers then they can describe a timeline for
| deprecating and removing the support for non-reallocating
| drivers.
| l1k wrote:
| The PCI resource allocation code is fairly intricate and
| everyone is scared that changing it may cause regressions.
| Sergei's patch set is quite intrusive and it would be
| necessary to somehow break it up into smaller pieces that are
| slowly fed into mainline over several release cycles, always
| watching out for regression reports. So, the problem is
| known, but the engineers working on PCI code in the kernel
| are given higher priority stuff to work on by their
| employers, hence the issue hasn't gotten the attention it
| deserves.
|
| Actually I forgot to mention there's another solution: A PCIe
| feature called Flattening Portal Bridge (PCIe Base Spec r6.0
| section 6.26). That was introduced with PCIe 5.0. It's more
| likely that FPB support is added in mainline than the
| pause/unpause feature. It's supported by recent Thunderbolt
| chips and it's an official feature of the PCIe standard, so
| companies will prefer dedicating resources to it rather than
| some non-standard approach.
| bombcar wrote:
| Would a workaround be that whenever the kernel detects this
| happening (and it did, it dmesg printed it) that it somehow
| increases an internal counter so on next reboot there will be
| more resources?
|
| This would require the kernel being able to either update its
| own command line somehow, or having some permanent storage
| somewhere it could store it.
|
| Or this could all be done by systemd - detect that message,
| increase the resource, next reboot will fix it.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| What is the point in having all of the drivers be open
| sourced and mainlined if we're not willing to fix them to
| support this?
| blueflow wrote:
| You are free to submit a patch or request a refund.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You are free to comment on the question raised, instead
| of a dismissive empty ad-hom.
| [deleted]
| arghwhat wrote:
| While tongue in cheek, the answer is accurate: open
| source does not mean "free service contract", it means
| that you can take the code and modify yourself (and
| preferably upstream the fix).
|
| Patches come both from vendors and users experiencing an
| issue. Vendors take care of most things, but for esoteric
| problems you might only have a handful of people
| experiencing it. The vendor is unlikely to care, so if
| you do not write the patch or pay someone to do it, who
| will?
|
| Still better than the competition, where such problems
| will never be fixed unless it generates sufficient bad
| PR...
| runjake wrote:
| What it sounds like you're saying is "If you don't know
| how to code, GTFO" because in all likelihood the parent
| made this comment because they're not capable.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Not quite. If you are a non-developer not patient enough
| to wait for others to volunteer, or are a developer
| thinking that your time is somehow more valuable than
| those of the maintainers, then GTFO. :)
|
| Waiting patiently and _politely_ reporting bugs is a fine
| strategy: If a problem affects enough people, it will
| eventually affect a developer capable and willing to fix
| it. If you want it go faster, you will have to get your
| hands dirty - many contributors acquired the skills
| exactly because they were annoyed by an issue and decided
| to fix it.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You're doing the same thing, dragging the original
| conversation off into berating the commentor for not
| fixing it themselves because you owe them nothing and
| they shouldn't be so entitled.
|
| > " _Still better than the competition, where such
| problems will never be fixed unless it generates
| sufficient bad PR..._ "
|
| The competition comes under "pay someone else to do it".
| arghwhat wrote:
| > You're doing the same thing, dragging the original
| conversation off into berating the commentor for not
| fixing it themselves because you owe them nothing and
| they shouldn't be so entitled.
|
| Ah, this argument again. Yeah, the maintainers owe you
| nothing, as they have already worked their asses off to
| give you something for free. You have the right to make
| polite bug reports and discuss fixes, but no one is
| entitled to force volunteers to do work.
|
| But, that is not the same thing as everyone having to fix
| their own shit. 100 million users does not need 100
| million developers.
|
| What matters is that the users that have issues _can_ fix
| issues, and if the issue affects enough people, it will
| eventually affect someone able and willing to fix it.
| That is why open source works, but it requires that
| _some_ people put in the effort, and many learn to do it
| exactly when they get annoyed by a bug.
|
| So yeah, if you are not willing to wait for someone else
| to come around and volunteer to fix it, patch it yourself
| or pay someone else to do it. That's how the system
| works, regardless of how demeaning you feel this is to
| non-developers or developers that feel that their time is
| more valuable than that of others.
|
| > The competition comes under "pay someone else to do
| it".
|
| Sure, if you have enough money to convince Apple or
| Microsoft specifically to prioritize fixing your issue
| (which may be in an unsupported or deprecated
| configuration) above what else they were doing, which
| would cost a whole lot more than just engineer and
| manager time. You have no alternative, as only your
| specific vendor can make the fix. Realistically speaking,
| if you had that kind of money you probably already have
| employed engineers that you could get to fix your open
| source issues for you and would not be arguing on hacker
| news about the need to write patches.
|
| For open source, you don't have to convince anyone in
| particular. Can't convince the first person you try with
| money? Just ask the next person, anyone can submit the
| patch.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I think you are mixing two arguments. One is a good,
| valid, argument which is about how volunteer maintainers
| don't owe anyone anything, and absolutely don't deserve
| to be harassed, insulted, coerced, guilt tripped, etc.
| And the other is is about internet Linux commenters (away
| from bug trackers and issue lists) replying in ways that
| close down and end conversation of anything which isn't
| toeing the 'party line' of how great
| Linux/FOSS/libre/gratis software/etc. is.
|
| The parent comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet was not in the
| context of bug reports filed to maintainers, or insulting
| anyone, or demanding anything specific. The parent of
| that said that the patch looked good "but" would need
| driver support, perhaps suggesting that's a showstopper.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet asked what the point of having open
| source drivers is if they can't be fixed, or charitably
| steelmanned read as "the drivers are open so they can be
| fixed to work with the patch". Blueflow's reply "you are
| free to submit a patch" is technically correct, but low
| value - few people on HN aren't aware of that. The
| following "or request a refund" is conversation ending,
| "fix it or shut up, stop talking about it".
|
| It's a common reply format on internet Linux discussions
| which is closer to 'silence wrongthink' or 'cancel
| culture' than tech discussion.
|
| > " _So yeah, if you are not willing to wait for someone
| else to come around and volunteer to fix it, patch it
| yourself or pay someone else to do it._ "
|
| Or ... talk about it, rant about it, 'raise awareness',
| exercise freedom of speech. "Patch it or shut up" aren't
| the only options. And look, dkozel replied with a long
| and technically detailed comment[1] and didn't need
| anyone jumping in to silence unapproved questions.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016094
| blueflow wrote:
| Your ideas and intentions might be good and noble, but in
| the end of the day its the contributors and maintainers
| who burn out. And from my impression, most people in OSS
| are already fed up with supporting users. And I'm too.
| Telling users off like "fix it or shut up, stop talking
| about it" is the necessary step to protect yourself.
| elsjaako wrote:
| What OS are you using where you can get the vendor to
| implement kernel features to fix obscure driver issues?
|
| I'm sure there's an amount of money you can throw at
| Microsoft to get something done. I don't know how much it
| is, but I'm guessing it's more than it would cost to find
| a vendor to do it for Linux.
|
| The serious answer to " What is the point in having all
| of the drivers be open sourced and mainlined if we're not
| willing to fix them to support this?" is "There are many
| points to this, but one of them is that it's possible to
| fix them to support it, if someone wants to put in the
| effort. It's worth something that it's theoretically
| possible if you really need it, even if no one else has
| done it yet.".
|
| The answer "You can do it yourself" is meant to help them
| understand "Anyone can do it, someone needs to step up to
| the plate. But it's also true that it costs resources. If
| you're wondering why no one else has done it yet, it's
| the same reason you haven't done it yet".
| fragmede wrote:
| With enough money you can get that kind of support from
| any Linux vendor, eg RedHat or Oracle.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Possibly it is hard, tedious, or the people able to fix it
| don't think it is worth the effort.
|
| Open source projects rely on volunteers mostly so it isn't
| like there's some outside force to appeal to. If nobody
| volunteers a solution, then it isn't important enough to
| solve. The point is that, if it were important enough to
| fix, anybody with the requisite skills could do so.
| mrb wrote:
| The key takeaway, especially for the author who wants things to
| "just work", is that he should have used a USB external disk,
| instead of a Thunderbolt external disk. OSes tend to have more
| issues with Thunderbolt disks (such as this issue you explained
| in details) than with USB disks, because the latter is more
| common, so more corner case bugs have been eliminated.
| flaxton wrote:
| This is exactly why I stopped using Linux as my personal computer
| many, many years ago. I could do it, yes, but just got tired of
| spending hours fixing random weirdness. I have work to do! Love,
| love love it on servers, and have many. But I use macOS on my Mac
| and everything runs smoothly for me...
| Manjuuu wrote:
| And digging even more, you'll find the same solution somewhere
| else two years ago:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/XMG_gg/comments/ic7vt7/fusion15_lin...
| badrabbit wrote:
| I said linux was fragile the other day and someone replied "in
| what way", this post is a good answer. In the past also I had
| similar critiques to my own criticism of Linux.
|
| Who knows how many total days and weeks I spent on random things
| like this and all the obstacles I had to overcome. Just to get
| secure boot working on debian, I had to overcome their block of
| my vpn IP on their wiki, and the sign-tool which is impossible to
| find and after a lot of googling found an ubuntu post suggesting
| a weird kernel version speicific path that worked but the builtin
| vbox kernel module signing thing can't find it during apt update
| so at each kernel update I have to manually sign vbox modules
| (which means making the privkey readily available and defeating
| the whole point but whatever), at least I made a small script
| that only needs my secureboot pin/pass now. And then I decided to
| use apparmor, which is nicer than selinux but it took weeks to
| lockdown two apps and have them work and I am still not confident
| I did it right.
|
| Ok,ok... let me pause there because I could go on. In my current
| day job, I attribute my success to two things: 1) Using linux for
| many years and fighting these "stupid" battles 2) I learned C
| which made learning a lot of other stuff a lot easier. I work in
| security now, so when there is a linux or container/k8s related
| incident it is easier for me than for my colleagues. I also don't
| shy away from difficult technically complex incidents or problems
| because I am battle-hardened in the art of figuring out seemingly
| random problems in topics I know nothing about with the sheer
| power of search engines, docs and random internet posts.
|
| When I worked my first k8s incident, I knew nothing about it. I
| was watching talks by google people on one window while reading
| docs on another and poking around in the gke node scratching my
| head on why the hell a k8s node is running chromeos and
| everything is readonly. But all of that is a piece of cake. Try
| random browser crashes because weird grsec/pax patches (before
| they closed it off) that were messing with jit or untangling a
| dependency mess on a gentoo install neglected for years which
| doesn't even have a supported python version now. The brutality
| and fragility of Linux has given me a lot of mental muscles that
| has helped me immensly and it has forced me to be distrustful of
| software in general and learn a lot of stuff from programming
| languages to permission models, os architecture and gnu tools
| like sed,grep,awk and the like.
|
| But yeah, I love linux so much but let's not pretend it is easy
| to use or user friendly. But hey, 2023 will be the year of the
| Linux desktop so we'll see.
|
| A lot if *nix philosophy and mentality like "RTFM" and defaults
| not being a big deal I think are from an era where the ecosystem
| was much less complex and the userbase was much smaller. I
| attribute many of these pain points to that undying mindset.
| tomrod wrote:
| Windows and Mac have their fragile points as well.
|
| For starters, Windows is Ubuntu bug #1. (I kid).
|
| The nice thing about Linux is it can evolve without being
| pulled into advertising-and-data-monetization as a business
| plan. In other words, society is better off with it.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| Windows + WSL2. After 20 years on Fedora and Ubuntu.
|
| Its that good.
| dark-star wrote:
| I had a similar experience recently. Updated my Manjaro setup,
| rebooted, and was greeted with text mode. X just didn't load. 1
| hour of reading logfiles and pondering about why the kernel
| module wouldn't load, it turns out I needed to add an obscure
| boot parameter (I think it was something like "ibp=off") to my
| kernel command line to make the nvidia module load again.
|
| Easy solution if you know how to solve it, 1 hour searching for
| that solution, and about 0% chance of that knowledge ever being
| useful again in the future.
|
| In the end I was still satisfied because at least I learned
| _something_ (no matter if it 's useful or not), and I was under
| no pressure to get that particular Linux system working again (I
| could still dual-boot Windows for example).
| leidenfrost wrote:
| I had a similar experience with a workplace machine. It worked
| flawlessly. But, sometimes, I went to make myself coffee or to
| the bathroom, and when I was back, the system just never woke
| up from sleep.
|
| I try setting the machine to sleep and manually waking it up.
| No problem.
|
| Later, I spent some time watching a long youtube video, then I
| opened the terminal and then the OS crashed.
|
| Dmesg? It showed nothing
|
| But, sometimes, when I tried to launch the terminal, I tried
| running htop and then the OS hanged. I had the feeling that it
| was something HD related.
|
| I restarted the machine, updated the kernel, asked the forums,
| everything. No answer.
|
| It was my work machine. They let me install Linux but I
| couldn't spend so much time with the OS. I need to have work
| done. Otherwise I need to bail and go back to Windows (ugh).
|
| I was about to delete Linux from the laptop, but I had an idea:
| The machine was a Thinkpad T1. I looked on the Arch Wiki about
| compatibility with that laptop. If the problem came from an
| incompatibility with the hardware, it will surely show up
| there. The machine showed up in a list and according to the
| wiki, there's nothing related to a crash or a freeze.
|
| Then, I looked up on lshw if there was any piece of hardware
| that was different of what the Thinkpad has by defaults.
|
| The result? A Kingston 1TB SSD. I googled "Linux Kingston ssd
| lock up", "Linux Kingston ssd crash".
|
| It turns out, some Kingston SSDs don't support all the deep
| sleep levels of energy saving. I needed to switch some off with
| a kernel parameter.
|
| I never had any problems with that machine again.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is one of the benefits of being "obscure in only one
| area at a time" - just like you shouldn't break more than one
| law at a time, heh.
|
| Linux is a relatively obscure OS, but you were on popular
| hardware with a popular SSD which helped increase the chance
| that someone else had run into a similar issue.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I had this issue after I built my first new machine in nearly 8
| years.
|
| I forget what I googled, but I essentially found a forum post
| almost immediately that explained the reason for the ibp=off,
| something to do with an intel security issue, caching, and the
| actual likelyhood of it being a security risk on a personal
| machine. The conclusion was basically "its enabled by default
| because its a good idea, but not really needed for most use-
| cases". Away I went disabling it, somewhat understanding why it
| was there.
|
| But I've also been an arch user for years, and one thing I'm
| accustomed to is when the bleeding edge breaks something, other
| bleeding edge users are already discussing it. The overall
| community documentation on issues is exhaustive. If you have an
| obscure issue in Windows and search the error, you get windows
| support forums with official support asking you to click the
| "try to fix it pwease" button and no other solution. Half the
| time the only fix is a reinstall.
|
| I ended up building a new computer because my old machine's
| windows install got itself in a state where it would fail to
| login after an update, yet constantly tried to apply that
| update after I'd revert it. No solutions anywhere online, no
| way to stop windows from trying to apply the ill-fated update.
| Just a broken install. I figured if I was going to spend hours
| re-installing and reconfiguring windows, I might as well get
| new hardware.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Anymore these days if it only takes me an hour to wade through
| all the reinstall/switch distro garbage to fix some obscure
| nonsense problem I count it as a win.
| maherbeg wrote:
| I'm generally an Apple hardware guy + console gamer so I don't
| have to have linux evenings like this. I used to enjoy the
| tinkering, but now I have Linux days in the Cloud and don't feel
| the need to be a computer therapist at night.
|
| On the other hand I just bought an Intel NUC to turn into a NAS
| and am planning to try out NixOS. I think I'm going to have a lot
| of evenings..
| jeromenerf wrote:
| Kernel parameters are usually documented in the kernel-
| parameters.txt file in the source. See
| https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...:
| hpbussize=nn The minimum amount of additional bus numbers
| reserved for buses below a hotplug bridge. Default is 1.
|
| The way to get from the error "No bus number available for hot-
| added bridge" at
| https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/pci/pr...
| to this specific kernel param is still a bit involved.
| zokier wrote:
| That doc string raises so many questions. First, it says
| minimum which to me implies that in some cases larger value is
| used, but no clue when. Secondly, why is the default 1 and what
| is the allowed range of values? Being 1 implies to me that
| there is some cost associated with the reservations, otherwise
| the default would be much higher? Is the 0x33 from the article
| completely random, would 2 worked just as well? What are the
| implications of using high value here?
| alkonaut wrote:
| What's the approach used by OSes that "just work" for things
| like this? Is this due to the more monolithic kernel of Linux
| making more things required to be known up front than e.g. in
| Windows?
| alexpotato wrote:
| I always like this story about MacOs.
|
| - Most OSes do a full dhcp look up when they connect to a
| network even if they have connected to the network before.
| Wifi saved networks is a good example of a network where you
| have some historical information on the connection
|
| - MacOs however keeps track of the IP addresses that it saw
| for each of the networks it has connected to recently. If it
| sees a network it's been on before, it first tries to just
| use the old IP address. This is under the assumption that the
| lease is still tied to the user's laptop.
|
| - In the best case, the laptop gets a working IP very quickly
| and in the worst case, you just do dhcp again
|
| - From a user's perspective, if they walk into a meeting with
| a bunch of folks with non Mac laptops, it will seem like the
| Mac connects much faster than everyone else's machine
|
| When I read this story, the author pointed out that many
| people say "Macs just feel like they work better!" and used
| this as an example. Granted, this partly comes from owning
| the ENTIRE stack from hardware to drivers to OS etc which is
| something only Mac can do.
| riskable wrote:
| ...and the network intrusion detection system throws up all
| sorts of alarm bells about IPs being spoofed and duplicate
| IPs in use.
|
| I _assume_ MacOS actually only re-uses IPs if it sees the
| lease hasn 't already expired but it might be dumber than
| that.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Is there one? I know that unplugging a Thunderbolt peer will
| crash my MacBook Pro (bridgeOS, not macOS, panics).
| Disappearing buses is an edge case that is little-tested on
| most operating systems.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Hot-plugging Thunderbolt devices is hardly an edge-case on
| Macs, it's a heavily advertised feature.
|
| I had about weekly kernel panics or machine freezes (would
| not wake from sleep) while unplugging my Thunderbolt dock
| (with displays and lots of devices) all throughout the
| USB-C Intel Mac era, but they all went away when I got an
| M1 Pro machine, so I wonder how much is down to OS design
| vs drivers vs hardware (vs how specific hardware influences
| driver design).
| jeffbee wrote:
| M1 machines don't have bridgeOS at all, right?
| bombcar wrote:
| If it can panic apparently they do have it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BridgeOS says it runs the
| Touch Bar.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The M1 lacks the T-series coprocessor altogether and all
| its functions are inside the main SoC. Whether that means
| that bridgeOS still runs on non-architectural cores
| inside the SoC, or its responsibilities have been rolled
| into macOS, I have no idea. I do know that only my
| T2-having MacBook suffers from these panics.
| aiwv wrote:
| Raises the question whether or not anyone writing this kind
| of software actually uses it.
| kalleboo wrote:
| According to another comment
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013844), macOS will
| pause, reallocate, and un-pause the bus.
| johnboiles wrote:
| Buckle up everyone I hear 2023 is the year of the Linux desktop!
| kibwen wrote:
| _> dkozel and your kind, whoever you are, wherever you are, and
| whatever you are doing right now, you are legend._
|
| Perhaps dkozel is reading this right now. :P
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dkozel
|
| https://lobste.rs/threads/dkozel
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Last comment was in 2020.
| dkozel wrote:
| Now 2022. ;)
| dahston wrote:
| So, how did you find this fix?
| sceadu wrote:
| cue the segway
| dkozel wrote:
| No segway, I've posted a bit of a discussion above. Not
| all that interesting unfortunately. The error message was
| obscure but the problem space was pretty small so I did
| mostly the same thing as Fabian and searched online for
| related terms to PCIe hotplugging and PCIe address
| allocation.
| hacb wrote:
| About take away #2:
|
| > I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to
| nothing in the process. This trick is unlikely to be useful
| again. By the time I encounter something similar, it is likely I
| will have forgotten about the solution.
|
| This is why it is important to keep a personal knowledge
| base/documentation. Mine is full of things I'll probably never
| encounter again, but I know it may be useful one day or another.
| npteljes wrote:
| Also, it's not like OP haven't learnt about kernel parameters.
| Often not just the dicrete knowledge itself, but also the way
| of arriving at it is just as useful.
| davidy123 wrote:
| Someone should tell the author about the great lshw, it lists
| full details of the system board (and everything else) without
| having to go to a GUI display. azalp
| description: Desktop Computer product: B660M AORUS PRO AX
| DDR4 (Default string) vendor: Gigabyte Technology Co.,
| Ltd. version: -CF serial: Default string
| width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-3.4.0 dmi-3.4.0 smp
| vsyscall32 configuration: boot=normal chassis=desktop
| family=B660 MB sku=Default string uuid=dotdotdot
|
| People posting those CPU and SSD screens shots rather than, say,
| some linked data that contributes to make a graph to forums has
| such a deleterious effect on people's ability to reason. I
| suppose eventually we'll end up screen scraping the screen shots.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| This. I generally have few problems with the people I work with
| one exception is when they start posting screenshots on Slack.
| If it's some gui and you can't get a good export then I
| understand the frustration - but this will be a screen shot of
| terminal.
|
| Why? I mean do you hate the future? Did a month from the
| present beat you up as a child? Perhaps when you were 10 years
| old 2 years from now kicked sand in your face and now you're
| going to punish it. I don't know. But they need to get over it
| for everyone's sake.
| trynewideas wrote:
| In tech support, I'd frequently get screenshots of a few
| lines of a terminal window pasted into PowerPoint slides and
| Word docs -- usually via some heavily compressed remote
| desktop-running-on-another-remote-desktop -- with the
| information I actually needed invariably a few lines higher.
| My favorite was flash photos of a monitor taken with a non-
| smartphone from fully airgapped sites, where the turnaround
| for running a command and getting the output would be at
| least 5 minutes because the on-site user had to leave the
| server closet and go down a few halls to get back to a
| network-connected system, copy the photo off the camera to
| the computer, and attach it to the ticket.
|
| Eventually I rigged up a tool to automatically pull
| screenshots from tickets via the ticket system's API, then
| raise contrast on them with imagemagick and run them through
| OCR. Some red error text on a black background screencapped
| through multiple layers of compression might as well not
| exist, even if it's perfectly readable to the end user, so
| I'd even done comparisons (that I've since unfortunately
| lost) of how different command-line OCR tools fared with low-
| contrast color text, because Tesseract wasn't always the most
| functional option.
| [deleted]
| ragingrobot wrote:
| Also, dmidecode is very handy. # dmidecode 3.4
| Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs. SMBIOS 2.7 present.
| Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 15 bytes Base Board
| Information Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
| Product Name: 02##K5 Version: A01
| Serial Number: /BGK####/CN#######/ Asset Tag: Not
| Specified Features: Board
| is a hosting board Board is replaceable
| Location In Chassis: Not Specified Chassis
| Handle: 0x0003 Type: Motherboard
| Contained Object Handles: 0
| Ruq wrote:
| My last (Arch btw) Linux Evening was my laptop suddenly not
| booting after an update. I thought it must've been me, so I
| booted into the install media and reinstalled and reconfigured
| grub in a way that I knew would fix it...except it didn't.
|
| I then learned that GRUB had a bug introduced in an update that
| completely borked it for my system. So rather than deal with it I
| finally used it as the excuse I needed to ditch GRUB for systemd-
| boot, which if anything is actually simpler.
| revskill wrote:
| I realized real competitor of MacOSX is not Windows, it's Linux.
| mahoro wrote:
| One more thing that happened with Linux in last 20 years is
| complexity raised in orders of magnitude.
|
| I remember Linux 2.x times and I had similar problems with
| hardware but a lot of them I fixed by following a limited set of
| tricks/patterns. Sometime I read a source code of some drivers or
| maybe applied some patches but not so often.
|
| But at that time I felt confidence that most problems I could
| fix. Now I don't (and actually switched to Mac 5 years ago)
| SpacePortKnight wrote:
| Occasional issues like these is why I continue to run Windows
| even though Microsoft has been pulling off all sorts of
| shenanigans with telemetry, broken file manager / start menu, ads
| etc.
|
| I really want to move to Linux but unless my laptop manufacturer
| provides support, its never going to happen. I don't want to
| think my OS when buying a hardware accessary or a software
| product.
|
| A laptop's a tool and Windows still provides the most support.
| qup wrote:
| What kind of windows support do you use?
| autophagian wrote:
| For takeaway 2, I've found using NixOS lately to be good at
| keeping myself disciplined about documenting the odd little hacks
| I've added to fix an issue. Like in this case, I'd have to add
| something to my boot.loader.grub.extraConfig setting, comment it
| and document it with a hopefully-useful commit message so that if
| I encounter something similar in future, I can at least look at
| those bits of documentation and hopefully connect the two.
| ssimono wrote:
| +1 on this. I use to consider those Linux evenings as a waste
| of time. But with every bit of NixOS tracked within git with
| some history and context, I now think of it like an investment
| for the next 50 years, which has way more chances to pay back
| _justinfunk wrote:
| I used to hear "Linux is only free if you don't value your time."
| - this article seems to validate that this is still the case. Am
| I getting the wrong impression?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I'd say its a bit biased.
|
| Personally, I've been riding the linux struggle bus for years
| in my personal time. It really hasn't been a struggle, but
| weird issue's I've dealt with during my "Linux evenings" has
| made obscure struggles at my day job far easier to debug and
| deal with, and overall has made me a better engineer because I
| know how my tools work and I can use them more effectively.
|
| It's a whole lot more fun learning about kernel drivers,
| systemd, networking drivers, etc when you're personally
| invested in tweaking your machine just right. I much rather
| deal with a Linux issue for an hour than spend an hour on
| leetcode.
| gabrielgio wrote:
| Yes, every OS has problem. The only difference is that Linux
| let you debug it.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've had linux evenings, windows evenings, macOS evenings,
| hardware evenings, software evenings, house evenings.
|
| Anything you use has a chance of failure and _on the whole_ I
| feel Linux has taken less time to do what I want to do with it
| than other similar options.
|
| Thought I started using macOS at home because I got tired of
| dealing with Linux desktop shit, so take that as you will.
|
| > "If you've ever read a mystery story you know that a
| detective never works so hard as when he's on vacation. He's
| like the postman who goes for a long walk on his day off."
|
| I got tired of taking the long walks.
| II2II wrote:
| It really depends upon what you are doing with your machine.
|
| If you're dealing with new hardware, situations like the one
| described in the article _may_ pop up since vendors will focus
| their testing on Windows (and possibly macOS) so there is a
| good chance that it will work on the commercial operating
| systems but not the open source ones. That is going to be
| especially true to more exotic hardware since there will also
| be less testing by the open source community.
|
| On the other hand, I find managing a Linux system significantly
| more time efficient. Some of it is because of the nature of
| open source. For example: installing, updating, and removing
| software is much easier since the licensing model allows
| distribution maintainers to create a universal software
| management tool. In other cases, it is simply because of the
| approaches typically taken by open source developers. For
| example: it is usually easy to copy configuration files from
| one system to another.
| [deleted]
| mentos wrote:
| "You get what you pay for." has always been my reaction to
| Linux issues.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| 1 - I wonder what OS do you use.
|
| 2 - Have you actually tried Linux?
| kingboss wrote:
| I have. It's still inferior to Windows and it's trying to
| be a discount version of MacOS. And it's doing a bad job at
| it.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| Inferior how?
|
| My KDE Plasma setup is nothing like MacOS.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I hate to admit it but GNOME is legitimately a macOS
| ripoff. I love it, and it's great, but it's basically
| trying to be macOS.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| I started using linux in 1996. I've had a mac since 2010 - it
| just works, while my sound card would randomly stop working
| (pulse audio, whatever, I don't care anymore), and I even had to
| manually patch the alsa drivers manually (and write the patch) .
| I wish I could use Linux reliably for anything else than a
| terminal (and I do use it everyday at the office in a terminal )
| , but it's just never worked well for me, in spite of my wanting
| it to work.
|
| I'm a bit sad about Mthe whole thing : I want it to work, but it
| doesn't. I don't have the time to waste yet another linux
| evening, yet I can't resent the people who work on it for free,
| and understand very well that it works for _some_ people.
| pvsukale3 wrote:
| This is kind of the reason I have switched to Mac. I used Ubuntu
| throughout my CSE degree and a year after. But system bricking at
| random upgrade, needing a fix was a no go for me at work. I
| understand some people do not face this issue.
|
| But whenever I wanted to try out something new or install
| anything, some random stuff would go wrong and would need hours
| of searching and fixing. Happens much less often with MacOs.
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| Sounds like you had faulty hardware.
| gabrielgio wrote:
| That is quite vague statement to make. Linux let you try/change
| a lot more on its internal than MacOS, so you can definitely to
| more damage to your system on linux.
|
| I don't see you trying simple things like "apt install go" and
| your pc would stop working (unless faulty hardware).
| jakesgates wrote:
| I really appreciate the write-up, as I have had many 'linux
| evenings' myself, and it always gets on my nerves when some
| members of the community act as if linux 'just works' for almost
| all users. Worth noting I love linux, and am a happy user, but I
| have had quite a few instances of relying on a more-experienced
| person previously running into the issue, or else I would still
| be stuck with those previous problems..
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| It does just work for most users. They don't get online and
| post 2000 word blog entries about their successfully completing
| their work for the day with no hiccups.
| wankle wrote:
| "I have vouched to avoid USB and its undecipherable specs."
|
| OK.
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| I agree, it's ironic. I haven't had much luck with Thunderbolt,
| even on Windows. USB has never failed me.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| (Presuming there are some linux experts here) Slightly off-topic
| question but does anyone have any strong opinions about d-bus as
| an IPC mechanism? Is it actually used much or do most people
| prefer other lower level Linux/Posix IPC mechanisms (shm, pipes
| etc)? Does it have any glaring disadvantages compared to e.g.
| Android's Binder, or is that only more widely used because Google
| enforces it?
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I had a couple of years stint with windows, and I had a couple of
| these "evenings" as well. Maybe Mac OS is immune, but windows
| never was and isn't now.
| rodric wrote:
| xkcd: Wisdom of the Ancients https://xkcd.com/979/
| artemonster wrote:
| I hate linux for this. How the hell a modern OS can be frozen
| completely shut by some runaway python script running in a VS
| code debugger, to a point that you have to kill your PC with a
| button. And then non-obvious issues that just "appear" out of
| nowhere and steal your perfectly fine evening where you have
| planned to work on your favorite side project.
| arghwhat wrote:
| This seems like a random, unrelated yet incredibly specific
| rant, and not really a unique property of Linux.
| not_the_fda wrote:
| Thunderbolt isn't that well supported, and they decided to
| specifically not use USB3 which is well supported for bogus
| reasons. #1 rule with Linux is pick well supported hardware.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> How the hell a modern OS can be frozen completely shut by
| some runaway python script running in a VS code_
|
| That isn't a just Linux thing. You can easily fork-bomb (or
| equivalent) Windows/iOS/other and so forth, especially (though
| not only) if running as a privileged user.
|
| _> And then non-obvious issues that just "appear" out of
| nowhere_
|
| That is definitely not something that I've never seen when
| using Windows! Where it has happened to me under Linux it has
| been eventually traced to a hardware issue or a bad update (the
| latter I've experienced on both those OSs over the years and
| the former will affect everything).
| LoganDark wrote:
| > That isn't a just Linux thing. You can easily fork-bomb (or
| equivalent) Windows/iOS/other and so forth, especially
| (though not only) if running as a privileged user.
|
| I've crashed DWM with WSL before, by doing something
| completely unrelated to Windows.
|
| What happens is you start getting the solitaire effect
| because suddenly no windows have graphics buffers anymore
| mrob wrote:
| Linux will free memory that's backed by files, and load it
| again when it's needed. Under heavy memory pressure this has
| the same effect as swap thrashing, even if you have swap
| disabled. The kernel's out-of-memory killer does not help,
| because it's designed to work only as a last resort, and the
| system is still technically making progress despite being
| unusable in practice. AFAIK no other mainstream OS has this
| problem.
|
| The solution is running a userspace out-of-memory killer, e.g.
| earlyoom.
| tuukkah wrote:
| How is your comment related to the article? The only connection
| I can see is bad quality of some hardware and drivers.
| emsy wrote:
| It's a reappearing issue with Linux that you run into
| problems other operating systems don't have to this degree.
| Which is sad, because seeing the direction Windows 11 is
| heading towards, I'd like for Linux to achieve widespread
| adoption.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > It's a reappearing issue with Linux that you run into
| problems other operating systems don't have to this degree.
|
| I've supported both professionally, and no, you don't. I
| blame the claim on a lot of people using commercial
| operating systems feeling a bit guilty, like they're
| supposed to be on Linux to be a real developer. They
| respond by criticizing an OS that they don't really use for
| the problems that they imagine happen all the time.
| Instead, what's happening is that they, personally, always
| run into problems trying to figure out why something won't
| work in prod, or trying to get their VMs to work like the
| tutorial, and they assume that people who use Linux as a
| daily driver run into problems at that rate. _They never
| pay attention to Linux unless something critical has
| already broken._
|
| Also, whenever they decide that they're going to try Linux
| again _to see if it 's ready for them yet_, they always
| choose Arch (it used to be Gentoo) or the latest trendy
| distro that has a MacOS aping desktop. Just install Debian,
| it's easy.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| If you want that, then use it and contribute. That's the
| only way widespread adoption will happen.
|
| Contribution does not necessarily mean code. It can be
| documentation, design, UX, sharing information, or just
| working getting people familiar with Linux.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| Oh don't worry as a daily user of windows 11 I can assure
| you that Microsoft is doubling down on random mystifying
| problems, paired with no useful forum for users to
| collectively figure things out.
| simion314 wrote:
| This is false.
|
| My story, I bought a new widget, a gaming wheel a few years
| back, and it did not work on my Windows machine, I even
| reinstalled Windows, installed the drivers from disk it did
| not work. I send the thing back and report it broken and
| the guys call me to report that works perfectly. In the end
| I bought a different model that worked both on Windows and
| Linux.
|
| So a gadget with official Windows support did not work on
| my machine, even after I wasted my time reinstalling
| Windows just in case but worked fine for some support
| people.
|
| I had a diffrent experience with a USB WifFi antenna , it
| come with a mini CD with drivers but my PC had no CD Drive,
| there was no online source for that no name brnd.
|
| I plugged it on a Linux machine and it worked, then I done
| a lsusb and found the real chip powering the device, then
| Googled for that I found a compatible Windows driver on a
| drivers website and I fixed it for Windows machine.
|
| Linux has problems, but install a LTS distro on compatible
| hardware and you should not have issues for a few years.
|
| To balance things, my latest bad experience in KDE was when
| Kwin crashed and refused to enable compositing again
| printing a vague reason in the logs, I found using Google
| that KWin put an isOPenGLSafe=false in soem log file and
| refused to start compositing but for some reason (maybe is
| a valid one) was incapable to print also that "I refuse to
| start compositing because of this setting - lesson for us
| devs, when we put stuff in log messages, put as much info
| as possible
| varispeed wrote:
| I don't see the drive connection type is as important as making
| sure your backup data stays encrypted.
|
| Now doing this across different operating systems is clunky and
| quite challenging.
|
| You could use something like True Crypt or Vera Crypt, but
| mounting your drive then won't be typically as simple as plugging
| it in.
|
| For that reason it's probably better to have a separate computer
| for backups connected to the network. That way you don't need to
| care about encryption on every system you connect it to. It just
| works (tm).
| luc_ wrote:
| Been there... Especially when I was in high school with older
| Ubuntu flavors and trying to dual boot Windows. Booting
| constantly got fucked up.
| cobertos wrote:
| > After all, if I elect to use Linux, a niche market by all
| means, shouldn't I be ready for these kinds of quests?
|
| Yes and no. I think if our only tools are are Google (well, now
| Kagi for me), Stack overflow et al., and the sites that hold
| quality content quick to the point, you'll be spending a lot of
| time on the info finding and not the fixing.
|
| I think it requires a a lot of information organization tools to
| continue to keep up with it. Or sink more time into info finding.
| Or just memorize everything if you have a brain for that
| sampa wrote:
| it is strange not to know to run dmesg first-thing when you have
| a HW problem for a guy who rants about "I spent several hours
| fixing a problem and I learned next to nothing in the process"
|
| if you wanna learn, you should've known at least about dmesg
| LoganDark wrote:
| > if you wanna learn, you should've known
|
| This is a catch-22
| abnry wrote:
| The best linux evenings are the ones which happen and the
| StackExchange network is down for maintenance. Got burned once
| screwing up GNOME on my Ubuntu install, and what do you know, Ask
| Ubuntu wasn't available.
| gbin wrote:
| The thing is.... You found a solution and if you wanted to
| understand you can always look at the kernel doc. When a similar
| thing happens in Windows, you are just done... Not only you have
| a very slim chance of not having to reinstall everything but even
| less understanding what is happening (ie. Probably an intern that
| committed something in some close source driver than will be
| silently fixed some day).
| asoneth wrote:
| If you are someone who can read and understand the kernel doc
| then I agree that you can be more efficient in Linux.
|
| For the vast majority of the population the response to errors
| is identical on both platforms: reboot, internet searches,
| learn to live with it, or reinstall and hope for the best.
| bitwize wrote:
| Similar things rarely happen in Windows because Windows has a
| stable kernel ABI and developers can, do, and are incentivized
| to supply drivers for their hardware.
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