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I would love to use such a thing! I'm bugged with programs I don't use anymore which start on system boot. Even after removing some programs, they just don't g

I would love to use such a thing! I'm bugged with programs I don't use anymore which start on system boot. Even after removing some programs, they just don't go away. A sandboxed environment would be really good to use!

jhasse 14y ago
http://www.gobolinux.org/ http://www.gobolinux.org/ unfortunately it seems to be dead.
laumars 14y ago
That's just bad administration as even on Windows, you can easily disable them (msconfig). With Linux, this isn't even an issue unless you're blindly installing dozens of daemons (which, again, can easily be disabled) as Linux doesn't have hundreds of application launchers that install themselves like Windows does (again, daemons being the exception). The only example I can think of where you might run into problems is if your desktop environment is doing some weird sessions. But that's usually fixed pretty easily in the system settings for whatever desktop environment you're running. This is all pretty basic stuff; you shouldn't need a sandboxed environment to prevent applications from auto-launching unless you're going around installing malware (and if you are deliberately installing malware on your main bare-metal OS, then you're insane).
- nitrogen 14y ago
  This may have been true 5-10 years ago, but modern desktops are removing the ability to manage services, sessions, and startup apps easily and clearly.
  - laumars 14y ago
    Unless they're blocking access to [insert your favourite terminal emulator] and deinstalling su, rm and unlink, then they are not removing any such ability.
  - cmsj 14y ago
    To be fair, some of this is driven by real needs. People want fast boots, so you have to work tightly in parallel. That requires a clear and complex dependency graph. That requires significantly more than some symlinks in /etc/rc?.d/. Also as distros aim to pare down their default installs, you end up in a situation where there is very little that you actually can disable without breaking your ability to boot. Furthermore, given typical CPU/RAM overheads on modern hardware, disabling something that takes a fraction of a second to start and consumes almost no RAM can seem slightly pointless! I'm not familiar with systemd, but upstart takes a similar approach to sysvinit - don't want something to start? Just move it out of /etc/init/ like you would have rm'd the symlink in /etc/rc?.d/ :)
    - nitrogen 14y ago
      I'm referring more to the GUI sessions, startup apps, etc. It seems when I first started using Linux, most of the DEs made it very clear how to edit menu entries, where startup apps were located, what data and apps were restored when a session was restarted... At least in the Ubuntu variants, those options are less obvious.
      - cmsj 14y ago
        Ah right, then yeah, that stuff is now pretty opaque and has changed a bunch since the old desktop days.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  > With Linux, this isn't even an issue That's a problem systemd is trying very hard to solve. /sarcasm SysV init may be old, crufty, and inelegant, but it's reasonably straightforward to parse and troubleshoot manually (and BSD-style rc inits are even more straightforward). Making the bootstrap process nondeterministic strikes me as tremendously unwise.
  - fein 14y ago
    I agree here. I really enjoyed the explicit control granted by sysV. The switch to systemd just seems like fixing something that isn't broken. I will probably be proved wrong as systemd matures, but right now it's just not the case.
    - laumars 14y ago
      100% both those comments. I used to be a huge ArchLinux fan but them switching away from their rc.conf model to systemd felt like a real kick in the teeth.
      - apotheon 14y ago
        Yeah . . . it looks like Arch has gotten to the point where it just kinda violates all the points of the so-called Arch Way wholesale, even worse than the mainstream (supposedly) Unix-like OSes tend to violate the so-called Unix Philosophy these days.
    - apotheon 14y ago
      > I will probably be proved wrong as systemd matures, but right now it's just not the case. Yeah . . . I doubt it. I made the switch to FreeBSD as my primary OS of choice back in 2005 or 2006 without being 100% certain why I decided to try to live on BSD Unix pretty much full-time right then (there were reasons, but I think the timing of the migration was largely whim). I never even missed the Linux world for the next half decade or so. I then tried living with Debian again for a while (long story why), and I discovered that everything of substance that had gone on in the Linux world since then seemed almost tailor-made to annoy the shit out of me. It was a real shock that destroyed the fondness I still harbored for Debian. I poked around at some other Linux distributions I hadn't tried, or handn't used in years, and discovered they were even worse -- and systemd is sorta the apotheosis (no relation) of exactly the sort of nondeterministic, "the software knows better than the user" BS that I remembered with severe loathing from my distant past primarily using (and fixing, for a living) MS Windows. Between Red Hat developers like Drepper and Poettering, the agenda of Canonical and Ubuntu, and the GNU project's strange synthesis of superficially opposed concepts like stagnation and invidious undermining of anything related to the (so-called) Unix philosophy of system design, I ultimately came to the conclusion that outside of a professional capacity (that is, writing code and/or managing servers, and that only if I'm paid) I'm simply not interested in screwing around with Linux-based systems any longer. Your tolerance may be higher than mine but, given your comment about what you dislike about systemd, I rather suspect you'll only grow more frustrated with the direction of Linux development community efforts over time. You might want to think about diversifying your OS experience in the near future (if you haven't already) so you have a place to ready and waiting for you to go when the Linux world has finally pushed you to the point of just wanting to escape.

jhasse 14y ago

http://www.gobolinux.org/ http://www.gobolinux.org/ unfortunately it seems to be dead.

laumars 14y ago

That's just bad administration as even on Windows, you can easily disable them (msconfig). With Linux, this isn't even an issue unless you're blindly installing dozens of daemons (which, again, can easily be disabled) as Linux doesn't have hundreds of application launchers that install themselves like Windows does (again, daemons being the exception). The only example I can think of where you might run into problems is if your desktop environment is doing some weird sessions. But that's usually fixed pretty easily in the system settings for whatever desktop environment you're running. This is all pretty basic stuff; you shouldn't need a sandboxed environment to prevent applications from auto-launching unless you're going around installing malware (and if you are deliberately installing malware on your main bare-metal OS, then you're insane).

nitrogen 14y ago
This may have been true 5-10 years ago, but modern desktops are removing the ability to manage services, sessions, and startup apps easily and clearly.
- laumars 14y ago
  Unless they're blocking access to [insert your favourite terminal emulator] and deinstalling su, rm and unlink, then they are not removing any such ability.
- cmsj 14y ago
  To be fair, some of this is driven by real needs. People want fast boots, so you have to work tightly in parallel. That requires a clear and complex dependency graph. That requires significantly more than some symlinks in /etc/rc?.d/. Also as distros aim to pare down their default installs, you end up in a situation where there is very little that you actually can disable without breaking your ability to boot. Furthermore, given typical CPU/RAM overheads on modern hardware, disabling something that takes a fraction of a second to start and consumes almost no RAM can seem slightly pointless! I'm not familiar with systemd, but upstart takes a similar approach to sysvinit - don't want something to start? Just move it out of /etc/init/ like you would have rm'd the symlink in /etc/rc?.d/ :)
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    I'm referring more to the GUI sessions, startup apps, etc. It seems when I first started using Linux, most of the DEs made it very clear how to edit menu entries, where startup apps were located, what data and apps were restored when a session was restarted... At least in the Ubuntu variants, those options are less obvious.
    - cmsj 14y ago
      Ah right, then yeah, that stuff is now pretty opaque and has changed a bunch since the old desktop days.
dredmorbius 14y ago
> With Linux, this isn't even an issue That's a problem systemd is trying very hard to solve. /sarcasm SysV init may be old, crufty, and inelegant, but it's reasonably straightforward to parse and troubleshoot manually (and BSD-style rc inits are even more straightforward). Making the bootstrap process nondeterministic strikes me as tremendously unwise.
- fein 14y ago
  I agree here. I really enjoyed the explicit control granted by sysV. The switch to systemd just seems like fixing something that isn't broken. I will probably be proved wrong as systemd matures, but right now it's just not the case.
  - laumars 14y ago
    100% both those comments. I used to be a huge ArchLinux fan but them switching away from their rc.conf model to systemd felt like a real kick in the teeth.
    - apotheon 14y ago
      Yeah . . . it looks like Arch has gotten to the point where it just kinda violates all the points of the so-called Arch Way wholesale, even worse than the mainstream (supposedly) Unix-like OSes tend to violate the so-called Unix Philosophy these days.
  - apotheon 14y ago
    > I will probably be proved wrong as systemd matures, but right now it's just not the case. Yeah . . . I doubt it. I made the switch to FreeBSD as my primary OS of choice back in 2005 or 2006 without being 100% certain why I decided to try to live on BSD Unix pretty much full-time right then (there were reasons, but I think the timing of the migration was largely whim). I never even missed the Linux world for the next half decade or so. I then tried living with Debian again for a while (long story why), and I discovered that everything of substance that had gone on in the Linux world since then seemed almost tailor-made to annoy the shit out of me. It was a real shock that destroyed the fondness I still harbored for Debian. I poked around at some other Linux distributions I hadn't tried, or handn't used in years, and discovered they were even worse -- and systemd is sorta the apotheosis (no relation) of exactly the sort of nondeterministic, "the software knows better than the user" BS that I remembered with severe loathing from my distant past primarily using (and fixing, for a living) MS Windows. Between Red Hat developers like Drepper and Poettering, the agenda of Canonical and Ubuntu, and the GNU project's strange synthesis of superficially opposed concepts like stagnation and invidious undermining of anything related to the (so-called) Unix philosophy of system design, I ultimately came to the conclusion that outside of a professional capacity (that is, writing code and/or managing servers, and that only if I'm paid) I'm simply not interested in screwing around with Linux-based systems any longer. Your tolerance may be higher than mine but, given your comment about what you dislike about systemd, I rather suspect you'll only grow more frustrated with the direction of Linux development community efforts over time. You might want to think about diversifying your OS experience in the near future (if you haven't already) so you have a place to ready and waiting for you to go when the Linux world has finally pushed you to the point of just wanting to escape.