14 ms·

Has modern Linux lost its way? Some thoughts on Jessie

282 points by fpgeek 12y ago

forkandwait 12y ago
For simplicity and clarity of design, may I suggest FreeBSD? Though I am not sure I would want to run Gnome or any of those crazy things -- I run Joe's Window Manager, jwm, because all I need from a window manager is to manage windows, not handle file types or show me a directory tree or emulate the the MS task bar or whatever.
- dima55 12y ago
  FreeBSD will not help him since "linux" is not his problem at all. If he didn't run all the fancy things, and did what you do, then his problems would be somewhere between non-existent and clearly-debuggable.
  - mverwijs 12y ago
    This had me laughing. Not the FreeBSD bit. That bit is serious. The 'didn't run all the fancy things' bit. That was funny. The problem is: in Linux, pretty soon, you cannot do without the fancy bits anymore. I run a bunch of servers. Servers need a firewall. Nothing fancy, just iptables. Right? I'm running Ubuntu servers. They have 'firewalld' installed. Firewalld uses dark magic to manipulate iptables and ip routes. Oh, it's all great when it works, for as long as it works. You can simple open up a port by issuing a firewalld-cmd command. Until you can't. Until firewalld-cmd says it can't connect to firewalld even though it thinks it is running. And firewalld can't restart because it thinks the configuration files are wrong. I'm not a Linux newbie by any standard, but I could not solve this problem. After restarting firewalld, all the routes on the machine were gone. And thank god for iLO. This is on a production server providing secondary services to 200.000 users. Soon after, I found similar issues on our loadbalancers, webservers, database servers, all running firewalld. There was no other solution other than to reboot the server. I tried debugging firewalld and ran into (no particular order) apparmor, dbus, python, firewalld-cmd, firewalld, network-manager and libvirtd. No where was a hint to be found of why firewalld didn't work. I don't consider this to be anything fancy. This is supposed to be a simple wrapper around iptables. It is supposed to 'just work'. It is supposed to leave clear logs about what it is trying to do in /var/log/syslog. Sure, I'm getting old and cranky. But I'm really tired of having to get called out of my bed at 03:00 am because of this 'innovation' that tries to solve edgecases. And solves them badly.
    - VLM 12y ago
      linux doesn't eat its own dogfood anymore. This would never be tolerated if the devs actually used their product. Its all about serving the imaginary theoretical market researched noob (-only) user of gnome mobile phones that don't exist and everyone else has to go away because they don't matter anymore. To freebsd! Things actually work, there. Its the universal OS of the 10s just like Debian was the universal OS of the 90s/00s but now is just a gnome bootloader for ubuntu.
    - nisa 12y ago
      Huh? I never saw something like firewalld on Ubuntu? There is ufw but it's not enabled by default.. Looks like you mean Fedora/RHEL7? Ubuntu on the server (14.04) is quite okay in my experience.. you can even deinstall dbus and still use upstart.. RHEL7 made me furious (NetworkManager by default... ) but I'm not used to it so it may be just missing experience.
      - mverwijs 12y ago
        firewalld for Ubuntu in the 'universe' repo. Don't use it. It's horrible, unstable, slows network speed and is impossible to debug.
tbrock 12y ago
I've never had a problem with Arch linux. Why not run a stable rolling release instead?
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  Debian unstable pretty much is a stable rolling release. Don't let the "unstable" tag fool you, stability is a relative term. The author was describing a community problem, not a methodological one. It could also be a technical one, Linux seems to have gotten an order of magnitude more complex in recent years, whereas user patience has similarly fallen. It's easy to imagine that people with the kinds of problems described just dealing with it rather than troubleshooting and sharing what they learned.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - spain 12y ago
    > Don't let the "unstable" tag fool you, stability is a relative term. I don't see why people throw this around a lot, it really isn't. Most recent example I can remember is when Debian decided to remove NVIDIA drivers from Testing and you end up with a nonfunctional desktop [0]. [0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=755020 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=755020
    - icebraining 12y ago
      In my experience, "testing" is a lot more unstable than "unstable" itself, at least when upgrading. I haven't had any major problems running Sid in the last four or five years.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    > Debian unstable pretty much is a stable rolling release. I'd say testing is. Unstable is not supposed to be normally used except for debugging stuff.
AceJohnny2 12y ago
I've been having similar issues and thoughts. I'm not a greybeard by any reasonable measure, having started using Slackware in '99-'00, quickly switched to Debian, and never looked back. I think it all stems from D-Bus, which has become the primary mechanism of command and control on desktop Linux. To address the OP's initial issue of user mounting disks, it's managed via Udisks, which is mostly accessible via D-Bus. I have trouble reconciling Unix's notion of "everything is a file" and how a modern Linux desktop operates via D-Bus. Don't get me wrong, I think D-Bus very powerful and flexible. I just wish it was easier to explore and test via file-based tools. Maybe a FUSE layer? Anyhow, if the OP thinks that Linux was once "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized", I can only laugh at his rose-colored glasses. Linux is and always was a cobbled-together mess of orthogonal paradigms (no better illustrated than by the design philosophy clash of XWindows vs Unix). Maybe earlier Linux was simpler because it was still playing catch-up with other Unix clones out there. Nowadays it's leading the pack in innovation, and so things are changing, and fast. I don't know if documentation really is worse now that it used to be, I'm afraid to fall in the same nostalgia fallacy. Ultimately, I see this rant as nothing other than "things are different now and I'm scared and confused". Not that I don't sympathize, being in roughly the same place. However, I decided I can't stop technology, and sucked it up and sharpened my google-fu.
- accurrent 12y ago
  DBus (And modules that plug into it i.e. Bluez) actually need much better docs. It would ease a lot of things out.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    Which in turn requires someone to actually write them. Which is a problem ALL open source software faces. Freedesktop are better then most at it.
- geofft 12y ago
  File-based tools is an interesting question. D-Bus is hierarchical, but it's also strongly typed, so you'd have to encode stuff as text, and when you get the serialization wrong, write(2) can't give you a useful error message. But maybe it'd be useful for reading and monitoring.... imagine if you could `sudo tail -f /dbus/org/freedesktop/UDisks2/Manager` or something, and see all calls to it. I've been using D-Feet and dbus-monitor, which seem to be solid enough. D-Bus does have extensive introspection. But yeah, in general the state of D-Bus tooling is miserable. Part of it is how verbose it is — which is fine for compiled software, but for interactive use, it really makes you miss the "creat" and "umount" school of thought. Part of it is that there aren't great introspection tools at the command line.
guylhem 12y ago
Relevant quotes for TLDR: "It worked, but I don’t know why" "I don’t even know where to start looking." "That’s about as comprehensible as Vorlon poetry to me" Potentially non politically-correct answer to the article title: maybe it's not Linux who lost its ways, but some old-time users? (who forget the beginner's spirit to look for answers on forums, manuals, to try to understand before casting a judgment) Linux has always innovated around the paradigms, taking inspiration from everywhere. It was never "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized". It has always been messy, but in a good way. When I first discovered linux, I had to adapt to all these new things. That was in 1992. When I decided to use again a modern linux distribution on my laptop in 2014, I had to adapt - again. I have no doubt I will have to keep adapting in my lifetime. The error would be to consider that the "right ways" are fixed, and that innovation should be stopped. There will be many new things, some will be kept, some will be discarded. Change is the only thing one can constantly bet on.
- paulannesley 12y ago
  Some other relevant quotes: “For years, I used to run Debian sid (unstable) on all my personal machines.” “Sometimes things broke. But it wasn’t a big deal, because I could always get in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was.” “I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… I found a bug report of this exact problem — Debian #760281, but it’s marked fixed, and nobody replied to my comment that I’m still seeing it.” … doesn't sound like somebody “who forget the beginner's spirit to look for answers on forums [etc]”
  - guylhem 12y ago
    Really? He says he doesn't want to look anymore, then that it's too complicated. He mustn't have searched really hard, or he would have found it's udisk job. So why couldn't he find it? It's not that a current linux system is N times more complex than the sid he used to run, it's that things changed: as was properly noted by someone else on this thread, dbus was one of these important changes. Now it's systemd. Next it'll be wayland or something else. You're correct in that he still tries to do some search, but he expects things to be like they were in the past, where he "could always get in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was", i.e. to be just as efficient, without learning the new tricks! The beginner's spirit is to want to learn new tricks, looking for answers and being really insistent in understanding better, instead of stopping after a google search and a comment on a bug report. As said in another post I loved for it straight-to-the-fact comment, "In contrast, to 10 years ago, I do not like hours of debugging to get USB working anymore. It was fascinating then". It's not more complex. A Linux system is a time investment, where knowledge has a half line. If you no longer can or wants to commit to learn new things at the same pace, but still want to fix things as before, maybe it's not the best idea to stick to Linux. IHMO, the author would be best served to try say FreeBSD, where things seem to change at a slower pace. But he would still have to learn this new thing, and I strongly believe he doesn't want that - just a system as before, without any changes. Ain't gonna happen.
geofft 12y ago
If you're running an up-to-date GNOME/KDE/etc. desktop, and not running systemd, for better or worse you're using a less-supported configuration. There's going to be other stuff that systemd will break, but in the long run you're better off using the upstream-recommended configuration. That aside... I think it's pretty clear that modern Linux is not losing its way. If you go back even five years, and complain that your latest pre-release version of Debian won't suspend properly because it needs a password, you'll get laughed at by all the people who try to suspend their laptop and have it crash in some way or another. We're now in the uncanny valley of software progress. If suspend weren't working, you'd feel hardcore and learn it and deal with it. If it worked perfectly, then you wouldn't think about it. (What was the last time you thought about how OS X or Windows does suspend, or handles permissions on mounted drives, or whatever? When was the last time you read a manpage about launchd or one of its helpers? Hint, the manpages are useless.) If it has almost all the complexity to work perfectly, you get neither of these benefits. But it would help things immensely if someone were to document all this, from a busy sysadmin's perspective, not from an upstream developer's. There are occasionally manpages, but they're written like git's. Lennart's "systemd for administrators" series is a start, but that's more of a pitch for why you should want to build your new systems on it, and it only covers systemd. Docs on how to figure things out when they go wrong would be most useful.
- xorcist 12y ago
  > What was the last time you thought about how OS X or Windows does suspend Every. Freaking. Time. That is, since an employer equipped me with a cheap Dell. It looks like it suspends, but one time out of ten it'll come straight out of sleep and cook in my bag. I've only used Thinkpads, with Linux, for my own work before, and they suspend multiple times a day without a problem ever. So this was a big a-ha moment for me regarding Linux usability complaints, to see what it is that people actually try to do.
  - weavie 12y ago
    You are not alone. I also have a work provided Dell that I have to shutdown unless I want to use my work bag to keep me warm on the walk home. We have another Toshiba at home running windows that will at random times of the night just spin up its hard drives and perhaps throw out the odd notification sound before spinning down again. It seems for windows suspend is not really go to sleep until you are woken up again by a human.
Scarbutt 12y ago
Another thing that bother me in Debian was subpixel-hinting and font-smoothing, it wasn't enable by default (or it wasn't capable and adding a font config half fixed it), is this still an issue in Jessie? That was really bad UX.
- Luyt 12y ago
  I think that had to do with some patents on the truetype font hinting interpreter in Freetype.
  - lloeki 12y ago
    IIRC those patents are related to MS ClearType and have expired (but my memory may serve me wrong)
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Some of them have expired, but there are still patents related to subpixel font hinting and layout which won't expire before 2018.
aceperry 12y ago
It's funny to hear the the name Debian associated with the label "modern." I don't mean to diss Debian, it's a solid distro and has a lot going for it, but it is seriously behind all of the cutting edge distros that I'm used to. Personally, I enjoy new technologies and systems in linux. I used to run Gentoo and other distros that constantly brought out cutting edge software. And I'm used to somewhat alpha/beta quality software that mostly works. And because it works well compared to my experience with windows software, so I wasn't too bothered. Maybe it's because my background is in hardware, but all of the new software had always taken awhile for me to grasp and appreciate. But in the linux community, I've always been able to find info and solve problems that I've come across and learn about the system. Windows problems usually can be solved because large masses of people tried so many things, but I wouldn't get any enlightenment about computers or software when fixing Windows problems. Maybe my world view has been skewed by comparing linux to windows, but I've always felt that I'm able to learn and understand more with linux vs Windows.
- pseudonom- 12y ago
  > it is seriously behind all of the cutting edge distros that I'm used to. Are you familiar with branches beyond Stable? I switched from Arch to Debian Unstable (which uses a rolling release) and find their edges to be about equally sharp.
  - aceperry 12y ago
    I haven't touched Debian in a long time, and I didn't know that unstable was a rolling release. Thanks for the info, I might look into it someday.
    - seba_dos1 12y ago
      Unstable was always a rolling release, it gets just frozen for some time before each stable release because the process of getting a package in testing requires it to be in unstable first.
- shmerl 12y ago
thekevan 12y ago
I don't think speaking about "modern Linux" and then referencing one user's experience with one distribution is indicative of the entire movement.
- regularfry 12y ago
  Are there distros where his complaints about lack of transparency, documentation and conceptual clarity don't apply?
swhipple 12y ago
I used to be able to say Linux was clean, logical, well put-together, and organized. I don't think this was ever really the case, but I do think software is evolving to meet the list of constantly updating use cases. Of course managing one network interface with all your peripherals connected at startup required less complexity. But if your target audience also has use cases of wanting their USB drive to "just work" when plugged in, being able to connect to a new wifi access point under their normal user, etc., you will want some extra layers of abstraction that aren't available if you limit yourself to FDs and Unix-style permissions. In addition, some software is cross-platform and doesn't always care about maintaining consistency with the conventions on a single platform.
- moe 12y ago
  you will want some extra layers of abstraction that aren't available if you limit yourself to FDs and Unix-style permissions. I have yet to see a single case where FDs and unix-permissions wouldn't have been perfectly sufficient. I think the real problem is that we are facing a generation of developers who never learned how to properly use them.
  - swhipple 12y ago
    There are cases where you want to be notified when an event occurs or the success of your application's action (in more detail than the error codes from a write(2) to a FD). You can solve the problem by using socket FDs, but you have to roll your own format for registration, communication, error checking, making sure the appropriate applications can read, etc. I think many developers would prefer using DBus as an abstraction for these types of problems.
    - moe 12y ago
      Why not a library that speaks a simple[1] line based protocol over pipes and/or sockets? Or even just plain old files? That's how unix used to work before the desktop people took over. [1] Yes, DBus is "sort of" line based. But from all I've heard it's the opposite of simple and... well, let's just say people don't seem to have much good to say about it.
sandGorgon 12y ago
for everyone wanting to use a modern day Debian - I recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 "Betsy" [1] http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/02/about-betsy/ http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/02/about-betsy/
qznc 12y ago
I think it is a old-timer issue. I'm using Linux on my desktop for ca 15 years. I also had a mysterious permission problem after my last Ubuntu upgrade. In contrast, to 10 years ago, I do not like hours of debugging to get USB working anymore. It was fascinating then. For the record, my permission problem was solved via "sudo pam-auth-update --force". Thanks Arch Wiki for giving me the crucial hint.
- andreaferretti 12y ago
  I am having a similar problem (password sometimes required to shutdown or mount disks) with my latest Ubuntu, so I would appreciate a little more detail. Do you happen to have a link to the arch wiki entry you are mentioning? What was exactly your problem?
  - qznc 12y ago
    I had problems with shutdown, hibernation, USB sticks, wifi notifications. Here is a very similar launchpad bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pam/+bug/1317518 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pam/+bug/1317518 As in the bug report, the problem was not replicable. While my Thinkpad had these issues, my desktop was fine. Unfortunately, my notes say nothing about the Arch wiki. Maybe I confused that with another issue.
    - andreaferretti 12y ago
      Ok, thank you for the information. I will try to work from here :-)
- wvh 12y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly on the old-timer issue (ca 17 years). Too much work, children and other responsibilities to justify hacking hours on the OS itself. I think the current state of Linux – especially on the desktop – is in a state of flux, not to call it disarray, and it makes me grumpy that after all these years of hacking, debugging, patching and bug reporting, things end up pretty usable, and then "they" manage to break some of the most basic functionality again. Only this time, it's gotten a lot harder to make sense of the whole mess...
aosmith 12y ago
I was a debian / ubuntu user fro many years. I switched to fedora / gnome when unity started to become standard and have never regretted it.
- teddyh 12y ago
  Don’t blame Debian for Unity, please. Sometimes, saying “Debian/Ubunty” is like saying “C/C++”. They are separate things and must be treated separately.
rlpb 12y ago
The traditional user/group system may be simple, but it is limited. For example, it fails when you have a multi-user desktop system when some people login in locally, and some people login in remotely. What should the permissions on on the camera be? And what about hotplugged USB devices? It's no longer possible to have a fixed device node with fixed permissions and fixed user group membership. The same applies to suspend. The local user perhaps should or should not be able to suspend the machine. Presumably remote users should not be able to do so at all. What about wireless network connectivity as the machine moves? Who should have permission to manipulate that? If we did not have more a more complex dynamic permission system[1], some would be saying that modern Linux is outdated and unable to cope with the more modern reality of much more dynamic needs like this. Instead, the article seems to be saying that it's become too complicated. We can't have it both ways. [1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/multiseat/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/multiseat/
- zurn 12y ago
  A fragile and too complex to troubleshoot system is an unreasonable tradeoff to support these niche use cases. Find better solutions or live with the old level of service. I suspect the PR cost of having imperfect multiseat support is insignificant.
- pmontra 12y ago
  I wonder how often it happens that people connects remotely to a Linux PC with a camera. When I do it is because I ssh to another laptop of mine, maybe to shut it down after I lost the desktop (maybe the graphic card crashed). OK, we should support as many use cases as possible but it could be acceptable to tell people that if they want to setup a multiseat machine shared with strangers (students at school? They can get very creative) they disable mics, cameras and don't plugin dvds and usb drives. Servers usually don't have any of them. Finally, if you give somebody a sudo you accept that s/he can shutdown the system remotely, normal case for a server. I also wonder how other OSes handle that, I'm looking at Windows and OSX. With VNC/RDP/Teamviewer/etc you get full access to the Windows desktop and all devices. I guess OSX has the same, plus sshd. So, maybe supporting a fringe use case is making more common use cases more inconvenient?
peteretep 12y ago
Is there someway we could just prefix these with [systemd-rant]?
baumbart 12y ago
Linux does not have lost its way. It has truly followed its way, and that's what you got. It was always clear (at least for me and many other people), that if you don't design a system but put it together step by step, you will end up with a mess. I have always been on the NetBSD side, and it's bright over here. Even FreeBSD suffers from similar problems as Linux, trying to get new features fast. That's just how software development works (or does not), you have to follow proper design to get something for the future. Linux will always be stuck in past design decisions, and in order to stay compatible, things will need be become more and more complex, until they break.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- icebraining 12y ago
  The whole point of systemd was/is to design a coherent system that integrates all the core parts. It's also what caused all the problems for OP, unlike the "step by step" approach that was working fine for him.
  - VLM 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect
- feld 12y ago
  What new features is FreeBSD trying to get fast?
fit2rule 12y ago
I tend to agree with this article in some ways .. I've been using Linux since the days of the minix-list, and have over the years been bothered by exactly the sorts of things that are described here .. it seems every year/new release of my preferred distro (Ubuntu Studio) I have to re-learn things that are not well explained or documented. So I've just kind of gotten used to using the source. Seriously! If I find something I don't get, I build the package from source, and debug it. This is really the only way I've been able to survive as long without tearing my hair out in frustration over the years. Its a glib response to the problem, but actually it really works.
Hz8NSD 12y ago
The guys who capable of improving modern Linux desktop are using Mac. So we are losing momentum in Linux desktop targeted software or facility. They are developing in Mac but targeting server software or devops tools. So pretty modern, hot and bleeding edge things are happening in there but not desktop area. GNOME - Always doing some experiment. No application. Just changing shell. No reliable usability. Call me when they are done. One good thing about GNOME is they care about beauty and elegance. KDE - They just don't care about beauty of ... anything. But their applications are freaking featureful, reliable and developed by people who actually using it. I can feel they are dogfooding. I saw KF5 screenshots. They still don't care about beauty. ElementaryOS(Pantheon) - Better than GNOME. They are having and developing actual application like geary and midori. You can feel they are actually dogfooding in contrast to GNOME couterpart. Unity - I like Unity itself. Very long time user. But Canonical lied to us it's stable but actually alpha stage. One more bad thing is it smells vendor lock-in pretty much. Anyway pretty usable and has big ecosystem(community + vendor). XMonad - At first time, it just looks like another tiling window manager. More I use it, it feels like 'custom desktop construction kit' if you don't mind learning about some haskell. As you all know, 'kit' is about fun and learning more than actual result. So I'm doing still this dumb like window manager ...
- andor 12y ago
  ElementaryOS(Pantheon) - Better than GNOME. They are having and developing actual application like geary and midori. You can feel they are actually dogfooding in contrast to GNOME couterpart. Are you trolling? Geary is a GTK3 application. It's great that people from Elementary are helping out, but basically it's made for GNOME, using GNOME's toolkit, object system and programming language. Midori is part of XFCE, and also uses GTK and Vala. The GNOME project of course has their own browser, called Web (previously Epiphany). http://www.gnome.org/applications/ http://www.gnome.org/applications/
  - mverwijs 12y ago
    According to the Midori website (http://midori-browser.org/about/ http://midori-browser.org/about/) it aligns with the XFCE philosophy, which is a far cry from 'being part of XFCE'. Instead, it states it is the default browser for 'ElementaryOS', so the assumption of GP is understandable.
jkot 12y ago
Jessie has not been released yet... And if you like good documentation, you should go with Redhat anyway.
geppetto 12y ago
This classifies as another useless systemd rant. Everybody switched to that ages ago. Can every distro be wrong? Anyway, I've been using Debian Sid since 2000 and, for what it's worth, it "just works" on my hardware now and it's much easier to install/manage than, say, five years ago. Then again, if you mess with the default configuration you're looking for trouble and should accept that problems are harder to fix for corner cases.
- brusch64 12y ago
  Well it may be a bad time to start with Debian unstable, when they are switching to systemd (or are in the process of doing it). I remember updating to Debian testing (never had the nerves for unstable) when they switched to Gnome3 and I experienced bugs (and really nasty ones). When they make big changes it is going to break things. If you don't want to have things broken, either use a stable distribution, don't upgrade for some time or live with it. Right now I am using Arch Linux mostly - but I've heard the change to systemd had some rough edges for Arch Linux too (didn't use it at this time). I can say that I am completely fine with systemd on Arch Linux and I don't understand the big problem some people have with it (on a philosphical level I do understand them, but not on a pragmatic level).
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  The distros were all wrong when they adopted hacky sysvinit configurations with things like Makefile-style concurrency, initscript headers parsed by a preprocessor just so they could get some half-assed dependency system, not modularizing their common initscript functions in library files and instead rewriting everything from scratch every script, so on and so forth. And then ignoring all the alternative init systems besides systemd and Upstart that were around well before. I'm not saying they're wrong this time, but there's no reason why not. The haphazard state of the Linux desktop that the original author laments over might be indication they're wrong in some places.
rian 12y ago
I don't understand technical Linux users who use GNOME/KDE. They are not designed to be hackable nor modular. They are intended for enterprise users who want something Windows-ish. Their core contributors aren't volunteers/users, they're people who are paid by Red Hat and SuSE. If you're a technical user/programmer and you want something more minimal, simple, hackable, then don't use GNOME/KDE. Use xmonad or dwm, they are written by programmers for programmers. They are literally only window managers, nothing else. Only what you put in your .Xsession is what gets started when you run startx. Sure, you don't get a file manager or auto-mounting of usb drives out of the box, that's because no sane programmer would want that by default. If you are one of the few that do, then install udisks and configure it the way you like (e.g. mount specific usb drives to specific locations with specific permissions). As a programmer you'll ultimately be happier. I promise. Debian doesn't get in the way. It fully supports customization at this level. Take advantage of it!
- bkor 12y ago
  I didn't know I'm supposed to be paid by Red Hat or SuSE? :-P I've been helping out on volunteer basis at least for the last 10 years. Seriously: Red Hat is a very big company and they provide loads of resources to GNOME for no apparent reason. Red Hat also expands their commitment in this. Still, there are loads of volunteers. Suggest to talk to people at the GNOME stand at various conferences. Or maybe you meant developer instead of contributor. In which case I suggest to read the membership applications to the GNOME foundation. There's more to contributing than just being a developer. See ttps://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/ for the archives.
  - rian 12y ago
    Kudos to you sir for contributing! By "core contributor" I did mean developer but really my point was that there is an explicit gap in the roles of the people involved in these platforms. You have a small group of people explicitly focused on development, and a much larger group of people explicitly focused on usage. Windows and Mac OS X are in the same situation. The best strategy for the people developing these platforms is to focus on a generally applicable UI to accomodate the large heterogeneous group. Ultimately this will result in the platform being more omakase (if you will) and less likely to be everything for everybody, though a decent default. I don't mean to say that this is a fault with GNOME/KDE themselves but more of a likely unavoidable consequence when you build a product for a large general audience. If you're a programmer this is really annoying. When something is broken or annoying to you, you have the ability to fix it but because there is so much organization/process/design around these systems, the activation energy is too high. But if you're a programmer you don't have to deal with this. You can just use a simpler system meant for hackability, a system where the users are the developers. I see nothing wrong with big vertically integrated Linux systems like GNOME/KDE and in fact I'm glad they exist. If they did not, I would not be able to genuinely recommend Linux to my non-technical friends. Apple has shown the vertical integration is an efficient and successful way to design products for large groups of people, not unsurprising that those systems are mimicking that.
orbitingpluto 12y ago
The most productive environment I've ever used is Gnome 2 using Compiz. It was incredibly easy to flip between windows. Compiz has since been abandoned and only the most die-hard fans try to fudge it into working on modern systems. I gave up after Debian Squeeze and just started using tmux instead. I felt that Linux was losing it's way after that. Eventually I stumbled across Cinnamon (and/or Mate) with hotcorners and tmux. It doesn't have the previous configurability but it's still pretty good. The reason people held onto XP for so long was that it just worked well and it was consistent. Many of the Linux GUI people should take that to heart. Instead they always seem to try to be in catchup or trying to surpass Windows. Gnome 3 and KDE 3+ have been so very unwieldy, resource hungry, or lacking in features. They've been the Windows 8 equivalent of the Linux desktop. Even to this day, most people don't like the Metro style interface (unless they are playing with it on a phone). I'm blown away by how difficult it is becoming to use Windows. I will go into the Metro style settings and see that a configuration option is not present and then have to go into the good ol' control panel. Or vice versa. I'm getting increasingly drawn towards using Powershell by default so I don't have to backtrack. Windows has been trying to force new "UI paradigms" to sell more copies of Windows. Linux should realize it doesn't need to adopt the new and flashy... unless it really is an improvement.
- kefka 12y ago
  Peculiar. I'm running Compiz on a 14.04 XUbuntu setup. It was a bit weird to set up, but after changing the window manager, I was able to get up Compiz running with most of the bells and whistles. I did notice the 3d windows does make some horrid tearing artifacts on rotate. Turning that off; it gives me the nice 8 desktops I'm used to. (Have Thinkpad T61, bound rotate cube keys as above the arrow keys)
- brusch64 12y ago
  I think KDE is as XP-y as it gets. No big frill, but you can configure nearly everything you wish. Ever tried KDE ?
  - Zardoz84 12y ago
    The only problem of KDE is the default configuration. Every time that I install it on an machine, must hurry to change mouse to double click. Everything else is enough good to use it without changing/tweaking it.
godzilla82 12y ago
Is Vorlon poetry a typo for vogon poetry
- shdon 12y ago
  Vorlons are aliens from Babylon 5.
  - chrisan 12y ago
    I was also confused by Vorlon as Vogon Poetry is "a thing" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon#Poetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon#Poetry Maybe if he used Klingon as "alien poetry starting with a V" instantly makes me think of HHGTG ..anywho :)
    - cwyers 12y ago
      Right, Vorlons aren't known for their poetry, Vogons are.
Iv 12y ago
Linux distributions (because this is actually what you are talking about) have not lost their ways but theirs founders. Face it, there are only so many years you can work on the same issues for every new model of laptops. People get tired, people retire from projects. But it is still open source. You are right that many behaviors (of Debian, apparently the focus of your article) suck. Well, jump in!
yuvadam 12y ago
I didn't grow up on Linux, but rather was accustomed to OSs that do everything for me: first Windows, then Mac. And when those have failed me, by feeling too complex and not giving me enough control as a power user, I discovered Arch Linux. As opposed to other distros, Arch is the only user-centric distribution out there. When something goes wrong, I don't have to deal with "where does this come from", because the distro itself doesn't interfere with anything. It's either a bad config on my part, or an upstream bug. Upstream bugs are fixed immediately due to the rolling release nature of Arch. And configuring my system is extremely easy, since 95% of the problems are solved by looking at the wiki. I won't bash on other distros - to each her own. But I urge any power user that wants full control over their system to try Arch. It's truly another class of Linux.
- philtar 12y ago
  All/vast majority of linux distros give you the same amount of control. The only difference is that most of the others customize a bit (debian is supposedly just setting sane defaults). Never in my life have I had to work ON my computer as opposed to doing work using my computer as much as I have using Arch.
  - qbrass 12y ago
    >Never in my life have I had to work ON my computer as opposed to doing work using my computer as much as I have using Arch. I'd say FOR instead of ON, but otherwise, that was my impression of Arch.
- lmm 12y ago
  I was a similar user, but lately the mainstream of Linux is forcing these monolithic, fragile systems on every use. I switched to FreeBSD a few years ago and haven't looked back - it has the same advantages you describe, only more so.
bkor 12y ago
Reading the article, this is not about systemd. Debian wants to offer a choice between systemd and something else. So they have things like systemd-shim, cgmanager, etc. He says he's using systemd, but while trying to figure out where his problem is, he's seeing references to systemd-shim, cgmanager and so on. Those things are not systemd, nor do you need them if you use systemd. Offering the alternative makes finding solutions to his problems more complex and confusing.
wvh 12y ago
I don't like me-too complaining, but I'm in pretty much the exact same situation: I've been running Linux since the nineties, and the last months I've been having problems with Debian that make my systems unusable and that I just don't know how to solve. Random hang-ups on right-click (KDE and DBus), screen blanking every few seconds (power saving bugs), screen corruption and windows disappearing (graphics bugs), daemons not starting because of partition layout (systemd related). I'm actually somewhat worried about the current state (especially on the desktop). It never was a big deal to me that some flashy functionality or hardware support took longer to show up in Linux and *BSD, because once it arrived, it usually worked well and was stable. Now however there are a lot of annoying complex bugs that are hard to trace and don't seem to be actively analysed and fixed. It's not a good sign that as a hacker I don't know where to begin to properly track some of these bugs myself, and the people who receive the bug reports don't seem to have a clue either.
stinos 12y ago
Here’s the crux of the issue: I don’t even know where to start looking. I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… I found a bug report of this exact problem — Debian #760281, but it’s marked fixed, and nobody replied to my comment that I’m still seeing it. If this is the crux for the OP I don't really see how this is for Modern Linux. Maybe it's just me (though I doubt it) but what is described here is basically how working with linux (and software in general to a lesser extent) has been for me as long as I've used it. Small annoying problems here and there which take quite some amount of time to find a fix for, if any. And after a while if there are too many of them it becomes irritating and you start a blog post to nag about it :]
- Arnt 12y ago
  He's nagging that modern linux isn't like old linux, because the old debugging techniques don't work. I feel the same way. Maybe modern linux isn't a bad thing viewed neutrally, but it's not the same thing as the one I love.
janjes 12y ago
This is not only debian I have had this error on one ubuntu machine but multiple times, not at boot but after a few days of use I guess also please call is gnu linux nog only linux. linux is a very small part of your operating system
sspiff 12y ago
Any blog post title which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. - Adapted from Betteridge's law of headlines [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
reacweb 12y ago
I think the main point of this article is that man pages are incomplete on linux. When I have to explain some unix arcane to a colleague, I often start by saying that man is the most important command in unix. But I am always obliged to say that on linux, it is often incomplete. When I learned unix 20 years ago on sunOS, man pages were complete. It has never been the case on linux. I think man pages should give all the assumptions about the system that may someday break or give pointers to documentations. I have often to use strace to analyse issues. When dbus starts to be involved, I am often lost.
brudgers 12y ago
I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… Googling to troubleshoot Linux sucks. Part of the suck is that Google's page rank favors old pages. Part of it sucks because it's keyword finding favors forum threads where the terms are in someone's signature. And part of the suck isn't Google's fault because GNU/Linux documentation is dense to the point of opacity. It is great for professional standings and not so great for amateur ones. Worst of all is that FOSS documentation has a lot of "not my problem" links. If a piece of Software is doing something bad to Firefox it's documentation will mention Firefox and link to the Mozilla homepage...so to speak.
transfire 12y ago
The ultimate problem is money and leadership. Open source lacks too much of both. In the end, proprietary and vertical systems tend to dominate. Interestingly, it looks like we are the verge of a new explosion in such system thanks to mobile. Besides the dominate Android, iOS and Windows, new systems are on the horizon: Tizen, FirefoxOS, webOS, Sailfish and others.
legulere 12y ago
I have the feeling that it's that way because the usecases today have changed while the fundamental parts of the system haven't. Unix was designed in the 60s and 70s and everything that came later was bolted on what was already existing. This includes stuff that's standard unix behaviour. For instance abusing the user system to gain better isolation of daemons. This all has to be done to stay compatible with previous systems and raises complexity.
ppurka 12y ago
One of the sources of this problem is the relentless experimenting that has been ongoing since about 2007-2008. First, there was pmount and hal introduced to take care this automounting, and as soon as this was in a working state, it got replaced by devicekit. Soon after, devicekit was abandoned in favor of a combination of udev, consolekit, policykit. Then then policykit got replaced by polkit. And then systemd was introduced and consolekit got abandoned. And each time the documentation gets worse (except for systemd, since the authors try to justify their choices). Overall, it has been a sequence of constant rewriting, and I don't see an end to it. People who have been using rolling distributions like Gentoo and administer their own machines are the most affected. If one is not using the whole systemd to major DE (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc) stack, it is arduous to set up a mounting system which always works. Usually, vfat external disks tend to be immediately writable on mount. Move over to exfat, mtp, ext[234], or another other native filesystem and it is an exercise in exasperation to get them to mount as read-write as an unprivileged user, or even mount at all as an unprivileged user (see https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15875 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15875). The only decent program that I have found that works quite reliably is udevil.
- zanny 12y ago
  I recently redid my Arch install and I'm mounting usb drives on a user account thats just in the wheel group no problem with pretty much any filesystem (ufs, ntfs, fat32, btrfs, ext4, f2fs). I agree that the rewrites all the time were annoying, but I have a hard time seeing systemd developers rewriting the same part of their project over and over now. For better or worse systemd should at least slow churn.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Basically because udevil don't buy into the whole "fine grained security" wankery that seems to be coming out of the corporate/government world. It may well have started with SELinux, and as best i can tell Fedora has always been at the forefront of pushing it.
- TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
  Well, since before that, really.. I can remember the early attempts at automounting back around '98 or '99, IRC. Previously: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
warfangle 12y ago
I've never been able to reliably use debian without a /lot/ of frustrating configuration. I'm not a bored high school student anymore. Back when I used sarge, it was okay - there was some configuration I had to do to get X working, and at one point I had a pretty sweet custom kernel build on a laptop that extended its battery life 35% over windows. Decided to spin up a VM to use debian as a dev environment again recently, and -- well -- after three hours of futzing with it I deleted the VM and booted Ubuntu instead. Had issues getting virtualbox extensions working; some others that I can't remember.
marrs 12y ago
I think this is a direct consequence of the commercialisation of the Linux desktop by Canonical, Red Hat, et al, but especially Canonical. The amateurs were pushed out and the professionals swarmed in, and now the requirement was to bring more "converts" from Windows. A number of bad decisions started to get made as these sponsors became frustrated with the low rate of uptake. One of them, I'm sure, was the perceived need to keep up with the competition, essentially getting into an arms race with the strategy (if there was one) of outdoing Microsoft. A good example of this is the absurd introduction of PulseAudio, which introduced features that nobody asked for while simultaneously breaking audio for a large number of users including myself. All because a similar (but working) feature was introduced in Vista.
- jerf 12y ago
  What I can't figure out is how this actually helps that goal anyhow. My fight with policykit (or polkit or whichever the hell one it was) is that with XMonad, I couldn't get network manager to work properly, even when I ran it and its configurator as root. For my own desktop, I'd be happy with either of "tell policykit that 'jerf' can do anything" or "tell policykit that 'root' can do anything", literally the simplest possible configuration. There appears to be (at least at the time) dick-all documentation on policykit, excepting magic invocations on the Ubuntu forums to do this or that. Reading the configuration files appears to suggest the primary use case for policy kit is to work in large installs like a university lab where the permissions are being portioned out in a highly granular manner via third-party authentication services. If this isn't true, don't blame me for coming to the wrong conclusion. I do not give a shit about any of this. I'm on a single-user machine and the one user can do anything it damned well pleases (to a first approximation). But there is absolutely no clue I could find about how to accomplish this. By just fucking around and turning off permission checking in every manner I could work out, I eventually got myself into a position where "root" was capable of adding new network, but my normal user is only permitted to switch between existing networks. (Incidentally, read that sentence again, it's actually quite surprising. The result of what I did should have been to let everybody do everything, right? No. Why not? Hell if I know.) This was enough for me to declare victory and move on, but it really isn't a victory. And the point of me posting all this isn't so much to bitch; that was just a bonus extra. The point is, if this is a "professional" solution to the problem of system permissions, I have no idea how it meets that goal. There seems to be no way for the aforementioned University administrators to learn how to properly configure it for their use cases, no logging to help them get it right. Putting on my sysadmin hat, I'd never trust this system any further than I could throw it, it's so opaque. I would get a bug report that Bob was able to use the video camera when he shouldn't be able to, and I'd push a fix, but I'd have virtually confidence that I'd actually solved the problem, to say nothing of continuously wondering exactly what my permission scheme was permitting to people. To me, it looks worse than a closed source solution... at least the closed source has a support line you could call.
harrystone 12y ago
This will continue as long as so many people want linux to be a free version of Windows or Mac OS X, instead of a free PC unix.
Gracana 12y ago
I don't think this is anything new. I've certainly never felt that Linux was "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized." Linux distros are a mish-mash of stuff of various levels of quality built by people with different goals, put together by volunteers into something that mostly works in the more-commonly-tested areas. Back when I played around with my OS as a hobby I was able to keep up with most of the issues and changes, but without investing that kind of time, I don't have much choice but to leave things at their defaults, install updates, and hope for the best. Things weren't better before, I was just more involved, and I wonder if the same is true for the author.
mister_m 12y ago
I think I am going to switch to plan 9.
vasilakisfil 12y ago
I completely agree, unfortunately. Still fighting not to get Mac for my job (programmer). But I don't know for how long.

282 points by fpgeek 12y ago

For simplicity and clarity of design, may I suggest FreeBSD? Though I am not sure I would want to run Gnome or any of those crazy things -- I run Joe's Window Manager, jwm, because all I need from a window manager is to manage windows, not handle file types or show me a directory tree or emulate the the MS task bar or whatever.

dima55 12y ago
FreeBSD will not help him since "linux" is not his problem at all. If he didn't run all the fancy things, and did what you do, then his problems would be somewhere between non-existent and clearly-debuggable.
- mverwijs 12y ago
  This had me laughing. Not the FreeBSD bit. That bit is serious. The 'didn't run all the fancy things' bit. That was funny. The problem is: in Linux, pretty soon, you cannot do without the fancy bits anymore. I run a bunch of servers. Servers need a firewall. Nothing fancy, just iptables. Right? I'm running Ubuntu servers. They have 'firewalld' installed. Firewalld uses dark magic to manipulate iptables and ip routes. Oh, it's all great when it works, for as long as it works. You can simple open up a port by issuing a firewalld-cmd command. Until you can't. Until firewalld-cmd says it can't connect to firewalld even though it thinks it is running. And firewalld can't restart because it thinks the configuration files are wrong. I'm not a Linux newbie by any standard, but I could not solve this problem. After restarting firewalld, all the routes on the machine were gone. And thank god for iLO. This is on a production server providing secondary services to 200.000 users. Soon after, I found similar issues on our loadbalancers, webservers, database servers, all running firewalld. There was no other solution other than to reboot the server. I tried debugging firewalld and ran into (no particular order) apparmor, dbus, python, firewalld-cmd, firewalld, network-manager and libvirtd. No where was a hint to be found of why firewalld didn't work. I don't consider this to be anything fancy. This is supposed to be a simple wrapper around iptables. It is supposed to 'just work'. It is supposed to leave clear logs about what it is trying to do in /var/log/syslog. Sure, I'm getting old and cranky. But I'm really tired of having to get called out of my bed at 03:00 am because of this 'innovation' that tries to solve edgecases. And solves them badly.
  - VLM 12y ago
    linux doesn't eat its own dogfood anymore. This would never be tolerated if the devs actually used their product. Its all about serving the imaginary theoretical market researched noob (-only) user of gnome mobile phones that don't exist and everyone else has to go away because they don't matter anymore. To freebsd! Things actually work, there. Its the universal OS of the 10s just like Debian was the universal OS of the 90s/00s but now is just a gnome bootloader for ubuntu.
  - nisa 12y ago
    Huh? I never saw something like firewalld on Ubuntu? There is ufw but it's not enabled by default.. Looks like you mean Fedora/RHEL7? Ubuntu on the server (14.04) is quite okay in my experience.. you can even deinstall dbus and still use upstart.. RHEL7 made me furious (NetworkManager by default... ) but I'm not used to it so it may be just missing experience.
    - mverwijs 12y ago
      firewalld for Ubuntu in the 'universe' repo. Don't use it. It's horrible, unstable, slows network speed and is impossible to debug.

tbrock 12y ago

I've never had a problem with Arch linux. Why not run a stable rolling release instead?

vinceguidry 12y ago
Debian unstable pretty much is a stable rolling release. Don't let the "unstable" tag fool you, stability is a relative term. The author was describing a community problem, not a methodological one. It could also be a technical one, Linux seems to have gotten an order of magnitude more complex in recent years, whereas user patience has similarly fallen. It's easy to imagine that people with the kinds of problems described just dealing with it rather than troubleshooting and sharing what they learned.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- spain 12y ago
  > Don't let the "unstable" tag fool you, stability is a relative term. I don't see why people throw this around a lot, it really isn't. Most recent example I can remember is when Debian decided to remove NVIDIA drivers from Testing and you end up with a nonfunctional desktop [0]. [0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=755020 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=755020
  - icebraining 12y ago
    In my experience, "testing" is a lot more unstable than "unstable" itself, at least when upgrading. I haven't had any major problems running Sid in the last four or five years.
- shmerl 12y ago
  > Debian unstable pretty much is a stable rolling release. I'd say testing is. Unstable is not supposed to be normally used except for debugging stuff.

AceJohnny2 12y ago

I've been having similar issues and thoughts. I'm not a greybeard by any reasonable measure, having started using Slackware in '99-'00, quickly switched to Debian, and never looked back. I think it all stems from D-Bus, which has become the primary mechanism of command and control on desktop Linux. To address the OP's initial issue of user mounting disks, it's managed via Udisks, which is mostly accessible via D-Bus. I have trouble reconciling Unix's notion of "everything is a file" and how a modern Linux desktop operates via D-Bus. Don't get me wrong, I think D-Bus very powerful and flexible. I just wish it was easier to explore and test via file-based tools. Maybe a FUSE layer? Anyhow, if the OP thinks that Linux was once "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized", I can only laugh at his rose-colored glasses. Linux is and always was a cobbled-together mess of orthogonal paradigms (no better illustrated than by the design philosophy clash of XWindows vs Unix). Maybe earlier Linux was simpler because it was still playing catch-up with other Unix clones out there. Nowadays it's leading the pack in innovation, and so things are changing, and fast. I don't know if documentation really is worse now that it used to be, I'm afraid to fall in the same nostalgia fallacy. Ultimately, I see this rant as nothing other than "things are different now and I'm scared and confused". Not that I don't sympathize, being in roughly the same place. However, I decided I can't stop technology, and sucked it up and sharpened my google-fu.

accurrent 12y ago
DBus (And modules that plug into it i.e. Bluez) actually need much better docs. It would ease a lot of things out.
- XorNot 12y ago
  Which in turn requires someone to actually write them. Which is a problem ALL open source software faces. Freedesktop are better then most at it.
geofft 12y ago
File-based tools is an interesting question. D-Bus is hierarchical, but it's also strongly typed, so you'd have to encode stuff as text, and when you get the serialization wrong, write(2) can't give you a useful error message. But maybe it'd be useful for reading and monitoring.... imagine if you could `sudo tail -f /dbus/org/freedesktop/UDisks2/Manager` or something, and see all calls to it. I've been using D-Feet and dbus-monitor, which seem to be solid enough. D-Bus does have extensive introspection. But yeah, in general the state of D-Bus tooling is miserable. Part of it is how verbose it is — which is fine for compiled software, but for interactive use, it really makes you miss the "creat" and "umount" school of thought. Part of it is that there aren't great introspection tools at the command line.

guylhem 12y ago

Relevant quotes for TLDR: "It worked, but I don’t know why" "I don’t even know where to start looking." "That’s about as comprehensible as Vorlon poetry to me" Potentially non politically-correct answer to the article title: maybe it's not Linux who lost its ways, but some old-time users? (who forget the beginner's spirit to look for answers on forums, manuals, to try to understand before casting a judgment) Linux has always innovated around the paradigms, taking inspiration from everywhere. It was never "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized". It has always been messy, but in a good way. When I first discovered linux, I had to adapt to all these new things. That was in 1992. When I decided to use again a modern linux distribution on my laptop in 2014, I had to adapt - again. I have no doubt I will have to keep adapting in my lifetime. The error would be to consider that the "right ways" are fixed, and that innovation should be stopped. There will be many new things, some will be kept, some will be discarded. Change is the only thing one can constantly bet on.

paulannesley 12y ago
Some other relevant quotes: “For years, I used to run Debian sid (unstable) on all my personal machines.” “Sometimes things broke. But it wasn’t a big deal, because I could always get in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was.” “I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… I found a bug report of this exact problem — Debian #760281, but it’s marked fixed, and nobody replied to my comment that I’m still seeing it.” … doesn't sound like somebody “who forget the beginner's spirit to look for answers on forums [etc]”
- guylhem 12y ago
  Really? He says he doesn't want to look anymore, then that it's too complicated. He mustn't have searched really hard, or he would have found it's udisk job. So why couldn't he find it? It's not that a current linux system is N times more complex than the sid he used to run, it's that things changed: as was properly noted by someone else on this thread, dbus was one of these important changes. Now it's systemd. Next it'll be wayland or something else. You're correct in that he still tries to do some search, but he expects things to be like they were in the past, where he "could always get in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was", i.e. to be just as efficient, without learning the new tricks! The beginner's spirit is to want to learn new tricks, looking for answers and being really insistent in understanding better, instead of stopping after a google search and a comment on a bug report. As said in another post I loved for it straight-to-the-fact comment, "In contrast, to 10 years ago, I do not like hours of debugging to get USB working anymore. It was fascinating then". It's not more complex. A Linux system is a time investment, where knowledge has a half line. If you no longer can or wants to commit to learn new things at the same pace, but still want to fix things as before, maybe it's not the best idea to stick to Linux. IHMO, the author would be best served to try say FreeBSD, where things seem to change at a slower pace. But he would still have to learn this new thing, and I strongly believe he doesn't want that - just a system as before, without any changes. Ain't gonna happen.

geofft 12y ago

If you're running an up-to-date GNOME/KDE/etc. desktop, and not running systemd, for better or worse you're using a less-supported configuration. There's going to be other stuff that systemd will break, but in the long run you're better off using the upstream-recommended configuration. That aside... I think it's pretty clear that modern Linux is not losing its way. If you go back even five years, and complain that your latest pre-release version of Debian won't suspend properly because it needs a password, you'll get laughed at by all the people who try to suspend their laptop and have it crash in some way or another. We're now in the uncanny valley of software progress. If suspend weren't working, you'd feel hardcore and learn it and deal with it. If it worked perfectly, then you wouldn't think about it. (What was the last time you thought about how OS X or Windows does suspend, or handles permissions on mounted drives, or whatever? When was the last time you read a manpage about launchd or one of its helpers? Hint, the manpages are useless.) If it has almost all the complexity to work perfectly, you get neither of these benefits. But it would help things immensely if someone were to document all this, from a busy sysadmin's perspective, not from an upstream developer's. There are occasionally manpages, but they're written like git's. Lennart's "systemd for administrators" series is a start, but that's more of a pitch for why you should want to build your new systems on it, and it only covers systemd. Docs on how to figure things out when they go wrong would be most useful.

xorcist 12y ago
> What was the last time you thought about how OS X or Windows does suspend Every. Freaking. Time. That is, since an employer equipped me with a cheap Dell. It looks like it suspends, but one time out of ten it'll come straight out of sleep and cook in my bag. I've only used Thinkpads, with Linux, for my own work before, and they suspend multiple times a day without a problem ever. So this was a big a-ha moment for me regarding Linux usability complaints, to see what it is that people actually try to do.
- weavie 12y ago
  You are not alone. I also have a work provided Dell that I have to shutdown unless I want to use my work bag to keep me warm on the walk home. We have another Toshiba at home running windows that will at random times of the night just spin up its hard drives and perhaps throw out the odd notification sound before spinning down again. It seems for windows suspend is not really go to sleep until you are woken up again by a human.

Scarbutt 12y ago

Another thing that bother me in Debian was subpixel-hinting and font-smoothing, it wasn't enable by default (or it wasn't capable and adding a font config half fixed it), is this still an issue in Jessie? That was really bad UX.

Luyt 12y ago
I think that had to do with some patents on the truetype font hinting interpreter in Freetype.
- lloeki 12y ago
  IIRC those patents are related to MS ClearType and have expired (but my memory may serve me wrong)
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Some of them have expired, but there are still patents related to subpixel font hinting and layout which won't expire before 2018.

aceperry 12y ago

It's funny to hear the the name Debian associated with the label "modern." I don't mean to diss Debian, it's a solid distro and has a lot going for it, but it is seriously behind all of the cutting edge distros that I'm used to. Personally, I enjoy new technologies and systems in linux. I used to run Gentoo and other distros that constantly brought out cutting edge software. And I'm used to somewhat alpha/beta quality software that mostly works. And because it works well compared to my experience with windows software, so I wasn't too bothered. Maybe it's because my background is in hardware, but all of the new software had always taken awhile for me to grasp and appreciate. But in the linux community, I've always been able to find info and solve problems that I've come across and learn about the system. Windows problems usually can be solved because large masses of people tried so many things, but I wouldn't get any enlightenment about computers or software when fixing Windows problems. Maybe my world view has been skewed by comparing linux to windows, but I've always felt that I'm able to learn and understand more with linux vs Windows.

pseudonom- 12y ago
> it is seriously behind all of the cutting edge distros that I'm used to. Are you familiar with branches beyond Stable? I switched from Arch to Debian Unstable (which uses a rolling release) and find their edges to be about equally sharp.
- aceperry 12y ago
  I haven't touched Debian in a long time, and I didn't know that unstable was a rolling release. Thanks for the info, I might look into it someday.
  - seba_dos1 12y ago
    Unstable was always a rolling release, it gets just frozen for some time before each stable release because the process of getting a package in testing requires it to be in unstable first.
shmerl 12y ago

thekevan 12y ago

I don't think speaking about "modern Linux" and then referencing one user's experience with one distribution is indicative of the entire movement.

regularfry 12y ago
Are there distros where his complaints about lack of transparency, documentation and conceptual clarity don't apply?

swhipple 12y ago

I used to be able to say Linux was clean, logical, well put-together, and organized. I don't think this was ever really the case, but I do think software is evolving to meet the list of constantly updating use cases. Of course managing one network interface with all your peripherals connected at startup required less complexity. But if your target audience also has use cases of wanting their USB drive to "just work" when plugged in, being able to connect to a new wifi access point under their normal user, etc., you will want some extra layers of abstraction that aren't available if you limit yourself to FDs and Unix-style permissions. In addition, some software is cross-platform and doesn't always care about maintaining consistency with the conventions on a single platform.

moe 12y ago
you will want some extra layers of abstraction that aren't available if you limit yourself to FDs and Unix-style permissions. I have yet to see a single case where FDs and unix-permissions wouldn't have been perfectly sufficient. I think the real problem is that we are facing a generation of developers who never learned how to properly use them.
- swhipple 12y ago
  There are cases where you want to be notified when an event occurs or the success of your application's action (in more detail than the error codes from a write(2) to a FD). You can solve the problem by using socket FDs, but you have to roll your own format for registration, communication, error checking, making sure the appropriate applications can read, etc. I think many developers would prefer using DBus as an abstraction for these types of problems.
  - moe 12y ago
    Why not a library that speaks a simple[1] line based protocol over pipes and/or sockets? Or even just plain old files? That's how unix used to work before the desktop people took over. [1] Yes, DBus is "sort of" line based. But from all I've heard it's the opposite of simple and... well, let's just say people don't seem to have much good to say about it.

sandGorgon 12y ago

for everyone wanting to use a modern day Debian - I recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 "Betsy" [1] http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/02/about-betsy/ http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/02/about-betsy/

qznc 12y ago

I think it is a old-timer issue. I'm using Linux on my desktop for ca 15 years. I also had a mysterious permission problem after my last Ubuntu upgrade. In contrast, to 10 years ago, I do not like hours of debugging to get USB working anymore. It was fascinating then. For the record, my permission problem was solved via "sudo pam-auth-update --force". Thanks Arch Wiki for giving me the crucial hint.

andreaferretti 12y ago
I am having a similar problem (password sometimes required to shutdown or mount disks) with my latest Ubuntu, so I would appreciate a little more detail. Do you happen to have a link to the arch wiki entry you are mentioning? What was exactly your problem?
- qznc 12y ago
  I had problems with shutdown, hibernation, USB sticks, wifi notifications. Here is a very similar launchpad bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pam/+bug/1317518 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pam/+bug/1317518 As in the bug report, the problem was not replicable. While my Thinkpad had these issues, my desktop was fine. Unfortunately, my notes say nothing about the Arch wiki. Maybe I confused that with another issue.
  - andreaferretti 12y ago
    Ok, thank you for the information. I will try to work from here :-)
wvh 12y ago
I agree wholeheartedly on the old-timer issue (ca 17 years). Too much work, children and other responsibilities to justify hacking hours on the OS itself. I think the current state of Linux – especially on the desktop – is in a state of flux, not to call it disarray, and it makes me grumpy that after all these years of hacking, debugging, patching and bug reporting, things end up pretty usable, and then "they" manage to break some of the most basic functionality again. Only this time, it's gotten a lot harder to make sense of the whole mess...

aosmith 12y ago

I was a debian / ubuntu user fro many years. I switched to fedora / gnome when unity started to become standard and have never regretted it.

teddyh 12y ago
Don’t blame Debian for Unity, please. Sometimes, saying “Debian/Ubunty” is like saying “C/C++”. They are separate things and must be treated separately.

rlpb 12y ago

The traditional user/group system may be simple, but it is limited. For example, it fails when you have a multi-user desktop system when some people login in locally, and some people login in remotely. What should the permissions on on the camera be? And what about hotplugged USB devices? It's no longer possible to have a fixed device node with fixed permissions and fixed user group membership. The same applies to suspend. The local user perhaps should or should not be able to suspend the machine. Presumably remote users should not be able to do so at all. What about wireless network connectivity as the machine moves? Who should have permission to manipulate that? If we did not have more a more complex dynamic permission system[1], some would be saying that modern Linux is outdated and unable to cope with the more modern reality of much more dynamic needs like this. Instead, the article seems to be saying that it's become too complicated. We can't have it both ways. [1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/multiseat/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/multiseat/

zurn 12y ago
A fragile and too complex to troubleshoot system is an unreasonable tradeoff to support these niche use cases. Find better solutions or live with the old level of service. I suspect the PR cost of having imperfect multiseat support is insignificant.
pmontra 12y ago
I wonder how often it happens that people connects remotely to a Linux PC with a camera. When I do it is because I ssh to another laptop of mine, maybe to shut it down after I lost the desktop (maybe the graphic card crashed). OK, we should support as many use cases as possible but it could be acceptable to tell people that if they want to setup a multiseat machine shared with strangers (students at school? They can get very creative) they disable mics, cameras and don't plugin dvds and usb drives. Servers usually don't have any of them. Finally, if you give somebody a sudo you accept that s/he can shutdown the system remotely, normal case for a server. I also wonder how other OSes handle that, I'm looking at Windows and OSX. With VNC/RDP/Teamviewer/etc you get full access to the Windows desktop and all devices. I guess OSX has the same, plus sshd. So, maybe supporting a fringe use case is making more common use cases more inconvenient?

peteretep 12y ago

Is there someway we could just prefix these with [systemd-rant]?

baumbart 12y ago

Linux does not have lost its way. It has truly followed its way, and that's what you got. It was always clear (at least for me and many other people), that if you don't design a system but put it together step by step, you will end up with a mess. I have always been on the NetBSD side, and it's bright over here. Even FreeBSD suffers from similar problems as Linux, trying to get new features fast. That's just how software development works (or does not), you have to follow proper design to get something for the future. Linux will always be stuck in past design decisions, and in order to stay compatible, things will need be become more and more complex, until they break.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
icebraining 12y ago
The whole point of systemd was/is to design a coherent system that integrates all the core parts. It's also what caused all the problems for OP, unlike the "step by step" approach that was working fine for him.
- VLM 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect
feld 12y ago
What new features is FreeBSD trying to get fast?

fit2rule 12y ago

I tend to agree with this article in some ways .. I've been using Linux since the days of the minix-list, and have over the years been bothered by exactly the sorts of things that are described here .. it seems every year/new release of my preferred distro (Ubuntu Studio) I have to re-learn things that are not well explained or documented. So I've just kind of gotten used to using the source. Seriously! If I find something I don't get, I build the package from source, and debug it. This is really the only way I've been able to survive as long without tearing my hair out in frustration over the years. Its a glib response to the problem, but actually it really works.

Hz8NSD 12y ago

The guys who capable of improving modern Linux desktop are using Mac. So we are losing momentum in Linux desktop targeted software or facility. They are developing in Mac but targeting server software or devops tools. So pretty modern, hot and bleeding edge things are happening in there but not desktop area. GNOME - Always doing some experiment. No application. Just changing shell. No reliable usability. Call me when they are done. One good thing about GNOME is they care about beauty and elegance. KDE - They just don't care about beauty of ... anything. But their applications are freaking featureful, reliable and developed by people who actually using it. I can feel they are dogfooding. I saw KF5 screenshots. They still don't care about beauty. ElementaryOS(Pantheon) - Better than GNOME. They are having and developing actual application like geary and midori. You can feel they are actually dogfooding in contrast to GNOME couterpart. Unity - I like Unity itself. Very long time user. But Canonical lied to us it's stable but actually alpha stage. One more bad thing is it smells vendor lock-in pretty much. Anyway pretty usable and has big ecosystem(community + vendor). XMonad - At first time, it just looks like another tiling window manager. More I use it, it feels like 'custom desktop construction kit' if you don't mind learning about some haskell. As you all know, 'kit' is about fun and learning more than actual result. So I'm doing still this dumb like window manager ...

andor 12y ago
ElementaryOS(Pantheon) - Better than GNOME. They are having and developing actual application like geary and midori. You can feel they are actually dogfooding in contrast to GNOME couterpart. Are you trolling? Geary is a GTK3 application. It's great that people from Elementary are helping out, but basically it's made for GNOME, using GNOME's toolkit, object system and programming language. Midori is part of XFCE, and also uses GTK and Vala. The GNOME project of course has their own browser, called Web (previously Epiphany). http://www.gnome.org/applications/ http://www.gnome.org/applications/
- mverwijs 12y ago
  According to the Midori website (http://midori-browser.org/about/ http://midori-browser.org/about/) it aligns with the XFCE philosophy, which is a far cry from 'being part of XFCE'. Instead, it states it is the default browser for 'ElementaryOS', so the assumption of GP is understandable.

jkot 12y ago

Jessie has not been released yet... And if you like good documentation, you should go with Redhat anyway.

geppetto 12y ago

This classifies as another useless systemd rant. Everybody switched to that ages ago. Can every distro be wrong? Anyway, I've been using Debian Sid since 2000 and, for what it's worth, it "just works" on my hardware now and it's much easier to install/manage than, say, five years ago. Then again, if you mess with the default configuration you're looking for trouble and should accept that problems are harder to fix for corner cases.

brusch64 12y ago
Well it may be a bad time to start with Debian unstable, when they are switching to systemd (or are in the process of doing it). I remember updating to Debian testing (never had the nerves for unstable) when they switched to Gnome3 and I experienced bugs (and really nasty ones). When they make big changes it is going to break things. If you don't want to have things broken, either use a stable distribution, don't upgrade for some time or live with it. Right now I am using Arch Linux mostly - but I've heard the change to systemd had some rough edges for Arch Linux too (didn't use it at this time). I can say that I am completely fine with systemd on Arch Linux and I don't understand the big problem some people have with it (on a philosphical level I do understand them, but not on a pragmatic level).
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
The distros were all wrong when they adopted hacky sysvinit configurations with things like Makefile-style concurrency, initscript headers parsed by a preprocessor just so they could get some half-assed dependency system, not modularizing their common initscript functions in library files and instead rewriting everything from scratch every script, so on and so forth. And then ignoring all the alternative init systems besides systemd and Upstart that were around well before. I'm not saying they're wrong this time, but there's no reason why not. The haphazard state of the Linux desktop that the original author laments over might be indication they're wrong in some places.

rian 12y ago

I don't understand technical Linux users who use GNOME/KDE. They are not designed to be hackable nor modular. They are intended for enterprise users who want something Windows-ish. Their core contributors aren't volunteers/users, they're people who are paid by Red Hat and SuSE. If you're a technical user/programmer and you want something more minimal, simple, hackable, then don't use GNOME/KDE. Use xmonad or dwm, they are written by programmers for programmers. They are literally only window managers, nothing else. Only what you put in your .Xsession is what gets started when you run startx. Sure, you don't get a file manager or auto-mounting of usb drives out of the box, that's because no sane programmer would want that by default. If you are one of the few that do, then install udisks and configure it the way you like (e.g. mount specific usb drives to specific locations with specific permissions). As a programmer you'll ultimately be happier. I promise. Debian doesn't get in the way. It fully supports customization at this level. Take advantage of it!

bkor 12y ago
I didn't know I'm supposed to be paid by Red Hat or SuSE? :-P I've been helping out on volunteer basis at least for the last 10 years. Seriously: Red Hat is a very big company and they provide loads of resources to GNOME for no apparent reason. Red Hat also expands their commitment in this. Still, there are loads of volunteers. Suggest to talk to people at the GNOME stand at various conferences. Or maybe you meant developer instead of contributor. In which case I suggest to read the membership applications to the GNOME foundation. There's more to contributing than just being a developer. See ttps://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/ for the archives.
- rian 12y ago
  Kudos to you sir for contributing! By "core contributor" I did mean developer but really my point was that there is an explicit gap in the roles of the people involved in these platforms. You have a small group of people explicitly focused on development, and a much larger group of people explicitly focused on usage. Windows and Mac OS X are in the same situation. The best strategy for the people developing these platforms is to focus on a generally applicable UI to accomodate the large heterogeneous group. Ultimately this will result in the platform being more omakase (if you will) and less likely to be everything for everybody, though a decent default. I don't mean to say that this is a fault with GNOME/KDE themselves but more of a likely unavoidable consequence when you build a product for a large general audience. If you're a programmer this is really annoying. When something is broken or annoying to you, you have the ability to fix it but because there is so much organization/process/design around these systems, the activation energy is too high. But if you're a programmer you don't have to deal with this. You can just use a simpler system meant for hackability, a system where the users are the developers. I see nothing wrong with big vertically integrated Linux systems like GNOME/KDE and in fact I'm glad they exist. If they did not, I would not be able to genuinely recommend Linux to my non-technical friends. Apple has shown the vertical integration is an efficient and successful way to design products for large groups of people, not unsurprising that those systems are mimicking that.

orbitingpluto 12y ago

The most productive environment I've ever used is Gnome 2 using Compiz. It was incredibly easy to flip between windows. Compiz has since been abandoned and only the most die-hard fans try to fudge it into working on modern systems. I gave up after Debian Squeeze and just started using tmux instead. I felt that Linux was losing it's way after that. Eventually I stumbled across Cinnamon (and/or Mate) with hotcorners and tmux. It doesn't have the previous configurability but it's still pretty good. The reason people held onto XP for so long was that it just worked well and it was consistent. Many of the Linux GUI people should take that to heart. Instead they always seem to try to be in catchup or trying to surpass Windows. Gnome 3 and KDE 3+ have been so very unwieldy, resource hungry, or lacking in features. They've been the Windows 8 equivalent of the Linux desktop. Even to this day, most people don't like the Metro style interface (unless they are playing with it on a phone). I'm blown away by how difficult it is becoming to use Windows. I will go into the Metro style settings and see that a configuration option is not present and then have to go into the good ol' control panel. Or vice versa. I'm getting increasingly drawn towards using Powershell by default so I don't have to backtrack. Windows has been trying to force new "UI paradigms" to sell more copies of Windows. Linux should realize it doesn't need to adopt the new and flashy... unless it really is an improvement.

kefka 12y ago
Peculiar. I'm running Compiz on a 14.04 XUbuntu setup. It was a bit weird to set up, but after changing the window manager, I was able to get up Compiz running with most of the bells and whistles. I did notice the 3d windows does make some horrid tearing artifacts on rotate. Turning that off; it gives me the nice 8 desktops I'm used to. (Have Thinkpad T61, bound rotate cube keys as above the arrow keys)
brusch64 12y ago
I think KDE is as XP-y as it gets. No big frill, but you can configure nearly everything you wish. Ever tried KDE ?
- Zardoz84 12y ago
  The only problem of KDE is the default configuration. Every time that I install it on an machine, must hurry to change mouse to double click. Everything else is enough good to use it without changing/tweaking it.

godzilla82 12y ago

Is Vorlon poetry a typo for vogon poetry

shdon 12y ago
Vorlons are aliens from Babylon 5.
- chrisan 12y ago
  I was also confused by Vorlon as Vogon Poetry is "a thing" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon#Poetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon#Poetry Maybe if he used Klingon as "alien poetry starting with a V" instantly makes me think of HHGTG ..anywho :)
  - cwyers 12y ago
    Right, Vorlons aren't known for their poetry, Vogons are.

Iv 12y ago

Linux distributions (because this is actually what you are talking about) have not lost their ways but theirs founders. Face it, there are only so many years you can work on the same issues for every new model of laptops. People get tired, people retire from projects. But it is still open source. You are right that many behaviors (of Debian, apparently the focus of your article) suck. Well, jump in!

yuvadam 12y ago

I didn't grow up on Linux, but rather was accustomed to OSs that do everything for me: first Windows, then Mac. And when those have failed me, by feeling too complex and not giving me enough control as a power user, I discovered Arch Linux. As opposed to other distros, Arch is the only user-centric distribution out there. When something goes wrong, I don't have to deal with "where does this come from", because the distro itself doesn't interfere with anything. It's either a bad config on my part, or an upstream bug. Upstream bugs are fixed immediately due to the rolling release nature of Arch. And configuring my system is extremely easy, since 95% of the problems are solved by looking at the wiki. I won't bash on other distros - to each her own. But I urge any power user that wants full control over their system to try Arch. It's truly another class of Linux.

philtar 12y ago
All/vast majority of linux distros give you the same amount of control. The only difference is that most of the others customize a bit (debian is supposedly just setting sane defaults). Never in my life have I had to work ON my computer as opposed to doing work using my computer as much as I have using Arch.
- qbrass 12y ago
  >Never in my life have I had to work ON my computer as opposed to doing work using my computer as much as I have using Arch. I'd say FOR instead of ON, but otherwise, that was my impression of Arch.
lmm 12y ago
I was a similar user, but lately the mainstream of Linux is forcing these monolithic, fragile systems on every use. I switched to FreeBSD a few years ago and haven't looked back - it has the same advantages you describe, only more so.

bkor 12y ago

Reading the article, this is not about systemd. Debian wants to offer a choice between systemd and something else. So they have things like systemd-shim, cgmanager, etc. He says he's using systemd, but while trying to figure out where his problem is, he's seeing references to systemd-shim, cgmanager and so on. Those things are not systemd, nor do you need them if you use systemd. Offering the alternative makes finding solutions to his problems more complex and confusing.

wvh 12y ago

I don't like me-too complaining, but I'm in pretty much the exact same situation: I've been running Linux since the nineties, and the last months I've been having problems with Debian that make my systems unusable and that I just don't know how to solve. Random hang-ups on right-click (KDE and DBus), screen blanking every few seconds (power saving bugs), screen corruption and windows disappearing (graphics bugs), daemons not starting because of partition layout (systemd related). I'm actually somewhat worried about the current state (especially on the desktop). It never was a big deal to me that some flashy functionality or hardware support took longer to show up in Linux and *BSD, because once it arrived, it usually worked well and was stable. Now however there are a lot of annoying complex bugs that are hard to trace and don't seem to be actively analysed and fixed. It's not a good sign that as a hacker I don't know where to begin to properly track some of these bugs myself, and the people who receive the bug reports don't seem to have a clue either.

stinos 12y ago

Here’s the crux of the issue: I don’t even know where to start looking. I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… I found a bug report of this exact problem — Debian #760281, but it’s marked fixed, and nobody replied to my comment that I’m still seeing it. If this is the crux for the OP I don't really see how this is for Modern Linux. Maybe it's just me (though I doubt it) but what is described here is basically how working with linux (and software in general to a lesser extent) has been for me as long as I've used it. Small annoying problems here and there which take quite some amount of time to find a fix for, if any. And after a while if there are too many of them it becomes irritating and you start a blog post to nag about it :]

Arnt 12y ago
He's nagging that modern linux isn't like old linux, because the old debugging techniques don't work. I feel the same way. Maybe modern linux isn't a bad thing viewed neutrally, but it's not the same thing as the one I love.

janjes 12y ago

This is not only debian I have had this error on one ubuntu machine but multiple times, not at boot but after a few days of use I guess also please call is gnu linux nog only linux. linux is a very small part of your operating system

sspiff 12y ago

Any blog post title which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. - Adapted from Betteridge's law of headlines [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

reacweb 12y ago

I think the main point of this article is that man pages are incomplete on linux. When I have to explain some unix arcane to a colleague, I often start by saying that man is the most important command in unix. But I am always obliged to say that on linux, it is often incomplete. When I learned unix 20 years ago on sunOS, man pages were complete. It has never been the case on linux. I think man pages should give all the assumptions about the system that may someday break or give pointers to documentations. I have often to use strace to analyse issues. When dbus starts to be involved, I am often lost.

brudgers 12y ago

I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… Googling to troubleshoot Linux sucks. Part of the suck is that Google's page rank favors old pages. Part of it sucks because it's keyword finding favors forum threads where the terms are in someone's signature. And part of the suck isn't Google's fault because GNU/Linux documentation is dense to the point of opacity. It is great for professional standings and not so great for amateur ones. Worst of all is that FOSS documentation has a lot of "not my problem" links. If a piece of Software is doing something bad to Firefox it's documentation will mention Firefox and link to the Mozilla homepage...so to speak.

transfire 12y ago

The ultimate problem is money and leadership. Open source lacks too much of both. In the end, proprietary and vertical systems tend to dominate. Interestingly, it looks like we are the verge of a new explosion in such system thanks to mobile. Besides the dominate Android, iOS and Windows, new systems are on the horizon: Tizen, FirefoxOS, webOS, Sailfish and others.

legulere 12y ago

I have the feeling that it's that way because the usecases today have changed while the fundamental parts of the system haven't. Unix was designed in the 60s and 70s and everything that came later was bolted on what was already existing. This includes stuff that's standard unix behaviour. For instance abusing the user system to gain better isolation of daemons. This all has to be done to stay compatible with previous systems and raises complexity.

ppurka 12y ago

One of the sources of this problem is the relentless experimenting that has been ongoing since about 2007-2008. First, there was pmount and hal introduced to take care this automounting, and as soon as this was in a working state, it got replaced by devicekit. Soon after, devicekit was abandoned in favor of a combination of udev, consolekit, policykit. Then then policykit got replaced by polkit. And then systemd was introduced and consolekit got abandoned. And each time the documentation gets worse (except for systemd, since the authors try to justify their choices). Overall, it has been a sequence of constant rewriting, and I don't see an end to it. People who have been using rolling distributions like Gentoo and administer their own machines are the most affected. If one is not using the whole systemd to major DE (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc) stack, it is arduous to set up a mounting system which always works. Usually, vfat external disks tend to be immediately writable on mount. Move over to exfat, mtp, ext[234], or another other native filesystem and it is an exercise in exasperation to get them to mount as read-write as an unprivileged user, or even mount at all as an unprivileged user (see https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15875 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15875). The only decent program that I have found that works quite reliably is udevil.

zanny 12y ago
I recently redid my Arch install and I'm mounting usb drives on a user account thats just in the wheel group no problem with pretty much any filesystem (ufs, ntfs, fat32, btrfs, ext4, f2fs). I agree that the rewrites all the time were annoying, but I have a hard time seeing systemd developers rewriting the same part of their project over and over now. For better or worse systemd should at least slow churn.
digi_owl 12y ago
Basically because udevil don't buy into the whole "fine grained security" wankery that seems to be coming out of the corporate/government world. It may well have started with SELinux, and as best i can tell Fedora has always been at the forefront of pushing it.
TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
Well, since before that, really.. I can remember the early attempts at automounting back around '98 or '99, IRC. Previously: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

warfangle 12y ago

I've never been able to reliably use debian without a /lot/ of frustrating configuration. I'm not a bored high school student anymore. Back when I used sarge, it was okay - there was some configuration I had to do to get X working, and at one point I had a pretty sweet custom kernel build on a laptop that extended its battery life 35% over windows. Decided to spin up a VM to use debian as a dev environment again recently, and -- well -- after three hours of futzing with it I deleted the VM and booted Ubuntu instead. Had issues getting virtualbox extensions working; some others that I can't remember.

marrs 12y ago

I think this is a direct consequence of the commercialisation of the Linux desktop by Canonical, Red Hat, et al, but especially Canonical. The amateurs were pushed out and the professionals swarmed in, and now the requirement was to bring more "converts" from Windows. A number of bad decisions started to get made as these sponsors became frustrated with the low rate of uptake. One of them, I'm sure, was the perceived need to keep up with the competition, essentially getting into an arms race with the strategy (if there was one) of outdoing Microsoft. A good example of this is the absurd introduction of PulseAudio, which introduced features that nobody asked for while simultaneously breaking audio for a large number of users including myself. All because a similar (but working) feature was introduced in Vista.

jerf 12y ago
What I can't figure out is how this actually helps that goal anyhow. My fight with policykit (or polkit or whichever the hell one it was) is that with XMonad, I couldn't get network manager to work properly, even when I ran it and its configurator as root. For my own desktop, I'd be happy with either of "tell policykit that 'jerf' can do anything" or "tell policykit that 'root' can do anything", literally the simplest possible configuration. There appears to be (at least at the time) dick-all documentation on policykit, excepting magic invocations on the Ubuntu forums to do this or that. Reading the configuration files appears to suggest the primary use case for policy kit is to work in large installs like a university lab where the permissions are being portioned out in a highly granular manner via third-party authentication services. If this isn't true, don't blame me for coming to the wrong conclusion. I do not give a shit about any of this. I'm on a single-user machine and the one user can do anything it damned well pleases (to a first approximation). But there is absolutely no clue I could find about how to accomplish this. By just fucking around and turning off permission checking in every manner I could work out, I eventually got myself into a position where "root" was capable of adding new network, but my normal user is only permitted to switch between existing networks. (Incidentally, read that sentence again, it's actually quite surprising. The result of what I did should have been to let everybody do everything, right? No. Why not? Hell if I know.) This was enough for me to declare victory and move on, but it really isn't a victory. And the point of me posting all this isn't so much to bitch; that was just a bonus extra. The point is, if this is a "professional" solution to the problem of system permissions, I have no idea how it meets that goal. There seems to be no way for the aforementioned University administrators to learn how to properly configure it for their use cases, no logging to help them get it right. Putting on my sysadmin hat, I'd never trust this system any further than I could throw it, it's so opaque. I would get a bug report that Bob was able to use the video camera when he shouldn't be able to, and I'd push a fix, but I'd have virtually confidence that I'd actually solved the problem, to say nothing of continuously wondering exactly what my permission scheme was permitting to people. To me, it looks worse than a closed source solution... at least the closed source has a support line you could call.

harrystone 12y ago

This will continue as long as so many people want linux to be a free version of Windows or Mac OS X, instead of a free PC unix.

Gracana 12y ago

I don't think this is anything new. I've certainly never felt that Linux was "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized." Linux distros are a mish-mash of stuff of various levels of quality built by people with different goals, put together by volunteers into something that mostly works in the more-commonly-tested areas. Back when I played around with my OS as a hobby I was able to keep up with most of the issues and changes, but without investing that kind of time, I don't have much choice but to leave things at their defaults, install updates, and hope for the best. Things weren't better before, I was just more involved, and I wonder if the same is true for the author.

mister_m 12y ago

I think I am going to switch to plan 9.

vasilakisfil 12y ago

I completely agree, unfortunately. Still fighting not to get Mac for my job (programmer). But I don't know for how long.