(no subject)

PowerQuest PartitionMagic was one of my favourite pieces of software ever written.

It offered a lot of functionality for disk and partition management on the PC that had previously been considered impossible, or the sole domain of enterprise storage management systems, such as resizing drive partitions on the fly -- i.e. with all their contents intact.

Later, it gained additional functionality, such as the ability to merge 2 (or more) disk partitions into one larger one.

If, for example, you merged drives C, D and E, you ended up with a big drive C which contained subfolders called "\D\" with the full contents of D: and "\E\" with the full contents of E:

It was then up to you to move stuff around to sort it.

However, the thing is this:

When you move from one drive to another drive, including separate partitions, the OS must copy the data from source to destination, then when it's copied, remove the original file... then repeat this for every file. This is unavoidably slow. It applies even on the same physical drive, if there are multiple partitions.

But if you move a file from one folder to another folder in the same partition, on any modern filesystem, the OS can just rename the file from

/data/my/old/file

... to...

/data/my/new/file

The actual contents of "file" don't move. So it's very, very fast.

So cleaning up the folders left by a PQMagic partition merge was quite quick. It was the merge that took hours. It copied as much data as would fit, shrank D: as much as possible by moving the start, enlarged C: and then copied some more... and repeat. This could be a *very* lengthy process.

This kind of thing is the reason that logical volume management systems exist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Volume_Manager_(Linux)

LVM is complicated and hard to understand. If the above article makes little sense, don't blame yourself. For standalone workstations, I recommend avoiding it.

So, there's LVM, then on top of the LVM space, you have partitions. Those are formatted with a filesystem, such as ext4, or older enterprise filesystems from old commercial Unixes, such as JFS (from IBM's AIX and OS/2), or XFS (from SGI IRIX).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFS_(file_system)

Fedora enables LVM by default which is just one reason I avoid Fedora.

Then to make matters worse, there are filesystems which support "subvolumes" inside a partition, e.g. Btrfs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

Btrfs is the default FS of SUSE Linux.

Then you have subvolumes inside partitions on top of LVM volumes on top of disks, and personally it all makes my head spin.

*Because* LVM is hard, and its functionality overlaps with partitioning, there are projects that try to merge them.

For Linux, there was EVMS:

http://evms.sourceforge.net/

Unfortunately, it did not catch on, so we have LVM instead.

https://lwn.net/Articles/14816/

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/22885/is-there-a-more-modern-or-more-popular-version-of-evms2

RH does not support Btrfs. However, because it wants some of the features of Btrfs, RH is now building its own new combined logical volume manager / partitioner / filesystem, Stratis:

https://stratis-storage.github.io/

Stratis combines an LVM layer with the XFS filesystem.

I have heard comments that Stratis is in effect re-creating a subset of the functionality of EVMS.

This is a very typical Linux development path.

The richest filesystem/volume manager from commercial Unix is ZFS, from Sun (now Oracle) Solaris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

Like JFS and XFS, ZFS is now open source. However, under a licence that is incompatible with the Linux kernel's GPL licence.

So you _can_ compile a Linux kernel with built-in XFS, but it violates the licence.

However, Ubuntu has found a way around this, with ZFS being a loadable module (AIUI) that isn't part of the kernel itself.

(AIUI. IANAL. Clarification welcome.)

Ubuntu Server offers ZFS instead, in place of Btrfs in SUSE or Stratis in Fedora (or XFS in all of them).

ZFS can replace the LVM _and_ also ext4/XFS/JFS, and therefore Stratis too, but neither SUSE nor RH will bundle ZFS because of licence concerns.

Apple _was_ going to bundle ZFS but it too decided the licensing was too tricky and it has developed its own system, APFS. But then Apple no longer is trying to compete in the server market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System

Yes, it is confusing. Yes, it is a mess. Yes, there are too many standards.

https://xkcd.com/927/

I really fancy a classic PowerBook G3 Pismo, for classic MacOS fun. Why?

Because I miss classic MacOS.

Unix is Unix. It's boring. It's everywhere. I run it on my desktop, my laptops, my phone, my tablet, my work PC. All different versions.

I dislike it less than the other options. I grew up on CP/M and VAX/VMS, then DOS, then Windows. At home, RISC OS.

I am not a programmer. Much of the stuff in Unix is irrelevant to me. I find its shell actively hostile, its filesystem an arcane mess that hasn't made sense since about 1973, its profusion of weird little config files, all in different formats, all to be carefully amended with various disgusting 1970s abominations of editors, to be a massive pain.

That's why my computer is a Mac. It needs less maintenance than almost anything else. My laptops run Ubuntu (and Haiku and A2/Bluebottle and IBM PC DOS 7.1). I rarely open a terminal if I can avoid it.

Classic MacOS is something else entirely. It's a thing of its time, yes, but it is a thing of great beauty. *The* single cleanest, most elegant GUI of any OS ever, from any time. No trace of a command line anywhere, not a single config file on the entire OS, and yet over 15 years it grew from something that ran in 128 kB of RAM on a 400 kB floppy to a multitasking Internet-capable OS on which I surfed the web, did my email, chatted to my friends on a half a dozen systems, did my invoicing, send data to & from multiple server OSes _and_ laid out magazines.

Its kernel wasn't elegant but there's more to life than kernels. It was the best-integrated general-purpose mass-market GUI OS the world has ever seen, and nothing ever even came close to its versatility. It was smoother and cleaner than ST GEM. It had a bigger better app selection than Amiga OS. It had a simpler yet more capable GUI than RISC OS. It made Windows or OS/2 look like sick jokes for a straight decade. And all this without any nasty dirty stinky mess of config files gluing it all together in the background.

I own a number of vintage Macs, and they're lovely, but there's no point in using PowerPC Mac OS X these days, because an Intel box does the same job better -- but it's not _really_ a Mac, although mine have gorgeous mechanical keyboards from the 1980s on them, naturally, because I'm a vintage computer fan and that's why I am here.

But the last _real_ Mac was the Beige G3 for me. It looked like a Mac, it talked ADB and AAUI and SCSI to the outside world, and it was visibly the same family as a Mac Plus from 1985.

(I gave my Blue & Whites away, which I slightly regret.)

Even my G4s aren't that Mac-like any more. They use PC stuff like USB and Firewire and PCI, which makes them cheap to run, but somehow a bit soulless.

The Mac was not just a computer, it was a culture, and it's one I worked with at the time but could't afford to use myself.

And whereas the ST and Amiga were cultures too, which I respect, I wasn't part of them then. I was an Acorn user then, but Acorns were barely usable on the Internet or on LANs. That stuff came after their decline and fall, for all that I have a Raspberry Pi with RISC OS on it.

Classic MacOS came from that era, but it survived and prospered and thrived into the Internet era of the Web and USB and multimedia.

That deserves anyone's respect.