Liam on Linux

A response to a Reddit question.

I can only agree with you. I have blogged and commented enough about this that I fear I am rather unpopular with the GNOME developer team these days. :-(

The direct reason for the sale is that in founder Mark Shuttleworth's view, Ubuntu's bug #0 has been closed. Windows is no longer the dominant OS. There are many more Linux server instances, and while macOS dominates the high-end laptop segment, in terms of user-facing OSes, Android is now dominant and it is based on the Linux kernel.

His job is done. He has helped to make Linux far more popular and mainstream than it was. Due to Ubuntu being (fairly inarguably, I'd say) the best desktop distro for quite a few years, all the other Linux vendors [disclaimer: including my employer] switched away from desktop distros and over to server distros, which is where the money is. The leading desktop is arguably now Mint, then the various Ubuntu flavours. Linux is now mainstream and high-quality desktop Linuxes are far more popular than ever and they're all freeware.

Shuttleworth used an all-FOSS stack to build Thawte. When he sold it to Verisign in 1999, he made enough that he'd never need to work again. Ubuntu was a way for Shuttleworth to do something for the Linux and FOSS world in return.

It's done.

Thus, Shuttleworth is preparing Ubuntu for an IPO and floatation on the public stock market. As part of this, the company asked the biggest techie community what they'd like to see happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821

The results were resounding. Drop all the Ubuntu-only projects and switch back to upstream ones. Sadly, this mostly means Red Hat-backed projects, as it is the upstream developer of systemd, PulseAudio, GNOME 3, Flatpak and much more.

Personally I am interested in non-Windows-like desktops. I think the fragmentation in the Linux desktop market has been immensely harmful, has destroyed the fragile unity (pun intended) that there was in the free Unix world, and the finger of blame can be firmly pointed at Microsoft, which did this intentionally. I wrote about this here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/

The Unity desktop came out of that, and that was a good thing. I never like GNOME 2 much and I don't use Maté. But Unity was a bit of a lash-up behind the scenes, apparently, based on a series of Compiz plugins. It was not super stable and it was hard to maintain. The unsuccessful Unity-2D fork was killed prematurely (IMHO), whereas Unity 8 (the merged touchscreen/desktop version) was badly late.

There were undeniably problems with the development approach. Ubuntu has always faced problems with Red Hat, the 800lb gorilla of FOSS. The only way to work with a RH-based project is to take it and do as your told. Shuttleworth has written about this.
https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/654
(See the links in that post too.)

Also, some contemporary analysis: https://www.osnews.com/story/24510/shuttleworth-seigo-gnomes-not-collaborating/

I am definitely not claiming that Ubuntu always does everything right! Even with the problems of working with GNOME, I suspect that Mir was a big mistake and that Ubuntu should have gone with Wayland.

Cinnamon seems to be sticking rather closer to the upstream GNOME base for its different desktop. Perhaps Unity should have been more closely based on GNOME 3 tech, in the same way.

But IMHO, Ubuntu was doing terrifically important work with Unity 8, and all that has come to nothing. Now the only real convergence efforts are the rather half-hearted KDE touchscreen work and the ChromeOS-on-tablet work from Google, which isn't all-FOSS anyway TTBOMK.

I am terribly disappointed they surrendered. They were so close.

I entirely agree with you: Unity was _the_ best Linux desktop, bar none. A lot of the hate was from people that never learned to use it properly. I have seen it castigated for lacking stuff that is basic built-in functionality that people never found how to use.

In one way, Unity reminded me of OS/2 2: "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows." And it *was*! Unity was a better Mac OS X desktop than Mac OS X. I'm typing on a Mac now and there's plenty of things it can't do that Unity could. Better mouse actions. *Far* better keyboard controls.

I hope that the FOSS forks do eventually deliver.

Meantime, I reluctantly switched to Xfce. It's fine, it works, it's fast and simple, but it lacks functionality I really want.

Something I seldom see mentioned, but I use a lot, is Linux systems installed directly onto USB sticks (pendrives).

No, you can't install from these, but they are very useful for system recovery & maintenance.

There are 2 ways to do it.

[1] Use a diskless PC, or disconnect your hard disk.

This is fiddly.

SUSE has some info on how to do this.

[2] Use a VM.

VirtualBox is free and lets you assign a physical disk drive to a VM. It's much harder to do this than it is in VMware -- it requires some shell commands to create, and other ones every time you wish to use it -- but it does work.

Here's how:

http://www.sysprobs.com/access-physical-disk-virtualbox-desktop-virtualization-software

Read the comments!

Every time you want to run the VM, you must take ownership of the USB device's entry in /dev

E.g.

chown lproven:lproven /dev/sdc

N.B. This may require sudo.

Then the VM works. If you don't do this, the VM won't start and will give an unhelpful error message about nonexistent devices, then quit.

(It's possible that you could work around this by running VirtualBox as root, but that is not advisable.)

The full Unity edition of Ubuntu 16.04 will not install on an 8GB USB key, but Lubuntu will. I suspect that Xubuntu would also be fine, and maybe the Maté edition. I suspect but have not tested that KDE and GNOME editions won't work, as they're bigger. They'd be fine on bigger keys, of course, but see the next paragraph.

Also note that desktops based on GNOME 3 require hardware OpenGL support, and thus run very badly inside VMs. This includes GNOME Shell, Unity & Cinnamon, and in my experience, KDE 4 & 5.

Installation puts GRUB in the MBR of the key, so it boots like any other disk.

Hints:

• Partition the disk as usual. I suggest no separate /home but it's up to you. A single partition is easiest.


• Format the root partition as ext2 to extend flash media life (no journalling -> fewer writes)


• Add ``noatime'' to the /etc/fstab entry for the root volume -- faster & again reduces disk writes


• No swap. Swapping wears out flash media. I install and enable ZRAM just in case it's used on low-RAM machines: http://askubuntu.com/questions/174579/how-do-i-use-zram


• You can add VirtualBox Guest Additions if you like. The key will run better in a VM and when booted on bare metal they just don't activate.

I then update as normal.

You can update when booted on bare metal, but if it installs a kernel update, then it will run ``update-grub'' and this will add entries for any OSes on that machine's hard disk into the GRUB menu. I don't like this -- it looks messy -- so I try to only update inside a VM.

I usually use a 32-bit edition; the resulting key will boot and run 64-bit machines too and modern versions automatically run PAE and use all available RAM.

Sadly my Mac does not see such devices as bootable volumes, but the keys work on normal PCs fine.

EDIT: It occurs to me that they might not work on UEFI PCs unless you create a UEFI system partition and appropriate boot files. I don't have a UEFI PC to experiment with. I'd welcome comments on this.

Windows can't see them as it does not natively understand ext* format filesystems. If you wish you can partition the drive and have an exFAT (or whatever format you prefer) data partition as well, of course.

I also install some handy tools such as additional filesystem support (exFAT, HFS etc.), GParted, things like that.

I find such keys a handy addition to my portable toolkit and have used them widely.

If you wish and you used a big enough key, you could install multiple distros on a single key this way. But remember, you can't install from them.

I've also found that the BootRepair tool won't install on what it considers to be an installed system. It insists on being installed on a live installer drive.

If you want to carry around lots of ISO files and choose which to install, a device like this is the easiest way:

http://www.zalman.com/contents/products/view.html?no=212

(Repurposed CIX post.)

Don’t get me wrong. I like Apple kit. I am typing right now on an original 1990 Apple Extended II keyboard, attached via a ABD-USB convertor to a Core i5 Mac mini from 2011, running Mac OS X 10.10. It’s a very pleasant computer to work on.

But, to give an example of the issues — I also have an iPhone. It’s my spare smartphone with my old UK SIM in it.

But it’s an iPhone 4. Not a lot of RAM, under clocked CPU, and of course not upgradable.

So I’ve kept it on iOS 6, because I already find it annoyingly slow and iOS 7 would cause a reported 15-25% or more slowdown. And that’s the latest it will run.

Which means that [a] I can’t use lots of iPhone apps as they no longer support iOS 6.x and [b] it doesn’t do any of the cool integration with my Mac, because my Mac needs a phone running iOS 8 to do clever CTI stuff.

My old 3GS I upgraded from iOS 4 to 5 to 6, and regretted it. It got slower & slower and Apple being Apple, *you can’t go back*.

Apple kit is computers simplified for non-computery people. Stuff you take for granted with COTS PC kit just can’t be done. Not everything — since the G3 era, they take ordinary generic RAM, hard disks, optical drives, etc. Graphics cards etc. can often be made to work; you can, with work, replace CPUs and runs OSes too modern to be supported.

But it takes work. If you don’t want that, if you just max out the RAM, put a big disk in and live with it, then it’s fine. I’m old enough that I want a main computer that Just Works and gives me no grief and the Mac is all that and it cost me under £150, used. The OS is of course freeware and so are almost all the apps I run — mostly FOSS.

I like FOSS software. I use Firefox, Adium, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Calibre, VirtualBox and BOINC. I also have some closed-source freeware like Chrome, Dropbox, TextWrangler and Skype. I don’t use Apple’s browser, email client, chat client, text editor, productivity apps or anything. More or less only iTunes, really.

What this means is that I can use pretty much the same suite of apps on Linux, Mac and Windows, making switching between them seamless and painless. My main phone runs Android, my travelling laptop is a 2nd-hand Thinkpad with the latest Ubuntu LTS on it.

As such, many of the benefits of an all-Apple solution are not available to me — texting and making phone calls from the desktop, seamless handover of file editing from desktop to laptop to tablet, wireless transparent media sync between computers and phone, etc.

I choose not to use any of this stuff because I don’t trust closed file formats and dislike vendor lock-in.

Additionally, I don’t like Apple’s modern keyboards and trackpads, and I like portable devices where I can change the battery or upgrade the storage. So I don’t use Apple laptops and phones and don’t own a tablet. iPads are just big iPhones and I don’t like iPhones much anyway. The apps are too constrained, I hate typing on a touchscreen “keyboard” and I don’t like reading book-length texts from a brightly-glowing screen — I have a large-screen (A4) Kindle for ebooks. (Used off eBay, natch.) TBH I’d quite like a backlight on it but the big-screen model doesn’t offer one.

But I don’t get that with Ubuntu. I never used UbuntuOne; I don’t buy digital content at all, from anyone; my Apple account is around 20 years old and has no payment method set up on it. I have no lock-in to Apple and Ubuntu doesn’t try to foist it on me.

With Ubuntu, *I* choose the laptop and I can (and did) build my own desktops, or more often, use salvaged freebies. My choice of keyboard and mouse, etc. I mean, sure, the Retina iMac is lovely, but it costs more than I’m willing to spend on a computer.

Android is… all right. It’s flakey but it’s cheap, customisable (I’ve replaced web browser, keyboard, launcher and email app, something Apple does not readily permit without drastic limitations) and it works well enough.

But it’s got bloatware, tons of vendor-specific extensions and it’s not quick.

Ubuntu is sleek as Linuxes go. I like the desktop. I turn off the web ads and choose my own default apps and it’s perfectly happy to let me. I can remove the built-in ones if I want and it doesn’t break anything.

If I could get a phone that ran Ubuntu, I’d be very interested. And it might tempt me into buying a tablet.

I’ve tried all the leading Linuxes (and most of the minor ones) and so long as you’re happy with its desktop, Ubuntu is the best by a country mile. It’s the most polished, best-integrated, it works well out of the box. I more or less trust them, as much as I trust any software vendor.

The Ubuntu touch offerings look good — the UI works well, the apps look promising, and they have a very good case for the same apps working well on phone and tablet, and the tablet becoming a usable desktop if you just plug a mouse in.

Here’s a rather nice little 3min demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3PUYoa1c9M

Wireless mouse turned on: desktop mode, windows, title bars, menus, etc.
Turn it off, mid-session: it’s a tablet, with touch controls. *With all the same same apps and docs still open.*
Mouse back on: it’s in desktop mode again.

And there’s integration — e.g. phone apps run full-size in a sidebar on a tablet screen, visible side-by-side with tablet apps.

Microsoft doesn’t have this, Apple doesn’t, Google doesn’t.

It looks promising, it runs on COTS hardware and it’s FOSS. What’s not to like?

I suspect, when the whole plan comes together, that they will have a compelling desktop OS, a compelling phone OS and a compelling tablet OS, all working very well together but without any lock-in. That sounds good to me and far preferable to shelling out thousands on new kit to achieve the same on Apple’s platform. Because C21 Apple is all about selling you hardware — new, and regularly replaced, too — and then selling you digital content to consume on it.

Ubuntu isn’t. Ubuntu’s original mission was to bring Linux up to the levels of ease and polish of commercial OSes.

It’s done that.

Sadly, the world failed to beat a path to its door. It’s the leading Linux and it’s expanded the Linux market a little, but Apple beat it to market with a Unix that is easier, prettier and friendlier than Windows — and if you’re willing to pay for it, Apple makes nicer hardware too.

But now we’re hurtling into the post-desktop era. Apple is leading the way; Steve Jobs finally proved his point that he knew how to make a tablet that people wanted and Bill Gates didn’t. Gates’ company still doesn’t, even when it tries to embrace and extend the iPad type of device: millions of the original Surface tablets are destined for landfill like the Atari ET game and Apple Lisa. (N.B. *not* the totally different Surface Pro, but people use it as a lightweight laptop.)

But Apple isn’t trying to make its touch devices replace desktops and laptops — it wants to sell both.

Ubuntu doesn’t sell hardware at all. So it’s trying to drag proper all-FOSS Linux kicking and screaming into the twenty-twenties: touch-driven *and* by desk-bound hardware-I/O, equally happy on ARM or x86-64, very shiny but still FOSS underneath.

The other big Linux vendors don’t even understand what it’s trying to do. SUSE does Linux servers for Microsoft shops; Red Hat sells millions of support contracts for VMs in expensive private clouds. Both are happy doing what they’re doing.

Whereas Shuttleworth is spending his millions trying to bring FOSS to the masses.

OK, what Elon Musk is doing is much much cooler, but Shuttleworth’s efforts are not trivial.

A couple of months ago, I tried to update my 2007 Toshiba Satellite Pro P300-1AY laptop from Ubuntu 12.04 to 13.04. It failed, badly -- my AMD RV620 GPU is no longer supported by fglrx, the proprietary AMD/ATI graphics driver. But Ubuntu used it anyway, resulting in a broken GUI.
( Read more... )

I quite like VirtualBox. Yes, VMWare has strengths, but VBox works a treat, does the seamless-desktop thing with certain
hosts/guests, and basically why pay?

I use VMware Player when I'm doing stuff that requires direct USB access - it's a lot less hassle than VBox for that. You need to run it with admin rights, though, which is a snag.

But when I am revewing operating systems, I tend not to use virtual machines.  I mean, sure, they work, but - for instance - one will not feel or experience the ways in which Ubuntu is a lot better than Windows unless one's running it on the actual hardware. E.g. the fast boot and shutdown times, the improved performance one gets when one doesn't need an antivirus program scanning every sodding disk access and all the crap that runs in the background in Windows.

Raw Ubuntu is quicker and feels quicker, and personally, I prefer the UI to Windows 7's. Win7 is the result of 17 years of work on the Win95 Explorer and yet in some ways it's inferior to the original. I preferred the original taskbar and the original file manager,  TBH.

Ubuntu is a breath of fresh air.

And if Ubuntu is nice and quick, then the stripped-down "remixes" of it, such as Lubuntu and Bodhi Linux, can be breathtaking. You don't get a real feel for that in a VM.

Another issue is drivers. There's the delightful way that Linux and Mac OS X just use generic drivers, rather than Windows' endless dicking around with that vendor's particular driver for that rebranded Taiwanese POS and the pointless fucking icon it sticks in your notification area.

There's the joy of no serial numbers, no activation, and an OS that you can just copy onto an external drive or onto an entirely different PC with totally different hardware and which Just Works™ without falling in a heap because the drive controller chipset has changed or because you've changed more bits of hardware than some evil fatcat bastard's minions in Seattle have decided you're allowed to.

You don't get any of that in a VM.

Running an OS in a VM is like trying to understand what it's like to pet a cat, or perhaps cuddle a baby if you like the things, when it's in an isolation chamber and your arms are in giant rubber gloves and you're peering at it through a small window.

Yeah, it's better than nothing, but it's Not The Same. You don't get a real feel for it.

In unrelated news, I had to bring up my main fileserver to retrieve the OpenSolaris & PC-BSD ISOs. Alas, its evaluation copy of Windows 2003 SBS has expired, but I get 1h to pull files off it each reboot, apparently.

I am considering trying to install Windows 2008 Server over the top. I don't care about saving my settings, I just don't want to have to backup & completely reformat. Alas, I seem to have lost my ISO of that.

Going looking, I found that W2k8 R2 is out & it is Micros~1's first ever 64-bit onlyOS. I'd missed this one. It's the server version of Windows 7, basically.

And I had no idea if the fairly-late-model Pentium 4 in my HP Proliant was a 64-bit capable one or not. I know it has hyperthreading, but not if it sports 64-bit extensions.

It doesn't have a mouse of its own and I couldn't get Ubuntu's rdesktop client to connect so I could run CPUID on it, so I tried logging in - only to be told that my time was up and be spanked with a BSOD. Thanks, Redmond.

An idea occurred. I could try booting my 64-bit Ubuntu CD. If it worked, it's 64-bit capable; if it doesn't, it's not.

Well, it's not, and Ubuntu helpfully printed a little message to tell me that I needed an x86-64 CPU and it could only find an x86-32 one. No worries; I am limited to original W2K8 Server then. I am sure I'll cope.

On a whim, I tried my copy of 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10, and to my considerable surprise, not only did it boot but it found the RAID controller and happily mounted my NTFS volume. I tried all manner of Linux distros on this last year - Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, CentOS and SME Server - and none of them could see the RAID5 volume on its Dell-badged ALI MegaRAID card. So at some point late last year, they fixed the driver in the kernel.

Which was nice.

Which leaves me wondering... try to upgrade it to a newer Windows Server, in which I could do with more experience, or stick Ubuntu on it, which will probably be quicker and easier and more use, and won't date-expire on my in 6mths...?