No, I’m not serious

The cool thing about Arch is that with some learning, time and effort, you can make it function just like Ubuntu

… And Canonical…

false dichotomy. Sometimes people justifiably dislike something for reasons beyond elitism (e.g. Canonical is a for-profit corporation that muddies the waters of FOSS), but it’s also not just playful bants.

Also, as with every opinionated topic: do your own research and think critically. Don’t hate Ubuntu until you have tried it and have investigated those who maintain it. Don’t praise it until you do so either.

I don’t care if you come to a different conclusion than me, as long as you didn’t just function on the “wisdom of the crowd”

Funny you should say that, because…

https://vim-adventures.com/

Real wizards use ed

It will cause a critical error during boot if the device isn’t given the nofail mount option, which is not included in the defaults option, and then fails to mount. For more details, look in the fstab(5) man page, and for even more detail, the mount(8) man page.

Found that out for myself when not having my external harddrive enclosure turned on with a formatted drive in it caused the pc to boot into recovery mode (it was not the primary drive). I had just copy-pasted the options from my root partition, thinking I could take the shortcut instead of reading documentation.

There’s probably other ways that a borked fstab can cause a fail to boot, but that’s just the one I know of from experience.

To the feature creep: that’s kind of the point. Why have a million little configs, when I could have one big one? Don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical. I get that there are use cases, but the average user doesn’t like having to tweak every component of the OS separately before getting to doom-scrolling.

And that feature creep and large-scale adoption inevitably has led to a wider attack surface with more targets, so ofc there will be more CVEs, which—by the way—is a terrible metric of relative security.

You know what has 0 CVEs? DVWA.

You know what has more CVEs and a higher level of privilege than systemd? The linux kernel.

And don’tme get started on how bughunters can abuse CVEs for a quick buck. Seriously: these people’s job is seeing how they can abuse systems to get unintended outcomes that benefit them, why would we expect CVEs to be special?

TL;DR: That point is akin to Trump’s argument that COVID testing was bad because it led to more active cases (implied: being discovered).

I’m gonna laugh if it’s something as simple as a botched fstab config.

In the past, it’s usually been the case that the more ignorant I am about the computer system, the stronger my opinions are.

When I first started trying out Linux, I was pissed at it and would regularly rant to anyone who would listen. All because my laptop wouldn’t properly sleep: it would turn off, then in a few minutes come back on; turns out the WiFi card had a power setting that was causing it to wake the computer up from sleep.

After a year of avoiding the laptop, a friend who was visiting from out of town and uses Arch btw took one look at it, diagnosed and fixed it in minutes. I felt like a jackass for blaming the linux world for intel’s non-free WiFi driver being shit. (in my defense, I had never needed to toggle this setting when the laptop was originally running Windows).

The worst part is that I’m a sysadmin, diagnosing and fixing computer problems should be my specialty. Instead I failed to put in the minimum amount of effort and just wrote the entire thing off as a lost cause. Easier then questioning my own infallibility, I suppose.

Debian is the best and I don’t know what to do with it

What the fuck.

This is your brain on racism.

This is a hypothetical that has no clear bearing connection to common practice.

In other words, I could just reverse this to contradict it and have equal weight to my hypothetical: devs should always use GPL, because if their software gets widely adopted to the point where companies are forced to use it, it’s better that it’s copyleft.

Well, ideally you’re choosing your license based on the cases where it differs from others and not the majority of times where it doesn’t make a difference.

Someone aiming to make Free software should use a copyleft license that protects the four freedoms, instead of hoping people abide by the honor system.

Also, no one can 100% accurately predict which of their projects will get big. Sure, a radical overhaul of TCP has good odds, but remember left-pad? Who could have foreseen that? Or maybe the TCP revision still never makes it big: QUIC and HTTP/3 are great ideas, and yet they are still struggling to unseat HTTP/2 as the worldwide standard.

I’vw become so brainwashed by the FOSS Difference™ that if I see something exclusive to proprietary OSes, I assume it’s 99% marketing and not actually an important nor useful feature. I have no idea what HDR is, but it sounds like a marketing acronym for something that’s done worse than the FOSS equivalent

Also, my life is objectively better since I stopped using Adobe outside work.

Without knowing a better way, my go-to solution woukd just be getting an full installation image and diffing my files with the files on it

ZPAQ is for cool people with massive space savings

z is for gzip archives only.

tar xf for eXtract the File

Re the comic: great art! Can’t wait to read more. I’m already curious about these characters and their setting.

Re the topic: I have to agree with Benno Rice here. While systemd is far from perfect, there is a lot that it got right, and there are a lot of reasons it became the most widely adopted init system—no, it’s not because the project owner is well-connected, that’s for Apple and M$. We should learn from that, instead of outright dismissing the users that have reasons for wanting/using it.

More generally, this falls under the “should the tech adapt to the user or the user adapt to the tech?” debate. Systemd chose to aim for broadly applicable while still being easy to use for beginners who just want to “set it and forget it” (the tech adapted to the user). Meanwhile, savvy users have figured out exactly how they want their init configured, and the bare minimum they need to do so, so they’re willing to learn a different system (the users adapting to tech).

I’m not even close to saying systemd is The Best™, nor even that it’s good. But it is good at what it wants to be, and it satisfies the overwhelming majority of gnunix users. Instead of writing them off as misguided followers of evil, maybe we should listen to their needs and try to find a way to tailor an init system to them.

Spoiler: we don’t do that because they want something that takes care of everything systemd does, that’s as widely supported, and that requires minimal setup and maintenance. They want systemd.

Debian, Arch, Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Redhat, Manjaro all have docs and wiki on their primary websites. Slackware has docs, Gentoo has a wiki. Anything that’s not on a distro’s site needs to be carefully considered before tampering. Almost all of those distros have a warning in their installation instructions to only listen to the information in their docs and wiki, and to a lesser extent their forums. Hell, even nosystemd.org tells you what systemd is, what it’s for, what replacements there are, and the proper way to get rid of it in bold text under the header “How do I get rid of systemd?”

Listening to hackneyed advice from unvetted sources just because they have strong opinions is a problem that any and every computer will face. That’s not a problem with linux anymore than the hoardes of trolls on random social media sites telling you to “delete System32” is a problem with Windows.

I want Linux to be customizable AND safe. But safe in the way that someone takes the time to learn how what they plan to do will effect their system, not safe in the sense of “impossible to bork”

As for elitism: if it’s “elitist” to indirectly poke fun of someone who deleted a core system component without understanding what it does without a backup, then so be it. It feels more like that word is levied by people whose ego is too big to take respobsibility for the mistakes they made, and instead blame others for laughing when it bites them in the ass.

Idk where these swaths of elitists that refuse to help are. OOP went to stackexchange and likely got a helpful answer complete with explanations, as that is the community standard. Over on !linux@lemmy.ml , I see people offering help with problems all the time without shitting on them. If I go to the aforementioned OS forums, or really any software-specific forums, I see people helping or pointing people to where they can get help.

And I’m not denying that assholes who say shit like “did you even bother googling?” exist. They’re nasty people with no patience, but they’re by no means the community standard unless they’re the only ones you pay attention to…

Or unless you see a screenshot of a question from a different website posted in a meme-sharing forum and expect the comments to offer advice, instead of laughing at the person who shot themselves in the foot and went to a hospital instead of seeking help at the DNC HQ

“I am a new linux user. After 15 minutes of research on google, I found a few forum posts and some niche websites that said SystemD was bad, so I took it as gospel. Now my system doesn’t work as simply as it did with installer defaults? How do I make everything Just Work™ after removing any OS components I don’t understand the need for?”