It’s true. On the other hand distros like Zorin or Pop!_OS don’t need the command line and work “out of the box”.
The real problem being that, Linux users are nerds. And once you get use to power, you can’t imagine a time where you did not have that power. That is why when a newbie asks “what linux should I use”, the answers are never the right ones. It’s always : you can use that to do that, or that one is better for that aspect or […] omitting the simple fact that before all of that, to have more Linux users, the goal is NOT to scare them. Give them something easy, that works. They’ll eventually figure it out.
That’s the point of the article. It’s well written. It’s spot-on.
Such an unbelievably talented and driven group of people. Having a full blown version of Fedora on Apple silicon would probably convince me to buy a macbook for my next laptop.
after using the m1 air, I’m sold on arm
it doesn’t have fans so no complaints of noise (my old laptop gave me ptsd of fan noise and I’ve also heard framework 12^th^ having fan noise as it has a single fan coupled with a p-series processor)
I’d love to see amd/intel make an arm chip as microsoft also seems to pick-up the windows on arm thing
You can disapate heat into the metal chassis without a fan, and if your CPU only generates a few watts, even at 100% this doesn’t cause it to overheat. This has been done with desktops that are.much more powerful, but it’s also been done on the new M2 MacBook air, because the m2 CPU is quite efficient. It doesn’t overheat because the case passively dissapates heat fast enough. It’s also not a performance laptop.
that’s because apple uses arm chips which are much more power efficient than Intel and amd’s x86 chips
it mostly uses 15-20 watts or around that which is easy to dissipate than 45-50 watt Intel and amd produces which requires fan
I’ve heard even the most powerful m1 max chip doesn’t need fan when video editing (which can go for continuous 6 hrs on battery and you don’t see a performance hit when charging or on battery)
I haven’t tried the amd mainboard yet but I have the 12th Gen Intel framework and the fan is capable of running very loud if you want to take maximum advantage of the processor performance.
Turning off turbo, running thermald etc can give you a more comfortable and quiet experience and longer battery runtime if you are prepared to give up that peak performance which is mostly not required. PC hardware sells on unsustainable peak performance tests thanks to the focus of reviewers on those numbers instead of the overall experience.
The Intel cpu gives much worse performance per watt than the m1 but the system it is in is also much easier to repair and upgrade and has much more mature open source support. It is a tradeoff.
I owned and enjoyed using an intel MacBook when they were serviceable and upgradeable. It had a long and productive life and was easily one of the best made laptops available in its time for the money. Framework might not be offering revolutionary CPUs but they make Apple’s business of selling disposable closed hardware look extremely dated. I would rather take a small performance hit until the rest of the industry catches up than spend any more of my time and money with Apple. Apple have more engineering talent and money than just about anyone which could be used to make ground breaking sustainable, repairable, open hardware and they always choose to go the other way.
I have to respect the Asahi devs for attempting to liberate apple hardware. Making systems more free is never a bad thing. It is unfortunate that systems even need to be liberated.
Kinda hard to buy a Framework when they don’t sell to your country! Framework laptops are only available in a handful of areas, whereas Macbooks are sold in almost every country on Earth.
Framework is cool, but Apple Silicon is still a pretty enticing concept if you want a silent system! I have an M1 Mac Mini that doesnt make a peep of noise even when its churning out tests and compiling, but my work laptop costs 2x the price, came out the same year, and struggles in the same tasks.
Some of it is Windows and its shite scheduler. Some of it is ARM. One day RISC-V will be at the same level and we won’t have to pick :)
Whatever Red Hat is doing with Enterprise Linux has luckily no direct effect on Fedora which in itself is a great distribution, so this is a good step.
Serious question: why would anyone opt for XFS these days? I remember reading about it being faster/more efficient with small files, but is that still valid?
XFS has been the default file system for RHEL since RHEL 7. A lot of places typically roll with defaults there, so it makes sense to see it still widely used.
From the top of my head, compared to ext4: RAM use and the ability to shrink an FS if necessary. Oh, also I’ve used an EXT FS driver on a Windows host, but I’ve never seen one for XFS.
The two benefits to XFS that I’ve ever seen are that it has no inode limit like ext4 (which prevents the FS shrink). The other is that it seems to handle simultaneous I/O better than ext4 does; think very active database volumes and datastores.
Rock solid may be a stretch. They still suffer from outrageous metadata bugs even to this day when used in busy file systems.
That bug alone has been open for over a decade. Development focus of the people who understand and want to fix those things have shifted to other filesystems like ext4 and ZFS.
It has more features but it also isn’t as weird and wacky as btrfs and zfs.
Honestly I’m not sure it shouldn’t be the default fs for most distros, except it wasn’t born in the Linux kernel like ext and btrfs, but it’s been here forever and it’s been very well behaved, unlike others I can mention.
Used it for a while on lvm raid, xfs was never what gave me problems.
To me, zfs is like the Gentoo of file systems. If you actually use the zfs features and do a lot of digging and experimentation before you go all in on it, it’s not bad; it really can be quite good. If someone wants a filesystem that they format and forget, ext4 and xfs are still solid options. I used to use ext4 for most of my filesystem needs and xfs for my long term storage on top of mdadm. I just really wanted zfs snapshots.
I’ll give you one reason it’s used commercially: Veeam can only use xfs or refs as a deduplication enabled store using fastclone. For example I have a 60 disk nas hosting hundreds of customer backups and a petabyte. Without deduplication imagine how many extra petabytes of storage would be consumed. Each backup is basically the same image as well as the backup processing time.
Maybe they’ll get that same feature on zfs one day.
Unless you want me to use refs? But I have tried that, and I’ve lost a whole volume to iscsi volume mounted to windows and formatted refs due to corruption when a network power loss happened gradually and whatever reason, that network interruption caused the whole volume to be unmountable over iscsi ever again. I’m not keen to retry that.
Xfs is pretty good with 60 disks, I wouldn’t trust ext4 with that many but there’s nothing factual about ext4 but a feeling.
About to get a second 60 disk nas for another datacentre for the same setup as above to migrate away from Wasabi as offsite. Will build xfs again. Looking forward to it.
Yeah but veeam doesn’t support fast block cloning which means you don’t need to ever recopy blocks that don’t change. From a performance point of view, fast block cloning gives incredible speed up so that in turn means more backups happen in a short time. That’s pretty important even at our small business scale. I guess larger veeam service providers solve things differently.
I have no experience with ZFS and didn't know it supported project quotas too. I found out about XFS from an LPIC book where it said that XFS, unlike other filesystems, also supported project quotas (this was about 10 years ago). It's been working fine for me the past few years, so I've never looked for alternatives. Now I'm curious.
Asahi Linux is a project and community with the goal of porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, starting with the 2020 M1 Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.
Well, that’s a rant and a half. I’ve got a similar setup and don’t see the same message, but that’s still weird.
The good news is you don’t actually have to know about Asahi, they’re upsteaming all their work. If it’s useful to you, you’ll end up using it without even knowing
Who knows what they are using to make that determination. Obviously you need some tweaking. It sounds like you’re reacting somewhat poorly though. Life goes on. There’s other ways that you can see the site if you really want to. Think about it from their perspective.
At some point, if people like you are being pushed away from the project, thats an acceptable price to pay for blocking all the harassment. Asahi has existed since the launch of apple ARM, your attitude stinks and it shows.
I got the same popup. Blocks the article, no way to get past it to read it. And no, I don't read Hacker News nor did I follow a link from them. Fuck Asahi. They can pull their heads out of their asses and then maybe I'll regain some interest in their shit... but I doubt it. They've just demonstrated sheer technical incompetence as well as childish pettiness. Definitely not anyone worthy of being relied on.
Asahi: Successfully reverse engineers undocumented silicon and releases first of its kind firmware upstream where possible. You: (of the Asahi devs) “demonstrated sheer technical incompetence.”
Asahi devs: receive abuse, harassment and discrimination from a website, often personally directed at minority team members. Ask the websites mods to do something about it, get ignored. Asahi devs: Block traffic from said website (and some collateral traffic) to do what they can to protect their team from harassment. You: “childish pettiness … not worthy of being relied on”
Maaaateee… you got blocked from looking at a website, it’s at most a mild inconvenience to you. Maybe recalibrate your outrage. I’m sure someone of your technical competence can find a way to circumvent the pop up, if you care even a little.
Got the same thing. Whatever they’re using to detect the source of incoming clicks, it isn’t working. Valid rant against HN or not, IMO that just means they’re morons who I wouldn’t trust to support a distro.
they’re using the css :visited attribute on a link to a HN thread to display the message.
having passively followed asahi for some time (too poor to own a mac to actually try it out) the fact that they have to resort to shit like this is gross, but i 100% put the blame on HN for being an unmoderated trashfire (and explicitly bypassing the referrer based blocking asahi first had instead of, idk, actually moderating their site)
Thank you! Like is this kind of corny behavior? Sure, but maybe if HN wasn’t full of shitty people being actively enabled by a lack of moderation they wouldn’t have to try to do shit like this.
Although these styles can change the appearance of colors to the end user, the window.getComputedStyle method will lie and always return the value of the non-:visited color.
OK. I don't really have an issue with that if they genuinely are having problems with the site.
Just tried clicking that link, and got a huge pop up refusing me access to the site, and accusing me from being from a site called Hacker News (???).
According to the text in the screenshot you've posted, there is no referrer header, so perhaps you're using some privacy extension that strips referrers.
I just moved and I was literally in shock when Mint auto-added my Dads printer INSTANTLY and I printed on it first try no problem. I have literally had so many issues with printers (and this one) and I honestly expected printing to be out of the question on Linux so I’m definitely impressed.
How long ago was this written? Sure it’s not perfect but you can run a lot of distributions like fedora, ubuntu, opensuse etc etc whatever exactly as described. Maybe this is a joke I didn’t understand lol. But in case it is not:
No need to use command line if you don’t want to
Drivers are installed automatically (okay this might depend on the distro but in OpenSUSE I recall this being possible in a GUI)
There is a steam flatpak, and most user apps can be installed through a GUI, often as flatpaks
For a user like this, I see no reason to interact with system packages other than choosing when to update.
I’m a programmer and even I rarely edit ANYTHING in /etc on my desktop. Sure I edit stuff in ~/.config, but that is not stuff a “normal” user would need to do.
Now sure if you want to start customizing your login screen and this that and the other thing, eventually you will have to run something on the command line. But Windows doesn’t allow much customization beyond changing your desktop background, and pales in comparison to the amount of customization you can do with KDE, all through a GUI
What you’re saying is correct but all the things you’re describing are not 100% foolproof. Flatpaks are community maintained and can contain misconfigurations.
Also the sandboxed nature and all these foreign concepts for new users would have a user question why they’re not seeing their folders or why their cursor or theme doesn’t match their system.
These systems are great but they’re not nearly as polished as Windows and Mac.
It’s great for us but Linux has always struggled with any semblance of full polish. I think you’re overestimating the average computer user. Probably Ubuntu based distro’s are still as close as we got to an OS for the regular person.
The introduction of new concept could be mitigated by a proper system of introducing and explaining these to a new user but it’s difficult not to overwhelm them with info or keep them engaged and willing to learn.
I got into IT because troubleshooting Windows gave me a lot of experience. I don’t think there is anything that comes to mind that would make apps less likely to have bugs then on Linux.
The only exception is gaming where a lot of game studios have years of experience with Windows APIs that they tightly integrated with in the past. Less needed now, but that’s developer inertia for you.
I think the appstore / sandbox / flatpak situation is actually quite accessible to a younger audience that grew up with smartphones. They don’t deal with files much
Not to mention the fact chromebooks exists where local files are a mere joke and everything get’s uploaded to Google Disk or an alternative to that and they have never been more popular. The average person doesn’t save a word-processing document on a computer locally, they save it on a cloud and trust whoever owns that cloud service.
Im not afraid of command line, but also dont feel like linux guy yet. The thing is that installing and using some distros are way easier than windows. I installed POP OS recently and cant believe how smooth and easy it was. Average windows users might not need command line at all on distro like that
There was a time where I liked configuring and compiling things. I wrote my own scripts and pkgbuilds for arch. I’ve broken and fixed my system more times than I can count. I don’t mind it, but god I’m lazy. So I run POP now cause shit works and I don’t really have to mess with it.
Same for me, sort of. Started with Ubuntu in 2007 (I still feel nostalgic about the login drum “bu-du-bup” sound), then arch for a couple of years, all the tiling wms, endless polishing of dotfiles. I mainly used the computer to modify how I used the computer. Then I found things I liked doing, like typesetting with TeX, and after that I just wanted a system that let me do that without spending time on the system itself. Since then I’ve used Debian.
I’m in this camp. Been messing with linux since 2004. Ubuntu 5.10 i think it was, Fedora core 4, slackware, crunchbang, arch…almost 2 decades later i’m on Pop OS. shit just works it’s out of my way. i can customize it to look how i want, set it and forget it. nvidia works great etc. i use the terminal a lot though. mainly for bash scripts and ssh server stuff, directory navigation and management etc. I use a lot of third party TỤI apps too. I like the option of having a stable easy to use GUI for mundane lazy periods and the ability to do whatever i need in terminal. Plus pop os with tiling and floating window manager toggle is awesome.
Totally agree with this. The more you understand the terminal, the more you know how fast and efficient command line is (not for all activity, but many of them are easily done through command line) rather than through UI. But it takes time to understand, not in insant.
I can’t remember the last time I had to use the command line to do something that wasn’t me writing/publishing code or managing a server. It may have been years.
I agree. If anyone looks at windows support you will find the command line as well. It is much easier to copy paste a specific command than to try and diagram a series of paths and clicks to get something done. Neither OS requires it, but support is much easier when you do.
fully agreed. shure a barebones install of just the distro and no DE needs command line but once you have the DE you in theory never need it again. but i still prefer Entering a command. faster and more efficient instead of navigating 1000 menus
@cipherlab@pnutzh4x0r Nonetheless, it's quite the achievement. That's exactly what Linux needs: visible, tangible and reputable hardware that's ostensibly better than the competition. It's great to be flexible, but you still need to have a face.
Most Windows and practically all Mac instances are preinstalled by the hardware vendor. There are very few companies selling preinstalled Linux gaming machines other than the Steam Deck. I expect they might be a majority of new Linux steam users for some time as they are by far the lowest entry cost in terms of hardware, prerequisite technical knowledge and time.
Many gamers who dabble with Linux are still taking the path of least resistance and dual booting for gaming. Linux first people like myself will continue to grow in number but as long as it is a DIY thing realistically we will always be a few percent at best as most people want a simpler out of box gaming experience.
I recently got back a 10 year old Dell Latitude I lent my brother back when he started high school.
Having no particular project for it, I installed Debian 12 + Plasma 5.27 on it: it’s now 4 days that I’m enjoying tweaking the hell out of it
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