Another rant

[Xen]

Liam Proven schreef op 16-11-2017 16:54:

> That sounds nasty. My sympathies.
> 
> FWIW, a few observations:
> 
> I am old and grumpy. Computers are tools for me now, more than toys.
> This means I want the minimum of playing around. (I have other,
> dedicated computers for that.)

Even though compared to you I am young I have definitely reached the age 
where I constantly say "I am too old for this" when I run into the same 
hassle I had when I was 15.

When I was 15 I had time to learn.

But now it's not learning, but just facing the same trouble time and 
time again, all over again, in just slightly different variations.

You'd hope stuff would improve or that your life would become more 
solid.

But during the 2000s Linux distros were pretty calm and well maintained.

Now everyone rushes to the next big thing and doesn't actually finish 
what they start....



I just tried to upgrade LVM2 to a version from Yakkety ;-). That used to 
work just fine, but my system doesn't boot anymore now.

I don't know why because my system doesn't show boot messages anymore 
anyway since I installed 16.04.3 so I cannot troubleshoot and I don't 
get an initrd prompt.

Luckily I had a 4.8 initrd that still booted because update-initramfs -u 
doesn't update it automatically.

Saved me the not-so-proverbial usb live boot.

Peculiar that an LVM upgrade ruins things; I diffed the initramfs's and 
there was no difference in boot scripts, no difference in configuration, 
the binaries only differed and that was everything.

So very peculiar that an upgrade in what amounts to libdevmapper would 
kill my system...

...but because /tmp is not persistent, I cannot check back....

Love ............. all those changes.








(Who the hell uses /var/tmp, that is too far away to be useful).

(Why don't they just dump the non-persistent stuff in /run/tmp and leave 
us the directory?)




Stranger still is that while my scripts failed to get this system 
running, I constantly got initrd prompts, but now nothing.

How can the initrd fail so hard that it won't even load all because of 
LVM?

But this is annoying because the version in 16.04 is really old.




> So I am exploring alternatives. So far, Xfce sucks the least. But if I
> use Xfce, then there's no reason to stay on Ubuntu.

I'm still on KDE... but I actually wanted to install Unity but I 
couldn't download another image.

I mean, 16.04 is the last real Unity image.

17.04 had a preview of Unity 8.

17.10 had it removed.

18.04 will just be Gnome 3.

Fact is KDE will stay the same and as long as they don't upgrade another 
major version it can only improve over time.

Akonadi is useless and I have never used Baloo and the search features 
are pointless for me.

KMail never works, and the rest of it also seems pointless. Activities 
are worthless too.

But the base system still works as shabby as it may be.

Dolphin is not great but doable.

If only they fixed the eternal samba problems.

Then Linux would be a bit usable.

But autofs doesn't work very well with samba (it's buggy) and 
libpam-mount is too primitive and user-unfriendly to be useful.

The Gnome distributions solve it with Gnome.

And seem to do better than others.

I never liked /media and I barely use it.

Too far away, too random, and even if it is persistent because of labels 
it never feels persistent at all...

So the only real solution I guess in Linux given the root structure is:

a) GUI access only in a nice way
b) additional root structures like in Windows ;-).

(why not)

c) something I wanted to create to at least make access easier ;-).


> So I've been experimenting. It runs well on OpenSUSE and while it's
> still not a small distro, with Xfce, it's relatively slim on modern
> hardware. E.g. it ran well on a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, a low-end
> machine these days.

OpenSUSE is/was always pretty well done with many more system management 
consolidation solutions.

Ie. yast.

It also has a much more busy mailing list... :-/.



> I've now wiped it. That machine currently triple-boots IBM PC DOS 7,
> Haiku and Devuan.

Pff...

> I am working on adding OS/2, AROS and Oberon A2.
> 
> You might enjoy Devuan. It's Debian without systemd. I find it works
> well. With LXDE it is small, light and fast.

Because I cannot depend on Debian solely for my desktop O.S. I find that 
I still have to invest in SystemD, so I have not gone the Devuan 
approach yet, but I am happy they exist.