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On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Anton Aylward <opensuse@antonaylward.com> wrote:
On 07/24/2015 12:14 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 9:47 AM, Anton Aylward <opensuse@antonaylward.com> wrote:
On 07/24/2015 10:40 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
Use quotas.
You mean instead of traiffs?
That may make (some? more?) sense in a mutli-use context, but for a single user home system its an administrative detail I don't need.
Versus dithering on how to partition a drive, versus always having to overestimate the amount of space because resizing is yet another admin detail.
Are you not paying attention? You are talking about the classical problem with partitioning that used to annoy the hell out of me in the old PDP-11 and SCO UNIX days, and still does with ext4, of determining provision in advance of actual use.
OK and this is made more likely a problem when partitioning than when not partitioning.
The reasons for partitioning still hold. Making /tmp noexec,nosuid is a security fix. Having a seperate /tmp means no hard links which is another security fix. Having seperate /var, /local and more makes upgrading easier if you need to wipe the RootFS. And so on.
Choose: A. The risk is overblown. AppArmour and SELinux should contain such things, and if not it's a bug that needs to be fixed. B. All Linux distros have risky default installs seeing as none of them by default use the layout you describe.
The way around the provisioning problem that I found as simple;
1. Use LVM. Not only can you grow/shrink partitions, you can use additional drive or parts of drives.
LVM is automatically in sysadmin territory, not end user.
2. Use ReiserFS (or XFS) so you don't have to figure out how many inodes you need ahead of time.
This is nonsense for a home user. And XFS isn't shrinkable, so you better not overestimate. Ooh, the stress of a decision, let's have a burrito while we think about PARTITIONING for another hour...
I will bet dollars to donuts users who engage in such excessive partitioning buy bigger drives, so the habit costs them more money too.
HO HO HO, very funny. Big dives, the 1 Terabyte, are cheaper than the ones half that size at most outlets I visit.
And anyway, using LVM I can mix and match, use any drive I have, of any size. I can even mix SATA with ATA with IDE.
Blah blah blah, LVM ninjitsu is required for all of this. And you were complaining about the admin headache of quotas? LVM is emacs for storage. It's a UI nightmare.
If I really wanted to save money I could pick up old small drives from thrift stores and garage sales, check the bad blocks out when i build the LVM and LO! You whole argument falls apart in another direction.
See this is why I think user facing partitioning is neurotic nonsense. Within minutes it turns into arguing with the partition ninja gleefully exposing his narcissism by showing off what HE can do, rather than being an advocate for all users. It's like a Stuart skit, "look what I can do!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyvbFMGmImg You like LVM, and it helps you do things you need to do, that's fine. But for the vast majority, on a home computer, it's esoteric nonsense. It's not basic computer knowledge.
Working with the multi spindle "old iron" of the PDP/VAX days I learnt that the parallelism of IO was a powerful thing!
Since it's a home computer, all the more reason to just single partition and forget about it. Most computer users have no understanding of partitions anyway - it's esoteric. Basic knowledge for an admin, esoteric knowledge for anybody else.
Ah. you one of those who believe that Joe Six-pack has (a) no understanding of what's "under the hood" of Linux because he's been dumbed down by years of using Microsoft and the very basic UI of the iPod; and (b) he has no curiosity about How Things Work other than the innards of his GTO.
Well that may be true for the weenies who stick with Windows of the people who just want to GTD using OSX on over-priced single sourced hardware, but Linux seems to attract people who like to know what's going on "under the hood" and try things out.
Umm, well I'm on quite a range of forums and a metric ton of Linux users have heard of LVM and are decently familiar with the concept but overwhelmingly they are not proficient at using it. It's not used by default on Ubuntu since forever, and openSUSE doesn't use it by default (anymore?), while Fedora does and it trips up users all the time. I advocate for those who use a computer to get things done rather than playing around for hours with on disk layouts. I'm one of those that thinks there are better technologies on Linux than what Microsoft and Apple have to offer, but the coddling of ninjas, and lack of discipline sucks resources away from making Linux distros mature enough to be used by masses rather than as primarily for servers or by computer geeks who just like to tinker and understand. There's more to an eco system than having people who understand how something works; you have to have people who actually use the tool to get other things done. And for that to happen they can't be f'n around with otherwise useless shit like partitioning. Figure out *one layout* that works, and apply it to everyone, always, for 10 years, until the ninjas figure out something better. Microsoft, Apple, are successful in the desktop space because they say no effectively. They make decent choices for the user under the hood and prevent them from options that the user will either have difficulty supporting or those that company doesn't want to support. It's called focus. And when you look at the best that GNOME and KDE have done, it's when they say no. When they have focus. It's not when they say yes to everyone's wishes and just add more ways to ultimately do the same thing. Hidden partitions do help out the user. Android/Cyanogenmod phones have dozens of partitions, but the user never sees this, nor knows about it, nor can they change it. And yet they benefit from things like stateless resets, and easy upgrades that result - easier than any Linux distro, easier than OS X, and about on par now with Windows 8.1. So if there is some clear advantage to such highly granular partitioning schemes, it should be the default. And like I've said before you can see this in the default Btrfs subvolume structure, which involves 15 subvolumes, to carve things out for the snapshot and rollback strategy. I've got some criticisms of this, but overall it does what it was designed to do, and the user really doesn't have to think about it, and nor should they. They should just be able to get good safe results with the defaults. And they do. -- Chris Murphy -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org