On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Anton Aylward <opensuse@antonaylward.com> wrote:
On 07/24/2015 01:18 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
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.
One Right to Rule Them All.
Indeed. So why do we have that range of models from Ford, Chrysler, GM, Toyota? Why do we have the two seater cars and stretch limos? Walk into a Staples and look at the range of calculators they have ... then at the HP calculators that use RPN.
Bad analogy. Models of cars = distros and their various products (I've lost count how many variations of even official Fedoras there are including spins... a lot) Four wheels, brakes, gasoline/battery, headlights, taillights, etc = standardized partitioning scheme. A car is a car - I can drive any model competently with minor adjustment. That is completely not true with Linux distros, they are different OS's that happen to share a kernel, basically.
Part of the success of the UNIX/Linux is that it is unconstrained, so flexible, that is gets cut and sliced in so many different varieties and derivatives. The whole world isn't Windows or OSX.
The most successful Linux is Mint, by the numbers, and it's successful *again* for what it does not do more than what it does do. It's enacts discipline and safety and ease of use by constraining the choices. When it comes to the success of the kernel, sure, I agree it's a measured balance of unconstrained (out of tree stuff) and the constrained (Linus saying fuck you no this does not go in mainline).
I'm not denying that there are people who don't want to look under the hood, even of Linux. But this forum is about people that do. I'm not preaching to front office types. I know that even the people here will have their 'toys' that they don't take apart. My phone, tablet are 'production" not "development", even for me.
But even when it comes to phones and tablets there's no 'one layout" that works. People choose the apps they need, configure then how they need. Even the less technically sophisticated now about things like memory cards; even the less technical executives know about the business vs person mechanisms to keep those two apart. Even the less technically adroit will try out different music players, different video players, different cloud storage.
OK.
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.
That's a very naive way of looking at it. Also very limited. There are situations where the limited decision space can be useful. The military does this by training, training, training so that some things become reflex and you don't have to stop and think about them. If you've been driving shift for a few years you'll know this: you don't have to stop and think about speak and engine revs and are you going up hill or down and what weight you are towing -- you just change gears at the right time without thinking about it.
The boundary between what DOES get standardized - where the pedals are - is one thing. But what you can make with the car SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO is quite another.
And I consider partioning to be basic infrastructure, not at all user facing. Almost nothing good ever comes from users sharing partitioning information. Engineers putting it together, and making it a default layout, yes that's good: openSUSE default Btrfs layout, hallmark. Rough edges, needs smoothing, some adjustments, but it's innovation and the user doesn't have to even be one wit aware of it to benefit. Same for the Project Atomic / OSTree work, it's badass. Atomic updates, rollbacks, you don't even need Btrfs, it's designed to work on ext4 or XFS with or without LVM. That's infrastructure working to benefit the user.
One of the primary differences between Windows and Linux is already there in the decision space. You have to decide to install Linux. Yes you could be given an installer that, as I've pointed out elsewhere, uses an autoyast script to make the installer do anything! ANYTHING, absolutely anything. I once tried setting it up so that it wouldn't install on anything less that a 250G drive and would create /boot, /swap and a LVM and then a pile of LVM LEs, consulting the person doing the install only for his name and password and time zone. So don't try telling what the installer does, because it does whatever you tell it. We've seen that with different version of openSuse over the years working quite differently. That they now do a BtrFS RootFS is part of the script. Complain enough and that will be changed. heck, its only the autoyast script!
And yes I've asked Novell about this: "If you want we'll provide a master install DVD for you that works that way ..." its just a script after all.
As for preventing making choices that the user will have problems with... HA HA HA. Defaulting to BtrFS has seen a lot of problems for a lot of users, so I'm not convinced.
Well it's a new file system, and openSUSE was a bit aggressive getting into the hands of users I think. That sometimes happens when innovating. But I think the main problem is snapper is not being aggressive enough with its cleanup of aggressive snapshotting. so either reduced frequency snapshots or more cleanups are needed. That's a tweak, I'm not sure if it's pushed to updates or not, but in my opinion it should be. Anyway the point is that defaults *ought* to be safe, and should represent the best overall choice, not knowing anything else. Or at the very least, it's do no harm. If that's not the reality, then it was a bad decision to make it the default. The one that continues to get my goat is Default in libvirt/virt-manager contexts. It's like, don't make me go lookup what Default is. The underlying hypervisors need to communicate upward what their default is, and the pop-up menu should show the actual setting, not the word "Default" which is utterly meaningless. -- Chris Murphy -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org