Posts by Doctor Syntax

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Re: 3 Percent now and forever IMO.

You haven't used Linux since the time of W7? But you still know all about it?

Re: No way

Before retiring I had a laptop dual boot Windows and SCO.

Re: Wunnerful was never the point

"Perhaps even, with the overt co-operation of Microsoft, as thin-client gateway machines to the MS cloud."

It's not difficult to visualise the rise of the Windowsbook, the equivalent of the Chromebook. The security-conscious version, especially for those who regularly pass through border controls, would one completely agnostic about the service it connects to, including the company VPN and a completely bland alternative, and not preserving any trace of what it connected to last.

Have you looked at the price?

Windows 2025

The discussion here has prompted me to ponder the following.

Take a KDE-based Linux. Set application style to MS Windows 9x, window decorations to Reactionary and colours to Windows2000 and plasma style to Arc Oxygen or Arc Color. This gives a passable overall appearance to W2K except for the icon set*. Now rummage round the KDE store for a W10-like icon set and install that (some of the other things suggested will also come from the store). Also rummage for some Windows-like splash screens, SDDM login screens etc - there's even one which says "Windows Starting". Tag Dolphin as Files Explorer, Kate as Notepad etc. Strip back a lot of the functionality that might give the game away that it's rather more than Windows but leave basic stuff like Okular**, Gwenview and, of course, an Office package.

Now show it to Windows users with a spiel along the lines of Microsoft deciding to bring out a new edition to celebrate the 25th anniversary of W2K and also trial a reversion to simpler times. I wonder how many would realise it wasn't Windows and how many would look on it as a distinctly better than current Windows.

* This, along with the Oxygen icon set, is essentially my desktop. It's conserved my desktop appearance from my last Windows through a couple of decades or so of Linux use.

** Linux lulls one into assuming that a desktop OS will just open a PDF on demand. Trying to open one on the W10 laptop mentioned elsewhere tries to sell me Foxit. W10 is really just a selling platform.

Re: functionality

My sister-in-law has a laptop running W7 which keeps nagging her to upgrade. Despite having a degree in physics long ago she's quite technology-timid I have a laptop which came with W10 which I'd converted to Linux only but when I retired it as the daily driver I restored W10* and set it up as dual boot. So a couple of weeks or so ago I took it along for her to look at what she might get if we ran the 7>10 upgrade. She decided against it. W10 was too unfamiliar to this W7 user.

* Always make a restore drive when you convert a Windows machine to Linux. If it develops a non-fatal H/W fault it might be best to have it running Windows when you take it back to the sop.

Re: functionality

" I spent 20 minutes trying to get it to do something then gave up."

Rather vague. What were you trying to get it to do?

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - They'll try

Since those days people have learned that there's more than one GUI - including Android on Linux.

"I don't know how it all ended"

Not well if they were on the receiving end of an audit.

Re: functionality

Use KDE. Put some Microsoft-style artwork on the splash screen. Tell the user it's W12. They might get a bit suspicious noticing that the menu layout is more logical and it's not trying to sell stuff all the time but it won't be any more unfamiliar than any new Windows version. Familiarity? How do you explain W8? How does anyone explain W8?

Re: I find your lack of evidence…. disturbing

The number of people who just run stuff on Linux on the desktop also dwarfs the number of people who like to fiddle with it.

Re: They'll try

"Why would they wish to maintain a unique bare metal operating system?"

Fear that punters would discover they neither need the cloud facilities nor the proprietary bare metal OS.

Re: functionality

"You missed my point but made it with your discussion, which is correct: it IS about functionality."

I think you missed mine.

You don't need MS Office to provide the office functionality that users want.

Let me repeat that in case you missed it.

You don't need MS Office to provide the office functionality that users want.

People are discovering this. Having paid (via their H/W purchase) for Windows which doesn't provide the functionality itself they find that Microsoft are demanding either a very expensive four-year-old product or rent to add that functionality. They then discover they can actually get the functionality they want for free elsewhere. What's the value proposition of Windows?

Re: The Wheel of Reincarnation turns

"or head in the future"

I think this could be Microsoft's head in the clouds moment.

Re: This might be a good thing...

Is this Poe's law at work?

Re: They'll try

"It's the APPS people care about"

Read your first part again. Those people using Chromebooks and Google online services are not caring about using Microsoft's apps.

The home users I know with W10 are also not paying Microsoft whatever it is a year to run Office 365, they're using one of the several alternatives.

When it comes to having to fork out money it's not APPS people care about it's FUNCTIONALITY. They're discovering they don't need MS Office to provide that functionality. By your own argument if they don't need Microsoft for the functionality they don't need it to provide the OS because those alternative apps all run on Linux as does much else. Why should their next desktop OS not be Zorin, Mint or whatever? It doesn't need to be Windows any more.

Now you may say, "There's no way I'm going to 'subscribe' to a cloud version of Windows." Really? Tell me, are you running Office 2019/2021 or Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) at a cost of at least $70 a year? 345 million of you are already paying for Microsoft 365. The various flavors of Office 20xx? Not so many. Nothing like as many.

Various friends who now have W10 are not paying $70 or anything else to Microsoft to run Office. They have found other, free equivalent applications. And me personally? I'm running LibreOffice on Linux.

Canada's Telus to shed 6K workers as profits plunge 61%

Re: 'Nuff said

They certainly don't sound like they're running a telecommunications business nor any other form of communication in fact.

Re: From The Department Of The Bleeding Obvious!

Even better if they're offering voluntary leaving packages. Their best staff will be those at the front of the queue.

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

Re: Showing my age

Is that because it's the only time they made them?

The one where your phone rings Friday lunchtime (when you're in the pub, of course) and you're told the week's invoicing has fallen over. The second week it happened, after sorting out the mess, the rest of the afternoon was spend going through the source code - 3rd party application but not quite enough source to compile provided - to find out just what they'd done to make the database engine blow its memory allocation.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: Not a lift but…..

"They got some planks and laid them from the truck to the ground so about a 20 degree angle and then somehow got the rack onto these bits of wood"

We ended up doing that with a new liquid scintillation counter for the Balfast Carbon Dating Lab. The final step of delivery saw it arriving in the back of a van with no tail list. They must have used a fork lift to load it but never thought to ask how it could be unloaded.

It was about the same height as a rack, maybe a tad wider and a tad slimmer. The driver's idea was just to drop it off the back. That idea went down as if it had been dropped off the back and he went very quiet when we stripped the packing case off it and so the item. A good part of it was a complex paternoster sample handling mechanism.

Once it had been slid off the van it still had to be squeezed through a narrow door and along an only slightly less narrow passage way. Knowing the people involved I'm pretty sure it would all have been measured up before hand so no surprises about actually fitting through.

You'd think delivery firms must have had enough problems to make enquiries routine, but no, they keep doing these things.

Re: Getting stuck in a lift is no fun

The most dangerous apart from other humns.

Re: We had some

Gerard Hoffnung would have loved it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZUJLO6lMhI

Re: Lift emergency panels

Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines.

https://www.plymouthmeh.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Those-magnificent-men-LYRICS.pdf

Re: Getting stuck in a lift is no fun

Upvote for the well done. You don't want them getting up off the plate.

"Every time I have asked why they didn't just walk to the destination floor and call the lift"

And while they're walking somebody on some other floor calls the lift and finds it full of furniture when i arrives.

Re: Getting stuck in a lift is no fun

The allegedly brick-like Motorola was one of the smaller phones available at the time. A fewmodels had lead-acid batteries, especially those for BT System 4* although that might have been shut down by then. I remember one BT Mobile product, the Steel came in two varieties, Light Steel and Heavy Steel depending on the size of the attached battery but the names were only relative. This was the time when portable computers were referred to as "luggables" and mobility for many phones depended on them being installed in a car.

*Talk of 2G, 3G, 4G & 5G always amuses me. If the pre-cellular was 4, TACS, the analogue cellular system, was 5 & GSM started at 6.

Big Tech's going to love India's new personal data protection bill

"the most damaging one yet in terms of the unrestricted powers it grants to the government"

HMG's hubris won't let them resist a challenge like that.

Blue Origin tells staff to catch next rocket back to their desks

"desk occupancy rates need to improve."

Translation: We can't renegotiate our leases and it's embarrassing.

Middleweight champ MX Linux 23 delivers knockout punch

"the installation of packages that do require systemd. PHP, for example, requires it."

Fortunately the PHP that underlies Nextcloud on my RP server never read that and continues to run happily on Devuan.

Re: Obsolete

"Because the point of the computer is to run the applications...I’m tired of operating systems."

Your collection of running applications - I take it you have several there at any one time - is a collection of chunks of code needing access to resources such as CPU, memory and peripherals. How do they get that access? It it was just one application, yes it could run on top of bare metal but how would you then get a second to run when the first has direct control? And a third? And a fourth?

The job of an OS is to share those resources out so that each application gets its share, keeps applications from accessing each other's resources while letting them communicate with each other as necessary. It passes control from one chunk of code to another so that although there's a continuous thread of execution (or several nowadays) the user is presented with the illusion of separate applications all with access to their hardware.

What you describe is a complex multi-layered OS starting with, but very definitely including, your hypervisor, the VMs and the OSes inside the VMs. There may be a good reason for that hypervisor but you do have a much more complicated setup than a single OS running on bare metal. It's not surprising you're tired of OSes and that they and their VMs use a lot of resources for themselves to do the job they've been set. If indeed there's a good reason for that setup then that's the price that has to be paid to meet the requirement; if there isn't then it's the price for an unnecessarily complex arrangement.

Nobody's asking you to change your hardware or what runs on it*. But a lot of people have bought a lot of hardware in the last 10 years** and they've all had to install an appropriate OS on it and will continue to do so. Articles and discussions such as this are part of deciding just what is appropriate and reviewing if the original decision remains appropriate. In fact you must have had some process for deciding on what was appropriate for your requirements even if you don't feel a need for reviewing it.

* Nobody was even asking you to read the article if it had no interest in it.

** Just as a lot of people will have set up home in the last 10 years and needed to buy a kitchen table.

"Well I can see your point. I just have a question. Then just how as the ONLY user, do I do the things that sudo allows me to do?"

man su

Re: this shoggoth of a startup daemon

"If it is so bad why don't you develop/code a better version?"

If by "better version" you mean a better version of systemd then you have to remember that its problems lie as much in the concept as the implementation. A "better" version of systemd would still be systemd.

If by "better version" you mean a better version of init then there's no need. Better inits already exist.

What is really needed is a better version of FOSS politics than that which got systemd foisted on us.

If you want fine-grained control the better way would be to revert to the original concept: lpadmin owns the printers, bin owns the contents of /bin (it you still have it), /usr/bin and so on. You then have the granularity, you don't have to hand out the root password to those who don't need it and you don't end up with the situation where you might demand 2FA for users to access the services and 1FA for access to control those services.

Re: @nematoad

"It [sudo]was invented to allow admins to give more granular access to some facilities in a more flexible way than UNIX groups on a UNIX-like system without giving full superuser access.

If you've ever run a UNIX-like OS in a larger environment..."

This entire issue seems to be the usual ongoing battle of convenience vs security.

I've run Unix from V7 onwards in production environments.

1. Back then there were several administrative accounts for different functions. For instance help-desk users could be given access to the lpadmin account to let them sort out printer woes. This was a sensible way to implement such granular access. The helpdesk user could su from their ordinary account to lpadmin with the lpadmin password, sort out the printer but with no extra privileges and then CTRL-D back to their ordinary account.

2. This seems to have been looked on as inconvenient and the other UIDs dropped out of use and everyone used root but at least it needed an extra password to gain access.

3. Mass use of root was then looked on as insecure so sudo was invented. The supposedly granular extra facilities were accessed by giving the user's ordinary password again.

4. Of course maintaining all these granularities in the sudoers file is inconvenient so we now have Ubuntu and its friends - including MX - having a standard user gain full root access just using their own password. 2FA it isn't

We've gone back to stage 2 but without the safeguard of a second password. Yes, I follow the arguments as to why sudo was invented but the reality is that it's being used in a way that is counterproductive to what it set out to achieve. In this round of convenience vs security convenience has won.

"Because MX Linux is derived from Debian I assume it has inherited sudo as well."

Debian and Devuan do indeed have sudo. However you can take it or leave it because the installation sets up a root account which Ubuntu and friends don't and it doesn't, by default, set up users in the sudoers file which Ubuntu and friends do. Out of the box the old way is the way to so things. Any time I have to set up a Ubuntu derived OS one of the first things to do is set up a root password. It also expects the likes of the KDE partition manager to present the root password.

I tried in install on my little nettop.device. It had a small but adequate unused logical volume group with Mint installed in regular partitions. Debian seems no longer able to install into logical volumes - would this? Yes it could see the logical volumes but needed a slightly larger root volume than I'd set up. Not a problem, there was space left and as I was using the KDE live ISO the KDE partition manager was available and could make the change without dropping to the command line. Not good. It needed the demo user password instead of roots. However installation did offer to set up an optional root password so maybe it would then default to Debian style. No such luck - the installed version still follows the Ubuntu approach.

Installation, BTW, starts copying the files in parallel with entering the user data. It doesn't however, set up the network connect, at least it doesn't for wireless, so it doesn't copy updated packages from the repository, leaving an update required at the end of the install. Of course when it gets to about 96% complete it has to do a grub install and grub probing takes up the other 90% of install time followed by rebuilding initrd which takes the final 90%. The subsequent update built a couple of kernel modules. I can't remember ever encountering this on Debian. It's painfully slow on this little box and if it were a regular feature of updates would be a bit of a pain - probably not as bad as Windows updates but better avoided.

Although it's Debian derived it seems to work more in a Mint sort of way. In fact the kernel announces itself as a Mint kernel in the logs. It'll take a while before I decide whether to use it to replace Mint on the nettop. I don't think it will replace Devuan on the bigger laptops.

Re: Glad it has some documentation

"I'm sure Devuan ultimately works but its documentation is absolutely dire."

If by ultimately works you mean its release schedule lags behind Debian then I agree. It may mean your very latest H/W might not have drivers in the install image. Otherwise it just works as in the way Debian just works but better in not having the systemd obfuscation.

As for documentation Debian documentation will fit better than Arch and I've never heard of anyone calling the Debian Administrator's Handbook dire. A pre-systemd version will obviously be needed to cover sysvinit.

I should add that I ran the then next version of Devuan on a Pi Nextcloud server months before it was officially released and I currently have the Daedalus, the Bookworm based version running on a laptop and will probably get round to updating the main laptop shortly.

Lacros rescues Chromebooks by extending their lifespans

Re: How long can Google say the same thing

"They can change their design at any time they wish, but for some reason they have chosen not to."

Design decisions become limitations. Once the implementation has been built round the decision any attempt to change the decision is apt to impinge on a lot of the decisions made in the course of implementation. I can imagine how it would be hard to disentangle it if it also acted as login screen and other stuff. Just thinking about it reminds be of another tangled mass of code that's best avoided.

Re: The real solution...

Also these little deficiencies are never pointed out in the sales pitch.

China floats strict screentime limits and content crimps for kids

Re: Coinciding interest with the West

"Thought-through detailed policy takes time and effort to develop. It is much more than political talk and promises."

By definition policies come from the politicians. Don't count on them getting any further than that.

Re: It'll be interesting

The parents will probably ask the kids how to bypass those.

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

What would wind forces do to a roof-mounted camera at 100mph? More BS?

Pictures or it didn't happen!!

Brit healthcare body rapped for WhatsApp chat sharing patient data

Re: Unintentional adversaries

See my note above re use in hospitals. What seems to be needed is a class of device best described as a smartphone with wifi, VOIP but no access to mobile phone bands. Preferably such devices would be run on a local-only network with only a gateway for VOIP to the outside world. This would meet the need for a mobile client for the organisation's own systems, essential voice communication and better security than a general purpose phone.

Re: "there was no specific policy in place directly for WhatsApp"

"Oh wait, did they even have work phones ?"

Yes.

Over the last few months we've spent too much time in the local hospitals. The nursing staff all seem to be equipped with phones. I hope it's a secure app they're using but they regularly use them for recording blood pressure readings.

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

"It simply cannot compete on price because construction is so hideously expensive."

We have built so few and at such erratic intervals that each is virtually a one-off. That helps keep cost high.

Intel opens chip innovation hub in Nanshan, China

grow the Intel Greater Bay Area Innovation Center into a global "innovation highland."

A highland growing out of a bay? It sounds a bit volcanic to me.

Twitter sues Brit non-profit, claims hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

Re: Arrogant Muskrat

"It's just that he has a lot of money"

Decreasingly so but he's found a workaround.

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

"The Reg FOSS desk is very happy that he hasn't had to edit an init script in many years, and does not miss such things even one tiny bit, but all the same it's going to irk some people."

It's a long time since I had to edit an init script. It's like restoring from backup. You don't miss doing it if you haven't had to but when you need it you really need it. With init scripts if there's a problem you can either put tracing statements into the script or run it from the command line, stepping through it. Good luck doing that with a black box. Systemd hasn't put me to that trouble, partly because it hasn't had the chance. Years back I had a shedload of trouble sorting out a problem with upstart which is similarly opaque.