Linux General Questions

*Legion* wrote:
muraii wrote:

It's not that it's Linux that I want, per se, it's that I want a no-frills, text-only system

You know there's a perfectly fine one of those running right underneath the MacOS GUI... :)

Can I boot right into it or exit the macOS GUI?

muraii wrote:
*Legion* wrote:
muraii wrote:

It's not that it's Linux that I want, per se, it's that I want a no-frills, text-only system

You know there's a perfectly fine one of those running right underneath the MacOS GUI... :)

Can I boot right into it or exit the macOS GUI?

At least a long time ago, you could. I haven't tried it recently. But it was possible to make it boot to a BSD login prompt rather than launch the GUI LoginWindow.

*Legion* wrote:
muraii wrote:
*Legion* wrote:
muraii wrote:

It's not that it's Linux that I want, per se, it's that I want a no-frills, text-only system

You know there's a perfectly fine one of those running right underneath the MacOS GUI... :)

Can I boot right into it or exit the macOS GUI?

At least a long time ago, you could. I haven't tried it recently. But it was possible to make it boot to a BSD login prompt rather than launch the GUI LoginWindow.

That would be choice, as long as it's a full shell. Holding CMD + S to boot into single-user mode doesn't provide a full shell, apparently, but maybe I should play around with it before I dismiss it.

ETA: From something written in 2002 and so not necessarily accurate:

Single-user mode starts you with an extremely minimal environment -- not only is the normal graphical interface not running, neither are most of the normal system daemons (init and mach-init are the only ones), and the boot disk isn't even fully mounted! Usually, you want to bring at least a little more of OS X up in order to get anything useful done. Exactly how much depends on what you want to do, but usually you want to either just mount the boot volume for write access, or do that and then start the various system daemons and components (e.g. networking) that make up most of the non-graphical parts of Mac OS X.

ETA 2: Confirmed that single-user mode is not usable by default, and I'm not really looking to fart around with the issues quoted above. Moving on.

Single user mode is definitely not what you want, that's really for troubleshooting and recovery. You want it to boot into normal user mode, but without launching into LoginWindow.

This is an example of how it was done a long time ago. The process is probably somewhat different now.

*Legion* wrote:

Single user mode is definitely not what you want, that's really for troubleshooting and recovery. You want it to boot into normal user mode, but without launching into LoginWindow.

This is an example of how it was done a long time ago. The process is probably somewhat different now.

Nice! I'll have a look. If I can do this and then choose to get LoginWindow by issuing

$ sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app

that'll be hawt.

If you're in the market for a new system with great hardware support (many developers are underwhelmed with the recent Mac lineup) I can heartily recommend the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. It ships with Ubuntu installed, and it should work well with any modern distribution (I use Arch).

Here's the thing about machines that are as well built as the MacBook Pros: there's always one people insist is that good, but it's never the same machine twice.

Every time I see one of these PCs, I think, "yeah, that's great, and two years from now the line won't exist anymore".

PC manufacturers all put out their MBP challengers, and nobody actually sticks with it long term. PC manufacturers rarely do consistency period. The Thinkpads are one of the few lines that actually had a reliable pattern that you could standardize on.

The XPS seems to have been pretty good for more than just one cycle, here's hoping it sticks around long term.

Dell's been doing Linux machines for a long time, and as a home user, it doesn't typically matter whether they're doing the exact same thing for multiple years, as long as, when you're ready for a new machine, they have something that roughly fits the niche you're in.

Even Apple isn't doing that anymore. Their most recent laptops are pretty dismal from a developer perspective. They've gone almost purely form over function.

There's no f*cking escape key on the goddamn things anymore. No escape key!

edit: the thinking is different if you're managing a fleet... then you want the ability to buy the exact same hardware for a long time. But that's not usually so important for end users. And Apple's not doing that, either, not anymore.

Lenovo's do me fine.

Malor wrote:

There's no f*cking escape key on the goddamn things anymore. No escape key!

Sure there is, it's that big key just to the left of "A".

Okay, by way of closure, I'm just going to try Focus and set everything but MacVim as off limits for a prescribed amount of time ("hardcore mode"). No UEFI hacking required. No reproducing my zsh and vim environments (even as easy it is using a dot-file git repo). And I support a software developer somewhere.

Malor wrote:

Even Apple isn't doing that anymore. Their most recent laptops are pretty dismal from a developer perspective...

The left edge of the Touchbar is effectively always set to act like the Escape key.

Plus if you're using vim as you should be you've remapped ESC to "jj" anyway.

We don't really have a Linux catch-all, but I thought this was worth a link, and this is the closest spot we have:

Linux totally dominates supercomputers

It finally happened. Today, all 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux.

I hope they're all using Linux Mint, because Linux mint is aaaaawesome.

It's absolutely terrible, underneath. Their security posture is dismal, and they rip out packages and replace them with totally different packages by the same name. These, note, are totally unrelated in any way, except that they have the same name, and thus block the package from the Ubuntu repo.

It looks good, but it's constructed very poorly, underneath, and gets even poorer maintenance.

When my MBP gives up the ghost I’m thinking I’ll go back to using Linux on a decent laptop. I’d like to use something with nice integration in the UI like Mint but prefer Slackware for its sanity. Slackware doesn’t officially support Gnome and I’m not a fan of KDE, Xfce, or even LXDE. So I roll my own with Openbox and some of the LXDE components. It’s fast and I like editing xml to reconfigure easily, but there’s practically no integration.

Have you thought about Arch? It's pointed right at the kind of people who like Slackware. On a technical basis, everything about it is first-rate, to the point that they've abandoned older programs like "netstat". (you're supposed to use "ss" now, although I still like netstat's output format better.) It's constantly bleeding-edge, but the maintainers are sufficiently skilled that things don't break as often as you might expect them to.

And, holy cow, it's got an efficient architecture. System updates are incredibly fast, even when a great deal of work is being done.

One major downside: just installing the dumb thing is kind of science project. It reminds me a great deal of Linux in the mid-90s, back when it first came out. I suspect they don't write an installer to keep the plebs away. If you can prove yourself enough to walk through a complex list of instructions and manipulate a system from a command line, they're interested in talking to you. Otherwise, use Ubuntu or something. (note: this is pure projection on my part, but having such an incredibly primitive installer, in a world full of free ones, HAS to be deliberate.)

And even if you don't use Arch, bookmark the Arch wiki. It's one of the best Linux resources on the Web.

I can see only a few reasons to use Slackware:

* You like resolving dependencies manually
* You hate progress any init system that isn't init

OK that might be a bit snotty.

Malor wrote:

Have you thought about Arch? bleeding-edge, but the maintainers are sufficiently skilled that things don't break as often as you might expect them to.

...

One major downside: just installing the dumb thing is kind of science project. It reminds me a great deal of Linux in the mid-90s, back when it first came out. I suspect they don't write an installer to keep the plebs away.

Yeah I’ve looked at it plenty but haven’t done anything with it. When I was using Linux I really appreciated Slackware’s directness. And it also expects you to give yourself to it, even though there are community projects (e.g., http://slackbuilds.org) to make maintenance easier. And they have a —current branch that’s also rolling, not unlike Arch.

And even if you don't use Arch, bookmark the Arch wiki. It's one of the best Linux resources on the Web.

No joke. I’ve used it for years.

*Legion* wrote:

I can see only a few reasons to use Slackware:

* You like resolving dependencies manually
* You hate progress any init system that isn't init

OK that might be a bit snotty. :)

Resolving dependencies manually is actually why I started using Slackware. I hadn’t known what was really going on under the hood when I was using Ubuntu (5.04) because it’s so easy to just say “Install this and whatever it needs!” The only thing that gave me much of a headache was trying to install the pandas Python library which requires a lot. But now I can install the Anaconda Python system and get dependency management if I want.

But I might give Arch a try still.

*Legion* wrote:

I can see only a few reasons to use Slackware:

* You like resolving dependencies manually
* You hate progress any init system that isn't init

OK that might be a bit snotty. :)

I loathe systemd. It has so, so, so much attack surface. It does WAY too much stuff.

You want the things at the core of your system to be simple, to make them easy to reason about. Complexity should exist at the upper layers; the lowest levels should be trivial, easy to understand, and simple to control. Simple systems are secure systems.

Systemd has so many moving parts that this is f*cking impossible. It it is one of the worst-designed pieces of bloatware I've seen in the Unix world. We will be finding security holes in that sh*tpile for decades.

"Yay, my system starts fast. I have no f*cking idea what it's doing, and absolutely no way to find out, but yay, it starts fast!"

Malor wrote:

It's absolutely terrible, underneath. Their security posture is dismal, and they rip out packages and replace them with totally different packages by the same name. These, note, are totally unrelated in any way, except that they have the same name, and thus block the package from the Ubuntu repo.

It looks good, but it's constructed very poorly, underneath, and gets even poorer maintenance.

What's a better alternative but is just as user friendly? Don't day Ubuntu don't say Ubuntu.

maverickz wrote:
Malor wrote:

It's absolutely terrible, underneath. Their security posture is dismal, and they rip out packages and replace them with totally different packages by the same name. These, note, are totally unrelated in any way, except that they have the same name, and thus block the package from the Ubuntu repo.

It looks good, but it's constructed very poorly, underneath, and gets even poorer maintenance.

What's a better alternative but is just as user friendly? Don't day Ubuntu don't say Ubuntu.

TrueOS (formerly known as PC-BSD)

I have never heard if that, which makes me nervous about it. I'm no Linux expert, but I thought I had heard of all the big ones.

Wasn’t that Snowden’s preferred OS?

muraii wrote:

Wasn’t that Snowden’s preferred OS?

I've seen him recommend Qubes, but can't get it to run in a VM, and don't have a spare PC to try it on, but sounds awesome in concept.

Bonus_Eruptus wrote:
muraii wrote:

Wasn’t that Snowden’s preferred OS?

I've seen him recommend Qubes, but can't get it to run in a VM, and don't have a spare PC to try it on, but sounds awesome in concept.

Oh, I’m thinking of Tails.

maverickz wrote:

I have never heard if that, which makes me nervous about it. I'm no Linux expert, but I thought I had heard of all the big ones.

It isn't Linux, but FreeBSD, with a bunch of sugar to decrease the need for tinkering.

muraii wrote:

Wasn’t that Snowden’s preferred OS?

Google tells me he was a user of Tails, which looks to be a Linux distro aimed at protecting one's data.

maverickz wrote:

What's a better alternative but is just as user friendly? Don't day Ubuntu don't say Ubuntu.

Well, what I typically use for that circumstance is Xubuntu, the XFCE spin of Ubuntu. I like XFCE pretty well, as it's oriented first and foremost around mice and screens, rather than tablet bullsh*t like GNOME is. The sheer amount of mouse movement I have to do to just point at stuff in that system is freaking obscene. They deliberately put everything as far from everything else as possible: this makes it easy to point to with a finger, but I'm not using a goddamn finger, I'm using a mouse, and I hate scrubbing for miles over my desktop when all the options should be right there.

I have a high precision pointing device and a very large screen, and I want an OS that's meant for that, not for goddamn fingers.

Malor wrote:
maverickz wrote:

What's a better alternative but is just as user friendly? Don't day Ubuntu don't say Ubuntu.

Well, what I typically use for that circumstance is Xubuntu, the XFCE spin of Ubuntu. I like XFCE pretty well, as it's oriented first and foremost around mice and screens, rather than tablet bullsh*t like GNOME is. The sheer amount of mouse movement I have to do to just point at stuff in that system is freaking obscene. They deliberately put everything as far from everything else as possible: this makes it easy to point to with a finger, but I'm not using a goddamn finger, I'm using a mouse, and I hate scrubbing for miles over my desktop when all the options should be right there.

I have a high precision pointing device and a very large screen, and I want an OS that's meant for that, not for goddamn fingers.

I'm the same way, I didn't like Unity for that reason. I just read that Ubuntu is going back to Gnome. But really, does Ubuntu offer anything that Mint doesn't and better? (I know Mint is a fork of Ubuntu)