Hi folks,
After about a year of being not very happy with Fedora 29, I am planning to bite the bullet and rebuild my desktop. This time I want to install something that works with TDE, and preferably not running systemd.
Requirements:
- my PC is a low-end machine with Intel i3 CPU
- my Linux admin experience is low to medium (been using Linux for about 20 years, but mostly "if it works, don't fiddle with it")
- I want to run TDE.
What would you recommend?
Thanks in advance,
Steve
I would definitely go with MX Linux and just add the repos in.
On October 3, 2021 11:21:02 p.m. "Steven D'Aprano" steve@pearwood.info wrote:
Hi folks,
After about a year of being not very happy with Fedora 29, I am planning to bite the bullet and rebuild my desktop. This time I want to install something that works with TDE, and preferably not running systemd.
Requirements:
my PC is a low-end machine with Intel i3 CPU
my Linux admin experience is low to medium (been using Linux for about
20 years, but mostly "if it works, don't fiddle with it")
- I want to run TDE.
What would you recommend?
Thanks in advance,
Steve ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@trinitydesktop.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@trinitydesktop.org Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@trinitydeskto...
On 4 October 2021 04:18:32 WEST, Steven D'Aprano steve@pearwood.info wrote:
Hi folks,
After about a year of being not very happy with Fedora 29, I am planning to bite the bullet and rebuild my desktop. This time I want to install something that works with TDE, and preferably not running systemd.
Requirements:
my PC is a low-end machine with Intel i3 CPU
my Linux admin experience is low to medium (been using Linux for about
20 years, but mostly "if it works, don't fiddle with it")
- I want to run TDE.
What would you recommend?
Thanks in advance,
Steve ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@trinitydesktop.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@trinitydesktop.org Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@trinitydeskto...
I would like to recommend you Devuan installation in raw and then enable TDM in OpenRC after TDE installation but I think I would suggest other people's answers first because this could be easy for me but maybe not the same for you.
On Sunday 03 October 2021 10:18:32 pm Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Hi folks,
After about a year of being not very happy with Fedora 29, I am planning to bite the bullet and rebuild my desktop. This time I want to install something that works with TDE, and preferably not running systemd.
Requirements:
my PC is a low-end machine with Intel i3 CPU
my Linux admin experience is low to medium (been using Linux for about
20 years, but mostly "if it works, don't fiddle with it")
- I want to run TDE.
What would you recommend?
The two I know of are, (both work very well on low end hardware):
Deuvian Tiny community, experience required. https://www.devuan.org/ https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Devuan_Trinity_Repository_Installation_Instr...
MX Linux Large community, newbie friendly. https://mxlinux.org/ https://mxlinux.org/manuals https://forum.mxlinux.org/ https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/MX_Linux_Trinity_Repository_Installation_Ins...
There might be other non-systemd distros, check:
https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Category:Installation
Best, Michael
MX Linus you can choose your init. Systemd or good old fast Init...
On October 3, 2021 11:40:13 p.m. Michael mb_trinity_desktop@inet-design.com wrote:
On Sunday 03 October 2021 10:18:32 pm Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Hi folks,
After about a year of being not very happy with Fedora 29, I am planning to bite the bullet and rebuild my desktop. This time I want to install something that works with TDE, and preferably not running systemd.
Requirements:
my PC is a low-end machine with Intel i3 CPU
my Linux admin experience is low to medium (been using Linux for about
20 years, but mostly "if it works, don't fiddle with it")
- I want to run TDE.
What would you recommend?
The two I know of are, (both work very well on low end hardware):
Deuvian Tiny community, experience required. https://www.devuan.org/ https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Devuan_Trinity_Repository_Installation_Instr...
MX Linux Large community, newbie friendly. https://mxlinux.org/ https://mxlinux.org/manuals https://forum.mxlinux.org/ https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/MX_Linux_Trinity_Repository_Installation_Ins...
There might be other non-systemd distros, check:
https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Category:Installation
Best, Michael ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@trinitydesktop.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@trinitydesktop.org Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@trinitydeskto...
Steven D'Aprano composed on 2021-10-04 14:18 (UTC+1100):
After about a year of being not very happy with Fedora 29, I am planning to bite the bullet and rebuild my desktop. This time I want to install something that works with TDE, and preferably not running systemd.
Requirements:
- my PC is a low-end machine with Intel i3 CPU
- my Linux admin experience is low to medium (been using Linux for about
20 years, but mostly "if it works, don't fiddle with it")
- I want to run TDE.
What would you recommend?
IMO: Rethink your aversion to systemd. Eventually you'll run into software you simply cannot use because it depends on some part of the growing systemd monolith. All the major distros have switched to systemd. Those that don't are increasingly relying on kludges and a growing amount of forking upstream to keep going.
If you expect to live more than 10 more years, you might as well go mainstream sooner than later. As a Fedora user, you should be well along that path by now. TDE on Fedora is just as good as it is on any other distro. I have had it on Fedora several years, at least back to F30.
I find nothing about systemd that gets in my way, and enough I like. I've forgotten whatever it might have been about sysvinit I liked better.
Any i3 with ample RAM is more than plenty for running TDE. Any CPU ran KDE3 OK can run TDE OK.
On Sun, 3 Oct 2021 23:59:25 -0400 Felix Miata mrmazda@earthlink.net wrote:
Steven D'Aprano composed on 2021-10-04 14:18 (UTC+1100):
After about a year of being not very happy with Fedora 29, I am planning to bite the bullet and rebuild my desktop. This time I want to install something that works with TDE, and preferably not running systemd.
Requirements:
- my PC is a low-end machine with Intel i3 CPU
- my Linux admin experience is low to medium (been using Linux for about
20 years, but mostly "if it works, don't fiddle with it")
- I want to run TDE.
What would you recommend?
IMO: Rethink your aversion to systemd. Eventually you'll run into software you simply cannot use because it depends on some part of the growing systemd monolith. All the major distros have switched to systemd. Those that don't are increasingly relying on kludges and a growing amount of forking upstream to keep going.
What do you have against forks? In case you didn't notice, TDE *is* a fork. elogind and eudev are both well-supported (there was a slight hiccup a month ago when the original eudev developer left the project, but it's under new management and AFAIK doing fine, with commits being made to the source repository). These are alternate providers, not "kludges".
OpenRC and sysvinit are not forks. OpenRC is well-maintained, and sysvinit is as close as I have ever seen to a bug-free nontrivial program (I checked up on it a couple of years ago. Five or six bugs filed, all for very obscure things). runit, which I know is used by at least one distro, isn't a fork either.
As for major distros, Gentoo hasn't switched (systemd is available, but is not the default), and likely never will. Of course, it's possible that our criteria for what constitutes "major" disagree: to my mind, it's some combination of "influential" and "number of users".
Checking the entire Gentoo package list, I find the following categories of applications that have hard dependencies on systemd that can't be satisfied by anything else:
-Tools for systemd that do things like analyzing log output.
-Two Gnome-related packages (gnome-logs and office-runner)
-Two packages I had never heard of before: switcheroo-control and profile-sync-daemon.
That's it. In all other cases, systemd support is optional, or an alternate provider is accepted. There may be a patch or two involved in some cases, but that's nothing new.
If systemd fits your use-case, then by all means use it, but don't spread FUD. Just because something is common, that doesn't make it the best choice for everyone. Otherwise, what are we doing here?
E. Liddell
Hi all,
On Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 10:38 (-0400), E. Liddell wrote:
On Sun, 3 Oct 2021 23:59:25 -0400 Felix Miata mrmazda@earthlink.net wrote:
Steven D'Aprano composed on 2021-10-04 14:18 (UTC+1100):
- my Linux admin experience is low to medium (been using Linux for about
20 years, but mostly "if it works, don't fiddle with it")
- I want to run TDE.
What would you recommend?
I'm a bit late to this party, but if can wait a bit more, hopefully Slackware 15 will be out Real Soon Now. (Yeah, it has been a long time since the last release, but there is a lot of current activity, and RC1 happened in mid-August, so I have some hope.)
IMO: Rethink your aversion to systemd. Eventually you'll run into software you simply cannot use because it depends on some part of the growing systemd monolith.
Felix, please don't take this harshly, but I think this is self-fulfilling defeatism.
All the major distros have switched to systemd.
I would argue that Slackware still holds a place in the list of "major distros", depending on whether or not you count "significance" as one of the criteria for your list. And, thankfully, Slackware remains systemd-free.
<snip>
If systemd fits your use-case, then by all means use it, but don't spread FUD. Just because something is common, that doesn't make it the best choice for everyone.
Hear, hear.
From my point of view systemd apparently solves problems I've never had, which in itself is all well and good. But The fact that (it seems) more and more software somehow replies on some systemd function concerns me, in that if it gets its fingers into more and more things, at some point it may become some monolithic monster which may turn Linux into the same ball of confusion that MS-windows is, and thus open Linux to security problems which are hard to discover and hard to fix. I really believe that the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy has a lot to be said for it.
Otherwise, what are we doing here?
Good point.
Jim
E. Liddell composed on 2021-10-04 10:38 (UTC-0400):
On Sun, 3 Oct 2021 23:59:25 -0400 Felix Miata wrote:
What do you have against forks?
Ordinarily, nothing, but an init system is foundational, outweighed in importance only by the kernel.
elogind and eudev are both well-supported (there was a slight hiccup a month ago when the original eudev developer left the project, but it's under new management and AFAIK doing fine, with commits being made to the source repository). These are alternate providers, not "kludges".
"Providers" that depend on developers whose job is playing catchup and maintaining workarounds for mainstream whatevers. IMO this is formula for commitment to project less likely to endure than otherwise, so more turnover, as evidenced by what you just wrote.
As for major distros, Gentoo hasn't switched
I wrote "most", not all.
it's possible that our criteria for what constitutes "major" disagree: to my mind, it's some combination of "influential" and "number of users".
When suggesting a distro, I more or less go by hands-on experience and Distrowatch, heavily discounting the rank of derivatives and derivatives of derivatives, with bonus points for length of history.
If systemd fits your use-case, then by all means use it
IMO, init system is a /really/ dumb basis for choosing a distro, and my reason for responding to the OP, though obviously that wasn't apparent. To me it's dumb to select a derivative distro as a foundation for TDE. OTOH, any distro TDE provides packages for should be just fine for anyone who needs help to select a distro to switch to from some other distro.
On October 4, 2021 10:48:18 AM CDT, Felix Miata mrmazda@earthlink.net wrote: >Ordinarily, nothing, but an init system is foundational, outweighed in importance only by the kernel.
Indeed, which is why its important to have an init system that works.
IMO, init system is a /really/ dumb basis for choosing a distro
So the foundational component of the operating system is a dumb basis for choosing one? In my experience, systemd has been nothing but breakage after updates, getting stuck during boot, and in the grand scheme of things its full of security flaws.
To me it's dumb to select a derivative distro as a foundation for TDE. OTOH, any distro TDE provides packages for should be just fine for anyone who needs help to select a distro to switch to from some other distro.
So why bother saying that derivative distros are a dumb choice if TDE can work with anything? Slackware is a derivative distro forked from SLS, is it dumb to use TDE with it?
Hunter via tde-users composed on 2021-10-04 11:34 (UTC-0500):
Felix Miata wrote:
an init system is foundational, outweighed in importance only by the kernel.
Indeed, which is why its important to have an init system that works.
And why RHEL, SLE, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, CentOS, Manjaro, Mageia and more use it either exclusively or by default. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd
There's something to be said for going with the main flow no matter its warts.
So why bother saying that derivative distros are a dumb choice if TDE can work with anything?
Thread context!!! See subject. Ruling out systemd by someone admittedly low in Linux admin experience because of its early growth foibles and hearsay mostly from those who were only ever exposed to it while it was young and developing quickly, if ever, a system that's been mainstream several computing generations, isn't doing oneself justice. It's like rejecting a Ford Escape because Ford once made Edsels.
Choice of distro really shouldn't matter to someone who simply wants a TDE desktop. Distro support for TDE is fungible, whether using sysvint, systemd or some other init system.
I really don't see the reason for debating systemd over sysv over every other init system once again. If the topic starter asked for a distribution without systemd, they must have had their reasons to ask for this. Forcing them to try systemd and downgrading the discussion to a generic systemd-antisystemd debate (of which there is an abundance already) is not a correct approach to the original question.
This is really a pointless debate. Systemd has its strenghts and downs, and pretty much everything else out there has. If I went into a shop explicitly asking for pencils and the personnel was insisting that I should buy pens instead, I wouldn't consider that advice the least helpful. After all, everybody chooses their own preferred tool, and Linux should be all about choice, as many believe.
On the original question, I have been using Slackware for quite a while and it adequately covers my needs. But I would recommend Devuan – it has indeed come a long way since its first release (it was buggy when I tried it). I recently installed it on a spare machine. The installation was flawless, you could choose from several init systems and even apt was not as annoying as I remember it. I was so amazed that for a moment I caught myself thinking of replacing my trusted Slackware with Devuan.
On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 11:48:18 -0400 Felix Miata mrmazda@earthlink.net wrote:
E. Liddell composed on 2021-10-04 10:38 (UTC-0400):
On Sun, 3 Oct 2021 23:59:25 -0400 Felix Miata wrote:
What do you have against forks?
Ordinarily, nothing, but an init system is foundational, outweighed in importance only by the kernel.
elogind and eudev are both well-supported (there was a slight hiccup a month ago when the original eudev developer left the project, but it's under new management and AFAIK doing fine, with commits being made to the source repository). These are alternate providers, not "kludges".
"Providers" that depend on developers whose job is playing catchup and maintaining workarounds for mainstream whatevers. IMO this is formula for commitment to project less likely to endure than otherwise, so more turnover, as evidenced by what you just wrote.
The original eudev developer left the project because his reasons for setting it up had to do with stock udev not working well on musl-based systems. That apparently isn't a problem anymore, so the project no longer scratches his itch.
eudev has now passed into the hands of a group of contributors from Gentoo, Devuan, and Alpine, who are interested in it for other reasons. I would say that it's now healthier than it's ever been (or at least the bus factor has gone up significantly).
In my opinion, alternate providers of init, device hotplug, and other foundational services are necessary to the health of the Linux ecosystem. I find systemd's push to become an init monoculture to be problematic.
E. Liddell
On Sunday 03 October 2021 10:59:25 pm Felix Miata wrote:
IMO: Rethink your aversion to systemd. Eventually you'll run into software you simply cannot use because it depends on some part of the growing systemd monolith. All the major distros have switched to systemd. Those that don't are increasingly relying on kludges and a growing amount of forking upstream to keep going.
If you expect to live more than 10 more years, you might as well go mainstream sooner than later.
The irony of your arguments Felix is it is the same argument KDE4 people made to those who switched to TDE. Especially the, “If you expect to live more than 10 more years,” since TDE recently celebrated its 10 year birthday…
Systemd created a major, aka lifelong, schism in the Linux community (to get faster boot times ffs).
Steve, if you’re worried about needing systemd for some potential future software, then use MX Linux, it has a systemd shim, so most (probably all really) systemd software runs on it. It also has:
- 1 click install off of a Live USB - MX Package Manager (MXPI) that allows for 1 click installs of almost 400 different popular software environments like Zoom, Steam, full LAMP stack, VirtualBox, etc. - 20+ developers and 20,000+ users
Pick whatever you want, TDE (and the dev’s and users) will be here for you.
Best, Michael
On Monday 04 October 2021 07:55:52 Michael wrote:
On Sunday 03 October 2021 10:59:25 pm Felix Miata wrote:
IMO: Rethink your aversion to systemd. Eventually you'll run into software you simply cannot use because it depends on some part of the growing systemd monolith. All the major distros have switched to systemd. Those that don't are increasingly relying on kludges and a growing amount of forking upstream to keep going.
If you expect to live more than 10 more years, you might as well go mainstream sooner than later.
The irony of your arguments Felix is it is the same argument KDE4 people made to those who switched to TDE. Especially the, “If you expect to live more than 10 more years,” since TDE recently celebrated its 10 year birthday…
Michael
Myself, I plan to live for ever, but I hope never to be forced into using systemd; or to do anything else, or to use any software or machine, that does not respect my wishes. I want my machine to do what I want, not for me to have to obey my machine.
When I used Debian and systemd, I always had strange problems that I could not resolve easily, but as soon as I switched to Devuan, my life got much less complicated.
No doubt Felix (and others who run Debian other systemd distros) have had better experiences. Otherwise they wouldn't stick with it. I may change my mind in the future, but I doubt it.
If it does come down to something like an ultimatum (i.e., use systemd or else!), then I will use the standard exemption that it goes against my religion. So now I need to find some religion or deeply-held philosophical belief or spiritual practice that will justify my rejection of non-GNU/Linux and other software that I find objectionable.
Top of my list so far are the Amish, Luddites and anarcho-primitivism. However these would require big changes in my life, so I hesitate to commit myself to any single path. Or I could just keep things simple, and run Devuan.
Bill
Am Montag, 4. Oktober 2021 schrieb William Morder via tde-users:
If it does come down to something like an ultimatum (i.e., use systemd or else!), then I will use the standard exemption that it goes against my religion. So now I need to find some religion or deeply-held philosophical belief or spiritual practice that will justify my rejection of non-GNU/Linux and other software that I find objectionable.
Top of my list so far are the Amish, Luddites and anarcho-primitivism. However these would require big changes in my life, so I hesitate to commit myself to any single path. Or I could just keep things simple, and run Devuan.
:-)
Bill
Stefan
Hi Felix,
Thanks for the advice, however I've been using systemd for the last year and a half (give or take) and I am keen to move on to something less obnoxious and resource-intensive.
On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 14:18:32 +1100 "Steven D'Aprano" steve@pearwood.info wrote:
Hi folks,
After about a year of being not very happy with Fedora 29, I am planning to bite the bullet and rebuild my desktop. This time I want to install something that works with TDE, and preferably not running systemd.
Requirements:
my PC is a low-end machine with Intel i3 CPU
my Linux admin experience is low to medium (been using Linux for about
20 years, but mostly "if it works, don't fiddle with it")
- I want to run TDE.
What would you recommend?
Devuan will give you the best chance of getting help here, as there are more users of Debianoid distros on this list than any other family.
Gentoo technically fits your requirements, but I don't recommend it (especially on a slow machine) unless you're dedicated to learning more about how Linux works. (I seem to end up dis-recommending my own distro frequently.)
E. Liddell
On October 3, 2021 10:18:32 PM CDT, Steven D'Aprano steve@pearwood.info wrote:
Requirements:
my PC is a low-end machine with Intel i3 CPU
my Linux admin experience is low to medium (been using Linux for about
20 years, but mostly "if it works, don't fiddle with it")
- I want to run TDE.
What would you recommend?
Thanks in advance,
Steve
On GNU/Linux, I always stuck with Devuan using Sysvinit. It works great with TDE but the repos are *extremely* slow in the US, at least the southeastern portion where I'm from (and it doesn't help that my internet is only a megabyte ahead of dialup), so it may not be the best alternative.
I use FreeBSD now with TDE R14.0.10 so if you want another option this is always viable (albeit painful for the time being). I plan on writing a tutorial for it one day. Since you have a low end machine I would stick with the UFS file system since ZFS likes to eat your memory.
Thank you to everyone for your suggestions, I was especially happy with the look and feel of MX Linux. I'm used to booting up with Fedora taking five or six minutes (going up to 20 or 30 minutes when it runs a file system check) so I was very impressed that the MX Linux USB stick booted up in less than a minute.
Alas, it was not to be. My hard drives were partitioned for RAID 1, and the MX installer simply couldn't cope with it. I ended up having to completely nuke my drives using the Fedora boot disk for MX to install itself, and then it wouldn't boot.
I'd already spent four days battling this problem, including having lost work because of it (which is not something I'm too happy about, during lockdown). So didn't have time to mess about any further trying to get it to work, so I bit the bullet and reinstalled Fedora. So I'm (almost) back to square one before the SSD died, except that now I have to spend another week or so reconfiguring everything back to the way I had it before.
Lessons learned:
- SSDs are crap. Fast, expensive crap, but still crap.
- Applications that store their vital user-critical data in the same hidden directory as their disposable temporary and cache data are evil. (I'm looking at you, Firefox and Firefox plugins.)
- Fedora's file system check on a failed SSD is crap. 22 hours of checking, to get nowhere.
- Never, ever enable "Fast boot" in the BIOS.
- MX Linux looks good, feels good, shame the installer doesn't work.
- The Kool Kids(TM) in Linux land decided that RAID was soooo 2010s. Don't believe them.
- Fedora will RAID your swap, because insanity.
- I pulled out my old PC with KDE 3 on it, so at least I could do email and search the Internet. (T)KDE is still the best desktop environment since Mac OS 6 in the 1990s. I miss it.
- If I didn't need a more recent browser to use the internet, I would totally stick to mid-2000s tech.
Thanks again for your attempt to help. I may try upgrading Fedora and seeing if I can get TDE working on that. When I can afford another two day downtime :-(
Steven D'Aprano composed on 2021-10-06 21:03 (UTC+1100):
Thank you to everyone for your suggestions, I was especially happy with the look and feel of MX Linux. I'm used to booting up with Fedora taking five or six minutes (going up to 20 or 30 minutes when it runs a file system check)
That never happened to me using Fedora whether with Plasma or TDE. I have several installations of TDE on Fedora 33 & 34 on both HDD and SSD but not RAID.
- Applications that store their vital user-critical data in the same hidden directory as their disposable temporary and cache data are evil. (I'm looking at you, Firefox and Firefox plugins.)
This is configurable. Firefox cache/tmp and other data need not be in ~/.mozilla. Both can be moved to separate elsewheres by changing
~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini
and in each profile directory's prefs.js
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.parent_directory"
- Fedora's file system check on a failed SSD is crap. 22 hours of checking, to get nowhere.
Fedora's fsck is the same one other distros use. A failed SSD will be a problem no matter what is on it.
- Never, ever enable "Fast boot" in the BIOS.
It works OK here on the few PCs I set it on, mostly Dells.
- The Kool Kids(TM) in Linux land decided that RAID was soooo 2010s. Don't believe them.
I've been using RAID1 on my primary PC for too long to remember. 3 years ago I took the OS off of the HDD RAID and put it on an SSD, so only my data is on the RAID.
- Fedora will RAID your swap, because insanity.
Fedora, like other distros I'm familiar with, allows deviation from defaults during installation. Neither RAID nor LVM nor BTRFS are a must in it or any other distro. Fedora is considered by many to be "bleeding edge", which sounds like the opposite of your interest: stability. Most TDE repos are built for non-"bleeding edge" distros.
- I pulled out my old PC with KDE 3 on it, so at least I could do email and search the Internet. (T)KDE is still the best desktop environment since Mac OS 6 in the 1990s. I miss it.
KDE3 is still available on openSUSE, though not until after a standard installation is complete. It's in an optional repo.
Thanks again for your attempt to help. I may try upgrading Fedora and seeing if I can get TDE working on that. When I can afford another two day downtime :-(
Two days' downtime isn't normal for installing an OS, but a bad SSD isn't normal either. It takes me roughly 3 hours to install and customize any distro. I mostly avoid live distros, with main exception being Knoppix.
On Wed, Oct 06, 2021 at 10:44:15AM -0400, Felix Miata wrote:
Steven D'Aprano composed on 2021-10-06 21:03 (UTC+1100):
Thank you to everyone for your suggestions, I was especially happy with the look and feel of MX Linux. I'm used to booting up with Fedora taking five or six minutes (going up to 20 or 30 minutes when it runs a file system check)
That never happened to me using Fedora whether with Plasma or TDE.
I'm happy for you that your experience has been different.
- Fedora's file system check on a failed SSD is crap. 22 hours of checking, to get nowhere.
Fedora's fsck is the same one other distros use. A failed SSD will be a problem no matter what is on it.
A file system check is not just fsck, it is also the user interface and the reporting of errors to the user. Or in this case, the *lack* of reporting of errors to the user. The only feedback you get is something close to:
Running start task File System Check something something /dev/something/long string of random alphanumeric characters
at the boot screen. You certainly don't get any feedback that the check was failing with thousands of I/O errors. To see that, you have to boot into the machine and look at dmesg, which you can't do until the fsck completes, which it won't do until there are no more errors...
(One wonders if anyone at Red Hat or Fedora checks their boot scripts on a machine with a failed HDD or SSD. I suspect not.)
With no feedback as to why the system was unable to finish, it took me literally two days to work out that it was a dead SSD, by which time it was too late in the weekend to purchase a replacement which meant I lost another day.
(I know, I know, we're living in a time when four or five million people have died due to the worst industrial accident in history, and tens of millions more have lost their jobs and livelihoods. I should count my blessings. What's three or four extra days to repair the system? Well, in my case, aside from the frustration, it's about a day or so of lost work.)
I eventually worked out what was going on by hard powering off the PC, booting into a rescue disk, identifying the failing partition by its UUID (it was /boot) and commenting it out of fstab. That allowed the system to boot up fine from boot-efi. And that allowed me to fail the ssd from the RAID array, and get back to work for a brief time, except that I didn't realise that swap was also raided, and boy oh boy is it a bad idea to be swapping memory to a failed disk.
Go on, ask me why swap was raided.
- Never, ever enable "Fast boot" in the BIOS.
It works OK here on the few PCs I set it on, mostly Dells.
On my PC, in fast boot mode, keyboard and mouse is disabled until after the BIOS passes control to the OS, which means you can't hit F2 to get back into the BIOS to disable fast boot mode or change the boot order.
Fedora is considered by many to be "bleeding edge", which sounds like the opposite of your interest: stability.
The Fedora community doesn't consider themselves to be bleeding edge, but they sure as hell behave like they are, if not right on the edge, close enough to the edge to be splattered.
And you are right about stability. If I could, I would still be running KDE and Linux from 2005 or so. Aside from the web browser, and perhaps a few video codecs, everything I use worked just fine back in 2005 and the last 15+ years has just made the overall experience worse.
(Gods, I'm going to be yelling "Get off my lawn" and shaking my fist at clouds next...)
Two days' downtime isn't normal for installing an OS
I know. But I have learned to expect the worst, always, in any and every upgrade. I expect that it will always take longer than expected, be more difficult than expected, will break things that I didn't expect to break, and invariably I'll end up with applications with a shittier UI.
I've so rarely been pleasantly surprised by upgrades.
I mostly avoid live distros, with main exception being Knoppix.
Now there's a name from the past. I remember when Knoppix was gee-whiz new technology. Imagine being able to run Linux from a CD!
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E. Liddell -
Echedey López Romero -
Felix Miata -
Hunter -
Jim -
John Cassidy -
Mavridis Philippe -
Michael -
Stefan Krusche -
Steven D'Aprano -
William Morder