It will cause a critical error during boot if the device isn’t given the nofail mount option, which is not included in the defaults option, and then fails to mount. For more details, look in the fstab(5) man page, and for even more detail, the mount(8) man page.

Found that out for myself when not having my external harddrive enclosure turned on with a formatted drive in it caused the pc to boot into recovery mode (it was not the primary drive). I had just copy-pasted the options from my root partition, thinking I could take the shortcut instead of reading documentation.

There’s probably other ways that a borked fstab can cause a fail to boot, but that’s just the one I know of from experience.

To the feature creep: that’s kind of the point. Why have a million little configs, when I could have one big one? Don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical. I get that there are use cases, but the average user doesn’t like having to tweak every component of the OS separately before getting to doom-scrolling.

And that feature creep and large-scale adoption inevitably has led to a wider attack surface with more targets, so ofc there will be more CVEs, which—by the way—is a terrible metric of relative security.

You know what has 0 CVEs? DVWA.

You know what has more CVEs and a higher level of privilege than systemd? The linux kernel.

And don’tme get started on how bughunters can abuse CVEs for a quick buck. Seriously: these people’s job is seeing how they can abuse systems to get unintended outcomes that benefit them, why would we expect CVEs to be special?

TL;DR: That point is akin to Trump’s argument that COVID testing was bad because it led to more active cases (implied: being discovered).

I’m gonna laugh if it’s something as simple as a botched fstab config.

In the past, it’s usually been the case that the more ignorant I am about the computer system, the stronger my opinions are.

When I first started trying out Linux, I was pissed at it and would regularly rant to anyone who would listen. All because my laptop wouldn’t properly sleep: it would turn off, then in a few minutes come back on; turns out the WiFi card had a power setting that was causing it to wake the computer up from sleep.

After a year of avoiding the laptop, a friend who was visiting from out of town and uses Arch btw took one look at it, diagnosed and fixed it in minutes. I felt like a jackass for blaming the linux world for intel’s non-free WiFi driver being shit. (in my defense, I had never needed to toggle this setting when the laptop was originally running Windows).

The worst part is that I’m a sysadmin, diagnosing and fixing computer problems should be my specialty. Instead I failed to put in the minimum amount of effort and just wrote the entire thing off as a lost cause. Easier then questioning my own infallibility, I suppose.

Debian is the best and I don’t know what to do with it

What the fuck.

This is your brain on racism.

This is a hypothetical that has no clear bearing connection to common practice.

In other words, I could just reverse this to contradict it and have equal weight to my hypothetical: devs should always use GPL, because if their software gets widely adopted to the point where companies are forced to use it, it’s better that it’s copyleft.

Well, ideally you’re choosing your license based on the cases where it differs from others and not the majority of times where it doesn’t make a difference.

Someone aiming to make Free software should use a copyleft license that protects the four freedoms, instead of hoping people abide by the honor system.

Also, no one can 100% accurately predict which of their projects will get big. Sure, a radical overhaul of TCP has good odds, but remember left-pad? Who could have foreseen that? Or maybe the TCP revision still never makes it big: QUIC and HTTP/3 are great ideas, and yet they are still struggling to unseat HTTP/2 as the worldwide standard.

I’vw become so brainwashed by the FOSS Difference™ that if I see something exclusive to proprietary OSes, I assume it’s 99% marketing and not actually an important nor useful feature. I have no idea what HDR is, but it sounds like a marketing acronym for something that’s done worse than the FOSS equivalent

Also, my life is objectively better since I stopped using Adobe outside work.

Without knowing a better way, my go-to solution woukd just be getting an full installation image and diffing my files with the files on it

Re the comic: great art! Can’t wait to read more. I’m already curious about these characters and their setting.

Re the topic: I have to agree with Benno Rice here. While systemd is far from perfect, there is a lot that it got right, and there are a lot of reasons it became the most widely adopted init system—no, it’s not because the project owner is well-connected, that’s for Apple and M$. We should learn from that, instead of outright dismissing the users that have reasons for wanting/using it.

More generally, this falls under the “should the tech adapt to the user or the user adapt to the tech?” debate. Systemd chose to aim for broadly applicable while still being easy to use for beginners who just want to “set it and forget it” (the tech adapted to the user). Meanwhile, savvy users have figured out exactly how they want their init configured, and the bare minimum they need to do so, so they’re willing to learn a different system (the users adapting to tech).

I’m not even close to saying systemd is The Best™, nor even that it’s good. But it is good at what it wants to be, and it satisfies the overwhelming majority of gnunix users. Instead of writing them off as misguided followers of evil, maybe we should listen to their needs and try to find a way to tailor an init system to them.

Spoiler: we don’t do that because they want something that takes care of everything systemd does, that’s as widely supported, and that requires minimal setup and maintenance. They want systemd.

Sorry for seeing some media and commenting about the similarities between it and situations I’ve experienced firsthand in my offline life

Now for another observation you won’t like: this type of person is not representative of the entire country, and it’s weird that you jumped to that conclusion

If this isn’t an accurate representation of a large portion of Americans.

They see themselves as the badass hero stopping The Scum from fucking up everything around them, when really it’s just these guys fucking up everything around them in their thirst for vigilante justice.

Debian, Arch, Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Redhat, Manjaro all have docs and wiki on their primary websites. Slackware has docs, Gentoo has a wiki. Anything that’s not on a distro’s site needs to be carefully considered before tampering. Almost all of those distros have a warning in their installation instructions to only listen to the information in their docs and wiki, and to a lesser extent their forums. Hell, even nosystemd.org tells you what systemd is, what it’s for, what replacements there are, and the proper way to get rid of it in bold text under the header “How do I get rid of systemd?”

Listening to hackneyed advice from unvetted sources just because they have strong opinions is a problem that any and every computer will face. That’s not a problem with linux anymore than the hoardes of trolls on random social media sites telling you to “delete System32” is a problem with Windows.

I want Linux to be customizable AND safe. But safe in the way that someone takes the time to learn how what they plan to do will effect their system, not safe in the sense of “impossible to bork”

As for elitism: if it’s “elitist” to indirectly poke fun of someone who deleted a core system component without understanding what it does without a backup, then so be it. It feels more like that word is levied by people whose ego is too big to take respobsibility for the mistakes they made, and instead blame others for laughing when it bites them in the ass.

Idk where these swaths of elitists that refuse to help are. OOP went to stackexchange and likely got a helpful answer complete with explanations, as that is the community standard. Over on [email protected] , I see people offering help with problems all the time without shitting on them. If I go to the aforementioned OS forums, or really any software-specific forums, I see people helping or pointing people to where they can get help.

And I’m not denying that assholes who say shit like “did you even bother googling?” exist. They’re nasty people with no patience, but they’re by no means the community standard unless they’re the only ones you pay attention to…

Or unless you see a screenshot of a question from a different website posted in a meme-sharing forum and expect the comments to offer advice, instead of laughing at the person who shot themselves in the foot and went to a hospital instead of seeking help at the DNC HQ

“I am a new linux user. After 15 minutes of research on google, I found a few forum posts and some niche websites that said SystemD was bad, so I took it as gospel. Now my system doesn’t work as simply as it did with installer defaults? How do I make everything Just Work™ after removing any OS components I don’t understand the need for?”

Afaik the issue is that they made their code “open” source in the way many for-profit companies do: they require a subscription before you have access to the code.

If I understand the GPL correctly that doesn’t violate it, since it only requires that the users have access to the source and not the general public.

no, not on my laptop, why?

I’ve been using nouveau on my laptop fpr a few weeks now, and so far, no issues

Very bleak and demotivating, thank you

I don’t have much to respond to because I appreciate what you’ve said and even agree for the most part, however:

Voting Democrat is always in your interests.

The Democratic party is not some force of good, and their administrations and policies still harm the working class and other marginalized groups. They just manage to do less harm and placate us slightly more than their primary opponents.

Voting democrat is more in my interest than voting Republican, but not as much as having an ancom in office. It is not in my interest in general, as I will still be shooting myself in the foot because it’s better than having someone else shove electrodes into my brain.

You may say that it’s the effect of “corrupt dems,” but that’s a myopic understanding of the party and its motives. It is an ideologically driven party, it’s just that that ideology is an uncomfortable truth: liberal capitalism. In service of that, it allows the input of marginalized groups, but will never allow us to gain full autonomy and control over our own lives as that would not serve capital.

I refuse to buy this narrative that any progress be made has to be made under the banner of a particular party/organization/group.

Please do not project onto me when addressing my questions/comments. Just because I get frustrated with “vote blue no matter who” rhetoric online doesn’t mean I cease existing offline; I do have a life irl where I have been occasionally known to engage in my community and political projects.

“how many times are as supposed to vote to prevent the fascists from gaining power?”

despite the quotation marks, that is not a question I asked. Please do not put words in my mouth

This “they’ll win anyway” is some miserly nihilistic take - we’ve won against the Nazis before we’ll win again.

I am not a nihilist, and, based on context, I don’t think you meant that word anyway. Perhaps “defeatist”?

Paraphrasing me as saying “they’ll win anyway” in regards to fascists (nazis or otherwise) strips what I said of important context: my point was that if the rhetoric stagnates in the choice of “neoliberalism or fascism” the fascists will eventually get a win for two reasons:

1. the status quo, neoliberalism, isn’t working out for the majority of people, and historically whenever that happens, societies undergo major upheaval. If the public only ever knew two options prior to that revolution, they—as a mob, not a collection of rational individuals—will take the second

2. It frames the fight in such a way where the fascists “only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”