
Has modern Linux lost its way? Some thoughts on Jessie - fpgeek
http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9299-has-modern-linux-lost-its-way-some-thoughts-on-jessie
======
geofft
If you're running an up-to-date GNOME/KDE/etc. desktop, and _not_ running
systemd, for better or worse you're using a less-supported configuration.
There's going to be other stuff that systemd will break, but in the long run
you're better off using the upstream-recommended configuration.

That aside... I think it's pretty clear that modern Linux is not losing its
way. If you go back even five years, and complain that your latest pre-release
version of Debian won't suspend properly because it needs a password, you'll
get laughed at by all the people who try to suspend their laptop and have it
crash in some way or another.

We're now in the uncanny valley of software progress. If suspend weren't
working, you'd feel hardcore and learn it and deal with it. If it worked
perfectly, then you wouldn't think about it. (What was the last time you
thought about how OS X or Windows does suspend, or handles permissions on
mounted drives, or whatever? When was the last time you read a manpage about
launchd or one of its helpers? Hint, the manpages are useless.) If it has
almost all the complexity to work perfectly, you get neither of these
benefits.

But it would help things immensely if someone were to document all this, from
a busy sysadmin's perspective, not from an upstream developer's. There are
occasionally manpages, but they're written like git's. Lennart's "systemd for
administrators" series is a start, but that's more of a pitch for why you
should want to build your new systems on it, and it only covers systemd. Docs
on how to figure things out when they go wrong would be most useful.

~~~
xorcist
> What was the last time you thought about how OS X or Windows does suspend

Every. Freaking. Time. That is, since an employer equipped me with a cheap
Dell. It looks like it suspends, but one time out of ten it'll come straight
out of sleep and cook in my bag.

I've only used Thinkpads, with Linux, for my own work before, and they suspend
multiple times a day without a problem ever. So this was a big a-ha moment for
me regarding Linux usability complaints, to see what it is that people
actually try to do.

~~~
andor
Some laptops have a mechanical lid switch (instead of a magnetic one) that
easily triggers when some pressure is applied to the lid. I have the same
problem with... a Thinkpad. Luckily, under Linux, you can disable wakeup
through the lid switch:

    
    
        # cat /proc/acpi/wakeup 
        Device	S-state	  Status   Sysfs node
        LID	  S4	*enabled   platform:PNP0C0D:00
        ...
    
        # echo "LID" > /proc/acpi/wakeup
    
        # cat /proc/acpi/wakeup 
        Device	S-state	  Status   Sysfs node
        LID	  S4	*disabled  platform:PNP0C0D:00
        ...
    

It's not a one-shot setting though, as the desktop environments reset it
before suspending. As far as I can remember, I put a script in /usr/lib64/pm-
utils/sleep.d to make it permanent.

~~~
artimaeis
If memory serves this is also possible in Windows under the advanced Power
Management settings.

------
AceJohnny2
I've been having similar issues and thoughts. I'm not a greybeard by any
reasonable measure, having started using Slackware in '99-'00, quickly
switched to Debian, and never looked back.

I think it all stems from D-Bus, which has become the primary mechanism of
command and control on desktop Linux. To address the OP's initial issue of
user mounting disks, it's managed via Udisks, which is mostly accessible via
D-Bus.

I have trouble reconciling Unix's notion of "everything is a file" and how a
modern Linux desktop operates via D-Bus. Don't get me wrong, I think D-Bus
very powerful and flexible. I just wish it was easier to explore and test via
file-based tools. Maybe a FUSE layer?

Anyhow, if the OP thinks that Linux was once "clean, logical, well put-
together, and organized", I can only laugh at his rose-colored glasses. Linux
is and always was a cobbled-together mess of orthogonal paradigms (no better
illustrated than by the design philosophy clash of XWindows vs Unix). Maybe
earlier Linux was simpler because it was still playing catch-up with other
Unix clones out there. Nowadays it's leading the pack in innovation, and so
things are changing, and fast. I don't know if documentation really is worse
now that it used to be, I'm afraid to fall in the same nostalgia fallacy.

Ultimately, I see this rant as nothing other than "things are different now
and I'm scared and confused". Not that I don't sympathize, being in roughly
the same place. However, I decided I can't stop technology, and sucked it up
and sharpened my google-fu.

~~~
stormbrew
Yep. D-Bus feels, honestly, like someone looked at every RPC mechanism ever
invented and decided to pile all their bad parts into one thing. It's not
discoverable, it has a frustrating permission system, its interface definition
is incredibly verbose with a very low information density, etc.

Of course, the fact that you need a full DE to easily mount a usb stick as a
non-privileged user means the whole thing is already failing hard. This is not
how this should work.

~~~
digi_owl
As best i understand, dbus came about as an attempt at making the KDE only
dcop into something that could be used across DEs. This to improve
interoperability between them.

~~~
lmm
dcop worked beautifully; the only problem was that the gnome team had
religious objections to depending on C++. It was never intended to be a
system-level thing though, and that's where a lot of the problems come from;
within a desktop session dbus actually works pretty well.

------
ppurka
One of the sources of this problem is the relentless experimenting that has
been ongoing since about 2007-2008. First, there was pmount and hal introduced
to take care this automounting, and as soon as this was in a working state, it
got replaced by devicekit. Soon after, devicekit was abandoned in favor of a
combination of udev, consolekit, policykit. Then then policykit got replaced
by polkit. And then systemd was introduced and consolekit got abandoned. And
each time the documentation gets worse (except for systemd, since the authors
try to justify their choices).

Overall, it has been a sequence of constant rewriting, and I don't see an end
to it. People who have been using rolling distributions like Gentoo and
administer their own machines are the most affected. If one is not using the
whole systemd to major DE (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc) stack, it is arduous to set
up a mounting system which always works. Usually, vfat external disks tend to
be immediately writable on mount. Move over to exfat, mtp, ext[234], or
another other native filesystem and it is an exercise in exasperation to get
them to mount as read-write as an unprivileged user, or even mount at all as
an unprivileged user (see
[https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15875](https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15875)).

The only decent program that I have found that works quite reliably is udevil.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
Well, since before that, really.. I can remember the early attempts at
automounting back around '98 or '99, IRC. Previously:
[http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)

~~~
digi_owl
Heh. From what i have seen elsewhere, jwz and at least one high up within
Gnome has some antagonism going between them.

------
Hz8NSD
The guys who capable of improving modern Linux desktop are using Mac. So we
are losing momentum in Linux desktop targeted software or facility.

They are developing in Mac but targeting server software or devops tools. So
pretty modern, hot and bleeding edge things are happening in there but not
desktop area.

GNOME - Always doing some experiment. No application. Just changing shell. No
reliable usability. Call me when they are done. One good thing about GNOME is
they care about beauty and elegance.

KDE - They just don't care about beauty of ... anything. But their
applications are freaking featureful, reliable and developed by people who
actually using it. I can feel they are dogfooding. I saw KF5 screenshots. They
still don't care about beauty.

ElementaryOS(Pantheon) - Better than GNOME. They are having and developing
actual application like geary and midori. You can feel they are actually
dogfooding in contrast to GNOME couterpart.

Unity - I like Unity itself. Very long time user. But Canonical lied to us
it's stable but actually alpha stage. One more bad thing is it smells vendor
lock-in pretty much. Anyway pretty usable and has big ecosystem(community +
vendor).

XMonad - At first time, it just looks like another tiling window manager. More
I use it, it feels like 'custom desktop construction kit' if you don't mind
learning about some haskell. As you all know, 'kit' is about fun and learning
more than actual result. So I'm doing still this dumb like window manager ...

~~~
wooger
XMonad is nice, but the haskell stuff makes it a chore. There is a great
tiling WM called SpectrWM
[https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/spectrwm](https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/spectrwm)
that is a re-implementation of Xmonad in C, with a sane text config file.

Works great for me.

The devs are all current/former OpenBSD guys, including Marco Peereboom (Who
forked OpenBSD recently).

~~~
oneofthose
I use awesomewm - it heavily relies on the Lua scripting language. It is great
and I use it on all my computers - I feel so unproductive if I don't have
awesomewm.

------
rian
I don't understand technical Linux users who use GNOME/KDE. They are not
designed to be hackable nor modular. They are intended for enterprise users
who want something Windows-ish. Their core contributors aren't
volunteers/users, they're people who are paid by Red Hat and SuSE.

If you're a technical user/programmer _and you want_ something more minimal,
simple, hackable, then don't use GNOME/KDE. Use xmonad or dwm, they are
written by programmers for programmers. They are literally only window
managers, nothing else. Only what you put in your .Xsession is what gets
started when you run startx.

Sure, you don't get a file manager or auto-mounting of usb drives out of the
box, that's because no sane programmer would want that by default. If you are
one of the few that do, then install udisks and configure it the way you like
(e.g. mount specific usb drives to specific locations with specific
permissions). As a programmer you'll ultimately be happier. I promise.

Debian doesn't get in the way. It fully supports customization at this level.
Take advantage of it!

~~~
wvh
I don't have time.

In the nineties I had endless time to customise and fix the system, but these
days I have so much work to do beyond the OS that I really can't spend much
time at all on making the OS work.

I actually like a simple-to-use end-user DE like KDE as a container for
terminal and browser windows. And I like that USB sticks can be mounted with a
simple click, so I can copy something and tell the person that's bugging me to
disappear with the stick so I can work on.

I remember an open-source and security conference around 2000 where I was
wondering why all the hackers had default RedHat (or SuSE) installations with
default Gnome or KDE and default backgrounds instead of nicely customised
machines like mine. It took me some years to realise they were on stage
because they got things done and didn't spend half of their time playing with
settings, themes, backgrounds, fonts and convenience scripts.

~~~
pjmlp
Same with me.

Discovering GNU/Linux in the 90's meant playing with configuration files and
themes for fvwm (the original not the rewrite one), twm, AfterStep,
WindowMaker, GNOME, KDE, Sawmill, Enlightment, Metacity and a few others.

I also don't have the time nor the patience to do it any longer and just take
the default install.

Which currently means Unity with Ubuntu on my travel netbook.

All my other computers run something else as OS.

------
rlpb
The traditional user/group system may be simple, but it is limited. For
example, it fails when you have a multi-user desktop system when some people
login in locally, and some people login in remotely. What should the
permissions on on the camera be? And what about hotplugged USB devices? It's
no longer possible to have a fixed device node with fixed permissions and
fixed user group membership.

The same applies to suspend. The local user perhaps should or should not be
able to suspend the machine. Presumably remote users should not be able to do
so at all.

What about wireless network connectivity as the machine moves? Who should have
permission to manipulate that?

If we did not have more a more complex dynamic permission system[1], some
would be saying that modern Linux is outdated and unable to cope with the more
modern reality of much more dynamic needs like this.

Instead, the article seems to be saying that it's become too complicated.

We can't have it both ways.

[1]
[http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/multiseat/](http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/multiseat/)

~~~
pmontra
I wonder how often it happens that people connects remotely to a Linux PC with
a camera. When I do it is because I ssh to another laptop of mine, maybe to
shut it down after I lost the desktop (maybe the graphic card crashed). OK, we
should support as many use cases as possible but it could be acceptable to
tell people that if they want to setup a multiseat machine shared with
strangers (students at school? They can get very creative) they disable mics,
cameras and don't plugin dvds and usb drives. Servers usually don't have any
of them. Finally, if you give somebody a sudo you accept that s/he can
shutdown the system remotely, normal case for a server.

I also wonder how other OSes handle that, I'm looking at Windows and OSX. With
VNC/RDP/Teamviewer/etc you get full access to the Windows desktop and all
devices. I guess OSX has the same, plus sshd.

So, maybe supporting a fringe use case is making more common use cases more
inconvenient?

~~~
useerup
On Windows there is the Group Policy. If your machine is domain joined, the
group policy is controlled by the domain. A non-domain joined machine also has
a policy, which can be edited using the "Local Group Policy Editor".

The policy contains items such as "Devices: Allow undock without having to log
on" or "Deny access to this computer from the network" (user/group list).

A policy consists of a number of such settings. For instance you can set who
can shut down the system, and who can do it from remote.

With Windows 8 came <a
href="[http://www.windowsecurity.com/blogs/shinder/microsoft-
securi...](http://www.windowsecurity.com/blogs/shinder/microsoft-security-
space/dynamic-access-control-in-windows-server-8-serious-
security-853.html">dynamic) access control</a> where access control lists
(ACLs) now can include tests for type of device being used, network location
etc. This can be used to disallow access to certain documents or applications
from phones/tablets while allowing access for the same user as long as he/she
uses a stationary device within the corporate network. Dynamic access control
also takes most of the pain out of complex access control as it can decide
access not just upon your security group membership, but also on other claims
such as limits, department, organizational unit, local certificates etc.

------
swhipple
_I used to be able to say Linux was clean, logical, well put-together, and
organized._

I don't think this was ever really the case, but I do think software is
evolving to meet the list of constantly updating use cases.

Of course managing one network interface with all your peripherals connected
at startup required less complexity. But if your target audience also has use
cases of wanting their USB drive to "just work" when plugged in, being able to
connect to a new wifi access point under their normal user, etc., you will
want some extra layers of abstraction that aren't available if you limit
yourself to FDs and Unix-style permissions.

In addition, some software is cross-platform and doesn't always care about
maintaining consistency with the conventions on a single platform.

~~~
moe
_you will want some extra layers of abstraction that aren 't available if you
limit yourself to FDs and Unix-style permissions._

I have yet to see a single case where FDs and unix-permissions wouldn't have
been perfectly sufficient.

I think the real problem is that we are facing a generation of developers who
never learned how to properly use them.

~~~
swhipple
There are cases where you want to be notified when an event occurs or the
success of your application's action (in more detail than the error codes from
a write(2) to a FD).

You can solve the problem by using socket FDs, but you have to roll your own
format for registration, communication, error checking, making sure the
appropriate applications can read, etc.

I think many developers would prefer using DBus as an abstraction for these
types of problems.

~~~
moe
Why not a library that speaks a _simple_ [1] line based protocol over pipes
and/or sockets? Or even just plain old files?

That's how unix used to work before the desktop people took over.

[1] Yes, DBus is "sort of" line based. But from all I've heard it's the
opposite of simple and... well, let's just say people don't seem to have much
good to say about it.

~~~
swhipple
It's true that DBus is somewhat of a complex solution if you have a simple
enough use case, and I think most of the criticism is the documentation rather
than the design (or, rather, criticism of the design is mostly that it isn't
Unix-like).

But having a daemon that relays your messages to other applications based on a
standardized protocol has some merit of its own, even if it isn't strictly
Unix-like.

I might have some bias, since I think the Unix-way is oversimplified for some
problems, even though there are often ways to make it work.

~~~
moe
_But having a daemon that relays your messages_

I agree, and I'm not opposed to the idea of a daemon.

DBus just seems to be (from my perception) rather poorly designed on every
level. And the more pervasive it becomes the more of its bad design bleeds
into more or less unrelated other software packages.

 _the Unix-way is oversimplified for some problems_

The unix-way of course has limits, but it's usually worth to explore it as far
as possible and _only then_ divert to more baroque designs.

In the majority of cases you'll find that pure, file-based approaches are a
lot more elegant, efficient, discoverable and debuggable than the alternatives
(see e.g. qmail vs postfix, or runit).

There's a lot to be said for being able to use the standard unix cutlery to
inspect and interact with the guts of your application.

Imagine DBus was just a directory with one or two files per pid. Imagine you
could read past messages with 'cat', follow them with 'tail' and inject new
ones with 'echo'.

------
yuvadam
I didn't grow up on Linux, but rather was accustomed to OSs that do everything
for me: first Windows, then Mac. And when those have failed me, by feeling too
complex and not giving me enough control as a power user, I discovered Arch
Linux.

As opposed to other distros, Arch is the only user-centric distribution out
there. When something goes wrong, I don't have to deal with "where does this
come from", because the distro itself doesn't interfere with anything. It's
either a bad config on my part, or an upstream bug.

Upstream bugs are fixed immediately due to the rolling release nature of Arch.
And configuring my system is extremely easy, since 95% of the problems are
solved by looking at the wiki.

I won't bash on other distros - to each her own. But I urge any power user
that wants full control over their system to try Arch. It's truly another
class of Linux.

~~~
philtar
All/vast majority of linux distros give you the same amount of control. The
only difference is that most of the others customize a bit (debian is
supposedly just setting sane defaults).

Never in my life have I had to work ON my computer as opposed to doing work
using my computer as much as I have using Arch.

~~~
qbrass
>Never in my life have I had to work ON my computer as opposed to doing work
using my computer as much as I have using Arch.

I'd say FOR instead of ON, but otherwise, that was my impression of Arch.

------
orbitingpluto
The most productive environment I've ever used is Gnome 2 using Compiz. It was
incredibly easy to flip between windows. Compiz has since been abandoned and
only the most die-hard fans try to fudge it into working on modern systems. I
gave up after Debian Squeeze and just started using tmux instead. I felt that
Linux was losing it's way after that.

Eventually I stumbled across Cinnamon (and/or Mate) with hotcorners and tmux.
It doesn't have the previous configurability but it's still pretty good.

The reason people held onto XP for so long was that it just worked well and it
was consistent. Many of the Linux GUI people should take that to heart.
Instead they always seem to try to be in catchup or trying to surpass Windows.
Gnome 3 and KDE 3+ have been so very unwieldy, resource hungry, or lacking in
features. They've been the Windows 8 equivalent of the Linux desktop.

Even to this day, most people don't like the Metro style interface (unless
they are playing with it on a phone). I'm blown away by how difficult it is
becoming to use Windows. I will go into the Metro style settings and see that
a configuration option is not present and then have to go into the good ol'
control panel. Or vice versa. I'm getting increasingly drawn towards using
Powershell by default so I don't have to backtrack.

Windows has been trying to force new "UI paradigms" to sell more copies of
Windows. Linux should realize it doesn't need to adopt the new and flashy...
unless it really is an improvement.

~~~
brusch64
I think KDE is as XP-y as it gets. No big frill, but you can configure nearly
everything you wish.

Ever tried KDE ?

~~~
Zardoz84
The only problem of KDE is the default configuration. Every time that I
install it on an machine, must hurry to change mouse to double click.
Everything else is enough good to use it without changing/tweaking it.

------
qznc
I think it is a old-timer issue. I'm using Linux on my desktop for ca 15
years. I also had a mysterious permission problem after my last Ubuntu
upgrade. In contrast, to 10 years ago, I do not _like_ hours of debugging to
get USB working anymore. It was fascinating then.

For the record, my permission problem was solved via "sudo pam-auth-update
--force". Thanks Arch Wiki for giving me the crucial hint.

~~~
wvh
I agree wholeheartedly on the old-timer issue (ca 17 years). Too much work,
children and other responsibilities to justify hacking hours on the OS itself.
I think the current state of Linux – especially on the desktop – is in a state
of flux, not to call it disarray, and it makes me grumpy that after all these
years of hacking, debugging, patching and bug reporting, things end up pretty
usable, and then "they" manage to break some of the most basic functionality
again. Only this time, it's gotten a lot harder to make sense of the whole
mess...

~~~
danieldk
So, why not use a distribution that doesn't change every six months or two
years? Such as Ubuntu LTS or CentOS.

------
brudgers
_I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit,
or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or…_

Googling to troubleshoot Linux sucks. Part of the suck is that Google's page
rank favors old pages. Part of it sucks because it's keyword finding favors
forum threads where the terms are in someone's signature.

And part of the suck isn't Google's fault because GNU/Linux documentation is
dense to the point of opacity. It is great for professional standings and not
so great for amateur ones.

Worst of all is that FOSS documentation has a lot of "not my problem" links.
If a piece of Software is doing something bad to Firefox it's documentation
will mention Firefox and link to the Mozilla homepage...so to speak.

------
stinos
_Here’s the crux of the issue: I don’t even know where to start looking. I’ve
googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or
dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… I found a bug
report of this exact problem — Debian #760281, but it’s marked fixed, and
nobody replied to my comment that I’m still seeing it._

If this is the crux for the OP I don't really see how this is for _Modern
Linux_. Maybe it's just me (though I doubt it) but what is described here is
basically how working with linux (and software in general to a lesser extent)
has been for me as long as I've used it. Small annoying problems here and
there which take quite some amount of time to find a fix for, if any. And
after a while if there are too many of them it becomes irritating and you
start a blog post to nag about it :]

~~~
Arnt
He's nagging that modern linux isn't like old linux, because the old debugging
techniques don't work.

I feel the same way. Maybe modern linux isn't a bad thing viewed neutrally,
but it's not the same thing as the one I love.

------
bkor
Reading the article, this is not about systemd. Debian wants to offer a choice
between systemd and something else. So they have things like systemd-shim,
cgmanager, etc. He says he's using systemd, but while trying to figure out
where his problem is, he's seeing references to systemd-shim, cgmanager and so
on. Those things are not systemd, nor do you need them if you use systemd.

Offering the alternative makes finding solutions to his problems more complex
and confusing.

------
reacweb
I think the main point of this article is that man pages are incomplete on
linux. When I have to explain some unix arcane to a colleague, I often start
by saying that man is the most important command in unix. But I am always
obliged to say that on linux, it is often incomplete.

When I learned unix 20 years ago on sunOS, man pages were complete. It has
never been the case on linux. I think man pages should give all the
assumptions about the system that may someday break or give pointers to
documentations.

I have often to use strace to analyse issues. When dbus starts to be involved,
I am often lost.

------
wvh
I don't like me-too complaining, but I'm in pretty much the exact same
situation: I've been running Linux since the nineties, and the last months
I've been having problems with Debian that make my systems unusable and that I
just don't know how to solve. Random hang-ups on right-click (KDE and DBus),
screen blanking every few seconds (power saving bugs), screen corruption and
windows disappearing (graphics bugs), daemons not starting because of
partition layout (systemd related).

I'm actually somewhat worried about the current state (especially on the
desktop). It never was a big deal to me that some flashy functionality or
hardware support took longer to show up in Linux and *BSD, because once it
arrived, it usually worked well and was stable. Now however there are a lot of
annoying complex bugs that are hard to trace and don't seem to be actively
analysed and fixed.

It's not a good sign that as a hacker I don't know where to begin to properly
track some of these bugs myself, and the people who receive the bug reports
don't seem to have a clue either.

------
Iv
Linux distributions (because this is actually what you are talking about) have
not lost their ways but theirs founders.

Face it, there are only so many years you can work on the same issues for
every new model of laptops. People get tired, people retire from projects.

But it is still open source. You are right that many behaviors (of Debian,
apparently the focus of your article) suck. Well, jump in!

------
forkandwait
For simplicity and clarity of design, may I suggest FreeBSD? Though I am not
sure I would want to run Gnome or any of those crazy things -- I run Joe's
Window Manager, jwm, because all I need from a window manager is to manage
windows, not handle file types or show me a directory tree or emulate the the
MS task bar or whatever.

~~~
dima55
FreeBSD will not help him since "linux" is not his problem at all. If he
didn't run all the fancy things, and did what you do, then his problems would
be somewhere between non-existent and clearly-debuggable.

~~~
mverwijs
This had me laughing. Not the FreeBSD bit. That bit is serious. The 'didn't
run all the fancy things' bit. That was funny.

The problem is: in Linux, pretty soon, you cannot do without the fancy bits
anymore.

I run a bunch of servers. Servers need a firewall. Nothing fancy, just
iptables. Right?

I'm running Ubuntu servers. They have 'firewalld' installed. Firewalld uses
dark magic to manipulate iptables and ip routes. Oh, it's all great when it
works, for as long as it works. You can simple open up a port by issuing a
firewalld-cmd command. Until you can't. Until firewalld-cmd says it can't
connect to firewalld even though it thinks it is running. And firewalld can't
restart because it thinks the configuration files are wrong.

I'm not a Linux newbie by any standard, but I could not solve this problem.
After restarting firewalld, all the routes on the machine were gone. And thank
god for iLO.

This is on a production server providing secondary services to 200.000 users.
Soon after, I found similar issues on our loadbalancers, webservers, database
servers, all running firewalld.

There was no other solution other than to reboot the server. I tried debugging
firewalld and ran into (no particular order) apparmor, dbus, python,
firewalld-cmd, firewalld, network-manager and libvirtd. No where was a hint to
be found of why firewalld didn't work.

I don't consider this to be anything fancy. This is supposed to be a simple
wrapper around iptables. It is supposed to 'just work'. It is supposed to
leave clear logs about what it is trying to do in /var/log/syslog.

Sure, I'm getting old and cranky. But I'm really tired of having to get called
out of my bed at 03:00 am because of this 'innovation' that tries to solve
edgecases. And solves them badly.

~~~
nisa
Huh? I never saw something like firewalld on Ubuntu? There is ufw but it's not
enabled by default..

Looks like you mean Fedora/RHEL7? Ubuntu on the server (14.04) is quite okay
in my experience.. you can even deinstall dbus and still use upstart..

RHEL7 made me furious (NetworkManager by default... ) but I'm not used to it
so it may be just missing experience.

~~~
mverwijs
firewalld for Ubuntu in the 'universe' repo. Don't use it. It's horrible,
unstable, slows network speed and is impossible to debug.

------
Gracana
I don't think this is anything new. I've certainly never felt that Linux was
"clean, logical, well put-together, and organized." Linux distros are a mish-
mash of stuff of various levels of quality built by people with different
goals, put together by volunteers into something that mostly works in the
more-commonly-tested areas.

Back when I played around with my OS as a hobby I was able to keep up with
most of the issues and changes, but without investing that kind of time, I
don't have much choice but to leave things at their defaults, install updates,
and hope for the best. Things weren't better before, I was just more involved,
and I wonder if the same is true for the author.

------
legulere
I have the feeling that it's that way because the usecases today have changed
while the fundamental parts of the system haven't. Unix was designed in the
60s and 70s and everything that came later was bolted on what was already
existing. This includes stuff that's standard unix behaviour. For instance
abusing the user system to gain better isolation of daemons.

This all has to be done to stay compatible with previous systems and raises
complexity.

------
thekevan
I don't think speaking about "modern Linux" and then referencing one user's
experience with one distribution is indicative of the entire movement.

~~~
regularfry
Are there distros where his complaints about lack of transparency,
documentation and conceptual clarity don't apply?

------
fit2rule
I tend to agree with this article in some ways .. I've been using Linux since
the days of the minix-list, and have over the years been bothered by exactly
the sorts of things that are described here .. it seems every year/new release
of my preferred distro (Ubuntu Studio) I have to re-learn things that are not
well explained or documented.

So I've just kind of gotten used to using the source. Seriously! If I find
something I don't get, I build the package from source, and debug it. This is
really the only way I've been able to survive as long without tearing my hair
out in frustration over the years.

Its a glib response to the problem, but actually it really works.

------
Scarbutt
Another thing that bother me in Debian was subpixel-hinting and font-
smoothing, it wasn't enable by default (or it wasn't capable and adding a font
config half fixed it), is this still an issue in Jessie? That was really bad
UX.

~~~
Luyt
I think that had to do with some patents on the truetype font hinting
interpreter in Freetype.

~~~
lloeki
IIRC those patents are related to MS ClearType and have expired (but my memory
may serve me wrong)

~~~
icebraining
Some of them have expired, but there are still patents related to subpixel
font hinting and layout which won't expire before 2018.

------
warfangle
I've never been able to reliably use debian without a /lot/ of frustrating
configuration. I'm not a bored high school student anymore.

Back when I used sarge, it was okay - there was some configuration I had to do
to get X working, and at one point I had a pretty sweet custom kernel build on
a laptop that extended its battery life 35% over windows.

Decided to spin up a VM to use debian as a dev environment again recently, and
-- well -- after three hours of futzing with it I deleted the VM and booted
Ubuntu instead. Had issues getting virtualbox extensions working; some others
that I can't remember.

------
geppetto
This classifies as another useless systemd rant. Everybody switched to that
ages ago. Can every distro be wrong?

Anyway, I've been using Debian Sid since 2000 and, for what it's worth, it
"just works" on my hardware now and it's much easier to install/manage than,
say, five years ago. Then again, if you mess with the default configuration
you're looking for trouble and should accept that problems are harder to fix
for corner cases.

~~~
brusch64
Well it may be a bad time to start with Debian unstable, when they are
switching to systemd (or are in the process of doing it).

I remember updating to Debian testing (never had the nerves for unstable) when
they switched to Gnome3 and I experienced bugs (and really nasty ones). When
they make big changes it is going to break things.

If you don't want to have things broken, either use a stable distribution,
don't upgrade for some time or live with it.

Right now I am using Arch Linux mostly - but I've heard the change to systemd
had some rough edges for Arch Linux too (didn't use it at this time).

I can say that I am completely fine with systemd on Arch Linux and I don't
understand the big problem some people have with it (on a philosphical level I
do understand them, but not on a pragmatic level).

------
transfire
The ultimate problem is money and leadership. Open source lacks too much of
both. In the end, proprietary and vertical systems tend to dominate.
Interestingly, it looks like we are the verge of a new explosion in such
system thanks to mobile. Besides the dominate Android, iOS and Windows, new
systems are on the horizon: Tizen, FirefoxOS, webOS, Sailfish and others.

------
harrystone
This will continue as long as so many people want linux to be a free version
of Windows or Mac OS X, instead of a free PC unix.

------
aceperry
It's funny to hear the the name Debian associated with the label "modern." I
don't mean to diss Debian, it's a solid distro and has a lot going for it, but
it is seriously behind all of the cutting edge distros that I'm used to.

Personally, I enjoy new technologies and systems in linux. I used to run
Gentoo and other distros that constantly brought out cutting edge software.
And I'm used to somewhat alpha/beta quality software that mostly works. And
because it works well compared to my experience with windows software, so I
wasn't too bothered.

Maybe it's because my background is in hardware, but all of the new software
had always taken awhile for me to grasp and appreciate. But in the linux
community, I've always been able to find info and solve problems that I've
come across and learn about the system. Windows problems usually can be solved
because large masses of people tried so many things, but I wouldn't get any
enlightenment about computers or software when fixing Windows problems. Maybe
my world view has been skewed by comparing linux to windows, but I've always
felt that I'm able to learn and understand more with linux vs Windows.

~~~
pseudonom-
> it is seriously behind all of the cutting edge distros that I'm used to.

Are you familiar with branches beyond Stable? I switched from Arch to Debian
Unstable (which uses a rolling release) and find their edges to be about
equally sharp.

~~~
aceperry
I haven't touched Debian in a long time, and I didn't know that unstable was a
rolling release. Thanks for the info, I might look into it someday.

~~~
seba_dos1
Unstable was always a rolling release, it gets just frozen for some time
before each stable release because the process of getting a package in testing
requires it to be in unstable first.

------
sspiff
Any blog post title which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word
no.

\- Adapted from Betteridge's law of headlines [1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

------
tbrock
I've never had a problem with Arch linux. Why not run a stable rolling release
instead?

~~~
vinceguidry
Debian unstable pretty much is a stable rolling release. Don't let the
"unstable" tag fool you, stability is a relative term. The author was
describing a community problem, not a methodological one. It could also be a
technical one, Linux seems to have gotten an order of magnitude more complex
in recent years, whereas user patience has similarly fallen. It's easy to
imagine that people with the kinds of problems described just dealing with it
rather than troubleshooting and sharing what they learned.

~~~
spain
> Don't let the "unstable" tag fool you, stability is a relative term.

I don't see why people throw this around a lot, it really isn't. Most recent
example I can remember is when Debian decided to remove NVIDIA drivers from
Testing and you end up with a nonfunctional desktop [0].

[0] [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=755020](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=755020)

~~~
icebraining
In my experience, "testing" is a lot more unstable than "unstable" itself, at
least when upgrading. I haven't had any major problems running Sid in the last
four or five years.

------
janjes
This is not only debian I have had this error on one ubuntu machine but
multiple times, not at boot but after a few days of use I guess

also please call is gnu linux nog only linux. linux is a very small part of
your operating system

------
vasilakisfil
I completely agree, unfortunately. Still fighting not to get Mac for my job
(programmer). But I don't know for how long.

------
mister_m
I think I am going to switch to plan 9.

------
jkot
Jessie has not been released yet... And if you like good documentation, you
should go with Redhat anyway.

------
sandGorgon
for everyone wanting to use a modern day Debian - I recommend Linux Mint
Debian Edition 2 "Betsy" [1]

[http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/02/about-
betsy/](http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/02/about-betsy/)

------
aosmith
I was a debian / ubuntu user fro many years. I switched to fedora / gnome when
unity started to become standard and have never regretted it.

~~~
teddyh
Don’t blame Debian for Unity, please. Sometimes, saying “Debian/Ubunty” is
like saying “C/C++”. They are separate things and must be treated separately.

------
godzilla82
Is Vorlon poetry a typo for vogon poetry

~~~
shdon
Vorlons are aliens from Babylon 5.

~~~
chrisan
I was also confused by Vorlon as Vogon Poetry is "a thing"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon#Poetry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon#Poetry)

Maybe if he used Klingon as "alien poetry starting with a V" instantly makes
me think of HHGTG

..anywho :)

~~~
cwyers
Right, Vorlons aren't known for their poetry, Vogons are.

------
peteretep
Is there someway we could just prefix these with [systemd-rant]?

------
baumbart
Linux does not have lost its way. It has truly followed its way, and that's
what you got. It was always clear (at least for me and many other people),
that if you don't design a system but put it together step by step, you will
end up with a mess.

I have always been on the NetBSD side, and it's bright over here. Even FreeBSD
suffers from similar problems as Linux, trying to get new features fast.
That's just how software development works (or does not), you have to follow
proper design to get something for the future.

Linux will always be stuck in past design decisions, and in order to stay
compatible, things will need be become more and more complex, until they
break.

~~~
icebraining
The whole point of systemd was/is to design a coherent system that integrates
all the core parts. It's also what caused all the problems for OP, unlike the
"step by step" approach that was working fine for him.

~~~
VLM
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-
platform_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect)

------
marrs
I think this is a direct consequence of the commercialisation of the Linux
desktop by Canonical, Red Hat, et al, but especially Canonical. The amateurs
were pushed out and the professionals swarmed in, and now the requirement was
to bring more "converts" from Windows.

A number of bad decisions started to get made as these sponsors became
frustrated with the low rate of uptake. One of them, I'm sure, was the
perceived need to keep up with the competition, essentially getting into an
arms race with the strategy (if there was one) of outdoing Microsoft.

A good example of this is the absurd introduction of PulseAudio, which
introduced features that nobody asked for while simultaneously breaking audio
for a large number of users including myself. All because a similar (but
working) feature was introduced in Vista.

~~~
jerf
What I can't figure out is how this actually helps that goal anyhow. My fight
with policykit (or polkit or whichever the hell one it was) is that with
XMonad, I couldn't get network manager to work properly, _even when I ran it
and its configurator as root_. For my own desktop, I'd be happy with either of
"tell policykit that 'jerf' can do anything" or "tell policykit that 'root'
can do anything", literally the simplest possible configuration.

There appears to be (at least at the time) dick-all documentation on
policykit, excepting magic invocations on the Ubuntu forums to do this or
that. Reading the configuration files appears to suggest the primary use case
for policy kit is to work in large installs like a university lab where the
permissions are being portioned out in a highly granular manner via third-
party authentication services. If this isn't true, don't blame me for coming
to the wrong conclusion. I do not give a _shit_ about any of this. I'm on a
single-user machine and the one user can do anything it damned well pleases
(to a first approximation). But there is absolutely no clue I could find about
how to accomplish this.

By just fucking around and turning off permission checking in every manner I
could work out, I eventually got myself into a position where "root" was
capable of adding new network, but my normal user is only permitted to switch
between existing networks. (Incidentally, read that sentence again, it's
actually quite surprising. The result of what I did should have been to let
everybody do everything, right? No. Why not? Hell if I know.) This was enough
for me to declare victory and move on, but it really isn't a victory.

And the point of me posting all this isn't so much to bitch; that was just a
bonus extra. The point is, if this is a "professional" solution to the problem
of system permissions, I have _no idea_ how it meets that goal. There seems to
be no way for the aforementioned University administrators to learn how to
properly configure it for their use cases, no logging to help them get it
right. Putting on my sysadmin hat, I'd never trust this system any further
than I could throw it, it's so opaque. I would get a bug report that Bob was
able to use the video camera when he shouldn't be able to, and I'd push a fix,
but I'd have virtually confidence that I'd actually solved the problem, to say
nothing of continuously wondering exactly what my permission scheme was
permitting to people. To me, it looks worse than a closed source solution...
at least the closed source has a support line you could call.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
I wonder if NetworkManager or polkit is doing some sort of opaque meddling
with POSIX capabilities? The CAP_NET_* options, in particular. I'm grasping at
straws here, certainly, but your description of the events leads me to suspect
something in that general direction.

------
guylhem
Relevant quotes for TLDR:

"It worked, but I don’t know why"

"I don’t even know where to start looking."

"That’s about as comprehensible as Vorlon poetry to me"

Potentially non politically-correct answer to the article title: maybe it's
not Linux who lost its ways, but some old-time users? (who forget the
beginner's spirit to look for answers on forums, manuals, to try to understand
before casting a judgment)

Linux has always innovated around the paradigms, taking inspiration from
everywhere. It was never "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized".
It has always been messy, but in a good way.

When I first discovered linux, I had to adapt to all these new things. That
was in 1992. When I decided to use again a modern linux distribution on my
laptop in 2014, I had to adapt - again. I have no doubt I will have to keep
adapting in my lifetime.

The error would be to consider that the "right ways" are fixed, and that
innovation should be stopped.

There will be many new things, some will be kept, some will be discarded.
Change is the only thing one can constantly bet on.

~~~
paulannesley
Some other relevant quotes:

“For years, I used to run Debian sid (unstable) on all my personal machines.”

“Sometimes things broke. But it wasn’t a big deal, because I could always get
in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was.”

“I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit,
or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… I found a bug
report of this exact problem — Debian #760281, but it’s marked fixed, and
nobody replied to my comment that I’m still seeing it.”

… doesn't sound like somebody “who forget the beginner's spirit to look for
answers on forums [etc]”

~~~
guylhem
Really? He says he doesn't want to look anymore, then that it's too
complicated. He mustn't have searched really hard, or he would have found it's
udisk job.

So why couldn't he find it?

It's not that a current linux system is N times more complex than the sid he
used to run, it's that things changed: as was properly noted by someone else
on this thread, dbus was one of these important changes. Now it's systemd.
Next it'll be wayland or something else.

You're correct in that he still tries to do some search, but he expects things
to be like they were in the past, where he "could always get in there and fix
it fairly quickly, whatever it was", i.e. to be just as efficient, without
learning the new tricks!

The beginner's spirit is to want to learn new tricks, looking for answers and
being really insistent in understanding better, instead of stopping after a
google search and a comment on a bug report.

As said in another post I loved for it straight-to-the-fact comment, "In
contrast, to 10 years ago, I do not like hours of debugging to get USB working
anymore. It was fascinating then".

It's not more complex. A Linux system is a time investment, where knowledge
has a half line. If you no longer can or wants to commit to learn new things
at the same pace, but still want to fix things as before, maybe it's not the
best idea to stick to Linux.

IHMO, the author would be best served to try say FreeBSD, where things seem to
change at a slower pace. But he would still have to learn this new thing, and
I strongly believe he doesn't want that - just a system as before, without any
changes. Ain't gonna happen.

~~~
VLM
Why should he have to put in the effort to do something that used to be, and
should currently be, trivial?

Its an aesthetic decision.

A car analogy is anyone who doesn't like tail fins on cars is too old to be
driving and should go back to a horse. An architecture analogy is something
incredibly cluttered looking like gothic or victorian architecture is the only
way to design a house and anyone who wants clean modernist design is
aesthetically wrong and should go away. Cars and houses are supposed to be
ugly and pointlessly expensive and cluttered looking and anyone who disagrees
is inherently wrong because, um, well just because they're noobs to cars and
houses.

The advantage of freebsd is its design aesthetic is dramatically superior to
the linux design aesthetic. Its devs have better taste in OS style. As a side
effect that makes it easier to use and more productive and more noob friendly,
but thats merely a side effect.

