
Virtual Linux dev workstation: how to recover from crashes? - dredmorbius
https://plus.google.com/+TreyHarris/posts/8oysaczh9J2
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dredmorbius
More generally: Trey makes an excellent argument for the importance of _user
state_ , in a workstation context. This is a matter I've become increasingly
despondant on myself, across numerous platforms: Linux desktop, Android, Mac,
Windows.

The biggest sin I witness of _any_ user-oriented software (as opposed to
server or controls systems) is of failure to maintain state. The atomisation
of tasks among different applications, with increasing fragmented and kludgy
means for data interchange plays into this. The increasingly widespread use of
computers is itself a tremendous part of the problem.

A recent OECD survey of computer skills among the general population found
that fully _half_ the general population has _no_ or at best only the very
most rudimentary computer skills. "Advanced" skills -- defined as the ability,
say, to use a Search or Search and Replace functionality within a word
processing app, was roughly 5% of the population.

If you're a HN / YC coder, administrator, or designer, you're some small
fraction of the 1%.

The flipside is that _general-purpose systems are not being built or designed
with you in mind._ This was a view I first saw _voiced_ (explicitly stated)
from the GNOME development leadership in the early 2000s, and more recently
from both the Mozilla and Chrome browser development team leads. It's a cause
Jonathan Zittrain has campaigned for, "generative computing", along with Cory
Doctorow, for years. It's a battle we're losing.

And generally, tools for establishing and maintaining a complex system of
state between numerous tools and applications ... is poor.

Trey's approach is to try to use VM snapshotting, at regular intervals, to
create recovery points. That's an option, but it strikes me that it's
operating at too low a level, and may well be preserving the state leading to
whatever instabilities are crashing his system(s). Recovering to the point
just prior to failure seems rather like _Groundhog 's Day_.

A generalised support for history within applications, allowing for recovery
and rollback to _that application 's prior state_ strikes me as far more
useful. I'm increasingly thinking that Emacs, and its various terminal-support
modes, may actually be that generalised model for many instances.

And, as I write this comment, I see that Firefox/Android has once again wiped
out the 100+ tabs I'd been trying to organise and sort through, something of a
task-list organisational mode I've found I use on browsers, or rather, try to,
though its a usage mode they support exceedingly poortly.

 _I am not the target userbase._

Oh well.

~~~
dredmorbius
In a further irony: Firefox crashed, again, as I was attempting to restore my
prior browsing state, from history, one-at-a-time, as there is no mechanism
for multi-recovering, or snapshot-recovering, previous state.

I was in the midst of attempting to file a crash report to Mozilla, and needed
to reference a URL (Trey's initial article), but switching away from the
crash-report screen itself, on Android, lost it.

It is 2017. Do you know where your user state is?

