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Comment by koprulusector | Hacker News Reader

>Over the last year or so Mac users have run into problems that appear related to a background service named triald. Some report it stealing huge amounts of CPU, others associate it with various glitches, and a few have noticed gigabytes of disk space apparently being taken up by its folder at ~/Library/Trial, and in their Time Machine backups. This article explains as much as I know about this mysterious new service, and ponders what’s going on.

- I find it so odd, Apple users fascination of their own operating system, this sort of voyeur or wildlife documentarian attitude. It’s your machine, but the inner workings are this ineffable mystery.

>I’m not aware of any control over or opt-out from Trial, although it could be covered in Apple’s general request to share data including panic logs, if you can remember where to control that.

>I first noticed Trial when studying Visual Look Up in the log. At the start of each Look Up, the subsystem com.apple.trial enters the following into the log:

>Initializing TRIClient. Trial version: TrialXP-292.18

>_PASEntitlement: Entitlement "com.apple.private.security.storage.triald" is not present.

>Found entitlement: "com.apple.trial.client" --> <private>

><private> 0x12d9547e0 (no container): using Trial root dir <private> >This suggests that Trial is recording information about Visual Look Up, although nothing more explicit appears in subsequent log entries.

- Apple can double speak all they want about digital privacy, but their actions tell the truth. As a paying Apple customer, you’re not deemed worthy enough to even understand how your own machines work, less even to “tamper” with their working, and who knows what data is actually being shared?

- Personally, I say no thank you. I’ve been on Debian or a variant for almost 10 years now, and haven’t looked back. It’s only gotten easier, as software generally moves more and more to SaaS web apps and the intrinsic cross-platform nature of the browser.

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> It’s your machine, but the inner workings are this ineffable mystery.

At some point, every machine's software becomes an ineffable mystery. Do you know what is going on in all your 3rd-party Linux drivers, say, from NVIDIA?

[The machine] will not fulfill its destiny until you let go of the illusion of control. -- Master Oogway.

What's your point?. That since some software doesn't play nice and doesn't treat its users with respect, we shouldn't value all the software that does? I don't find this agreeable

I don't think I meant that, although it might sound like it. I think you're accusing me of the fallacy of all or nothing, but to me the original argument sounds like an obsession with purity, but clearly one line isn't enough to explain that.

The replies to my original post seem to me to be arguing for 100% transparency from the keyboard to the atoms on the finfets. I don't think I'm strawmanning that (maybe hyperbolizing a little, but with RISC-V proponents, maybe not!)

That sounds like a noble goal, like world peace, ending starvation, and curing all modern ails. However, the extent to which tribalism and out-grouping emerges from people who don't use the "superior, pure" solution is nonsense: just look at the tone of the first post, snidely declaring that this is proof apple is again such a bad solution. That's not helpful, and after hearing similar tech arguments for nearly 35 years online, it is tiresome (ironic). On top of that, the dream of transparency seems unlikely because every open source hardware project I've ever seen has failed [1], there is zero motivation for it.

Again, not to say it isn't a noble goal, but don't fetishize it to the point of outgrouping others.

[1] This is a broad statement, as there is plenty of gadgetry that is open source hardware. I mean: open source hardware for Linux laptops. Or at least hardware that has open source drivers but doesn't have an "Appendix H".

Thanks for elaborating. I agree with what you just said, a high level of snobbery won't fix anything, and expecting everything to be "pure" is utopian. That being said, I think that the original commenter was just expressing his frustration at the fact that "tech minded" people continue to buy into Apples ecosystems and then observing the behaviour as though they didn't own their stuff. In a way, not dissimilar to your point elsewhere about how people complain about Nvidia drivers but keep buying their hardware.

Everything is about trade-offs.

Since I can't meaningfully audit kernel level stuff anyway (not my area) I mostly care whether it works for me (or for the production purpose the customer needs or etc.) and that's not an ideal world but I choose to prioritise open source userspace contributions and running code.

I also run windows 10 on a Thinkpad Helix 2 for my personal machine - with WSL to provide me an X11 environment that I use to ssh to the debian/freebsd/<whatever the customer runs> machines I'm actually doing development work on. I like writing server side code (and tolerate writing browser side code) so being a linux desktop admin would involve a whole extra field of expertise that wouldn't gain me anything, and I'd rather spend the required learning time on writing and publishing more code instead.

Other people are entirely welcome to choose entirely different trade-offs, of course, but this particular attitude works for me.

Edit: Ironically, my one foray into OS X ended because Aqua insisted on reaching into my X11 instance and controlling focus, which completely trashed my fvwm2 FocusFollowsMouse setup in terms of usability for me, so I decided the Microsoft black box was a better trade-off than an Apple black box even though in those days I had to have cygwin for my X11 + ssh setup.

It certainly is. I have Ubuntu 20.04 running on a Multiboot Yoga, an old Dell, and a MacBook Pro 2013 (because this is the only OS that will boot). I use both the default Gnome desktop, and sometimes switch to FVWM2 or MWM (mostly on VNC because I hate all the bells-and-whistles on Gnome).

I hate using Linux on the actual laptop. The touchpad is always a trainwreck. Sensitivity and scroll speed/acceleration is infuriating (too much Xorg config hassle). Trying to get "middle click" working -always- has issues. Power buttons never work properly, same with LidClose actions (i've read many knowledge bases and stackoverflow posts, none seem to work for my particular hardware, as is always the case). It is frustrating as hell to get it to act like a well-behaved "normal" laptop. Don't get me started on suspend/hibernate issues, or the flaky bluetooth drivers that always need system ctl restart command line help.

Now that I've made the tradeoff to not use Linux as anything but a remote server via VNC, my choices are Windows or Mac for a primary computer. I don't like ads showing up in start menu, or idiotic MFA and login requirements, so I'm left with Mac.

If I was using full-screen VNC I'd probably not mind MacOS in theory.

But I don't get on with touchpads (the apple ones are absolutely superior to anybody else's but it's just not my thing) and my wrists -really- don't get on with mice these days, so a trackpoint is pretty essential to my comfort.

Happily, I see the start menu sufficiently rarely that any presence of ads doesn't even register to me, and the login stuff is basically "meh" since it's (so far) stayed out of my way sufficiently for me not to care.

But that's my choice of trade-offs - may you have great joy out of yours :D

A system should only be a mystery in so far that you were too lazy to look up how exactly something works. Having "undocumented service" running wild should be unacceptable, even so it has become so common place. Linux isn't free of this, far too many times there is no man-page to tell you what something does, but at least you can dig into the source if you have to.

Not with 3rd party drivers. I think people fetishize the desire to have complete control, and it is a myth. I've been using Linux since 1997, and all the fighting for transparency has been a tempest in a teapot with no progress made at ALL.

If people wanted to fight for it, stop using NVIDIA products, but do you see that happening? Not bloody likely.

This isn't so much whataboutism as it is about trying to coerce an ecosystem of hundreds of vendors to listen to a small cadre of open source proponents.

If the Linux kernel forces AMD to improve UAI and make it look like LAM, I'd consider that a victory. Let's see what happens.

Nobody forces you to buy NVIDIA hardware. I don't.

Correct, and not even on ideological grounds for me. Intel's stuff was good enough at the time and a lot cheaper.

Aye, the open AMD graphics drivers are pretty good.

Nouveau will get there, one hopes...

The need isn’t to have complete control in actuality, but instead the ability to control any particular something in the system, or at least understand it.

i.e. the ability to examine and understand something weird that’s going on and that may be a potential problem.

You've brought up the Nvidia blobs twice now. You are right that those drivers are distributed without source, and so remain a mystery. The key difference is that the Nvidia drivers are the exception. There are open source drivers available for most GPUs, including Nvidia. Personally, I have never felt the need to use anything other than open source drivers. In short, I'm living the dream: every software component in my computer is inspectable. There are no ineffable mysteries.

This ideal falls short in the hardware realm, where we have to contend with the Intel Management Engine and the like.

Nevertheless, the modern Linux world is vastly more open and accessible than the closed-by-design Apple world. Even if I had to use Nvidia drivers, that would be one binary blob in a sea of open source, whereas the Apple ecosystem is opaque binary blobs as far as the eye can see, without even the courtesy of documentation. It makes a difference.

The open source driver doesn’t work correctly. I use Clear Linux which follows a stateless design, similar to NixOS or Guix. However I had to install the proprietary driver as the color profile for my monitor was setup incorrectly, and the DE (Gnome) would crash/freeze.

It is not a myth. I know every service running on my personal machines (the Ubuntu workstations at work do get away from me a bit...)

Here's the practical upshot - once, many moons ago, I forwarded port 22 to my home desktop machine so I could access it remotely. I had fail2ban running and regularly checked the logs, so I wasn't worried. What I didn't realize was that maybe 6 months prior I'd made a test account for some purpose, with 'test' as the username and password. Inevitably, some worm managed to guess this combo in less than the 6 tries before fail2ban kicked in. The kicker, though? I was sitting at the machine when it happened, and I could tell immediately. The HDD light was flashing, and I knew it shouldn't be. There was load on the CPU, and I knew there shouldn't be. Checked 'top', spotted the weird process immediately, killed it, locked the account (it never escaped the test account so no harm done) and went on with my day.

Can you imagine that story on Windows? "My hard drive light is blinking and I don't know why" - yep, that's daily life. "There's a weird process in the list" - yep, there's lots of those, good luck tracking down which company is responsible.

> If people wanted to fight for it, stop using NVIDIA products, but do you see that happening? Not bloody likely.

Why would I ever buy Nvidia? Asking as a non-AI developer who doesn’t play PC-games.

I’m perfectly happy with Intel graphics. I hear it has good, open-source drivers too.

Exactly what am I missing?

> If people wanted to fight for it, stop using NVIDIA products, but do you see that happening? Not bloody likely.

I don't use Nvidia because of this, and I'm not alone. If you ask "what is the best graphics card for linux" on a linux forum you will invariably get a chorus of "not Nvidia".

That's certainly a single piece of evidence that every machine-- including all Linux distros-- are ineffable mysteries.

Similarly, all fruits have fat content. Just off the top of my head:

1. avocados (a whopping 15% fat content!)

2. there is no legal requirement for me to list another fruit here

> Do you know what is going on in all your 3rd-party Linux drivers, say, from NVIDIA?

I’d certainly like to.

I'm pretty sure the most common picture of Linus Torvalds is a picture of him giving NVIDIA a rather rude gesture with his finger, and the reason was because of the way they push a proprietary driver and don't work well with an open community.

No, but I'm able to read and modify the code for all of the in-tree drivers, which are the only ones in use on my machine.

There's also a large difference between a closed driver or firmware blob, where the function is known but the workings are not, and large portions of the userspace, including system services and applications, that are entirely opaque.

As someone who used to work at Apple and have this knowledge at my fingertips…

It really is nice to have, when you want to look it up. Userspace daemons and their behavior should not be a mystery.

At an extreme minimum, most daemons on macOS have at least a man page describing their high level function.

Well, I just filed FB9971057: triald should have a man page explaining what it does ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Unsure it would help against a person who is dead set at reading logs to figure out what a daemon does, but it might provide some basic insight to the casual reader.

Where is this documentation? Can you demonstrate how to invoke a man page for a particular background daemon? e.g. an arbitrary process from launchctl list output?

just type man and then the name of the service in terminal, like you'd do for awk or vim. For example, man launchd

man triald will report no manual entry, though.

I already know about launchd. I am talking about stuff like com.apple.geod and the dozens of other daemons running on my device. Where is that documented?

I only buy AMD GPUs, specifically because AMD provides open-source drivers and NVIDIA doesn't.

Same. I bought Intel for a long time because they Just Worked. It looks like AMD will Just Work _and_ have great performance.

> Do you know what is going on in all your 3rd-party Linux drivers, say, from NVIDIA?

Sadly not because, like OSX, that software is proprietary and us filthy peasants are denied the honour of gazing upon the holy source code crafted by the holiest engineers, anointed by Huang himself.

Of course, that's assuming you don't download the Nvidia leak and gaze upon the source code within. That would be bad, you're bad for thinking it, don't do that. Only bad people would do that. May Huang have mercy on your soul.

This reminds me of Windows Search Indexer on my PC. Microsoft's spying aside, it apparently needs 13.5% or more of my CPU at all times. It started after I updated multiple time sin a row, and for the past few weeks, has never stopped. I've killed it via task manager, only to have it come back shortly after.

One of my first tasks after a clean install of Windows is to disable any unnecessary services, including the Search Indexer. Not only do I disable the service itself, but I also explicitly remove all folders from the "indexed locations" control panel, and explicitly disable the "Allow files to be indexed" bit on the disk itself.

I've literally never needed to search my disk for a file (using the Windows search interface), and if I ever do, I'd rather wait a few more seconds that one time for my search to complete, rather than have the indexer consume my CPU at all times.

My PC had been fine before the updates (hence not updating until I needed some other thing to work), and I'd never seen Search Indexer pop up in Task Manager in any notable way. something tells me that I might just have a broken version of it, and since Windows Update also looks to be a bit broken, I may just be SOL for the near future.

This set of problems may be obviated by actually getting Manjaro to cooperate. It's on the todo list.

Try out Fedora! There's Fedora Rawhide if you want rolling release.

I have been using Rawhide (+ mainline, non rc or git, kernel) on my work machine for the past 6 months without issue.

If you have to compile a lot of kmods it can be a pain as everything is transitioning to GCC12 but the kernels are still built with GCC11. A container can take care of that though.

I really want to like Fedora - it gets so much right. But: `yum` is the worst package manager I have ever used on linux by far, and that sours the whole experience. I wish I could get "Fedora with pacman/apt instead".

Hm, maybe try using Nix alongside it?

dnf replaced yum I believe. dnf is certainly much nicer than pacman, it's slower but does a lot more to ensure your system actually works.

dnf is what replaced yum, and it's alright.

yum is still aliased on most fedora / rhel systems so you can put Fedora 35 on a drive and run yum update -y and it'll kick off the associated dnf process.

Why is it the worst package manager?

I haven't used it since ~2005, but at that time it was inexcusably slow. Notably, remarkably, shockingly slow. I would dread invoking it, it was so slow. 10x the time to do many operations, as apt/dpkg, and that's not an exaggeration.

I assume that got better, though. I hope it did.

That "yum" no longer exists. dnf has a "yum" alias so that scripts still work, and a lot of the commands are named the same and accept the same arguments, but that's basically where the similarity ends.

And yes DNF is much faster.

Fedora hasn't used "yum" in 7 years (although the alias still exists). I'm curious whether you've ever actually used Fedora.

It would be acceptable if windows search worked well and was fast -- but it's not. I search for something and it still churns the file system looking for my search query. What is the point of all that indexing if it still seems to always traverse the fs for each search!? By comparison, a third party search application [1] gives me results as soon as my key lifts and doesn't excessively index (at least for me). [1] https://www.voidtools.com/

A reindex of my entire drive in Voidtools Everything is substantially faster than a search in Windows Explorer over that drive.

That does speak to the remarkable efficiency of Voidtools Everything, as I understand it they don't use Window's filesystem stack but parse the NTFS partition directly. And I get that the Windows indexer is technically more powerful because it indexes file metadata like author etc. I still don't get what makes Windows search this slow.

If you use Windows as a daily driver, Voidtools' Everything should be in your top 10 first apps to install (or in your install script...). I have been using it for the better part of a decade, no issues, no resource consumption, just lightning fast searching for files of all drives on your system.

Even worse is the Mac search indexer. Ever wonder why your CPU temps are pinned at 90c in low-power mode? Open activity monitor, cmd+f for mdworker, and you found your culprit. It's insane that they enable thay be default...

I've never had spotlight hog things for more than a few hours, and only after a fresh install. It's generally well behaved. And it's very useful and fast for searching.

A few hours is a pretty long time for a CPU to be running at near-T-Junction temps. On top of that, every time I pull from a larger repo or unzip a large folder, MacOS will decide it's time for me to take a quick 2 hour break while it depletes 60% of it's battery. Instead of setting up a complicated ignorelist, I just disabled Spotlight indexing altogether.

I do wish it was faster. I will say, however, that I never really noticed it on my new M1 macbook. They made it less intrusive, I guess. It used to be quite bad for a few hours and I'd sometimes just walk away and grab lunch, or time my new system install for bedtime. Perhaps the switch to SSDs helps as well, it's easy to forget how slow laptop spinning rust was.

If the content of the folder or repo have thousand of files and folders, then it would made sense for Spotlight to index them all.

It the same for transferring the folder/files to other location. a single 1GB file will take 5 second to transfer to external hard drive. A 1GB non-zipped folder (consists of thousands of thousand file from 1KB to 1MB each) will take half hour or more to transfer to external drive. I have a 150GB folder that contains over 500k of files, averaging 120KB to 4 MB, will take 3 hours to transfer to the external drive. I have another 120GB folder that are consist of videos, averaging 300MB to 10GB, took 20 minutes to completely transfer to external drive. This transfer through NVMe ---> spinning rust external drive through USB 3.1.

If you are pulling a large repo that have thousands of files in it will take a while for Spotlight to index each file. That is not the fault of Spotlight, that is just the way it is because it have to scan individually each file to index.

You need to go in the Search Indexing setting to remove the directory for indexing. And only tick the directory that you want to index.

Also to completely disable it, you needs to disable the service and remove the entry from schedule tasks. It keep coming back because of the service and scheduled tasks are not disabled. This is how Google Chrome keep starting up their updater and bypassing my disabled startup entries for Chrome. Because of scheduled tasks is not removed, Chrome uses that to reactivate their updater and recreate a startup entry. Managed to completely neutered Chrome updater through Sysinternals AutoRuns.

Windows Search Indexer and Windows Update are probably the worst two components in Windows, though at least Windows Update has gotten noticeably better in the last few years.

> - Apple can double speak all they want about digital privacy, but their actions tell the truth. As a paying Apple customer, you’re not deemed worthy enough to even understand how your own machines work, less even to “tamper” with their working, and who knows what data is actually being shared?

> - Personally, I say no thank you. I’ve been on Debian or a variant for almost 10 years now, and haven’t looked back. It’s only gotten easier, as software generally moves more and more to SaaS web apps and the intrinsic cross-platform nature of the browser.

Personally, all the paying Apple customers in my family have been able to understand how the systems works to make video calls and talk to their grandchildren.

10years ago we tried installing Linux on an HP laptop we paid for and could barely get a picture opened up because... (do I really need to spell this out?) of unreliable display drivers means that the screen blacks out on whim.

I find it so odd, Linux users overlooking the fact that people who don't tinker with computers all their life do not have the time to get Linux up & running.

Try again. Linux Mint is fantastically simple to use, and legitimately "just works" for average-Joe uses cases.

Linux, and its various distros, are an ever-evolving tech. Linux 10 years ago was so much less capable than Linux in 2022. Just because it didn't work then, definitely doesn't mean it won't work now.

On what laptops does sleep/hibernate work correctly when you close the lid, with Mint?

Seriously, swear to fucking god, every time someone says “oh Linux just works”, the next comment is “oh? I tried that distro on the recommended hardware and had trouble with…”

Next response is ALWAYS: “Oh yeah that’s broken but I don’t use that feature.” Usually about hibernate. As in, apparently everyone using a laptop plugged into a wall and never closes the lid. Or uses a desktop. I don’t even know, it doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

I just don’t believe you guys any more. Everyone who says Linux just works has adapted their workflows to be hyper specific to the things they do, and have just decided that basic-ass features present and working on mainstream OSes are just gimmicks that the rest of us should forgo out of moral purity.

Also with this “try again” noise. Good lord, happy y’all are blessed with the patience to try again until you find the right Goldilocks set of hardware and tweaks that doesn’t give you a migraine but there exists a large contingency of the population that doesn’t spend every waking moment staring at glowing rectangles. Spare us a fucking thought, and spare a thought for our relatives who took years to learn how to double click.

My Dell Precision 55XX works fine with Ubuntu, everything is supported. For example I have two 4k monitors at HiDPI... which I've been using for over five years, despite frequent mentions on this site that it doesn't work.

Cool, you should talk to ModernMech, he’s having trouble with power management. Or indeed any of the folks on this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30644113

Not possible to reply any longer.

Interesting...my new Precision 7560 can't sleep _in_Windows_!

On what laptops does sleep/hibernate work correctly when you close the lid, with Mint?

If anyone knows how to get XUbuntu 18.04 LTS to not shut down with the lid closed and power on, please let me know. I have a subnotebook that sits in a cabinet to run something, and since a recent "upgrade", it won't stay alive. Looking with Google produces at least five articles on this, all contradictory and none of which work. There's a GUI for setting this, it's set appropriately, and that doesn't work. There's a relevant configuration file where the "close lid" option can be set, and that doesn't affect this problem.

Is the relevant configuration file logind.conf, or another one? Whenever I had such issues it was always the one file I had to change.

I think Linux to many is a hobby much like woodworking, one that can also help feed their identity. I've been there myself.

I don't think you can expect deep empathy and a strong desire to simplify things down to the grandparent level if much of the reason for using the system is for geek cred and a landscape for such endless tuning/tweaking.

I'd even put myself in the latter camp, I like tuning things!

Certainly Linux on the desktop has gotten dramatically better over the last few years, but I don't see it ever getting to appliance level without really cutting out what we typically associate with the flexibility of Linux (more like Android or a set top box)

I feel more like it's analogous to driving a stick shift or baking your own bread. "This is superior; everyone should be doing it!" The problem with that sentiment is that it's 100% true yet totally unrealistic (for reasons unknown -- I don't know why every grandparent out there can't learn to use the command line, from a neurological perspective), and the dissonance erupts like steam from a geyser when those people see the folly of not doing those things.

That's a much better analogy.

I just used an outrageously complex espresso machine to make myself some coffee. For most, that would be purely an inferior choice when compared to a drip machine. I think a lot of it depends on how much you want that last few %. I think a lot of people simply aren't interested in the investment required to get a little more out of their computers.

And as a computer guy, of course that makes no sense to me :)

Linux users probably skew more ethical than the average Mac user. Otherwise, Apple wouldn't make so much money locking down future generations freedoms.

You're using a different definition of "understand how the systems works". Your grandmother doesn't understand unix signals.

Re: "I find it so odd, Linux users overlooking the fact that people who don't tinker with computers all their life do not have the time to get Linux up & running."

Statement is a bit out of date, apart from a good PC, most Linux users don't even know they are using it.

I find it crazy people have apps running on their Macs and windows desktops that they can't even find out what it is doing, let alone how it works.

Thankfully we have a choice, each to their own.

I find it crazy people have apps running on their Macs and windows desktops that they can't even find out what it is doing, let alone how it works.

Have you looked at a Linux syslog lately? This is 20.04 LTS on desktop. It does a lot on its own. Probably too much.

    Mar 31 00:33:18 Nagle-LTS whoopsie[1278]: [00:33:17] Cannot reach: https://daisy.ubuntu.com

Since the system was idle at the time, why did it need to contact that site? I think that's crash logging.

    Mar 31 02:17:42 Nagle-LTS snapd[503370]: storehelpers.go:721: cannot refresh: snap has no updates available: "bare", "blender", "brackets", "chromium", "core", "core18", "core20", "demo-curl", "gnome-3-26-1604", "gnome-3-28-1804", "gnome-3-34-1804", "gnome-3-38-2004", "gnome-system-monitor", "gtk-common-themes", "gtk2-common-themes", "inkscape", "remarkable", "snap-store"
    Mar 31 02:17:42 Nagle-LTS snapd[503370]: autorefresh.go:536: auto-refresh: all snaps are up-to-date

I'm not subscribed to any optional Ubuntu services. Yet:

    Mar 31 02:30:09 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: Starting Ubuntu Advantage Timer for running repeated jobs...
    Mar 31 02:30:11 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: ua-timer.service: Succeeded.
    Mar 31 02:30:11 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: Finished Ubuntu Advantage Timer for running repeated jobs.
    Mar 31 03:05:03 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: Starting Firmware update daemon...

Something is trying to do a firmware update every few hours:

    Mar 31 03:05:04 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: Started Firmware update daemon.
    Mar 31 03:05:05 Nagle-LTS fwupd[1434387]: 10:05:05:0005 FuPluginPciMei       ME family not supported for 0:9.0.1.1333
    Mar 31 03:05:05 Nagle-LTS fwupd[1434387]: 10:05:05:0007 FuEngine             failed to record HSI attributes: failed to get historical attr: json-glib version too old
    Mar 31 03:05:05 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: fwupd-refresh.service: Succeeded.
    Mar 31 03:05:05 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: Finished Refresh fwupd metadata and update motd.

Apparently it didn't work because, despite this being a current system, something is out of date.

The Ubuntu "snap" system is busy, although it didn't update anything today. Two independent systems seem to be updating "snaps", which are part of Ubuntu's container system for remotely updated applications.

    Mar 31 06:36:49 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: Starting Daily apt upgrade and clean activities...
    Mar 31 06:37:11 Nagle-LTS dbus-daemon[936]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.PackageKit' unit='packagekit.service' requested by ':1.11660' (uid=0 pid=1437238 comm="/usr/bin/gdbus call --system --dest org.freedeskto" label="unconfined")
    Mar 31 06:37:11 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: Starting PackageKit Daemon...
    Mar 31 06:37:11 Nagle-LTS PackageKit: daemon start
    Mar 31 06:37:11 Nagle-LTS dbus-daemon[936]: [system] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.PackageKit'
    ....
    Mar 31 06:38:52 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: apt-daily-upgrade.service: Succeeded.
    Mar 31 06:38:52 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: Finished Daily apt upgrade and clean activities.
    Mar 31 06:43:56 Nagle-LTS PackageKit: daemon quit
    Mar 31 06:43:56 Nagle-LTS systemd[1]: packagekit.service: Succeeded.

There's a lot happening behind the scenes. Hopefully none of it is hostile or contains backdoors. One wonders.

> There's a lot happening behind the scenes. Hopefully none of it is hostile or contains backdoors. One wonders.

No, one doesn't wonder. one googles that, then there's an answer. That's exactly the root's point here.

And as demonstrated, a lot in the logs to guide your search, nothing shown is behind the scenes.

Personally I disable snap but I know what it does and why it is useful.

I've been using "linux on the desktop" exclusively for the last two decades and it's always curious to me when people complain about having to be a techno wizard to operate it because for at least the last 10 years I've pretty much had to configure nothing and everything from fancy displays to networked printers has worked without a hitch. I can honestly say that I'm not even sure where I would look to configure or troubleshoot some hardware on my modern linux system because that's just not something I ever have to do.

One thing I did do while I was building that first linux pc, and for every computer I've bought or built since then, was a tiny bit of research on driver compatibility. Just something as simple as typing '<laptop model> linux compatability' into google. Or, if while configuring a new system there is a choice of wifi cards or hard drives or whatever, I just look each one up and check before I buy. It is a minor hassle compared to the on-going benefits I derive from a linux system.

Sure, in a perfect world all manufacturers would produce high quality open source drivers for all systems, but we are just not that well coordinated. It is getting better, though.

> One thing I did do while I was building that first linux pc, and for every computer I've bought or built since then, was a tiny bit of research on driver compatibility. Just something as simple as typing '<laptop model> linux compatability' into google

And that's the reason you don't have problems - you're going for hardware/laptops that are well supported in Linux.

Do you expect mom and pop to do the same? Versus buying something off-the-shelf with Windows, or MacOS and it just working, without needing to undertake that step?

I dunno, my dad spent 6 months researching his new truck.

I would guess that truck is a much larger outlay than a laptop?

And is your dad a Truck person? He may have enjoyed the research process (heck, I enjoy researching tech purchases).

They don't put anything on anything. They buy Windows computers for Windows, and Mac computers for Mac. Summary, they would buy Linux computers for Linux. This isn't the 90s, or the 00's anymore.

My trajectory was ~2000-2011 as a heavy Linux-on-the-desktop user (and Windows, for gaming), but quickly converted to Mac when was issued one at work after that, and that's where I've stayed ever since. I didn't even realize how much time I was wasting and how used I'd gotten to working around shitty, broken stuff, mostly by just avoiding doing things. Once I saw what life was like on the other side, it was a no-brainer to switch.

I try Linux again every couple years, and have every time been quickly reminded why I stopped using it (on the desktop, anyway).

Do you put Linux on Windows computers? If so, did you also put Mac on them?

Linux was definitely fickle in the early 2000s. It got a lot better over the last ten years. Meanwhile, whenever I have to use Apple products I feel like they've gone backwards in some regards.

I used to dual boot windows for games. But now I can play games on Linux too.

> having to be a techno wizard

> while I was building that first linux pc

> for every computer I've bought or built since then

> bit of research on driver compatibility

This is pretty self explanatory. Your expectation of what basic computer skills should be is way too high.

I look at that the other way round: the average basic computer skill levels are insufferably low.

How many car drivers do you think can even recognize the parts under the hood? That's how things should be - these are tools, and most users will be interested in using it to achieve something, not the intricacies of building the tool itself.

How many cars can be reconfigured on the fly to act as a sporty racer, a huge work truck, an ATV, a unicycle, or literally any wheeled vehicle you can imagine?

Computers are general purpose tools, the ability to reconfigure them to accomplish different tasks is the core feature that makes them useful.

Not being able to pick out software and hardware that work together is like not knowing how to drive. If you can't do this then you are just a passenger.

Willfully avoiding learning basic programming concepts is like refusing to learn how to change a flat tire. I guess nowadays if your car is always connected to a cell tower and you have a comfortable income you might be able to drive your whole life without ever needing this skill but they were still teaching us how to do it back when I took driver's ed.

I have no expectations, only anecdotes for the intellectually curious. People can obviously do and learn about whatever they like.

Put Mac in the same laptop and compare.

>It’s only gotten easier, as software generally moves more and more to SaaS web apps and the intrinsic cross-platform nature of the browser.

What is the difference between not knowing what the software on your system is doing and not knowing what any of your software is doing and it is not running on your system?

How's the battery life on linux laptops these days?

Not OP, but my laptop lives long enough for me to get to a plug point if needed. I have power at work and home and I have suspend turned on when I close the lid. I can live with a few seconds of wake up time, when I have no accessible power for long periods of time. It is really not that complicated.

good enough, especially with optimisations.

Still not as good as Windows but much better than it used to be, especially if you're using well tested hardware like a Thinkpad

My experience with ThinkPads has been terrible. I've lost faith in ThinkPads. Too bad we can't get working Linux hardware at work.

Fortunately, I can buy my personal hardware from whomever I wish, and it certainly will not be Lenovo.

I agree that the quality of the hardware has gone downhill (weak hinges, getting more fragile every year, keyboard quality) but running Linux has been fine. No real complaints.

> running Linux has been fine

That has _very_ much not been my and some colleagues' experience.

I dual boot Windows and Linux and I found out I can actually work longer in Linux. Maybe it's related to the fact that Windows services consume more CPU.

Pretty good, especially if you install TLP for power management. I get at least a full workday and a half out of my Dell 9375.

Does it really matter?!

Are you really that careless with your privacy and your basic freedoms to the point that you make your choices based on the ~battery life~ of your computing device?

Sorry to pick on you, but whenever I hear these sorts of questions I realize how shallow people can be, even those who are (supposedly) informed and smart enough to know better.

To be worried about the inconvenience of ~shorter battery life~ over fundamental freedoms is like failing the marshmallow test for tech people.

>Are you really that careless with your privacy and your basic freedoms to the point that you make your choices based on the ~battery life~ of your computing device?

Not OP, but yes. In a laptop, battery life is the number one thing I'm looking for. That being said, Linux does fine when it comes to battery life in my experience.

1. The marshmallow test has been debunked (just like so many other flashy claims in the social sciences field, the science is questionable and the replication crisis is very real). So using it in a rant about how uninformed people are is itself a laughable irony.

2. Many of us simply do not agree that the use of an Apple computing device impinges on either our privacy or basic freedoms, or (more nuanced) that the marginal risk is so small that it’s not worth the moderately large inconvenience of shorter battery life.

1. It doesn't matter if the effects of the marshmallow test are true or not. The idea is just to illustrate how tech people are as weak-willed, short-term focused and plain "convenience-at-all-costs" as the general consumers.

2. There is no argument here: if you can not control what and how your device operates, your freedom is being taken. You can argue that you don't value this freedom over the convenience it brings you, but this is at best an admission of you being on (1).

> 1. It doesn't matter if the effects of the marshmallow test are true or not. The idea is just to illustrate how tech people are as weak-willed, short-term focused and plain "convenience-at-all-costs" as the general consumers.

Can you explain to me what the long term gain I could expect, exactly, by foregoing a MacOS laptop?

I have lots of computing devices; many are Linux, a couple are Windows, and I have an Apple laptop.

This follows two attempts at a Linux laptop, with crummier hardware in many ways, and many inconveniences from Linux-on-the-desktop sucking. It just works, and I have lots of battery life.

> 2. There is no argument here: if you can not control what and how your device operates, your freedom is being taken.

Am I supposed to be a free software zealot? If my computer sucks, that also impinges on my freedom.

Yes, there may be some hypothetical ability to clone lots and lots of repos and do a lot of troubleshooting and cure one source of suck-- and then argue with upstream maintainers and kowtow until eventually my fix is accepted. When the sources of suck on Linux outnumber the sources of suck on MacOS by a reasonably high multiple, I'd rather keep the MacOS device in my bag than the other machines I have that run Linux.

If you're going to argue about some kind of collective loss by many people making the same choice as me-- that we all lose freedom, etc-- spare me. Tragedy of the commons, etc: not enough people are going to make the choice you're posing to have any significant effect.

> Can you explain to me what the long term gain I could expect, exactly, by foregoing a MacOS laptop?

You would not be contributing to an ecosystem controlled by a single entity who is increasingly abusing their dominance to extract more rent from consumers and other developers.

> You would not be contributing to an ecosystem controlled by a single entity who is increasingly abusing their dominance to extract more rent from consumers and other developers.

c.f.

> > If you're going to argue about some kind of collective loss by many people making the same choice as me-- that we all lose freedom, etc-- spare me. Tragedy of the commons, etc: not enough people are going to make the choice you're posing to have any significant effect.

So, I'd be using my market power to advocate for things that are disproportionately important to you at my own expense. That doesn't seem like "freedom".

I've been a Linux user and developer forever. For awhile, I was a kernel subsystem maintainer. I've walked the walk about making free software available and useful.

I also believe having a Mac laptop benefits me, and is worth the money, and that it is not morally corrosive. Can you please spare me the judgment that I'm "weak-willed" or stupid for my choice?

> not enough people are going to make the choice you're posing to have any significant effect.

A billion flies can not be wrong...

I am not personally affected by what you choose to use. I could give two shits about it and go on with my day.

It's you who stands to gain or lose - along with all those that make a similar choice.

> That doesn't seem like "freedom".

You are also free to stuff yourself with sugar, drugs, play russian roulette, sleep around with any willing consenting adult.

But no, being free to do X does not mean that X is morally virtuous. And you don't get to say "spare me of your judgement" and you shouldn't be expecting any sympathy if you have to face any consequences when things blow up on your face.

> A billion flies can not be wrong...

This willfully pretends not to understand the argument (I hope). My use of MacOS is not likely to make a big difference in the adoption of MacOS, and therefore ascribing all of the massive network effect of usage to me is a tad unfair.

> I am not personally affected by what you choose to use. I could give two shits about it and go on with my day.

OK. Personally, I'm doing quite fine with MacOS for my laptop. Thanks for your concern, but you don't need to call names and judge me over it. If you really don't care so much, you can spare us all the invective.

> You are also free to stuff yourself with sugar, drugs, play russian roulette

All of these things have likely and measurable short term harms to the individual doing them. Using Apple carries some risk of individual and systemic negative effects, but also some benefits (both individually and communally).

Note, this is true of all things. I just drove to school to teach some classes to kids. I could have died on the way. There are possibly even better moral choices of where I could spend my time that are given up (opportunity costs). But, I judged this is what I wanted to do and the benefits outweighed the risks.

> But no, being free to do X does not mean that X is morally virtuous.

I'm pretty sure that I've done way more to make open systems possible on the desktop than you. The fact that one thing I'm doing isn't moving the needle that direction (but isn't hurting it, either) should be OK. Otherwise, you should immediately stop all activity which isn't helping the cause of open-systems-on-desktop to avoid accusations of hypocrisy.

> you shouldn't be expecting any sympathy if you have to face any consequences when things blow up on your face.

Anyone deserves sympathy when things blow up in their face.

> My use of MacOS is not likely to make a big difference in the adoption of MacOS, and therefore ascribing all of the massive network effect of usage to me.

It's not all to you. But you are contributing to it, and you shouldn't be excusing yourself on the basis of "look at everyone else doing it".

> I'm pretty sure that I've done way more to make open systems possible on the desktop than you.

This is not a competition to see who is more virtuous or less of a sinner. It is just me arguing that using Apple products is a moral failing.

> you should immediately stop all activity which isn't helping the cause of open-systems-on-desktop to avoid accusations of hypocrisy.

I am not perfect and I am not free of sin. But at least I am willing to call a failing as such. The first step to redemption is to accept your own faults.

> But at least I am willing to call a failing as such.

I think there's room in the world for closed offerings and open offerings, and that they each have their own advantages and contributions to the world (and their own risks).

> The first step to redemption is to accept your own faults.

P'raps calling most of the world "weak-willed" (which I notice you've stealth-edited your prior comment to soften) and implying they may not be "smart" is going a bit beyond accepting your own faults and instead exposing others to harsh judgment for not valuing the things that you do.

This is not about "open offerings" and "closed offerings". It is specifically about how little it takes for people to give away their freedoms. To wit, ~battery life~.

> It is specifically about how little it takes for people to give away their freedoms.

You frame it that way -- most people don't.

I like having a MacOS computer. Lots of daily things work better. Including battery life.

Linux still exists and I still use it elsewhere. If Apple turns evil, I can move to having a Linux laptop again and just be slightly more miserable.

> If Apple turns evil

It is not a matter of "turning evil". They are already do "evil" things. It's just that you don't care because it doesn't affect you personally or the things that you consume from them.

> They are already do "evil" things.

I disagree. I think Apple has been a pretty good steward as a commercial vendor, with a few missteps. I have a pretty high degree of trust in them-- though my eyes are always open for any substantive problems emerging.

> 2. There is no argument here: if you can not control what and how your device operates, your freedom is being taken. You can argue that you don't value this freedom over the convenience it brings you, but this is at best an admission of you being on (1).

To illustrate something by exaggerating (one of) the numbers to make it crystal clear what I'm getting at:

A Mac that I don't fully control but has 12 hour battery life feels more free in practice than a fully-open platform with a 1-hour battery life. The latter leaves me less able to use the device for things I want to, and takes up more of my time hunting for wall outlets or just having a dead machine when I need one that's working. Time spent keeping my devices working does not feel like freedom, since I could have used that time for other things.

There's hypothetical freedom to do stuff I don't really care to do (audit or fiddle with my OS), then there's the actual range of liberty-of-action for stuff that I do care to do. Personally, I tend to favor the latter, strongly. The former's just a nice-to-have.

Point 2 is laughable.

You take a very extreme, all or nothing stance. The rest of us make trade offs.

You make trade-offs on dimensions that do not violate fundamental principles or when you are confronted with a situation when you need to choose the lesser of two evils.

"Inconvenience caused by a shorter-battery life" vs "patronizing a company that is systematically abusing its power to take away freedom from everyone" is not such a case that requires any type of trade-off to be made.

It's not the battery life that's the issue on Laptops these days, as it is typically better than windows.

The biggest issue is getting all the hardware supported out of the box. For example, there is a certain amount of mucking about you have to do to get any off the shelf laptop running Linux. On rare occasion system updates change something that the laptop doesn't like, hunting down that change can become tedious.

The solution for that is easy: don't buy the absolute-latest-generation of any hardware.

I've owned Samsung laptops, HP laptops, Thinkpads. I've built my own work desktops. I've never had any issues, as long as the hardware is ~6 months out on the market.

That's about the time it takes for linux devs to catch up with companies that focus on windows drivers.

That's useless advice. Even Webcams from laptops as older as 6 years may still not work under Linux. Anything which has an Intel webcam for example is almost guaranteed not to work, outside of perhaps a couple of popular models (like MS Surface devices, and then not precisely "out of the box").

The rule still is to get either a Linux-supported or at least a Linux-popular laptop, even if it's more expensive or doesn't match all your features/requirements. Then it doesn't matter whether it's 6 years old or brand new. It will work.

i.e. it's more important for it to be Lenovo and the correct line than the age. But not all Lenovo are equal. T/P stuff is likely supported out of the box even if brand new. X depends on popularity of the model. Tablets/IdeaPad stuff.... look elsewhere. (Lenovo is just an example, leaving other brands for the reader).

I've been using Linux as my main OS for almost 15 years.

Even on very cheap HP laptops, following this rule has worked for me flawlessly so far. Between telling people "you should spend more money on X just to be sure" and "Y is cheaper and it is very likely that it will work", I'd 100% recommend them trying the cheaper option first. Even if it turns out to not work, they can always return it and go to the more expensive alternative later.

The rule is not "spend more money", that's just bullshit. You buy the most expensive laptop they have it is almost guaranteed not to work, because no one else will have bought it. The rule is to keep yourself to the business/professional lines, or otherwise the really popular models.

And not only I have _never_ bought a new laptop ( always used/refurbished/thrift) , but for the past 12 years I have been submitting patches to Linux to support the laptops I get. Once you get outside of the popular lines, there is very few people doing that. It will not happen in 6 months or 6 years unless you do it. Typing this from an HP laptop which even 6 years after release did not have all WMI hotkeys mapped.

I know you didn't say "buy the most expensive", but you said "stick with professional models" which comparatively are more expensive than general models which can work just fine.

> That's useless advice. Even Webcams from laptops as older as 6 years still don't work under Linux. Anything which has an Intel webcam for example is almost guaranteed not to work, outside of perhaps a couple of popular models (like MS Surface devices, and then not precisely "out of the box").

I have 5 laptops on linux at home, all but one being from a "pro" line (ie Lenovo thinkpad, HP elitebook, Dell latitude, all have a working webcam. I'd say with the exception of fingerprint readers which I never cared to test all the functionnalities have been working from day 1.

I think anyone is safe provided you buy profesionnal models, don't buy the latest and newest tech and avoid nvidia GPUs.

Any laptop that has a webcam connected to the intel chipset (the IPU) instead of USB UVC is basically unsupported under Linux. Most consumer laptops use the IPU (e.g. IdeaPads, Miix, HP Elites, Surfaces, all Chromebooks, etc. ), while most business lines use much more standarized USB UVC webcams. The reason is cost, as usual. USB UVC is basically a separate device; IPU webcam is much cheaper (processing is done on the intel chipset, you can use a MIPI sensor like on a phone, you don't even have real hw-controlled privacy LED but a software facsimile, etc.).

The IPU3 (Kaby Lake era!) is the only one generation that has been upstreamed, and as of today it only supports 2 types of sensors that were used in a couple Lenovo Miix models. Nothing else! There are some patches floating around for the Surface devices of the era [1], but nothing upstreamed. And of course any newer IPU is out of the question (Intel is now at IPU6).

And it happens that all of these IPU3 webcams that work with upstream kernel are mostly because of the effort of just ONE guy, who is not employed by Intel, and who did not even know C a couple years ago (if you happen to be reading this, kudos to you!).

[1] https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/blob/master/p...

I can confirm that Surface cameras work fine on Linux (even without a patched kernel), and Ideapad webcams that I've tried also work just fine. Not sure where you're getting this from, or if it's still an issue anymore.

Sorry but no. https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/issues/91 https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Camera-S... ( note green mark means works with the patches. Red mark means doesn't work even with patches). You even need a different userspace, normal v4l consumers dont work even with patches.

You have an even older model, I guess. Before SP4 webcams were USB.

How do you deal with laptops that have both an integrated and an Nvidia graphic card? I can't find a reliable way of having the dedicated card on for just some applications on Linux. It's either always on or always off, which is not as convenient or useful as the on-demand mode available on Windows.

> How do you deal with laptops that have both an integrated and an Nvidia graphic card?

Honestly, I don't.

I think all my laptops had only iGPUs. I always treated my laptops as secondary workstations for the times I was away from my main desktop.

It's been my observation over many years that Nvidia and ATI/AMD video cards are the source of a solid 50% of major computer problems. This seems to hold even for Macs. They're best avoided unless you really need them, at least for machines you plan to do non-GPU-related work on.

> The solution for that is easy: don't buy the absolute-latest-generation of any hardware

Or don't out Linux on Windows hardware. System integration teams are a thing, and one person without access to documentation is going to do it poorly.

Instead, buy Linux in Linux hardware.

It varies, like it does for literally every other combination of hardware and software on the market, but mine gets between 8 (light web browsing) and 12 (terminal programming, no web browser running, wifi disabled) hours on a single charge.

For reference, Windows on the same laptop gets about 6 hours while just sitting there.

My thoughts exactly. A machine that I paid money for and bought shouldn't have these kinds of mysteries from me. A binary driver is one thing. I can uninstall it albeit at the cost of impaired functionality but I had the option of buying another graphics card, OS whatever at the beginning. Here, I buy hardware, OS and everything else from one vendor and I can't uninstall, delete or kill a process that's running on my own machine? If it's something malicious on Linux, I can deny it access to parts of the drive, I can kill it or make it non executable. I can even find the executable and corrupt it so that it won't run.

The existence of a Mac OS service you don't immediately understand really has nothing to do with Apple's stance on digital privacy. There's no logical connection here.

I'd argue that's not a helpful take.

This appears to be downloading and executing new code, and potentially returning results back to the mothership.

That there is no explicit opt-in, or even much information about WHAT this is doing, is sadly what I've come to expect from Apple.

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