The quest to make Linux bulletproof | Hacker News Reader

The quest to make Linux bulletproof

theregister.com

4 pointslproven4 comments

Interesting article. I don't agree with the points made though. I don't want my OS to be driven by commercial interests like what's happening with that Snap/FlatPak duopoly now. I don't even really want either. Because what happens in the end is that the vendor has more control over what I do on my computer. For example the snap store is not open, only canonical can run it. This is why I switched to FreeBSD.

I also don't agree with "Sysadmims need to move away from knowing where everything is stored". Just no.

One of the commenters on this article on the register site put it really well:

> It doesn't do away with the complexity, it just holds the struggling body completely underwater so the surface appears smooth.

> Interesting article.

Thanks.

For clarity, I wrote it and I submitted it. This is part 2; part 1, the intro and context, is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34874213)

> I don't want my OS to be driven by commercial interests

That's fair enough, and if you have the skills to just switch to FreeBSD, it's a good choice. I found it hard work, myself, as I described here:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/20/freebsd_131/

Canonical does indeed run the only public Snap store, but there are private ones -- all the tools to host one are in the stock repos. The creator of Ubuntu Unity put one called "lol" up as a proof of concept, but it's gone now.

Hiding the complexity? Totally agree, yes.

Moving away from knowing where everything is? Well, it's not as bad as it sounds. With Nix or Guix you can still use `which` or `locate`, you can do `find -name blah`, etc. It's not hidden or invisible -- it's just all in a big software-managed tree.

TBH however much they like to think so, I bet most present-day Linux sysadmins don't know every folder on their machines, what's in them and what should or shouldn't be there.

The early part of my career, pre-Linux, was as a Windows sysadmin, and the last version of Windows I knew inside-out like that was Windows 95A. I could ID every file and tell you what it did, and I hand-built an install that fitted into a 16MB mid-1990s SSD. That was about ¼ of the size of a standard install or something.

No version since was so amenable, and no version of Windows NT ever has been, IMHO. It's just too complex.

If Linux would like to bulletproof then they would implement ZFS Boot Environments that FreeBSD has with beadm(8) or bectl(8) tools.

With ZFS Boot Environments you can change any aspect of the system/upgrade everything/change packages and even leave system in totally broken state ... and just reboot to one of other Boot Environments that you created earlier - once you 'got it' how awesome and useful that is - you will want that everywhere.

Some more info here: https://is.gd/BECTL

Regards.

openSUSE, Spiral Linux, Garuda Linux and siduction can all do the Btrfs eequivalent of this.

AIUI, Void Linux is actively working on this, and it's not the only one -- I think, from faint recollection, Chimera Linux and NixOS are working on ZFS support too.

SUSE and Red Hat won't touch it because of the fear of legal action from Oracle. Oracle itself won't touch it, even though it'd be a huge win for Oracle Linux -- I strongly suspect because that would legitimise other distros.

It's a shame Ubuntu is backing away from it, but now it is, it's opening the door for other distros.

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