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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that Red Hat is a positive force. They seem to be on a crusade to make the Linux desktop incomprehensible to the casual user, which I suppose makes sense when their bread and butter depends on people paying them to fix stuff, instead of fixing it themselves.

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You don’t know they are a positive force?

This, despite the fact that Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise Linux, etc exist because of the hard work and money spent by Red Hat.

And what are those companies doing to fix this issue you claim Red Hat causes? Nothing. Because they like money, especially when all you have to do is rebuild and put your name on other people’s hard work.

And what exactly is incomprehensible? What exactly is it that they’re doing to the Linux desktop that make it so that people can’t fix their own problems? Isn’t the whole selling point of Rocky and Alma by most integrators is that it’s so easy you don’t need red hat to support it?

Just a note: Rocky and Alma came out of CentOS

Of course -- but CentOS' upstream was RHEL, no?

I think it's fair to say that Red Hat simply doesn't care about the desktop--at least beyond internal systems. You could argue the Fedora folks do to some degree but it's just not a priority and really isn't something that matters from a business perspective at all.

Can you name a company which does care about the linux desktop? Over the years i’m pretty sure redhat contributed a great deal to various desktop projects, can’t think of anyone who contributed more.

Well Red Hat did make a go at a supported enterprise desktop distro for a time and, as I wrote, Fedora--which Red Hat supports in a variety of ways for various purposes--is pretty much my default Linux distro.

So I'm not being critical. Yes, Red Hat employees do contribute to projects that are most relevant to the desktop even if doing so is not generally really the focus of their day jobs. And, no, other companies almost certainly haven't done more.

> Can you name a company which does care about the linux desktop?

To some extent Valve. They have to, since the Steam Deck's desktop experience depends on the "Linux desktop" being a good experience.

Off the top of my head System76 jumps to mind with their hardware and Pop!_OS.

Canonical. at least they used to, although not a fan of the recent (last ten years) Canonical.

Certainly, Ubuntu used to be friendlier to new would-be Linux desktop users for a variety of reasons. (And we could get into some controversial decisions/directions it's taken but I won't.) I'm sure lots of people still run Ubuntu although Canonical is less prominent these days. My impression is that Canonical was sort of a passion project of Mark Shuttleworth's and they're just a lot lower key at this point.

Fedora is probably the best out-of-the-box desktop experience. Red Hat does great things, even if the IBM acquisition has screwed things up.

I find systemd pleasant for scheduling and running services but enraging in how much it has taken over every other thing in an IMO subpar way.

It's not just systemd, though. You have to look at the whole picture, like the design of GNOME or how GTK is now basically a GNOMEy toolkit only (and if you dare point this out on reddit, ebassi may go ballistics). They kind of take more and more control over the ecosystem and singularize it for their own control. This is also why I see the "wayland is the future", in part, as means to leverage away even more control; the situation is not the same, as xorg-server is indeed mostly just in maintenance work by a few heroes such as Alanc, but wayland is primarily, IMO, a IBM Red Hat project. Lo and behold, GNOME was the first to mandate wayland and abandon xorg, just as it was the first to slap down systemd into the ecosystem too.

The usual semi conspiratorial nonsense. GNOME is only unusable to clickers that are uncomfortable with any UI other than what was perfected by windows 95. And Wayland? Really? Still yelling at that cloud?

I expect people will stop yelling about Wayland when it works as reliably as X, which is probably a decade away. I await your "works for me!" response.

It’s very fair you can say “X works for me” but everyone saying otherwise is in the wrong.

I don't get your point. People regularly complain that Wayland has lots of remaining issues and there are always tedious "you're wrong because it works perfectly for me!" replies, as if the fact that it works perfectly for some people means that it works perfectly for everyone.

My point was the exact same sentiment applies to X. It lacks things Wayland does. So X is only fine for some people.

These days Wayland is MUCH smoother than X11 even with an Nvidia graphics cards. With X11, I occasionally had tearing issues or other weird behavior. Wayland fixed all of that on my gaming PC.

It’s even more pleasant when you use a distro that natively uses systemd and provides light abstractions on top. One such example is NixOS.

NixOS is anything but a light abstraction (I say this as a NixOS user).

Tbh it feels like NixOS is convenient in a large part because of systemd and all the other crap you have to wire together for a usable (read compatible) Linux desktop. Better to have a fat programming language, runtime and collection of packages which exposes one declarative interface.

Much of this issue is caused by the integrate-this-grab-bag-of-tools-someone-made approach to system design, which of course also has upsides. Redhat seems to be really helping with amplifying the downsides by providing the money to make a few mediocre tools absurdly big tho.

How is it not a light abstraction? If you're familiar with systemd, you can easily understand what the snippet below is doing even if you know nothing about Nix.

    systemd.services.rclone-photos-sync = {
      serviceConfig.Type = "oneshot";
      path = [ pkgs.rclone ];
      script = ''
        rclone \
          --config ${config.sops.secrets."rclone.conf".path} \
          --bwlimit 20M --transfers 16 \
          sync /mnt/photos/originals/ photos:
      '';
      unitConfig = {
        RequiresMountsFor = "/mnt/photos";
      };
    };
    systemd.timers.rclone-photos-sync = {
      timerConfig = {
        # Every 2 hours.
        OnCalendar = "00/2:00:00";
        # 5 minute jitter.
        RandomizedDelaySec = "5m";
        # Last run is persisted across reboots.
        Persistent = true;
        Unit = "rclone-photos-sync.service";
      };
      partOf = [ "rclone-photos-sync.service" ];
      wantedBy = [ "timers.target" ];
    };

In my view, using Nix to define your systemd services beats copying and symlinking files all over the place :)

Hah I just wrote something similar today to periodically push backups to another server from my NAS.

I agree the systemd interface is rather simple (just translate nix expression to config file). But NixOS is a behemoth; Completely change the way how every package is built, introduce a functional programming language and filesystem standard to somehow merge everything together, and then declare approximately every package to ever exist in this new language + add a boatloat of extra utilities and infra.

I was referring to working with systemd specifically on NixOS. But yes, the Nix ecosystem is not easy to learn, but once it clicks there is no going back.

Not easy to learn is a bit of a red herring imo. Its also a disproportionate amount of stuff to hold in your head once you have learned it for what it is.

An OS is first of all is a set of primitives to accomplish other things. What classic worse-is-better Unix does really well is do just enough to make you able to get on with whatever those things are. Write some C program to gather some simulation data, pipe its output to awk or gnuplot to slice it. Maybe automate some of that workflow with a script or two.

Current tools can do a bit more and can do it nicer or more rigorously sometimes, but you loose the brutal simplicity of a bunch of tools all communicating with the same conventions and interfaces. Instead you get a bunch of big systems all with their own conventions and poor interop. You've got Systemd and the other Redhat-isms with their custom formats and bad CLI interfaces. You've got every programming language with it's own n package managers. A bunch of useful stuff sure, but encased in a bunch of reinvented infrastructure and conventions.

The value brought by NixOS is on line 6.

  --config ${config.sops.secrets."rclone.conf".path} \

NixOS let you build the abstraction you want, and mix them with abstractions provided by others, and this single line illustrates this point extremely well as `sops` is not yet part of NixOS.

Secret management would likely come in NixOS in the future, but in the mean time you can add either use https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix or https://github.com/ryantm/agenix to make it possible to manage files which have content that should not be public.

Other package managers also provide some abstraction over the packages, and would likely see the same systemd configuration abstracted the same way in post-install scripts. Yet, the encrypted file for `rclone.conf` would come as a static path in `/etc`.

You could resume NixOS as having moved the post-install script logic before the installation, yet this tiny detail gives you additional abilities to mix the post-install scripts and assert consistency ahead of making changes to the system.

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