On 19.02.2015 06:28, Chris Murphy wrote: > On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 4:20 PM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: >> Niki Kovacs wrote: >>> Le 18/02/2015 23:12, > >>> close, but then, for mysterious reasons, Red Hat decided to cripple it >>> into oblivion. Go figure. >> >> One word: desktop. That's what they want to conquer next. > > OK well there's a really long road to get to that pie in the sky. I > don't see it happening because it seems there's no mandate to > basically tell people what they can't have, instead it's well, we'll > have a little of everything. > > Desktop OS that are the conquerers now? Their installers don't offer > 100's of layout choices. They offer 1-2, and they always work rock > solid, no crashing, no user confusion, essentially zero bugs. The code > is brain dead simple, and that results in stability. > > *shrug* > > Long road. Long long long. Tunnel. No light. The usability aspects are > simply not taken seriously by the OS's as a whole. It's only taken > seriously by DE's and they get loads of crap for every change they > want to make. Until there's a willingness to look at 16 packages as a > whole rather than 1 package at a time, desktop linux has no chance. > The very basic aspects of how to partition, assemble, and boot and > linux distro aren't even agreed upon. Fedora n+1 has problems > installing after Fedora n. And it's practically a sport for each > distro to step on an existing distros installer. This is > technologically solved, just no one seems to care to actually > implement something more polite. > > OS X? It partitions itself, formats a volume, sets the type code, > writes some code into NVRAM, in order to make the reboot automatically > boot the Windows installer from a USB stick. It goes out of it's way > to invite the foreign OS. > > We can't even do that with the same distro, different version. It > should be embarrassing but no one really cares enough to change it. > It's thankless work in the realm of polish. But a huge amount of > success for a desktop OS comes from polish. I think the problem is that you simply have to draw a distinction between technology and product. The rise of the Linux desktop will never happen because Linux is not a product but a technology and as a result has to be a jack of all trades. The reason Apple is so successful I believe is because they understood more than others that people don't care about technology but want one specific consistent experience. They don't core how the harddisk is partitioned. So I can see the rise of the "X desktop" but only if X is willing to have its own identity an eschew the desire to be compatible with everything else or cater to both casual users and hard-core admin types. In other words the "X Desktop" would have to be a very opinionated product rather than a highly flexible technology. >> We also pretty much don't use any drives under 1TB. The upshot is we had >> custom scripts for > 500GB, which made 4 partitions - /boot (1G, to fit >> with the preupgrade), swap (2G), / (497G - and we're considering >> downsizing that to 250G, or maybe 150G) and the rest in another partition >> for users' data and programs. The installer absolutely does *not* want to >> do what we want. We want swap - 2G - as the *second* partition. But if we >> use the installer, as soon as we create the third partition, of 497GB, for >> /, it immediately reorders them, so that / is second. > > I'm open to having my mind changed on this, but I'm not actually > understanding why it needs to be in the 2nd slot, other than you want > it there, which actually isn't a good enough reason. If there's a good > reason for it to be in X slot always, for everyone, including > anticipating future use, then that's a feature request and it ought to > get fixed. But if it's a specific use case, well yeah you get to > pre-partition and then install. > When I was younger I cared about where exactly each partition was positioned but nowadays I refer to all my file systems using the uuid so I don't really care anymore if / is the second or fifth partition. The same is true for network interfaces. Since I mostly deal with physical interfaces on Hypervisors only these days and there I am more interested in bridges rather than the nics themselves I couldn't care less if the interface is named eth0 or enp2something. I tend to think more in terms of logical resources these days rather than physical ones. Regards, Dennis