On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 5:39 PM, Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com> wrote: > On Jul 2, 2015, at 5:14 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote: >> >> I've suggested that the distribution doesn't support dual boot if it >> has no hand in making it possible. The user doing this on their own >> manually is user enabled and supported. The distro has nothing to do >> with it. > > The difference between us is that you see that as a problem. It is a problem for everyone except the privileged few. It is not a problem for me, because I happen to be one of the privileged few and I happen to think dual boot UX is complete utter shit and therefore avoid it whenever possible. But that reality doesn't help everybody else achieve their goals. > There are a great many things the CentOS installer doesn’t do for you, that you are expected to do for yourself. And those are likewise things that are not supported by the CentOS installer. All I've said here is that dual boot is NOT actually supported by the CentOS installer. Now if you want to argue that's a bug, and ntfsprogs should have been included in the media so that this could be supported, that's an improvement. But the support would still be weak because it'd still be broken in more use cases. > >>> Would it be *nice* if RHEL/Fedora/CentOS could do this? Sure. Is it a necessary prerequisite? Absolutely not. >> >> I disagree. >> >> Along the same lines as this, relating primarily to security and privacy: >> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/32686.html >> >> I'll argue that the four freedoms aren't meaningful when they only >> benefit a scant minority. > > Ah, it's *philosophy* then. The “science” that lets us spin words until we get ourselves so dizzy we can’t think straight. Sigh. I'm not dizzy, my clarity on this is quite good. Philosophy is in part what's brought us the concept of libre software in the first place, I seriously doubt you're going to castigate the whole concept of free software just because it's founded in a philosophy of, you know, freedom. > > Given that CentOS doesn’t let you create C programs without any knowledge of how to program, would you also argue that CentOS doesn’t give you Freedom 0? No, but that would render the freedoms moot. Programs are assumed to exist, just like electricity is assumed to exist. > This is what happens when you start using entitlement arguments. No entitlement argument has been made. Software freedom doesn't matter if there's no software. Software freedom doesn't matter if there are no users. When you have users who need a particular workflow for which all the programs exist, and the solutions to deficiencies are known but aren't addressed by development, then there are disenfranchised users and to them the freedoms don't matter. Those freedoms can't be realized without access. I'm not saying access is a right or an entitlement, I'm saying the lack of access has consequences, and that consequence is free software is rendered impotent to those users. It doesn't free them if it's not something they can use. > CentOS isn’t required to do absolutely everything for you that it could possibly do. Someone has to spend the time to make that happen. If you are not willing and able to do this work yourself, you have no claim on the time of people who can. I'm not making a claim on anyone's time. I'm stating, as provable fact, that as a consequence of those who could do this work and choose not to, even when the problems and solutions are clear and even well tested, many users who could and would use free software do not use free software. They resort to using proprietary software. > >> And the end result is, increasingly, >> developers are picking Macs because so many basic UI/UX things are >> handled so well and continue to be a PITA on Linux (desktop in >> particular). > > OS X *also* doesn’t resize Windows partitions for you. > > OS X's Boot Camp feature will resize an HFS+ partition to make room for Windows, but it can’t then split the NTFS partition to make room for Linux. Triple booting is an unsupported configuration by Apple. Installing OS X after Windows is an unsupported configuration. There is only one supported configuration, and that's a disk with one (visible) partition with OS X on it. Boot Camp Assistant will only split that configuration to make room for a single Windows installation. But this can be done with CLI tools successfully. But it's still unsupported by Boot Camp Assistant. Just like CentOS's installer not being able to shrink NTFS, install to free space, and configure a boot loader that boots both OS's means the CentOS installer doesn't support dual boot (with Windows, and also doesn't support dual boot with any Linux that uses LVM). I'm being completely consistent here. Just because there's some way for the user to make something work doesn't mean it's supported by anyone except them. > > Boot Camp won’t even support triple boot. If you want to, you’re into a situation that’s considerably more complicated than what you have to go through to dual-boot Windows and CentOS: > > http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp > > Oh, and lest you think I have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m writing this on an OS X box which I’m using instead of CentOS not because CentOS sucks, but because Apple is one of the few sources of really nice modern Unix workstations. I don't know what "really nice modern Unix workstation" means in contrast to CentOS. OK it's nice, but it must also necessarily be better in some important ways or you'd use CentOS. At this moment I'm using Fedora 22 on a Mac mainly because I'm testing. Most of the time I use OS X because it's more reliable in pretty much every single way: automatic graphics switching just works, the track pad just works, and Bluetooth just works. At the moment all of those things when running any Linux distro make the system next to unusable for more than a few hours. So because choices, including Apple's choice to keep so much of their hardware proprietary and their hardware vendors shushed, and my choice to buy this hardware, as a consequence my experience of software freedom is more limited. I'm not asserting rights. I’ve got a SecureCRT window constantly open to the CentOS box I develop on, I’m making a CentOS 7.1 USB stick right now in the background, and I’m about to build another CentOS server once it’s finished dd’ing that stick. > > So no, “developers” are not abandoning Linux for OS X. A bunch of us are choosing to use OS X on the desktop, but when it comes to deployment, well, let’s just say that macminicolo.net is very much on the fringe. OK well it's funny you say they're not abandoning Linux for OS X while you're doing what so many others have decided to do which is make OS X their primary platform for free software development because of some deficiency of doing that work on a free OS. You are not wholesale abandoning Linux, but you have abandoned it for certain work loads presumably for completely rational reasons where you conclude your productivity is simply better on OS X. So instead of a vague "it's a nice platform" without stating the pros of OS X or the cons of CentOS (or Linux in general) you haven't really helped stem this transition. I'd prefer to see free software developed on free software. That's why I continue to put in a lot of effort on QA'ing Fedora. -- Chris Murphy