Has modern Linux lost its way? (Some thoughts on jessie)
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For years, I used to run Debian sid (unstable) on all my personal machines. Laptops, workstations, sometimes even my personal servers years ago ran sid. Sid was, as its name implies, unstable. Sometimes things broke. But it wasn’t a big deal, because I could always get in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was. It was the price I paid for the latest and greatest.
For the last number of months, I’ve dealt with a small but annoying issue in jessie: None of Nautilus, Thunar, or digikam (yes, that represents Gnome, XFCE, and KDE) can mount USB drives I plug in anymore. I just get “Not authorized to perform operation.” I can, of course, still mount -o uid=1000 /dev/sdc1 /mnt, but I miss the convenience of doing it this way.
One jessie system I switched to systemd specifically to get around this problem. It worked, but I don’t know why. I haven’t had the time to switch my workstation, and frankly I am concerned about it.
Here’s the crux of the issue: I don’t even know where to start looking. I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… I found a bug report of this exact problem — Debian #760281, but it’s marked fixed, and nobody replied to my comment that I’m still seeing it.
This has been going on for months, which has me also wondering: is it only me? (Google certainly suggests it’s not, and there are plenty of hits for this exact problem with many distros, and some truly terrible advice out there to boot.) And if not, why is something so basic and obvious festering for so long? Have we built something that’s too complex to understand and debug?
What do LQ members think; Has modern Linux lost its way?
I'm not sure what the author of the article means by "lost its way". In any case, I think most modern distros are generally much easier to install and set up than they used to be years ago.
By the way, I'm quite happy with Debian Sid. It offers the perfect balance between stability and new software (for my needs, that is).
Distribution: Lubuntu, Raspbian, Openelec, messing with others.
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When I started playing with Linux, there was a lot of issues like Dependency hell, ease of install, etc. Linux did become more user friendly, and at the same time for me, less about the OS and just about using the computer as a device/tool.
Now I have a system I built to learn/play with Slackware, because I think I have missed things that I could benefit from knowing (rather then just blindly using). Linux distro's give the user choices to be as hands on or off as they deem, yet still have the opportunity to examine and learn from the code your using. Distro's go off on whatever their developer thinks or wants the market to do. The market may or may not support their decission, that always remains to be seen.
Distribution: Mainly Devuan with some Tiny Core, Fatdog, Haiku, & BSD thrown in.
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I'm thinking 'business' Linux is giving us things we don't need as desktop users, & maybe complicating things needlessly(?).
I never liked the way Windows did things with their 'registry', & I am thinking that is what is happening to Linux with this 'systemd' way of doing things.
So personally, I am keeping a foot in the *BSD camp, in case I need to change my main O/S to stay with the 'unix' philosophy.
Location: The garden of England. Technically, the compost heap.
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In the old days you had to tinker for hours to get Linux set up to be usable and now it is (mostly) install and go. As far as I can tell Linux is continuing it's journey from geek hobbyist os to a more serious tool for the masses which is inevitably going to mean change. I find myself wondering; lost it's way or simply growing up?
Still there are other cool and geeky operating systems for the geek hobbyist to move to. MenuetOS anyone?
None of Nautilus, Thunar, or digikam (yes, that represents Gnome, XFCE, and KDE) can mount USB drives I plug in anymore
I'm sorry but this poster is asking if linux has lost it's way because some gui programs aren't automatically mounting a flash drive? Make a new bug report! It's probably not the exact same thing..
Quote:
I used to run Debian sid (unstable) on all my personal machines.
Seriously? They are bragging about using a unstable system and complaining its unstable in the same breath..
IMO, this marks a more subtle losing of ways. I imagine awhile back, the poster would of spent their time fixing their bug, instead of raising FUD about the OS as a whole.
It seems the strategy (that is becoming more common in my experience) is this:
Become annoyed at bug and fail to submit a new bug report.
Ignore bug
Become frustrated that people are not working fast enough to fix your problem
Create a emotionally charged post attacking linux and its inevitable decline
Wait for responses attacking your post and downplay the effect, saying something along of the lines of "just my opinion"
Heres the crux of the issue: I dont even know where to start looking. Ive googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or I found a bug report of this exact problem Debian #760281, but its marked fixed, and nobody replied to my comment that Im still seeing it.
Hi all...
You can find this kind of problem with any operating system, Windows or Linux.
What is unfortunate is that, as time has gone by, Windows and a few Linux distributions have steadily become more bloated and resource hungry. Likewise, other software makers have followed suit to take advantage of more powerful hardware.
Regards...
Last edited by ardvark71; 03-19-2015 at 10:06 AM.
Reason: Correction.
Check if ulatency is installed on your systems
This problem happened to me over a period of time so I never caught the connection.
There is a post somewhere that outlines the problem as a bug with ulatency not any of the distros where the problem has been discovered.
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