• 3 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Why?

    Triple booting is a pita, moreso if you don’t know how to partition a disk. I’d want any laptop encrypted, which adds further complexity to the triple boot.

    If you wanna browse, research, watch videos and tinker just install a distro. If you wanna spend time switching your system off and on again over and over and over again to find out what’s working/broken go for the triple boot.

    Docker could be worth a shot. You can ‘docker pull fedora/arch/debina/whatever’ and can play around with the base systems. Alpine takes up about 6mib so isn’t too resource intensive if you need to nuke it a few hundred times to get up and running.



  • How bad is really bad?

    AntiX is a good choice. Other option is a usb3 drive for each family member so everyone has their own portable AntiX on a stick.

    MX is the related project with a more standard install and could be worth a look, the Fluxbox option should be quite light.

    Each user could have a personal AntiX system on persistent usb3 and each system could have a bare metal MX Linux install. Just see what wins out via natural selection over time.

    LXQT is another option for a full desktop environment that will run on a potato. If family members are mainly just users and you are admin, the base OS may not matter much. They could switch between a potato running Alpine and a good system running Fedora and if they are just logging into LXQT to launch browser, office, email etc the internal system plumbing is not gonna concern them.












  • I think we may agree that a lot of the ecosystem is dependent on Red Hat, if they close stuff even more stuff tomorrow someone else will need to step up and put in an awful lot of hours quickly. Suse are stepping up with a 10 million dollar claim in response to the current situation and Rocky and Oracle are exploring the legalities of the GPL which is entertaining.

    Forking the kernel is non-trivial, a far bigger undertaking than a casual 10 million dollars from Suse. It’s well over 30 million lines of code over decades with billions invested in it.

    Again from Ted: * IBM hosted that meeting, but ultimately, never did contribute any developers to the btrfs effort. That’s because IBM had a fairly cold, hard examination of what their enterprise customers really wanted, and would be willing to pay $$$, and the decision was made at a corporate level (higher up than the Linux Technology Center, although I participated in the company-wide investigation) that none of OS’s that IBM supported (AIX, zOS, Linux, etc.) needed ZFS-like features,because IBM’s customers didn’t need them.*

    I’m not a position to outcode IBM but I am very grateful there are distros out there that do ensure things largely work without them.


  • Yeah, I was using Alpine for a long time on my pi2 or 3, and an old htpc filling in as server but I’ve stumbled upon a few small issues with musl compatibility and feel glibc just makes life a little easier. I recall ‘testing’ it out using an ancient 2gb usb2 stick, it ended up running 24/7 for about 18 months just fine before I replaced the old box with new pi. With flatpak and all the other new and shiny things it makes a decent desktop/laptop OS too. They didn’t seem happy at all with upstream openrc a year or two ago and think they were looking to integrate s6 instead but haven’t kept an eye on the development and think skarnet is still working away on his frontend.


  • It’s entirely possible. They could have gotten Jeff or anyone else who didn’t agree with Red Hat on the show, there is not a shortage of people in the community that disagree as you say. They could have done another show to cover what ‘the entire linux community’ thinks about this.

    For whatever reason they choose to invite on a Red Hat employee, not ask any difficult questions and generally just agree with everything he says. I don’t know the Red Hat dev or the people doing the podcast but if the ‘entire linux community’ are not happy it’s not great journalism.

    “Now we’ve heard Red Hat’s version of events, for some balance we will interview the devs of Rocky & Alma and next week we have editor of The Register on”

    I’ve not looked at the podcast, maybe they have done this sort of thing…but if their only contribution is to get on a Red Hat employee and agree with him, I’m confortable dismissing them.

    If I was IBM and my employee was going on a podcast for damage limitation, I’d want assurances those hosting would be doing exactly what they did, agreeing with company policy.

    I rely on Linux, not Red Hat. In my time on linux, a decade or so, Linus has been consistently awesome and Red Hat have consistently been dicks.

    If Linus starts ranting about freeloaders I will listen, but freeloader chat from IBM is less compelling.



  • TBF someone did say stream ‘wasn’t a great name’ which was the harshest criticism of Red Hat I heard.

    If: “The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side” as you say it might not have been too difficult to source someone knowledgeable with a slightly different opinion to that of someone on Red Hat’s payroll for at least an interesting debate, or follow up podcast as presumably Red Hat/ IBM don’t want employees debating this stuff.

    If, as you say, the entire community is seemingly against them, a balanced take doesn’t seem to be 2 people just agreeing with an employee about company policy and denigrating “freeloaders”.

    I’ve been watching shitty behavior from Red Hat for well over a decade now and am not a fan of the company but I’m happy to be written off as a tinfoil hat wearing relic of the past…but people like Jeff Geerling describing them as sticking a knife in his back, twisting it and abusing the community should at least give a little pause for thought. He explicitly says he doesn’t want Red Hat employees patronizing him with exactly the sort of stuff the Red Hat employee is being encouraged to do in the podcast.

    Jeff always seemed like quite a reasonable and easy going chap to me and doesn’t often use his platform to discuss being stabbed, abused, patronized and made a fool out of.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8

    In light of the community response to the Red Hat situation that podcast really did feel like a marketing piece from Red Hat.

    Things are getting entertaining though as Oracle have indeed, as hoped, stepped up to question Red Hat’s moral ethics 😂 https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/10/oracle_ibm_rhel_code/