Yeah for sure there’s ton of clickbait, but this isn’t “a minor technical matter”. The news here isn’t the clash over whether the patch should be accepted in the RC branch, but the fact that Linus said he wants to remove bcachefs from the kernel tree.
I’m sure many people don’t even think about that. Having to reinstall all your packages from scratch is not something they do frequently.
And for the people who are looking to optimize the initial setup, there are many ways to do it without a declarative package manager. You can:
So the SSD is hiding extra, inaccessible, cells. How does
blkdiscardhelp? Either the blocks are accessible, or they aren’t. How are you getting a the hidden cells withblkdiscard?
The idea is that blkdiscard will tell the SSD’s own controller to zero out everything. The controller can actually access all blocks regardless of what it exposes to your OS. But will it do it? Who knows?
I feel that, unless you know the SDD supports secure trim, or you always use
-z,ddis safer, sinceblkdiscardcan give you a false sense of security, and TRIM adds no assurances about wiping those hidden cells.
After reading all of this I would just do both… Each method fails in different ways so their sum might be better than either in isolation.
But the actual solution is to always encrypt all of your storage. Then you don’t have to worry about this mess.
I don’t see how attempting to over-write would help. The additional blocks are not addressable on the OS side. dd will exit because it reached the end of the visible device space but blocks will remain untouched internally.
The Arch wiki says
blkdiscard -zis equivalent to runningdd if=/dev/zero.
Where does it say that? Here it seems to support the opposite. The linked paper says that two passes worked “in most cases”, but the results are unreliable. On one drive they found 1GB of data to have survived 20 passes.
in this case, wiping an entire disk by dumping /dev/random must clean the SSD of all other data.
Your conclusion is incorrect because you made the assumption that the SSD has exactly the advertised storage or infinite storage. What if it’s over-provisioned by a small margin, though?
He didn’t say anything about Nazism being an opinion you disagree with.
This is literally the only point the article makes and there’s no point even discussing it further if you’re too blind or dishonest to admit that.
You don’t have to trust Drew, though. Vaxry is pretty clear on his stance on the subject.
if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views.
which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server
that is inclusivity
Source: https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists
Note how this article is not where he first stated the above. This article is where he doubles down on the above statement in the face of criticism. In the rest of the article he presents nazism as an opinion people might have that you disagree with. He argues that his silent acceptance of nazis is the morally correct stance while inclusive communities are toxic actually.
This means that it’s not just Drew or the FDO who are arguing that Vaxry’s complete lack of political stance is creating safe spaces for fascists. It’s Vaxry himself that explicitly states this is happening and that it’s intentional on his part.
C is pretty much the standard for FFI, you can use C libraries with Rust and Redox even has their own C standard library implementation.
Right, but I’m talking specifically about a kernel which supports building parts of it in C. Rust as a language supports this but you also have to set up all your processes (building, testing, doc generation) to work with a mixed code base. To be clear, I don’t image that this part is that hard. When I called this a “more ambitious” approach, I was mostly referring to the effort of maintaining forks of linux drivers and API compatibility.
Linux does not have a stable kernel API as far as I know, only userspace API & ABI compatibility is guaranteed.
Ugh, I forgot about that. I wonder how much effort it would be to keep up with the linux API changes. I guess it depends on how many linux drivers you would use, since you don’t need 100% API compatibility. You only need whatever is used by the drivers you care about.
Does it have to be Linux?
In order to be a viable general use OS, probably yes. It would be an enormous amount of effort to reach a decent range of hardware compatibility without reusing the work that has already been done. Maybe someone will try something more ambitious, like writing a rust kernel with C interoperability and a linux-like API so we can at least port linux drivers to it as a “temporary” solution.
Personally I don’t care so much about the things that Linux does better but rather the abusive things it doesn’t do. No ads, surveillance, forced updates etc. And it’s not that linux happens to not do that stuff. It’s that the decentralized nature of free software acts as a preventative measure against those malicious practices. On the other side, your best interests always conflict with those of a multi-billion company, practically guaranteeing that the software doesn’t behave as you. So windows are as unlikely to become better in this regard as linux is to become worse.
Also the ability to build things from the ground up. If you want to customize windows you’re always trying to replace or override or remove stuff. Good luck figuring out if you have left something in the background adding overhead at best and conflicting with what you actually want to use at worst. This isn’t just some hypothetical. For example I’ve had windows make an HDD-era PC completely unusable because a background telemetry process would 100% the C: drive. It was a nightmarish experience to debug and fix this because even opening the task manager wouldn’t work most of the time.
Having gotten the important stuff out of the way, I will add that even for stuff that you technically can do on both platforms, it is worth considering if they are equally likely to foster thriving communities. Sure I can replace the windows shell, but am I really given options of the same quality and longevity as the most popular linux shells? When a proprietary windows component takes an ugly turn is it as likely that someone will develop an alternative if it means they have to build it from the ground up, compared to the linux world where you would start by forking an existing project, eg how people who didn’t like gnome 3 forked gnome 2? The situation is nuanced and answers like “there exists a way to do X on Y” or “it is technically possible for someone to solve this” don’t fully cover it.
That’s just like your opinion man.