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Wow... I've been a fan of Mint for years but I dunno...

The hack itself seems like it was the result of sloppy security on their part, and a lot of what I'm reading makes it seem like their development practices aren't much better.

Decided to format my work laptop and try kubuntu - so far I am pleased. It's a bit faster than Mint was (especially on boot) and seems a bit more polished.

Yikes! Linux Mint Forum Database Compromised for at Least a Month Before Announcement.

Not good. Starting to move to Ubuntu-Mate....

whoa. I would not have expected that.

was there any dissent towards Mint from the REAL GNU/Linux distributions like Debian or Slackware? I considered Mint a REAL distribution in the realm of those, or, at least in the realm of Ubuntu or Arch. I didn't know much about Mint, however. If they knew and didn't tell anyone for a month, that's a huge discrepancy in the kind of conduct and operations practice you'd expect from the people running a distribution that large.

Linux has a problem. There are too many distributions. Way too many. Everyone always talks about choice and so forth, but really, it's ridiculous. Most of them are simply different package selections and a different wallpaper. So few actually fill a niche so well it required a new distribution. This practice should be watered down. Instead of a million different distributions, people should begin turtling up around the distributions that matter.

This never would have happened if Mint was Cubuntu.

UberGerbil wrote:

I had assembly code for my Apple ][ that I got from somewhere

Way-way-way off topic (but you brought it up), but the first "real" program I ever wrote was a 'game' on an Apple ][ in machine code (call -151 or whatever) that had a helicopter flying around the screen (all rate-sensitive, some actual physics, etc.), blades rotating (sped up if you wanted to climb etc.), press a button on the joy-stick and a hook would drop where you could pick up stuff, including waving/hurting people that you could save from whatever peril they were in, and fly over to safety to drop them off. Was proud of myself when I figured out how to save it to floppy (or was it cassette tape? I forget.).

Then I learned there was such a thing as an Assember (I think they called it "Lisa", was expensive though came in a nice binder, required an (also expensive) floppy drive),

MarkG509 wrote:

Way-way-way off topic (but you brought it up), but the first "real" program I ever wrote was a 'game' on an Apple ][ in machine code (call -151 or whatever) that had a helicopter flying around the screen (all rate-sensitive, some actual physics, etc.), blades rotating (sped up if you wanted to climb etc.), press a button on the joy-stick and a hook would drop where you could pick up stuff, including waving/hurting people that you could save from whatever peril they were in, and fly over to safety to drop them off. Was proud of myself when I figured out how to save it to floppy (or was it cassette tape? I forget.).

Then I learned there was such a thing as an Assember (I think they called it "Lisa", was expensive though came in a nice binder, required an (also expensive) floppy drive),

Is this an attempted patent claim for Choplifter??

Captain Ned wrote:

Is this an attempted patent claim for Choplifter??

Nope, all my patents are consigned to my employer. But, that's about the right idea, and I'm pretty sure I pre-date them.

fhohj wrote:

whoa. I would not have expected that.

was there any dissent towards Mint from the REAL GNU/Linux distributions like Debian or Slackware? I considered Mint a REAL distribution in the realm of those, or, at least in the realm of Ubuntu or Arch. I didn't know much about Mint, however. If they knew and didn't tell anyone for a month, that's a huge discrepancy in the kind of conduct and operations practice you'd expect from the people running a distribution that large.

Linux has a problem. There are too many distributions. Way too many. Everyone always talks about choice and so forth, but really, it's ridiculous. Most of them are simply different package selections and a different wallpaper. So few actually fill a niche so well it required a new distribution. This practice should be watered down. Instead of a million different distributions, people should begin turtling up around the distributions that matter.

This never would have happened if Mint was Cubuntu.

Honestly, if linux is going to go mainstream, we need to have one major distro that's well supported by all the OEMs. Ubuntu seems closest to this IMO (they actually have a hardware certification list with the OEMs... whoa). Yeah, now that I think twice about it, Mint isn't inspiring much confidence here.

Something interesting though - after trying (and failing) to make a Geforce 310 work nicely on every distro I tried a few months back (not entirely stable, plus vmware needed proper hardware acceleration to run aero in VMs, though the card runs fine in Windows), I looked into buying a used AMD card to play with. I can get a 6350 or 6450 half-height for cheap, but apparently they loved DMS-59 back in the day (for cards they sold to OEMs/business stuff). Umm, I don't even have an adapter for that, so that's another few bucks. That, or people are selling these cheap because they're the versions (that no one wants) with DMS-59. Could've sworn HP shipped 6450's with DVI/DP back in the day...

just brew it! wrote:

bthylafh wrote:

@JBI:

Debian's got a MATE spin now if you fancy trying GNOME 2 again.

Heh. I'm pretty well settled in to KDE at this point. But if KDE 5 turns out to be a train wreck, I'll keep that in mind!

(I figure I'm probably good for a few years though... Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is supported until 2019, and it's also the last LTS release that is systemd-free. The native ZFS support in the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is awfully enticing though... damnit!)

Look mang, I dislike systemd as much as anyone, but it's got enough good points that it's not going anywhere. Since it's already in something like 95% of distros, you might as well get used to it.

I'm looking forward to 16.04, I just wish my Xenial VM/secondary install would stop eating itself after updates. Mostly I want Clem and friends to start building off that newer, shinier base, so that we get some really awesome versions of Mint, Elementary and friends over the next year.

localhostrulez wrote:

Honestly, if linux is going to go mainstream, we need to have one major distro that's well supported by all the OEMs. Ubuntu seems closest to this IMO (they actually have a hardware certification list with the OEMs... whoa). Yeah, now that I think twice about it, Mint isn't inspiring much confidence here.

No, we really, really DON'T need that. I've had enough of monoculture, thanks. What we do need is a loose confederation of distros, pulling from a solid upstream, with an agreed-upon and maintained LSB level. We're getting closer. If we can get this, things tend to Just Work an awfully large percentage of the time. I run Arch, which doesn't share any code or packages or anything with Debian nor Ubuntu, and yet Steam games work perfectly on my machine, with the Steam Runtime disabled, because the myth of fragmentation is EXACTLY THAT. Show me a Linux package that I can't adapt and install on my machine, and I can show you exactly where the author/publisher/etc did something stupid.

Sure, you're right about that under the hood, but...

If it's to gain mainstream success, yes, we need a big, well supported distro that everyone's throwing their weight behind. Ship it on consumer machines (and have some features for that), ship it on business machines (and offer some remote management capabilities), get the name out there, give it some shine, etc. Ubuntu's actually coming along quite decently in this regard - apparently they have an enterprise version (probably paid) with the management features, along with their free consumer one. Bingo.

Let me put it this way... Windows is Windows, on any machine. OK, there's a few newer/older versions in circulation and they keep changing the interface, but anyway. There's also Mac OS X, which is that. And then there's linux - how many linux distros are there, all slightly different, some more confusing than others? For the average person, that has to be confusing. What's an OEM supposed to ship? Etc. I'm not saying you shouldn't have other distros out there, but I am saying there should be one major one that everyone supports, that's what you mainly get if you buy a linux machine, etc. Asking my grandmother to download Firefox doesn't mean one of the many oddball variations (with none that stand out), after all - it just means Firefox, that well known browser, and even she knows what that is.


Side note... I downloaded Ubuntu 15.10, and stuck it on an 8000 elite/E8400/Q45/Geforce 310/8GB machine (same test-bed I've had for the last several months) - yes, I know 14.xx is the LTS version, but I'm curious. The 8000 itself is on Ubuntu's certified list, and is pretty standard Intel hardware for the time (funny, since it's from 2010, and most of the list is Haswell/Broadwell/newer hardware), but the GPU option isn't. Installed that, let it download 3rd party stuff and updates during setup, loaded up Chrome, and switched the driver to the tested nvidia binary one instead of the x.org one. It's kinda funny that people complained when they added the amazon stuff into the search menu - it's annoying, yes, but easy to disable and nowhere near as obtrusive as 10. Man... Plus, the UI is quite logical here - everything's pretty much where I'd expect it to be, the settings panel is simple and easy, etc. And it turns out that linux distros work best if you use their included drivers (i.e. use the binary driver built in, don't mess with nvidia's download) - the opposite of what I do on Windows.

Now for my usual test... lots of Taylor Swift youtube videos. (I may be a Swiftie... maybe... ) I'm getting slightly high CPU use (50% for 1080p, 25% for 720p), but that's just VP9 being its usual self. Totally smooth playback, hasn't crashed yet, playing 1080p (on a single 1280x1024 monitor... I'm lazy, and that monitor was closest to the machine). So far so good, although I haven't tried vmware WS. Next step is plugging the big 30" monitor, mouse, and keyboard in, and running it as a daily driver for a bit. Pretty much everything I do runs on any desktop OS anyway (save for a few tools like Solidworks and paint.net), since I moved to gmail and Libreoffice a while back.

Side note: Whose idea was it to frame the Taylor 22 video as 4:3, and make it into a 16:9 file? This looks really dumb on a 4:3 (or 5:4) monitor...

Edit: I had another thought about fragmentation - Android. Any given apk will run on most Android phones out there (unless they're on an ancient version), but people have different versions of Android, different versions because of OEMs, different preinstalled software, different UIs/launchers from the OEMs, etc. That doesn't help brand identity for the Android platform, for one.

Edit edit: I see you have a Dell M4800 - what sort of hybrid graphics does it have, and how well does Arch handle those for you? I keep wondering how well hybrid graphics work - sounds like muxerless/newer ones are better - but Ubuntu does actually have some hybrid GPU systems certified. (AMD anyway, not sure about nvidia.) Maybe it's time to put Ubuntu on the zbook and see if I can use the GPU for Solidworks through VT-D? Or is that crazy talk? (Never seen VT-D used for anything consumer, though I do have it.)

localhostrulez wrote:

(Never seen VT-D used for anything consumer, though I do have it.)

Afaik, unless your base OS is a bare metal hypervisor, there is nothing one can do with VT-d. This is not the final word at all, but here's a simple anecdote from current personal experience...I have two M5A99FX Pro R2 mobos, both with FX-8320's, one running Win 8.1 Pro and one running ESXi 6.0 (5.5 until two days ago). AMD-V/IOMMU (AMD's nomenclature for VT-x / VT-d) is enabled on both boards. In ESXi, PCI devices are available for passthrough to VMs, and all the devices I've tested have worked exactly as expected (it also seems, although I lack certainty, that you would absolutely never want to passthrough your only or primary GPU to any VM, ever). In Windows, with VMware Workstation Pro 12.1, no PCI devices are available for passthrough to VMs. It seems you MUST be bare-metal hypervising for VT-d / IOMMU to work, or even be available, even when enabled. On the blue side, those with overclockable "enthusiast-class" Intel -K procs that lack vT-D and ECC RAM capability probably aren't hypervising on bare metal anyway while overclocking. Those who might hypervise on bare metal probably wouldn't overclock, so non -K usually get vT-D throughout the lineup (with a strange peppering of ECC support - ARK feature filtered for ECC support is pretty amusing, in a way).

yeah systemd seems great.

I found the freedesktop, dbus, udev, hal dream team stuff much more confusing when it came in. systemd seems ok. It's a bit confusing on Debian though because the system is still set up in some ways for SystemV even though it's running systemd. I'm guessing it's that way to allow for compatibility and ease of migration with and to the other two init systems they have available to serve in the bootstrapping role. So it makes a little more convoluted to get to know systemd but besides I think systemd is just great so far.

I was waiting for that. I wonder how much this will pragmatically hurt this distro.

MarkG509 wrote:

Yikes! Linux Mint Forum Database Compromised for at Least a Month Before Announcement.
Not good. Starting to move to Ubuntu-Mate....

Forge wrote:

What we do need is a loose confederation of distros, pulling from a solid upstream, with an agreed-upon and maintained LSB level.

localhostrulez wrote:

And then there's linux - how many linux distros are there, all slightly different, some more confusing than others? For the average person, that has to be confusing. What's an OEM supposed to ship?

There are only four distros that matter: RHEL, Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu. That's 95% of the install base right there. RHEL and SUSE cluster together, and Debian and Ubuntu cluster together. So really only two distinct lines exist between the four of them.

I rank Gentoo/Funtoo and Arch very highly as well, but commercially those four are the only distros that matter.

This has been pretty well worked out at this point.

Flatland_Spider wrote:

RHEL and SUSE cluster together,

Why would you say that? Neither is a derivative of the other.

They are the two flagship RPM based distros, and they are similar. They're not as close as Debian and Ubuntu, but they're closer then RHEL and Debian.

Flatland_Spider wrote:

They are the two flagship RPM based distros, and they are similar. They're not as close as Debian and Ubuntu, but they're closer then RHEL and Debian.

I'd go even further and say that Ubuntu is a superset of Debian and SuSE is an alternate of RH, though not RHEL. There's too much alike between them to split them, IMO. In the case of Ubuntu/Debian, something like 90% of Ubuntu's packages are untouched from upstream Debian, they even have Debian versioning/branding in many places.

With SuSE/RH it's shared history rather than a common source, but the scenario isn't really that different underneath. Building an arbitrary package for RPM will get you something that's very close to what SuSE and RHEL both ship.

localhostrulez wrote:

Edit edit: I see you have a Dell M4800 - what sort of hybrid graphics does it have, and how well does Arch handle those for you? I keep wondering how well hybrid graphics work - sounds like muxerless/newer ones are better - but Ubuntu does actually have some hybrid GPU systems certified. (AMD anyway, not sure about nvidia.) Maybe it's time to put Ubuntu on the zbook and see if I can use the GPU for Solidworks through VT-D? Or is that crazy talk? (Never seen VT-D used for anything consumer, though I do have it.)

My M4800 has a Quadro K2100M and Intel HD 4600 (Haswell). I can leave it enabled and use bumblebee to switch GPUs per-app, or I can disable switching and run everything on the Quadro. Since that laptop isn't terribly mobile, I've been using the latter a lot lately. If you need the extra runtime, it's not terribly taxing to use Optimus/bumblebee, but it does cause some minor issues and need some work. Running on the NV GPU solo is issue-free and not difficult.

DrCR wrote:

I was waiting for that. I wonder how much this will pragmatically hurt this distro.

Saturday morning over coffee I installed Ubuntu-MATE 16.04 LTS Beta 2 in a VM. It made me appreciate the theming and art-work in Linux Mint. But, within an hour or so of setting up the panels, installing apps, and tweaking, including snarfing some of the themes and icons from Mint, the difference between the two became negligible.

Understandably, Mint 17.3 is more polished and stable than the Ubuntu Beta. But by mid-April when Ubuntu exits beta, Mint-MATE will be in trouble.

MarkG509 wrote:

DrCR wrote:

I was waiting for that. I wonder how much this will pragmatically hurt this distro.

Saturday morning over coffee I installed Ubuntu-MATE 16.04 LTS Beta 2 in a VM. It made me appreciate the theming and art-work in Linux Mint. But, within an hour or so of setting up the panels, installing apps, and tweaking, including snarfing some of the themes and icons from Mint, the difference between the two became negligible.

Understandably, Mint 17.3 is more polished and stable than the Ubuntu Beta. But by mid-April when Ubuntu exits beta, Mint-MATE will be in trouble.

I think that mostly depends on how long it takes Clem to get a 16.04-based Mint out the door. Last I heard, though, he's talking 6 months or more, which is an issue for me, and may cost him users in the short term.

Looks like Clem is much more bullish about Mint 18.0 now. Last fall he was giving very conservative estimates, now he's apparently looking at a 1-2 month lead time between 16.04 launch and Mint 18 launch. http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2975