What is happening to linux?

1

Apologies in advance, I need to rant about linux now…

I’ve been using ubuntu for a while. However, when I was unable to get steam to run. (For reasons which I don’t understand, it just wouldn’t start.) I decided to upgrade to the latest ubuntu.

So now I have steam, but lots of other things don’t work.

Most of it seems to be because of a set of security rules, which prevents apps from accessing network and directories they aren’t supposed to.

Unfortunately, that means that if your home directory is a symlink, nothing works.

If your home directory is on NFS[1], nothing works.

I just installed an app that is meant to decompile code. When I tried it it could not read the file. I think it’s because it’s on NFS but the error message is unhelpful and based on how unix is supposed to work, there is no reason why it couldn’t read the file.

Based on the assumption that NFS is the problem, I copied the file to /tmp/ and tried again. Still no luck.

So I created a directory in my home directory (which is currently not a symlink, nor on NFS) and tried it again, and suddenly it worked! Fantastic! Except, it is still unable to create an output file, so I can’t actually get the result of the decompile!

At this point, my own forum rules prevents me from adequately expressing what a (#&@)(&#)(!^(#&^)@(#&_#&)(@&#(&)#(&@#$ linux has apparently become.

Anyways, I’m going to try arch linux this weekend I think.

[1] I googled the NFS problem, and found a bugreport where someone gave an answer sort of like ‘oh, but not a lot of people use NFS, so security is more important…’. For the record, having a bunch of rules that specify what apps can and cannot do is not a scalable security model, and problems like this proves it.

2

I’ve always hated Ubuntu and its derivatives. I’ve always found them easy to break. Arch is fine ish but it’s a minor inconvenience to setup and it’s just not really much better IMO.

By far my favorite (and what I stuck with) is OpenSUSE’ Tumbleweed. it just seems to work better for me and, conversely to the aforementioned, I haven’t been able to break it anywhere nearly as easily. When I have it’s been weird package conflicts that a snapper rollback can take care of.

Ubuntu apparently is under fire for a lot of stuff Canonical is doing also. I don’t keep up with the drama, I just know it exists and it’s one more reason not to use it.

I like that I can use my computer and not think about “I’m using Linux so what do I need to worry about” and Tumbleweed has done that the best for me.

It sounds like your issues are probably in the kernel, so distro doesnt mean much to you there, but with regards to your update breaking everything…

Putting the home directory somewhere somewhat unexpected never seems to work well when I’ve tried it on Linux or macOS. there’s assumptions that are made with it being such a crucial directory and edge cases with that are rarely tested. If there is a workaround, usually the response (and tbf it’s not completely unfair given the small number of people that do it) is that if you think you’re smart enough to move things around and mess with them like that, you’re smart enough to make it work and implement whatever workarounds and hoops you have to jump though. :confused: for better or worse.

3

The problem is AppArmor. AppArmor sets up rules in the kernel, similar to how a firewall works, but affecting system calls rather than network packets. One of their default rules is that snaps don’t get network access unless they ask for it, and because of how AppArmor is implemented, NFS requires network access.

Unfortunately it seems like several linux distributions use AppArmor, although I can’t find any evidence that it has actually helped improve security…

4

I uninstalled AppArmor, but apparently snapd depends on AppArmor, so now I can’t install snaps anymore. Not sure how big of a problem that is yet.

5

I don’t think I’ve ever used snaps… no one likes them and they don’t seem to be widely used.

6

This the one thing I really hate about Linux: Developers making idealistic assumptions about what users need and don’t need!

It turns out that many HPC clusters use NFS for home directories. This also means the admins avoid updating the OS, since it breaking things. When they are forced to make an update, someone has to spend a lot of time fixing what everything that breaks.

7

ubuntu is moving lots of their packages to snaps unfortunately.

8

yeah I’m using Manjaro and it’s ok, but my fs is ext4, i’m sorry that NFS is not playing ball with you.

9

Yeah. I know they’ve lost a lot of users because of it too… like I said I haven’t much kept up with it but I know it’s been controversial.