Why I am starting to hate Linux.

[Brian Sturgill]

Don't get me wrong, I like Linux better than Windows or MacOS (except in
looks).
Don't believe me, try to make a file in Windows called "con.c" or
"con.mssucks.txt".
Try keep software running through 3 MacOS major software upgrades. Only
SunOS comes close
in continual gratuitous changes. Why 3, well that's typically when Apple
goes beyond
deprecation to gee it just isn't there any more.
There is lots of reason to prefer Linux, but things are changing.

A couple of days ago I realized I had forgot to setup local backups on my
Linux box I bought a couple of months ago (I had the most important stuff
backed up remotely, this for the little stuff.)
On MacOS you plug in the USB drive and it asks. On Windows, I think you
actually have to go to the backup setttings, but it straightforward from
there.

Ubuntu had made a gratuitous change in the disk management app and when I
asked for
changes on the new USB drive, it brought up a screen with my primary drive.
The first (unnamed)
partition was formatted VFAT, and I was expecting either VFAT or NTFS. The
long and short of it
is that I blew away my EFI partition. I realized it about 2 seconds too
late.

So being an experienced systems programmer/admin, I used the new drive to
backup up everything just in case. And then started looking into how to
rebuild the EFI on the off chance I can get things working again. And low
and behold, it's pretty easy and I did so... though I'm not sure
I had it all right because when I rebooted, I booted, but systemd (the
abomination from hell) got caught in a loop.
For reasons it refused to explain, dbus (I normally spell it dbag), syslog
(systemd-style), portmap, bluetooth and one other were refusing to start.
Systemd reported that the processes were failing with exit code
'exit_status'. The 'exit_status' is literally what systemd is reporting. I
haven't been this frustrated since AT&T System V started flashing a message
on the main console that I should contact my system admin to correct a
problem with the system. [It wouldn't let root login.]

I search the net for 10 minutes and find that to get to single user you
need to:
Catch grub at just the right place and type <ESC> to get the grub menu.
My fast system, using default Ubuntu setup has about a 1-2 second window to
type the escape.
If you hold escape down, then you end up in the grub command line which
seems to be useless.
If you don't type escape fast enough you boot the broken Ubuntu... and have
to force it back down [a 2 minute process].
If you type escape too fast it gets dropped.
You then select "Ubuntu" and then very carefully type a "e" , then go to
the end of the line and add:
   systemd.unit=rescue.target

I misspell something twice, it took me a total of 40 minutes to make my
first real attempt
at super user... but it didn't work.

I search and search, and finally I found this:
Remove $vt_handoff if present.
This was in directions for emergency.target, but hey it works.

All told it took me an hour to figure out how to get into single user mode.
Search through all of /var/log... cannot find out why the systemd services
are failing.

So, I decide I will remove and reinstall things like dbus and see if that
fixes it.
Well, I need to get the network up.
On this particular linux I didn't hand configure the networking, so I don't
have it in
my /root/Changes directory that I always keep.
ifconfig is only showing lo:
Because of bizarre systemd related changes, the ethernet is no longer eth0,
and I have zero idea what the name is.
I cannot manually configure an address.
So I try telinit 3. No joy.
Have to get booted into single user again.
Only took 3 tries, I'm getting better at it... about 10 minutes.

At this point I punt on recovery and am going for a reinstall.
I think about it, decide I'll try Devuan (a non-systemd Linux)... but it
won't boot off
a USB stick. I follow all of its (very sparse) directions, but nothing. I'm
guess it might
be it doesn't do EFI... but it's just a guess.

In the meantime, I did more systemd related searching. It seems that snap
and flatpack require systemd. Ugh... too many things requiring these... OK,
back to Ubuntu Mate... moving up to Jammy Jellyfish (20.0 to 22.0).

Installed without difficulty (which was better than 20 which had some
hardware issues on my new box.)

Move my files back... oh joy.
Really once I was up, things were better, but there were nits.

I prefer a Mac-looking or Windows-looking environment and get appropriate
Gtk/Gnome themes.
These are for GTK2 and GTK3, so they should work, but only about have of
the 10 themes I had showed up... I picked one.
Didn't really work, tried another... still was wrong. Icons would disappear.
Finally I tried a dark theme which worked, even though it was still light
on the screen!
Still no idea what this is about, but things seem to be working.

Now for the biggest frustration. For YEARS I've been running firefox with
about 8 profiles.
The profiles differ in whether or not they sync and what sort of history
they keep.
For example I have a "Facebook" one that stays logged on to Facebook (and a
few other such places) using an alternate email address and locking down
things as tight as possible.
I have a Personal profile and a business profile and a Linked-In and a
Meetup and well you
get the idea. I create icons in my dock for each of the profiles in a
special order. The great thing about this was that if I have 3 personal
firefox's up they grouped with the other personal ones.
Facebook, with facebook, etc. I can click the Dock icon to raise just those
windows that I want to use.

Well, gratuitously systemd/dbus changes things. First of all, Firefox is
now a snap. There might be a few security benefits, but the system treats
things rather differently. The path to run firefox has about 6 levels of
symlinks. and ends up being /snap/firefox/1232/usr/lib/firefox/firefox.
It's not the end of the world, but it makes an already near useless ps
output that much more useless.
If you look at mounts (/etc/mountd) you get:
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/bare_5.snap on /snap/bare/5 type squashfs
(ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core20_1405.snap on /snap/core20/1405 type squashfs
(ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/firefox_1232.snap on /snap/firefox/1232 type squashfs
(ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/gnome-3-38-2004_99.snap on /snap/gnome-3-38-2004/99
type squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/gtk-common-themes_1534.snap on
/snap/gtk-common-themes/1534 type squashfs
(ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/snapd_15177.snap on /snap/snapd/15177 type squashfs
(ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/snapd_15534.snap on /snap/snapd/15534 type squashfs
(ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/snapd-desktop-integration_10.snap on
/snap/snapd-desktop-integration/10 type squashfs
(ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/software-boutique_57.snap on
/snap/software-boutique/57 type squashfs
(ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/ubuntu-mate-welcome_709.snap on
/snap/ubuntu-mate-welcome/709 type squashfs
(ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
tmpfs on /run/snapd/ns type tmpfs
(rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=1622336k,mode=755,inode64)
nsfs on /run/snapd/ns/snapd-desktop-integration.mnt type nsfs (rw)
nsfs on /run/snapd/ns/firefox.mnt type nsfs (rw)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/core18_2344.snap on /snap/core18/2344 type squashfs
(ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
/var/lib/snapd/snaps/powershell_202.snap on /snap/powershell/202 type
squashfs (ro,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,x-gdu.hide)
App image does this too, but only while a needed program is actually
running.
Good luck trying to figure out what disks you have mounted.

But most annoying to me, firefox is now using dbus, which means that the
system treats all running instances of firefox exactly the same.  It means
that my beautiful icon system doesn't work... all firefox windows end up
attached to a temporary icon on the right of the dock and clicking on it
raises and lowers ALL firefox windows, not ones from just one profile.

If I wanted this level of "help" I'd use Windows or Mac. They do crap like
this to me a lot.
The level of complexity of Linux is now totally out of control. I expect
things to implode soon.
Anybody up for BSD?

Brian
-- 

Brian
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