Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: Glog78Hi Samsai -> you are a programmer. I didn't check the implementation but from my current understanding of the issue ... either this protection should cry on nearly every installed program , cause from a user standpoint the can be essential or it does cry only on very few situations which leaves alot of loopholes and scenarios which makes it no real protection.

So, is your argument that we shouldn't accept any solution that is less than perfect? I think you'll find that suddenly life becomes very very difficult if you start rejecting solutions simply because they are not total solutions. The world runs on compromises, and computers and their software are by themselves a massive pile of compromises built on compromises.

Sure, some users may consider certain packages essential which others would not. However, I think we can establish a fairly agreeable layering, where we designate software that is foundational and without which the normal operation of the system becomes difficult or impossible. In that grouping we can include things like bootloaders, display managers, desktop environments, init systems, package management tools and the core dependencies of the previously mentioned items. After all, I think it's common sense that some user-level application getting accidentally removed is a less of a hassle than your system not booting or entirely losing your graphical environment.

I think we should discuss those solutions not agree to them by default or hype them. All what we have currently presented is in my eyes just "acitvism" which in the end we all might more suffer than win.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Glog78;) it is related to the fact that a user needs to go down to the Terminal as it seems to use BTRFS Snapshots to go back. In this case it's not usable for a "beginner".

So you'd prefer a graphical tool? Like in the case you've accidentally removed your X server?
:tongue:

But it allows you to (ro) boot from the (working) snapshot, fire up the browser and look up how to proceed. You could also just use YaST (X or ncurses) to restore changed files, but if you've badly messed up things a rollback is probably better - for which indeed command line is needed (AFAIK).

But probably we get OT here....

Nope i prefer a failsafe solution (like F5 on windows) or (androids system rescue) to be able at any point with just a button press to recover the system. Thats the idea ... boot your system with f5 -> get a selection of snapshots you can go back to -> win. I guess that would cover up 95% of the beginner mistakes or distribution problems if we can also really split userdata from systemdata (xdg standard and so on).

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Quoting: SamsaiI don't really understand the outrage. What even is the use-case for a package manager to totally uninstall essential packages upon install of an unrelated package? I can get behind being able to tell the package manager to uninstall essential packages when told to do so explicitly, but installing regular application software should never make massive alterations to the foundational parts of my system to begin with. Having especially the graphical package managers protect you from accidental system breakage is nothing but a good thing.

Honestly, some of this complaining in this thread could easily be applied to --no-preserve-root or even the concept of sudo. Why is 'rm' trying to slow me down from deleting my entire root folder? Why do I need to input my password to modify system files? They are trying to turn my OS into a padded cell! Back in the good old days I could punch in arbitrary values into arbitrary memory locations and the computer stepped out of my way!

Honestly, I am totally behind Liam on this. The complaints on this issue reek of elitism and I see no value in making desktop Linux more fragile to breakage or more obscure to make some tinkerers feel better about themselves. And I say that as a tinkerer myself: I am quite willing to bet that I run a more exotic setup than many of the people that are now up in arms about how their right to tinker is somehow being trampled on. You are still perfectly able to uninstall your display managers and bootloaders even after the apt patches if you really want, just try to realize that this is an exotic use-case and 99.9% of people would only do so by accident and thus there should be some level of safety to prevent that. Even Formula 1 cars come with safety features.

Hi Samsai -> you are a programmer. I didn't check the implementation but from my current understanding of the issue ... either this protection should cry on nearly every installed program , cause from a user standpoint they can be essential or it does cry only on very few situations which leaves alot of loopholes and scenarios which makes it no real protection.

I really remember the times when suse's (aka suse 6.x times) default editor was vim or emacs (i don't remember which of both) and i never heard of them and wasn't able to even edit a file. So who defines and what is an essential package ? I gave an example for some questions earlier to think of why none of this solutions technically makes sense (imho) but rather complicate the way even people who have an understanding can help.

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Quoting: RoosterWait..

Why is this whole comment sections basically a continuation of the previous thread, instead of discussing the actual topic which has nothing to do with the CLI and is a GUI only move to prevent new users from bricking their DE, which I would say is very objectively a good move.

If someone thinks that this was a bad move from KDE, I would love to hear their arguments.

From -> https://pointieststick.com/2021/11/19/this-week-in-kde-most-of-gnome-shell-in-the-overview-effect/ [External Link] -> "Discover now prevents you from doing anything that would uninstall Plasma in the process, which is probably not what you were intending to do (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24):"

So KDE Discover now prevents you to deinstall kde plasma but you can go on and deinstall xfce or gnome which might used on a second user of this pc ? (Linus usecase ->) He doesn't liked dolphin as far as i got it and used another filemanager which can be in this scenario still be deinstalled ...

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Glog78OpenSuse i would call as mainstream but when was the last time someone adviced OpenSuse somewhere for a beginner? Even during 7 pages of this discussion you and me are probably the only two who talk about OpenSuse / Suse so far. Being able to do so on the terminal is a step forward. But i guess we are far from "newbie" friendly even at this point.

Strange. You request safety features like snapshots, being able to boot those and roll back, and yet say the distro that implements all that by default is not for new users....

Quoting: denyasis** Oh, I missed that part in your post. If you count OpenSuse as "mainstream". It has full system snapshot by default, courtesy of BTRFS. Reboot, pick the old snapshot in GRUB and good to go! (Ok... you need a terminal command to finish the rollback, you know, altering the file system and all).

;) it is related to the fact that a user needs to go down to the Terminal as it seems to use BTRFS Snapshots to go back. In this case it's not usable for a "beginner".

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Something to think -> is a good example which did come up denyasis (for other reasons)

If someone removes Network Manager -> is this package essential with systemd networkd still being around or not ?

Just a question :)

Question 2 to make it hard -> if one distribution says it is essential and the other says it isn't -> what would you as an developer of a not distribution package choose as an answer ?

Question 3 to make it completly lost -> what if the user wants to exchange network manager against wicd ?

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Quoting: denyasisThanks for the info! I think we can certainly find arguments on what we would call a safety net or not, especially for a distro aiming for a more advanced (or adventurous) user.

Yeah, I would not advise a new user to use OpenSuse. There are just enough rough edges, even at my skill level, that I run into hiccups. I'll say my installs are non standard and I've tweaked a lot, so it could be user error.

PolKit is an enigma to me, especially since Suse seems to modify it, so it's not entirely the same as upstream and thier documentation is inconsistent. Steam tries to modify network settings on start, invoking a polkit rule. Depending on the DE, KDE just works, XFCE asks for the admin password, Enlightenment spams the password dialog, locking up the environment.

Maybe I should get this influencer guy to try it on OpenSuse? Lol

Hmm i know NetworkManager has a polkit - policy. Maybe thats the one get used, i can't be sure cause i use systemd networkd. Dropped all the "fluff" for my none moveable pc. But i also don't see a reason why steam should change network settings -> maybe it's just using NetworkManager to detect if it is in online or offline mode or for some other "security" features ?

Additional Information after a small google search -> https://githubmemory.com/repo/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/7856 [External Link] << my guess sounds about right.
Additional Information (2nd) -> "If using systemd-networkd for network management, install lib32-systemd in order for Steam to be able to connect to its servers" from the arch wiki ;)

If i see it right -> it not only ask network manager for the network status but also needs networkmanager and most likely related polkit stuff to be in 32bit ....

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Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: Glog78Since i use arch on my machine , there is no real default "net"

Really? I'm not familiar with arch, I've used the wiki a ton... it's So helpful!!

But I'd be really surprised if you have to backup all your custom confs in /etc because pacman overwrites them on every update. Or that a DE doesn't use PolKit (or equivalent) without some sort of base default rules package.

I feel it would be a little weird to have no system safe guards, even coming from upstream.

*I could be totally wrong about Arch and if so, I'd gladly share a frosty beverage of your choice if you could enlighten me on the rules.d local override process for Polkit. Trying to fix an issue with Steam and the network.

** Oh, I missed that part in your post. If you count OpenSuse as "mainstream". It has full system snapshot by default, courtesy of BTRFS. Reboot, pick the old snapshot in GRUB and good to go! (Ok... you need a terminal command to finish the rollback, you know, altering the file system and all).

There are safe guards (like pacman usually by default don't overwrite configs but put them next to the existing file) Which is good and bad *lol* ... imagine a config not working because of a missing parameter after a reboot because you didn't checked for the new config template (hadn't had this since years but i had this a few times) *ups* << usually they are not leaving the system in an "unusable" state but i would probably define unusable different than a "newbie" :) -> imagine dns not working anymore after an systemd update or since i boot directly from efi into the kernel i once used an "outdated" way to write the root partition into efi ... lets say thanks god i always have a "normal" bootloader ready ...

With default i mean there is no default net which you can be sure to be find on every arch installation. I for example can boot my X even without polkit (init 2 -> startx /usr/bin/xterm ;) ). There are however packages with files under /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d and /usr/share/polkit-1/actions. There is no special rule for steam (if that helps) The last issue i had with steam and network i fixed by setting up a local dns proxy and re-enabling ipv6 -> had a ipv4 only config before.

OpenSuse i would call as mainstream but when was the last time someone adviced OpenSuse somewhere for a beginner? Even during 7 pages of this discussion you and me are probably the only two who talk about OpenSuse / Suse so far. Being able to do so on the terminal is a step forward. But i guess we are far from "newbie" friendly even at this point.

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Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: Glog78

Quoting: denyasisUmmmmmm

Y'all know you can turn the safety net off right?

Like it looks like it could be a command line option, or you could put it in the apt conf file.

It's not even a big deal. I mean the most we'd have to do is Google it when we run that issue.

but isn't exactly this what linus did -> turn of the safety net by going to the commandline and even ignoring the warnings there ?
How do you want prevent people from googling and doing still what they are not meant to do ?

It's an open source OS. You can do anything with it, even change the source to remove any safety net. While nothing will prevent that, I don't find it unreasonable to make it a little harder to nuke your system from the UI, especially for a program that gets a lot of user attention and use and so powerful/integral to the OS.

But if it's that oppressive, you can turn it off, just like the others. I can foresee doing myself that in some cases.

Come to think of that, I'm genuinely curious; What other safety nets do you turn off on your system?

I think mine are all on, the number of times apt has saved me be refusing to overwrite conf files in /etc is high.

Edit: sorry my spelling is horrible and apparently I can't complete a sentence today.

Since i use arch on my machine , there is no real default "net". But on pc's i only administrate (eg: my mom's one with an ubuntu) i let it be as default as possible. But if default even on an lts version breaks stuff -> i give up on saying there is a good way to prevent things from breaking. Neither the changes on apt nor the changes on discovery nor any other changes will prevent things from breaking. That's my personal truth noone want to hear.

So my conclusion is not to make it harder or change anything (let people learn, let people understand , let people do their mistakes) but give them a much easier way to go back to a usable state. On windows it should be still F5 during bootup and go to last known working configuration or failasafe configuration.

Why don't we have those options (specially since they most likely can be easy implemented -> snapshots) on mainstream distributions ?

Why are people still be able to break systems when even android has a recovery solution ?

Why do we discuss solutions which are either force one group or the other group to change how they work ?

Why do people measure with different indicators what is newbie friendly and what makes me more angry ... why do they change this even within minutes?

Also what does really help and what doesn't? Or is current activism just something we use as an excuse?

As i wrote into my introduction -> if we really want to create newbie friendly distributions ... tools like proton-ge / protontricks / mangohud / vkbasalt and many more we are used to advice in the gaming community need to be marked at least as advanced technology if not marked as professional technology. They are far from being easy to use / configure or maintained -> even we have made big progess. But we also watch them with our years long knowledge about linux.

We can't say that lutris is a solution if basically nearly no distributions provides the maximum compatibility libraries for lutris. It's totally understandable why they don't (aka copyright's) but hey it differs totally from distribution to distribution (gstreamer plugins)....

Don't let me get into all the hassle you have if you want to have 32bit compatibility currently ...

This is all far from understandable for a normal windows user let alone a newbie.... And this is what sucks about all of this. We are not discussion the roots / the real problems but we fix something to get out of the focus. Does this really help linux? Does this make it easier for a none tech guy to get into linux? Also one question -> do we really want to have none tech guys into linux? What makes linux linux and not a windows clone? What is the reason why alot of us did switch and why do we love it? Do we love it for it's hand holding or do we love it for it's freedom?

I can say i have my answer and i don't agree with modern linux systems getting more and more uncontrollable or even understandable...
How many people still do understand which config file is to change (the systemd one or the etc one or mabye both ?)
How many people still do understand if a snap / flatpak can access a file or not ?
How many people understand why they can watch a wmv using their media player on linux but can't watch it in proton ?
How many people do understand that steam uses a container and while wine can access default shaders in /usr ... steam can't and more so how to diagnose this?
With soon to be 3 dx9 layers for wine (opengl / zink - gallium / dxvk) which one is to be used when ?

This is what we need to reduce , complexity -> it needs to be easy and default. And if something happen we need to go back easy to an default working system. But that's only my personal opinion. And as you can see above -> if i don't cheer for the current solution i am elitist -> or have unsustainable opinion and should be quiet. I know why i haven't said anything for years.

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Quoting: denyasisUmmmmmm

Y'all know you can turn the safety net off right?

Like it looks like it could be a command line option, or you could put it in the apt conf file.

It's not even a big deal. I mean the most we'd have to do is Google it when we run that issue.

but isn't exactly this what linus did -> turn of the safety net by going to the commandline and even ignoring the warnings there ?
How do you want prevent people from googling and doing still what they are not meant to do ?

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