What is lacking in the previous one? NTFS support in linux is mostly to read and write files from windows disks, right? I think all the NTFS linux drivers - even the fuse one before the Paragon one - have been alright at that.
Ubuntu switched to the Paragon NTFS driver by default. When I upgraded to kernel 6.5 (I think) from Ubuntu, I started getting frequent kernel panics, like every day. Soon, I noticed that I couldn't even compile a Rust project on an NTFS partition because the compiler was getting random file system errors, and compiling was at high risk of causing a kernel panic. The NTFS driver in that kernel version is just totally broken. I switched to the FUSE NTFS-3G, and then I stopped getting panics and can compile stuff again no problem.
Looking at kernel commits, it looks like the driver may have been fixed since, but I'm scared to use it after it had such major brokenness in that version.
It wound up being OK, but it had a long span of time where it was virtually unmaintained and turned out to be buggy at points. The newer NTFS driver is based off of the old read-only NTFS driver which subjectively many claim is cleaner (I honestly haven't done a head to head so idk) and they're having an easier time modernizing it with support for things like large folios. Seems like a good deal to me.
Personally: I used NTFS3 and it was alright. If anything the biggest thing I got hit by was an issue where the udisks2 mount call from Dolphin would result in NTFS-3g specific flags getting sent to it, causing the mount to fail. But in actual usage it actually worked just fine for me.
> Linux 7.1 is also notable for its code removals. Driven by AI-assisted bug reporting, ISDN and other old network driver code was removed to avoid that influx of bug reporting against those very rarely touched or used drivers for obsolete hardware.
Moving really old and unused code out of the kernel just to get less AI-assisted bug reports is IMO one of the best consequence ever of AI.
I love it.
We should start trimming the fat out of everything.
The old unmaintained ISDN hardware for which the code has been removed is likely 20 years old, or so. The perfectly good laptops are usually 3-4 times younger.
FreeBSD and NetBSD aren't going anywhere and can be used for older hardware, for the amount of production and load bearing use Linux sees there's an enormous amount of cruft and garbage in it.
That's good for your personal computing, but a renewing forest fire is good for all sorts of organizations. And species. It's a very good algorithm to run.
It's naturally de-ossifying and forces uptake of new methods and practices.
It gives you an opportunity to question assumptions and do things greenfield again.
I remember working with a guy who apparently deleted more code than he added in his time at the company. I think it said more about the codebase than anything but it was good that someone was trying to make it better.
Funnily, I have been that guy at the last 3 places I've worked at. Every place has some amount of cruft code, and I love sniffing it out and deleting it.
Is the parent really being sarcastic? I read it as genuine.
There’s presumably plenty of code bloat in the kernel, and while no human would ever scan for bugs in a corner of the kernel that hasn’t been used or touched in decades, AI 100% will. And while those bug reports might be useless as bug reports, they seem promising as “why is this code even here?” flags.
I don't mean to be harsh, but if there's a codepath that is exercised on your hardware, but not on mine, I don't think it would be fair for me to deem it as "bloat". There are a TON of supported devices and use cases that are not my own, but are essential to someone else.
Sure, sure. I’m not arguing for removing drivers for uncommon devices, or even rare devices. But there’s a line somewhere. Maybe it’s at “devices that no longer exist.” But I think it’s somewhere before that. And I have no idea how you’d figure out which devices fall where around this hypothetical line. I can only hope that they had good justification for these removals.
> very rarely touched or used drivers for obsolete hardware
I guess end users can not upgrade but a definition of obsolete would be nice.
To me, every HP printer ever is obsolete. But I assume someone else has an equally valid and different opinion. How does that go with computer hardware?
It's ok, you can let go of Chesterton's ISDN phone pole now. Come, we have cable, we have fiber. Just for you, I'll even fire up a little hotspot from the palm of my hand as we walk away.
Presumably that old code was actually useful at the time it was added. It might not be used now, but it helped someone back then. One of the great things about early Linux was that it tried to run on every piece of hardware available. If Linus only wrote drivers (or allowed others to submit drivers) that worked on his personal computer, Linux would have never flourished this far.
Is there anything particularly interesting about this? The first number of the version changes when the second number gets too big, not for any other reason.
But not a very accurate blogpost. "Here's why this literally cannot work (in theory)" to denigrate a system that actually works (in practice). Their goal is to convince people to stop using it because it personally inconveniences them, but they never provide an alternative solution that actually solves the problem (in practice) that Anubis actually solves (in practice). If leaving the problem unsolved (in practice) was a desirable option, the site owner would not have turned to Anubis in the first place.
before and after apache logs showing much less crap in them from bots. Do you think the maintainers of https://lore.kernel.org/ would leave something in that didn't work? It isn't perfect but I have run it on a (much smaller) web site getting hammered by bots and logged "before" and "after" and the difference is measurable.
Its literally trivially objectively measurable, this isn't something that is based in opinion.
You can throw it up on your own website and simply grep the logs if you don't trust it, or look for the analysis reports from people who have done exactly that.
Like the other commenter said, why would linux.org deploy and leave deployed a technology that did nothing? Do they just enjoy trolling users? I doubt it.
Places that want to use Anubis but find the logo not professional enough are free to pay the author, IIRC it was major "professional support" benefit :D
It's mostly surprising how many grown adult men go into a blind rage when confronted with a picture of a cartoon woman. In a lobsters thread about Anubis, a community member of 12 years got themselves permanently banned because they were frothing at the mouth with accusations of pedophilia against the developer and refused to apologise when given an opportunity by moderators. Telling on themselves, perhaps? It's funny, in a bizarre way, that this is a hill people will die on.
> ...they were frothing at the mouth with accusations of pedophilia against the developer...
I think I remember that thread. IIRC, it went something very, very roughly like this:
Future banned user: It weirds me out a bit how young the mascot looks. I've never been comfortable with cutesy, underage-looking mascots.
The dogpile: How dare you insinuate that the dev a pedophile? Don't you know how anti-trans that dogwhistle is?
and the conversation degraded from there.
I'll also note that you chipped in with
> It's mostly surprising how many grown adult men go into a blind rage when confronted with a picture of a cartoon woman.
when -AFAICT- noone in this subthread expressed anything more heated than "dislike of kawaii". But perhaps you were speaking more generally, and weren't inspired by any conversation that happened in this subthread.
Yeah, it gets boring when the number change doesn't change and try improving everything at once, but the great thing is that freshness improves driven by number fomo and that tightens the improvement loop.
Exciting and risky things are always under flags, so if you really care you just build, configure, and bench your own kernel+system.
- "Anyway, possible slight hiccups in the merge window aside, the news
today is 7.1."
- "nothing particularly interesting or scary stands out, which is as it should
be."
I know it's a bit of a meme but I'm on Debian Stable and I am running the backport kernel, which is on version 6.19. So only one minor version away from the current 7.0.
I wish more people would consider Debian for their devices. It is a very stable system, which I appreciate, and, unlike Ubuntu, it was really an "it just works" experience, without any of the friction points that smaller distros have. I installed Debian Trixie on a very recent device (granted, all AMD for compatibility) when Trixie was still the Testing version, and all the necessary drivers were present.
Now if only I could figure out how to build packages and contribute back to Debian... Also if only AMD could get their NPU support for Linux figured out...
Actually, I'm running the backports kernel which is at 7.0 today.
$ uname --kernel-release
7.0.10+deb13-amd64
If you run stable, Debian backports takes care of a lot of the popular stuff. Kernels, kernel modules, Rust/Cargo, CMake, Clangd, GPU firmware (AMD/Intel), GDB, LibreOffice, OpenShot video editor, and Wireguard are all kept current in backports. And there's way more than I mention here, of course. Worst case I can install unstable in a schroot and run some bleeding-egde software.
I did all of my distro hopping when I was young, 20+ years ago. I settled on Debian because life got busy and I had no time to fuss with broken software updates.
Probably because it got popular as the easy Linux distro back in the 2000s and that label is sticking.
I remember that I attempted to install Debian on my laptop in 2009. It was ugly. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and it was a totally different and much nicer experience. Because of that I've been on Ubuntu until they started pushing snaps very aggressively. I live booted Debian 11 and realized that its UI was exactly the same. I don't know when it happened during that dozen of years but there wasn't anymore a reason to stick to Ubuntu. I installed Debian 11 and got a faster machine with less background processes. I'm on Debian 13 now. I've been told that KDE is much better than what I attempted to use in 2014 so maybe I could give it a try, but it's unclear to me what I have to gain.
I prefer KDE (on Ubuntu, because I tried it and it's good enough) - it's got more stuff built into the OS in terms of settings. I tended to find that Gnome needs you to install more things to expose configuration settings, whereas KDE's configuration UI is pretty good.
For me, it was kubuntu. Back in late 2005 or early 2006. The reason? They were always pretty good at shipping the latest KDE. I had grown tired of hoping someone would compile a new version for my preferred distro.
So kubuntu it was, and has been ever since. I'm currently looking into whether I should change to something else - as I've started growing tired of Ubuntu/Kubuntu after some 20 odd years.
I'm of the belief that the more popular an OS is, the more maintainers it will have (and thus less bugs). The only thing about Ubuntu that I hated was its choice of windowing manager. That's why there are so many variants like KUbuntu, XUbuntu, etc. Are there other reasons to not like Ubuntu other than the windowing manager?
> Are there other reasons to not like Ubuntu other than the windowing manager?
Snap applications are still not “equal enough” to installed apps.
They have gotten better, but it’s not seamless and when you get burned it’s 2 hours debugging. Each time.
An app I use/help maintain regularly gets bug reports about sandboxed behavior. It’s understandable but the easiest fix is to install an unsandboxed version.
I personally have some extra steps in my workflow for printing from a snap application because it doesn’t just work and I don’t want to spend the hours needed to debug it.
Ubuntu offered a slightly prettier installation experience.
Sure, no matter which distro you were installing you still had to provide a hostname, a domain name, some IP info (maybe), and an opinion on partitioning - there's only so many ways to ask the user these questions - but the ubuntu installer was prettier.
Around the time it was gaining popularity, almost every 'reviewer' (blogger) seemed to waste about 85% of their distro reviews talking about the installer - as though this was somehow important. The big sell of Debian, and Debian-derivatives, is that you install once, and then it's just in-place upgrades forever. The distro-hoppers, Microsoft evacuees, content-creators, etc - didn't really get that.
Anyway, once Ubuntu was installed it was much the same to operate as a Debian box. Obviously there were some surprising differences. Unity. Mir. One Cloud. Wubi. Upstart. Bazaar.
Come on - at least make one substantive criticism in your post putting down Ubuntu.
I came to Ubuntu because Wine worked on it with no effort. Yes, this was a long time ago. I have certainly cursed some of their changes since then, but I don’t want to spend my time doing yet another sysadmin job, so the less I change the better.
Well, it starts with when I have to opt out of location services during install, and Ubuntu reserving usernames (admin, for example) and ends with how aggressively they shut down upstream repos… if they’re not being DDoSd. Package conflicts are miserable, so they tried to paper over it, adding yet another bullshit layer of things to debug when something invariably breaks.
I’d rather flip the question back on you, how is Ubuntu better than, say, Rocky? If you say “upgrading is easier” I’ll chuckle for the rest of the day.
It’s fairly easy to build your own kernel packages from vanilla sources in Debian. I’m running the latest 7.0.x within a few hours of its release. The build takes about 30-45 minutes depending on how much time I spend on skimming the ChangeLog. YMMV.
If you don't actually need all the drivers, you can use "make localmodconfig" to substantially reduce that. My local kernels build in 90 seconds on a 32-thread desktop machine :)
The kernel is a lot more stable than people think: I run the daily linux-next on my Debian stable gaming PC to look for bugs, and I don't find very many.
You're being a bit disingenuous, it builds in 90 seconds because you build it daily and the vast majority of objects are unchanged and cached by ccache.
A stripped down cold build will literally take 90 seconds without caching on modern hardware.
The overwhelming majority of stuff that is being built is drivers, and most of them probably aren't needed for any specific user, so you can disable quite a lot of stuff.
Fwiw a full build of the fedora kernel config takes around 5-10m for my 12core ryzen 3900x, and it's definitely not the fastest CPU around.
I did that for a while because of compatibility issues with a newer laptop, it works but generally if there is no reason it's way easier to stay with the provided packages. Compiling weekly due to security patches becomes annoying over time for no real gain other than the version number
> It’s fairly easy to build your own kernel packages from vanilla sources in Debian.
IIRC, Debian has a command called "make-kpkg" which does nearly all the work for you, ending up with a installable package which works identically to the standard Debian kernel packages.
Wouldn't Forky/14 have this or newer when it releases next year? Debian moves slow - deliberately so, if you want fast use Arch or Fedora - but it does move.
Not a serious question but I'll give a serious answer anyway.
The last time I worried over which kernel was used in Debian Stable was... never. If I want a more recent kernel I run Debian unstable (Sid) which currently is at 7.0.12 (the current 'stable' kernel where 7.1 is 'mainline') but on my servers Stable (currently 'Trixie') does just fine with its 6.17.3 kernel. Debian 'Forky' will be released somewhere in 2027 with either a 7.0.x or 7.1.x kernel depending on how things go. The current kernel used in 'testing' (which will become 'stable' on the next release) is 7.0.10.
People don't usually understand that apt allows you to configure multiple sources across versions simultaneously, so you can e.g. run stable, but also selectively install from backports or unstable.
To do so, add the sources for trixie-backports and unstable, and add the following configuration (e.g. /etc/apt/preferences.d/trixie-sid-pin) so that the system knows which sources your prefer:
# Default to trixie
Package: *
Pin: release n=trixie
Pin-Priority: 990
# Very low priority for sid
Package: *
Pin: release n=unstable
Pin-Priority: 100
# Give backports medium priority
Package: *
Pin: release n=trixie-backports
Pin-Priority: 500
Now the system can access the latest kernel from unstable (and backports), while keeping everything else on stable:
> People don't usually understand that apt allows you to configure multiple sources across versions simultaneously, so you can e.g. run stable, but also selectively install from backports or unstable.
Which is just as well, because that's not generally a good idea unless you really know what you're doing:
Granted, the kernel is probably the best thing to do it with, on account of their aggressive stance on compatibility and the narrowness of impact (no .so files in play).
Backports are meant to work well along stable packages, but I agree it's definitely not a good idea to start pulling from sid from trixie (for regular packages, kernel is fine), this is asking for a ruined system.
Chaing priority wholesale is not needed just to install kernel image and might break other packages. Just install kernel image from backports after enabling backports.
> apt install linux-image-amd64/stable-backports
Somehow installing with `trixie-backports` isn't picking up latest kernel for me. Used what is being displayed in `apt search linux-image-7`
> The last time I worried over which kernel was used in Debian Stable was... never.
It was briefly a little annoying to deal with wireguard. But it was only a bit annoying, and then they updated. That's the only time I recall specifically caring.
Yes, when that was a thing I just compiled the wireguard module myself to feed it to the virtual router. It was only needed for a short interval and was thereafter handled by dkms, i.e. no problem.
doesn't debian usually stick to LTS kernels? afaik 7.0 was designated as an LTS release so it'll probably be the version that next major release will ship with (next year maybe?)
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/711a9c018ad252b2807...
Hope it gets to Fedora soon!
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