o far the worst thing I have to say about openSUSE Leap is that I found a bug in btrfsprogs.
When I told it to defrag and compress, I assumed it would use what the /etc/stab was set to and give me ZStandard compression.
I was wrong.
The kernel had already started compressing some files and so part of them are in ZStd and some in zlib (DEFLATE). No problem. Just redo btrfs filesystem defragment with -czstd and / and nope.
Error that Zstd is not a recognized compression format. What?
I tracked it down to an issue with openSUSE Leap’s version of btrfsprogs which is frozen on a version that had a regression and has not been fixed.
I could start jamming in updates to btrfsprogs and call it solved or I could just have it recompress as lzo for now.
Fortunately, this was the worst issue I’ve encountered so far.
I quickly ruled out openSUSE Tumbleweed after hearing stories like I woke up a laptop that hadn’t been updated in a few months and updated it all and it broke.
Rolling releases need a lot of administrative attention and that’s a cognitive load that I was just sick and damn tired of with Fedora, which isn’t even a full rolling distribution (things like glibc and the desktops still follow a major version).
The kid in you wants rolling release froot loops but the adult in you wants boring fiber cereal.
Like RHEL, the kernel stuff from SLE/D is kept back and SUSE backports hardware enablement and features and bug fixes selectively. But with openSUSE Leap, you can see the source code without the company threatening that there will be “consequences” for you, even though the GPL doesn’t allow these “consequences”.
So instead of a drama bomb sometimes when you update a Fedora kernel and get an error mounting the file system or Intel fuckery about turning off your graphics card for an entire release series before turning it back on months later and declaring that they gave up trying to fix a security issue in the driver, which is exposed to the Web platform thanks to Mozilla and Google, things kind of tend to stay working.
Unless you have a very new laptop and need a certain distribution that just brought it all in because they never support their releases very long, there’s basically no reason to mess with the “fuck around and find out” nature of installing Fedora and their broken updates.
That’s why I gave up on Debian 11 and moved over in the first place. My graphics acceleration was just doing odd things in my games and I figured I’d roll with the punches for a while and never moved distributions again until now.
Fedora is in a retrograde state at this point. Things break randomly and don’t get much or any attention even on very common hardware
“It Must Be My Huge CoC”. Another Fedora Rant. (Sorry.)
Roy and I were talking last night about the Fedora developers that have given up and threw their hands in the air and left or got banned for “CoC” despite doing exceptional work for Red Hat, unpaid work, for many years.
My CoC complaint against IBM/Red Hat Fedora’s IRC Moderator, Walter Francis, was acted on, kind of, by “jflory7”.
In TechRights IRC, Roy Schestowitz commented.
[8/14/23 14:09] DaemonFC: do you know jflory?
-Techrights IRC Log
[8/14/23 14:09] justin
[8/14/23 14:09] he prosted how ICBM banned an Iranian who had contributed to Fedora
[8/14/23 14:09] just because of natiionality
[8/14/23 14:10] i think jflory is with UNESCO now
[8/14/23 14:11] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/6ygtb3/why_i_have_deleted_fedora_and_wont_recommend_it/
[8/14/23 14:11] [Notice] -TechrightsBot-tr to #techrights- Reddit – Dive into anything
[8/14/23 14:11] “
[8/14/23 14:11] *Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is built and used by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project. *
[8/14/23 14:11] “
[8/14/23 14:11] ” From Fedora Export Control Product Matrix we can conclude that people that happen to be born and live in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and the Crimea Region of Ukraine are not part of the global community. I smell US politics here. It’s a shame, Fedora “
[8/14/23 14:11] 6 years ago
[8/14/23 14:12] years later:
[8/14/23 14:12] https://ahmadhaghighi.com/blog/2021/us-restricted-free-software/
[8/14/23 14:12] [Notice] -TechrightsBot-tr to #techrights- ahmadhaghighi.com | Free Software NOT as infree speech,NOR as infree beer
[8/14/23 14:12] “On 13th Jul 2021, I’ve been removed from Fedora Project with no prior notice because of this”
[8/14/23 14:12] “I don’t have any access to my Email (haghighi@fedoraproject.org) and my other FP resources (e.g., Fedora Ambassadors, Fedora People space, Git repo, etc.). My account was completely removed from Ask Fedora (I was an admin). All my posts in Ask Fedora (including the Welcome page for the Farsi section) were removed, and…”
[8/14/23 14:12] “My Fedora Project Wiki page User:Haghighi has been deleted on 2 September 2021. ‘
So jflory bans people because of their nationality and then deletes them from the Fedora project. Nice. So much for not discriminating due to national origin, I guess.
IBMs lawyers buzz around and exclude tens of MILLIONS of people from Fedora, due to where they were born, and then says it’s “Free Software”.
Roy also mentioned:
[8/14/23 13:51] jflory will cover up for him [Walter Francis/Khaytsus]
-Techrights IRC Log
[8/14/23 13:51] for sure
[8/14/23 13:52] they are the same “clique”
[8/14/23 13:52] like family
[8/14/23 13:52] you are always wrong
[8/14/23 13:52] by default
[8/14/23 13:52] presumed guilty
[8/14/23 13:52] at best he might apologise and remove the ban
[8/14/23 13:52] but needs to grow a pair and swallow his pride
Needless to say, I doubt they’ll take action against their toxic individual. Perhaps more disturbingly, Khaytsus is also a moderator in the IRC channel #linux on Libera Chat.
I think one time he k-lined me just for saying Windows was garbage and asking when #linux became the ##windows channel in a one liner.
## means that the channel is not about Free Software, but like Reddit, someone always derails the #linux channel to talk about Microsoft Java Subsystem For Windows, errr, I mean Windows Subsystem For Linux, of course.
Like Microsoft Java, Microsoft is “extending” the “Linux Subsystem” so the applications you build for it wouldn’t even run on a real Linux system anymore. It’s a trap!
Another Big IBM/Red Hat/Fedora Rant. (Sorry.)
The carnage also affects Red Hat employees. IBM is putting Red Hat through attrition seeing just how cheaply they can run it and have something calling itself RHEL.
Like Canonical, they barely pitch it as a bare metal solution anymore. They encourage their customers to put it in Microsoft Azure, where banks and governments go to get security breaches that Microsoft doesn’t even do anything about.
“Last week, Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking that they hold Microsoft accountable for a repeated pattern of negligent cybersecurity practices, which has enabled Chinese espionage against the United States government. According to data from Google Project Zero, Microsoft products have accounted for an aggregate of 42.5% of all zero-days discovered since 2014.
Microsoft’s lack of transparency applies to breaches, irresponsible security practices and vulnerabilities, all of which expose their customers to risks they are deliberately kept in the dark about.
In March 2023, a member of Tenable’s Research team was investigating Microsoft’s Azure platform and related services. The researcher discovered an issue which would enable an unauthenticated attacker to access cross-tenant applications and sensitive data, such as authentication secrets. To give you an idea of how bad this is, our team very quickly discovered authentication secrets to a bank. They were so concerned about the seriousness and the ethics of the issue that we immediately notified Microsoft.
Did Microsoft quickly fix the issue that could effectively lead to the breach of multiple customers’ networks and services? Of course not. They took more than 90 days to implement a partial fix – and only for new applications loaded in the service.
That means that as of today, the bank I referenced above is still vulnerable, more than 120 days since we reported the issue, as are all of the other organizations that had launched the service prior to the fix. And, to the best of our knowledge, they still have no idea they are at risk and therefore can’t make an informed decision about compensating controls and other risk-mitigating actions. Microsoft claims that they will fix the issue by the end of September, four months after we notified them. That’s grossly irresponsible, if not blatantly negligent. We know about the issue, Microsoft knows about the issue, and hopefully, threat actors don’t.
-Tenable CEO, Amit Yoran
When a “Linux” company, like IBM, pretty much stops talking about how good their product is, and starts recommending you shovel it into a pile of shit that leaks people’s Social Security numbers and banking information, from Microsoft, and think of it like a compatibility layer, as IBM and Canonical have, then you can consider the project pretty much on death’s doorstep.
To quote Walter Francis, I think “something slid off [their] cracker”. First systemd, then XFS and Stratis, now Microsoft Azure promotion. ⬆