sirocyl

noted computer gremlinizer

working on a @styx-os.

 

laptop.
                                                                                                     

"accidentally-vengeful telco nerd"
—Tom Scott

platform sec researcher, OS dev, systems architect, composer; Other (please specify). vintage computer/electronics nut.

I am open to tag suggestions - if there is something you want me to tag on my posts, leave a comment. <3


take a look at
this cool bug I found 🪲
discord
@sirocyl
revolt.chat (occasionally active)
@sirocyl#5128
styx linux OS project
styx-os.org/

daddragon
@daddragon

Every time I try to post something I get slapped by the hand of Linux Keeps Breaking Things for No Reason.

I cannot drag images from a samba share from nautilus to firefox to put in a post.


daddragon
@daddragon

I think it's because it's not actually mounted. The paths I get if I try and grab it is smb://the server/the/path/to/something which is not a file path.

Okay, fine on windows, because you have shit like \\server\whatever which windows itself resolves for you. But you can't fucking open(2) something with smb:// in it, so naturally they can't allow dragging and dropping it as a file path! Duh, silly.

But I do not care if it is a file path or not. If it was mounted, like we've been able to do in userspace with shit like udisks for like ten Goddamn years now, then it would just work. I can't open the network path to my big storage in rawtherapee because it doesn't understand the path either. There is some kind of path, because I can open a terminal, but rawtherapee doesn't understand it (it's like /run/user/1000/smb-share:server=whatever,share=theshare/path and I think it's choking on the : which. mmmmmmmmmmm.)

Like it works but it doesn't work. I can't even rule out whether this is a firefox-but-in-snap problem (because that also causes Really Cool Problems, like obliterating the "right" way to install extensions for gnome). Ourgh.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

this reminds me of how dolphin's drag and drop suddenly doesn't work if I have an Okular (document reader) window overlapping it in desktop spacetime.

you can click the files, you can right click them, but you can't ever drag them, until the window is removed or closed. May not be limited to okular.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

there's two things here colliding:

  1. no one has free time anymore, not really. not to spend doing grueling work. I get it. (this includes users. no one has that surplus free time/labor anymore. Programmers, statistically, tend to have more than most.)
  2. But that means
  3. you need to be honest with the users about your level of ability to do things, and just how little support they'll get. For random utilities this is excusable, but when specifically Gnome and KDE try to present well-tailored, professional fronts? You're doing that sort of 'lying about spare-capacity:complexity ratios' without realizing.

and these two forces are constantly fighting each other.

along with most users being completely alienated by software labor, because to them it's hard, but that's from inexperience, so surely it must be easier for the learned priests. But no, it doesn't get easier. you just get faster.

and most project programmers being completely alienated from the universe of non-poweruser users.

And that's the huge gulf that's fueled many an OSS/FS culture war.


sirocyl
@sirocyl

appoint - or hell, hire - one agent whose job it is, as a person, to read e-mails and turn them into Well-Formed Fully-Qualified Bug Reports, and need to do next to nothing else on the software platform. they can be a developer or engineer, but that's only because the skillset needed to understand both people and understand code or software systems, is necessary.

I'd gladly be that person, and I'm sure there's others out there.

but on the flip side, kicking people to User Forums is also very bad.

Everyone on an Arch or Gentoo or Ubuntu or Debian or any other FOSS forum is at war with you. You are presumed guilty, before your message proves you innocent. You will be moderated away for "duplicate threads". You will be banned for "not doing the chicken dance the right way" to join.

The same hazing rituals you see in the bug trackers, happens on the Forums - except it is now worse, because these aren't Engineers or Developers telling you off on technicalities - these are Forum Admins, Moderators, or worse, wannabe tinpot-dictator "Super Poster!"s who nolife the forums and scatter noobs before they can even say "hello?"

So even being genuine about "We aren't support, please goto Community" is a bad move, because now the Community is chewing you up and spitting you out all the same.

And nobody on community forums is taking your submitted problem/helpthread and turning it into a Well-Formed Fully-Qualified Bug Report.

(except me, sometimes. Sometimes I'm that nobody.)


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in reply to @daddragon's post:

(pardon me for offering answers for questions not asked)

Using SMB from linux caused all kinds of issues for me, particularly around file permissions, and my life got much easier when I just set up a NFS mount instead. Thankfully my target is quite happy to provide both without issue, which is probably uncommon.

Firefox in snap literally made me pack up and get the hell out of Ubuntu. You have my condolences. Snap makes everything painful.

I do wonder sometimes if I'm blessed with linux just behaving for me, or if I'm extremely good at forgetting about all the holes I avoid every day.

I have kind of the opposite problem vis a vis permissions, cuz I'm just One User with a couple machines, so the UIDs don't strictly match up. I had to force macOS to change my UID to 1000 so it matched ubuntu and that had some consequences. SMB kinda abstracts that so I'm just "the user on the sharing server." I also have the same shares set up in NFS kinda for that reason.

I keep putting myself in Situations lol. I think ubuntu particularly has cycles where things mature, and then they change something, and now everything's back at square one again. They changed how NFS worked between when I shut it off in one version and turned it on in another, and I had to go screw with a different set of files.

For better or worse everything I have touching the NFS share is linux, mixing that with macos does sound like a bad time.

Ubuntu for sure went from "Wow, this is great!" around 18.04 to "No!" with 22.04, for me. Snap has been the largest chunk of that for sure, but I'm sure they're going around fiddling with other stuff too.

It really feels like a lot of stuff that worked fine got broken by the ever-present Gnome urge to make changes with no backwards compatibility and the Snap "it would totally have advantages over the old package manager that worked just about perfectly if only it didn't break super important things and really you're wrong for wanting things to work" thing

The problem with Nautilus and SMB isn’t that it’s SMB, it’s that Nautilus is using GIO adapters natively instead of using OS level mounters to huck the files into a real filesystem mount and accessible to everything. It would work the way you expected if they used Samba to mount it to a Real Path, then hand that Real Path to external processes.

As it stands, other apps can talk to the paths that Nautilus hands out, but they need to be using GIO to access them.

I don’t know how Dolphin and Qt handle this, if they do it any better.

in reply to @sirocyl's post:

the worst type of forum poster are hobbiests who it's their only hobby/forum and thus their social space.

I made a post awhile ago and I stand by it: a "latest posts" category/page is the worst thing possible for a forum's health, because it encourages regulars to post on everything

the ubuntu forums at least tried something new, by replacing "posts" with Beans and the "post badge of honor" progress bar with the "Bean counter", both of which do not correlate to actual Posts and are as "Numbers:tm:" as Cohost's April stunt.

Problem is, some people legitimately got mad at that, and then Canonical had to make some concessions to like, make it somewhat resemble post numbers.

This same shit attitude toxifies StackOverflow and anywhere else that "posting is currency". Anywhere that gives you Number Go Up and puts that on your profile to wear as a badge, there will be people who nolife that forum for the High Score at Posting, even if - sometimes especially if their output is invariantly harmful to accounts posting, gaining traction, and being genuinely helpful.

Because that's the point. Eliminating competition by making the environment impossible to compete in, makes you Win at Posting and get the High Score!

Fucking losers.

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