Lennart Poettering's long story short: "`su` is really a broken concept
Declaring established concepts as broken so you can "fix" them.
Su is not a broken concept; it's a long well-established fundamental of BSD Unix/Linux. You need a shell with some commands to be run with additional privileges in the original user's context.
If you need a full login you invoke 'su -' or 'sudo bash -'
Deciding what a full login comprises is the shell's responsibility, not your init system's job.
Poettering is so very wrong on many things, having a superficial and shallow understanding of why Unix is designed the way it is. He is just a hobbyist, not a hardened sys admin with years of experience. It's almost time to throw popular Linux distros in the garbage can and just go to BSD
Which BSD would you suggest for desktop use? I'd like to test drive one out, preferably in a VM, or a distribution that had a "live DVD" so I can play with it before committing to metal. TIA.
I tried a bunch of them a few years ago. I found that FreeBSD was the best one, even though it doesn't come with a GUI by default, and so you have to install it afterwards. (Seems kind of ridiculous to me, but that's how they package it for some reason.) I don't know if they've changed the documentation since then, but note that you don't have to compile X11 and your window manager, as there is a system that can install pre-compiled packages that they don't bother to mention until after they tell you how to compile your own packages. Just skip ahead in the manual to find it.
Overall, I really liked FreeBSD, as I found it much more agreeable to how I think things should work. What ultimately drove me away from it was sort of what ultimately drives people who use Linux back to Windows: familiarity. For example, I once needed to use "strace," but FreeBSD has "dtrace" instead, and while I could find many web pages insisting that dtrace was better than strace, for some reason none of those web pages could tell me how to make the much more advanced dtrace perform the comparatively simple task that strace performs, simply printing system calls and their parameters to stdout. So I switched over to Linux for that little project. After a while, I found myself switching over to Linux for a lot of things, just to get shit done rather than spend all day learning how to do it, and so I realized I might as well be using Linux to begin with.
I do plan to give it another go some day when I have a lot more time to spend learning it, as I really did like what I saw when I was using it, but it's just a simple fact that I don't use my computer for fun, and I can do stuff faster in Linux, not because it has better documentation, but because I've already wasted a lot of effort learning to use Linux and so dealing with its bullshit is easier than learning how to use FreeBSD's lack of bullshit.
I do plan to give it another go some day when I have a lot more time to spend learning it
I'm sorry to break this to you, but it is very unlikely that sometime in the future you'll have more free time than now, at least not before retirement.
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Lennart Poettering's long story short: "`su` is really a broken concept
Declaring established concepts as broken so you can "fix" them.
Su is not a broken concept; it's a long well-established fundamental of BSD Unix/Linux. You need a shell with some commands to be run with additional privileges in the original user's context.
If you need a full login you invoke 'su -' or 'sudo bash -'
Deciding what a full login comprises is the shell's responsibility, not your init system's job.
Re: (Score:4, Interesting)
Poettering is so very wrong on many things, having a superficial and shallow understanding of why Unix is designed the way it is. He is just a hobbyist, not a hardened sys admin with years of experience. It's almost time to throw popular Linux distros in the garbage can and just go to BSD
Re: Bullshit (Score:0, Offtopic)
Which BSD would you suggest for desktop use? I'd like to test drive one out, preferably in a VM, or a distribution that had a "live DVD" so I can play with it before committing to metal. TIA.
Re: Bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried a bunch of them a few years ago. I found that FreeBSD was the best one, even though it doesn't come with a GUI by default, and so you have to install it afterwards. (Seems kind of ridiculous to me, but that's how they package it for some reason.) I don't know if they've changed the documentation since then, but note that you don't have to compile X11 and your window manager, as there is a system that can install pre-compiled packages that they don't bother to mention until after they tell you how to compile your own packages. Just skip ahead in the manual to find it.
Overall, I really liked FreeBSD, as I found it much more agreeable to how I think things should work. What ultimately drove me away from it was sort of what ultimately drives people who use Linux back to Windows: familiarity. For example, I once needed to use "strace," but FreeBSD has "dtrace" instead, and while I could find many web pages insisting that dtrace was better than strace, for some reason none of those web pages could tell me how to make the much more advanced dtrace perform the comparatively simple task that strace performs, simply printing system calls and their parameters to stdout. So I switched over to Linux for that little project. After a while, I found myself switching over to Linux for a lot of things, just to get shit done rather than spend all day learning how to do it, and so I realized I might as well be using Linux to begin with.
I do plan to give it another go some day when I have a lot more time to spend learning it, as I really did like what I saw when I was using it, but it's just a simple fact that I don't use my computer for fun, and I can do stuff faster in Linux, not because it has better documentation, but because I've already wasted a lot of effort learning to use Linux and so dealing with its bullshit is easier than learning how to use FreeBSD's lack of bullshit.
Re: (Score:2)
I do plan to give it another go some day when I have a lot more time to spend learning it
I'm sorry to break this to you, but it is very unlikely that sometime in the future you'll have more free time than now, at least not before retirement.
Re: (Score:3)
But the are distros based on FreeBSD such as PC-BSD that have the UI and other desktop features and apps canned and ready to go