[guylhem]

Relevant quotes for TLDR:

"It worked, but I don’t know why"

"I don’t even know where to start looking."

"That’s about as comprehensible as Vorlon poetry to me"

Potentially non politically-correct answer to the article title: maybe it's not Linux who lost its ways, but some old-time users? (who forget the beginner's spirit to look for answers on forums, manuals, to try to understand before casting a judgment)

Linux has always innovated around the paradigms, taking inspiration from everywhere. It was never "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized". It has always been messy, but in a good way.

When I first discovered linux, I had to adapt to all these new things. That was in 1992. When I decided to use again a modern linux distribution on my laptop in 2014, I had to adapt - again. I have no doubt I will have to keep adapting in my lifetime.

The error would be to consider that the "right ways" are fixed, and that innovation should be stopped.

There will be many new things, some will be kept, some will be discarded. Change is the only thing one can constantly bet on.

[paulannesley]

Some other relevant quotes:

“For years, I used to run Debian sid (unstable) on all my personal machines.”

“Sometimes things broke. But it wasn’t a big deal, because I could always get in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was.”

“I’ve googled this issue, and found all sorts of answers pointing to polkit, or dbus, or systemd-shim, or cgmanager, or lightdm, or XFCE, or… I found a bug report of this exact problem — Debian #760281, but it’s marked fixed, and nobody replied to my comment that I’m still seeing it.”

… doesn't sound like somebody “who forget the beginner's spirit to look for answers on forums [etc]”

[guylhem]

Really? He says he doesn't want to look anymore, then that it's too complicated. He mustn't have searched really hard, or he would have found it's udisk job.

So why couldn't he find it?

It's not that a current linux system is N times more complex than the sid he used to run, it's that things changed: as was properly noted by someone else on this thread, dbus was one of these important changes. Now it's systemd. Next it'll be wayland or something else.

You're correct in that he still tries to do some search, but he expects things to be like they were in the past, where he "could always get in there and fix it fairly quickly, whatever it was", i.e. to be just as efficient, without learning the new tricks!

The beginner's spirit is to want to learn new tricks, looking for answers and being really insistent in understanding better, instead of stopping after a google search and a comment on a bug report.

As said in another post I loved for it straight-to-the-fact comment, "In contrast, to 10 years ago, I do not like hours of debugging to get USB working anymore. It was fascinating then".

It's not more complex. A Linux system is a time investment, where knowledge has a half line. If you no longer can or wants to commit to learn new things at the same pace, but still want to fix things as before, maybe it's not the best idea to stick to Linux.

IHMO, the author would be best served to try say FreeBSD, where things seem to change at a slower pace. But he would still have to learn this new thing, and I strongly believe he doesn't want that - just a system as before, without any changes. Ain't gonna happen.

[VLM]

Why should he have to put in the effort to do something that used to be, and should currently be, trivial?

Its an aesthetic decision.

A car analogy is anyone who doesn't like tail fins on cars is too old to be driving and should go back to a horse. An architecture analogy is something incredibly cluttered looking like gothic or victorian architecture is the only way to design a house and anyone who wants clean modernist design is aesthetically wrong and should go away. Cars and houses are supposed to be ugly and pointlessly expensive and cluttered looking and anyone who disagrees is inherently wrong because, um, well just because they're noobs to cars and houses.

The advantage of freebsd is its design aesthetic is dramatically superior to the linux design aesthetic. Its devs have better taste in OS style. As a side effect that makes it easier to use and more productive and more noob friendly, but thats merely a side effect.

[digi_owl]

Sure, the mount may be udisks job. But udisk will not do so unless pol(icy)kit gives the thumb up. And it will only do so if consolekit/logind verifies that the user has an active seat. And that in turn depends on the login/session manager doing its job.

All that do automate "mount /dev/sdb1".

[feld]

*Vogon poetry