Keep it polite, folks. No personal attacks against others, especially speculations regarding mental or emotional capabilities.
I honestly think the whole Linux community should be reading that sub rather than acting like Linux is perfect. Right now desktop Linux is for very tech savvy people who are willing to put in the time to learn and fix, and it’s for their grandmas who only need a web browser and maybe a word processor. Anyone who thinks differently needs to get their head out of the sand. I use Fedora.
Most Linux haters have skill issue. I mean you can apply a complete Windows-mimicking skin to Ubuntu or Mint and use that
Omg the downvotes in that community 🤣
I love how he complains about being “brigaded” when the most comments on any post in the community is like 8.
The community definitely has been brigaded though, as every single post (except one that is negative to Microsoft) has been downvoted to oblivion.
‘Brigading’ would be if pro-Linux communities were organizing to specifically target another community.
The fediverse is likely to attract the kinds of people interested in Linux in the first place, and all the negative attention that community attracts comes organically.
I talked with the user a bit in Linux_vs_Windows before they were booted from the community, and it’s my opinion that they just have a hate-boner going for Linux. It’s possible to have valid criticism of Linux, but they go way past legitimate and straight into obsession territory. They tend to post in that community daily. So their points aren’t exactly great (though sometimes they hit on a good meme) and they get the points they get naturally.
It’s not a conspiracy, their arguments just tend to be shit.
In A UEFI World, “rm -rf /” Can Brick Your System
efivars are made read only by the kernel. That firmware bug (!) was worked around in the kernel years ago.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/filesystems/efivarfs.rst
Specifically in 2016: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ed8b0de5a33d2a2557dce7f9429dca8cb5bc5879
uefi is cringe anyway, reject uefi and return to grub in the system firmware
Firmware is one step before.
BIOS, UEFI, coreboot, or whatever weird code runs on a Raspberry Pi’s GPU to load your system, those are firmwares.
The firmware is what starts your bootloader; grub, BOOTMGR, u-boot, etc
even if my grub is in the system eeprom?
Oh I’ve never heard of such a setup. But that does muddy the lines a bit, I can see the argument for calling it part of firmware then.
yeah it’s goofy, you can embed grub in coreboot cbfs and load straight into it, skipping the bios/uefi stage. it’s a bit difficult to set up (and you need coreboot supported hardware) but when you get it working the boot times become really quick
i just realised though that you can embed Linux into cbfs as well, does that then mean that Linux could be my kernel and firmware at the same time?
you can embed grub in coreboot cbfs and load straight into it, skipping the bios/uefi stage.
Why would someone do that? *keeps reading*
boot times become really quick
Now I almost want to try it out.
Wow very cool. Thanks for that link, I had no idea coreboot was so flexible!
rm -rf /can brick your systemWell good thing there’s basically no legitimate reason to ever even use
rm -rf /anyway so GNU version is perfectly within its rights to refuse to do that by default, am I right? If you know what you’re doing and want to nuke partitions, that’s whatcfdiskandmkfsare for, dammitYeah like so could deleting system32, and there were plenty of memes about that also.
‘Bricked’ in this sense meaning not that you’d just trash your OS and need a reinstall, but that it could actually stop your computer from booting at all. So the system32 analogy doesn’t exactly fit.
It’s because some motherboards implement UEFI in a way that allows important variables to be overwritten by I/O processes. Executing
sudo rm -rf /*would recursively go into the EFI parameters folder where the kernel mounts EFI variables and attempt to delete things. Some motherboards allowed these delete operations to remove things in the motherboard’s firmware it needs to complete POST, thus rendering the motherboard useless.But that’s a problem with the motherboard, not with Linux or Windows. The same damage can be caused by Windows.
So that meme reminds me of a prank.
There was once I had the same exact laptop as a buddy, but wasn’t using it anymore. He was finishing his degree and just about to turn in like 8 papers/assignments and had a ton of work saved on it. So I wiped my laptop and installed fresh Kubuntu, and then swapped the drives when he wasn’t looking. Then I pretended to have done him a favor since he had been having intermittent windows problems.
He was livid but was trying so hard to be kind, loool. Made it better when I could swap it right back and everything was there
That prank is so mischievous.
It was so good because I could be as rotten as I wanted, there was zero lasting harm. He immediately forgave me and found it amazing once he booted up the original drive and made sure it was all good
When I removed the knife from his throat he immediately assured me that he didn’t have any grievances whatsoever.
That was just a huge dick move.
Maybe if afterwards I showed him the knife was made of painted wood, blunted completely, and I snuck a throat protector in his turtleneck.
I did more things like checking a windows install on my laptop first, and cloning his drive off before I pulled it.
We would regularly pull pranks on each other, the rule was it couldn’t cause lasting harm. This fit well within that, and he got me at least as good multiple times. One of my best friends, ever
Your lack of empathy is appalling. Not your fault, but it’s not considered normal to not understand that stressing out someone is really bad. It’s a psycopathic trait, check this out.
And here we have the reason why online psychological diagnosis is considered malpractice, especially over text in a single session
I’m a highly empathetic person, to the point it causes me difficulties in life, especially in male relationships. I did this specific prank because I knew he personally would love it and he was already highly stressed and needed a break. It worked out great, both for our friendship and his college career.
But thanks for the completely useless, unfounded, and insulting armchair diagnosis. Perhaps in the future your time might be better spent figuring out your compulsive need to prove yourself right and the best understander of a situation despite having almost no requisite knowledge
Seems I got under your skin lol.
So what’s the benefit of temporarily putting your friend in distress? What got better as a result of you scaring them?
Um, our relationship? Have you ever had friends where you prank each other? The trust it engenders when you show you can play in that space but still not cause any lasting harm pulls people closer. At least it has in my experience. He’s one of my best friends ever
If someone who I considered a friend pulled that kind of stunt with me I would have one fewer friend. Screwing with people is rude and it’s plain bully behavior when you know they’re stressed and you mess around with a thing that is cruicial for them. You had fun at someone else’s expense.
Or maybe I know my friends better than you do after reading a quick story.
Idk man, maybe if this was the first time we did anything in this realm I could see that, but it’s an established part of our relationship. We trust each other. And maybe some levity with no real stakes actually helped lighten his stress during a difficult time, and that was the whole point? He was spiraling a bit and wouldn’t take a break, so just a bit of fun helped him chill and refocus, IMHO.
He graduated cum laude so I think it all worked out pretty well. I think you need to chill a bit and not assume you know everything about everyone after like 3 lines of text
linux is terrible because removing the entire root folder can brick your system it should be more like windows where removing system32 can brick your system
The mention of UEFI in this context likely means they are thinking of a deletion recursing through sysfs and by extension deleting all visible UEFI variables which, in some firmware editions and versions, causes it not to be able to get through post or into the setup menu.
I vaguely recall this and the general issue was very bad firmware design, but it was possible to make it impossible to even reinstall a system. If you were industrious in windows you could have done the same thing, so malware under windows could also brick such platforms.
Of course rm has more safeguards on it so you have to pass more flags and really really be asking it to try to screw things up.
Nice to know.
So, I would assume the firmware gave write access to a part of permanent memory, critical to starting the system.
I feel like that would be someone like me, thinking of it as a feature and giving the possible values for those variables in the readme. And of course, who reads the readme even though it says “READ ME”?
UEFI defines a structured way to have data shared with OS as read write variables, including the ability to create, modify, and delete variables that UEFI can see.
However, some firmware used this facility to store values and then their code assumed the variables would always be there. The code would then crash when it goes to read a deleted variable and not know what to do. The thing is deleting those variables per spec is a perfectly valid the due the OS to do, but firmware was buggy and the bugs not caught because normally OS would not bother those variables except for a few standard popular ones, like boot order.
So flashing the firmware would “solve” the issue? As in, it should rewrite the variables missing (and everything else), making the hardware usable again?
Generally speaking, these platforms are not flashable unless they can boot a flash utility, assuming that whatever prior firmware is running is at least in good enough shape to boot to an update environment.
There are designs to be robust and accessible even in the face of all this, but relatively rare, effectively unheard of in laptop market. Even some of those emergency recovery environments may be more limited than you would like to repair this sort of thing.
I see, in that case, that would not be someone like me :P as I tend to care about specifications.
This is a really useful explanation for someone who doesn’t know about the UEFI spec.
