I’m doing this little extra feature because I ran into several news items over the past week or so that made me say “what the hell?” out loud to my monitor.
Fedora To Get a New Partition Manager. All? Almost all? Linux distributions use gparted, which is open source and can be updated. Why not add to that? Also, it’s yet another preannouncement about how this new replacement tool will work – it’s not functional yet.
Text streams should be the fallback interface in Unix. Every 2 or 3 years someone gets this idea in some form – somehow it doesn’t overcome 40+ years of text usage.
Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems. Nobody can find fault with ideas like easier package management and signing. (Though maybe having the same upgrade mechanism for base + 3rd party software isn’t a good idea) However. this answer, coming from part of the group behind systemd, ties all software installation into having a btrfs volume – even requiring a virtual btrfs volume if there isn’t one installed. Incompatible software versions are dealt with by turning /usr into a sort of container. That kills any sort of need to interoperate with other software. And of course it assumes there is no Unix but Linux. (via)
Grump grump grump.
The new partition manager is actually kind of reasonable. Gparted can’t deal with things like LVM volumes and RAID. They already have a library for that stuff from their installer and are now writing a GUI for it.
Seems like Linux distros are heavily developing solutions for server systems with higher and higher level of automation (in terms of provisioning and centralized/externalized configuration management). Looking at it from a 3rd party Linux software developer it’s all good, but when I think of my own Linux workstation and its administration, I can not think “why does all of this need deprecating”.
I am not hostile to the idea that Fedora brings up new tool for partitioning the disk. I prefer to use the FreeBSD gpart. The GNU parted is not nice to me.
So, of course these new tools do not work as expected when they are new, it is like with the new anaconda, back then it was unstable and almost unusable, now it works quite well, although some ppl are still reporting trouble with it. It is some improvement, but also a shame that GNU/Linux ppl are not able to provide a tool that can handle GPT partition table nearly as good/easy/functional as FreeBSD gpart does.