Tag: ff0000

upgrading to linux mint version 21.3 “virginia”

whbeebe2 Comments
neofetch showing Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia

The great upgrade from Linux Mint v 21.2 to v 21.3 occurred early this morning while I was fixing breakfast. I get up early to open the house, and check on the creatures as well as my machines. I found the notice to upgrade on the Linux Mint Upgrade Manager, so I just kicked it off while I finished my morning chores. So far nothing is amiss, and if you sat me in front of two systems, one running 21.2 and one running 21.3, I wouldn’t be able to tell the two apart unless I cheated (cat /etc/os-release). And that, for me, is a wonderful thing. I’ve grown rather conservative about allowing change in my primary computer platforms. It would appear I’m in good company (in a way);

Just a note that I’m currently bisecting into this merge for a horrendous performance regression.

It makes my empty kernel build go from 22 seconds to 44 seconds, and makes a full kernel build enormously slower too.
…
This is on a 32-core (64-thread) AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, fwiw.

This from Linus Torvalds. As the author of the Phoronix article notes, Linus is still “rocking” a Ryzen Threadripper system from four-going-on-five years ago, something the author finds surprising. I don’t think it’s surprising at all. After the high cost of moving to new hardware, there’s the equally high cost of time invested in the system to get it work the way you are comfortable with. And finally, you get to know that system and how it’s supposed to work; when something doesn’t work quite right you instinctively know and can start looking for what’s wrong, which Linus did.

Anyway, the update is now on the system and everything works just fine as it did before (so far).

Links

Linux Mint New Features — https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_virginia_whatsnew.php

Linus Torvalds Hits Nasty Performance Regression With Early Linux 6.8 Code — https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-Sched-Regression

AMD Threadripper 3970X and 3960X Review: High-End Domination — https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-threadripper-3970x-review

why apple makes me mad

whbeebe

There is a video of Ken Thompson on YouTube (yes, I know about NoTube November and what I said; I haven’t back slid) where he announces he’s walking away from Apple and going to Linux, specifically Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi. The video is below at the proper location in his talk, so you can listen to it now if you want.

I bring up Ken Thompson’s talk because today I was reminded of why he said he was leaving Apple in that talk. After starting Visual Studio Code on my brand new M1 Max MacBook Pro I attempted to check for VS Code updates and was gobsmacked with the following error dialog:

Visual Studio Code Quarantine Message

Look in the lower right corner at the dialog with the red circled ‘X’ about running on a read-only volume. There’s a link to mitigate the issue, but the the statement that “This might mean the application was put on quarantine by macOS” just royally pisses me off. This is the very first time I’ve been hit with the “quarantine application” issue on macOS, but not the first time I’ve run into a show-stopping problem on macOS that shouldn’t have happened.

I followed the link in the message, and based on the post I performed the following to get things straightened out.

sudo chown $USER Library/Caches/com.microsoft.VSCode.ShipItxattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app

My VSCode is located locally in my account folder, not under global /Applications. I’m sure that chown isn’t needed, but still it’s good to have around. Once those changes were made, I quite VSCode and restarted it via Launchpad as always, then checked again for updates, and it worked just fine (VSCode was already up to date anyway).

It’s obstacles thrown up like that that make developers like me who actually know how to get work done want to just walk away from Apple. I’m sure Apple will point to XCode, but I don’t want to develop with XCode because I do a lot of wide-ranging work well beyond Apple and macOS. It’s not as bad as Microsoft, who have basically driven me away from Windows permanently with their shenanigans with regards to Windows 11. But it’s getting close. If it gets bad enough I may indeed contemplate migrating to Asahi Linux; that’s another reason why I chose this M1 Max over a later version of Apple Silicon; Asahi Linux was originally developed on, and for, the M1.

Links

Code won’t update on macOS #7426 — https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/7426