Linux too fragile, coming home to Solarish again. Linux ZFS problematic.
by kebabbert from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5B32Q)
I have now tried Ubuntu LTS for a couple of years, but I had too many problems to stay on Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu LTS is soooo fragile. It pushes out updates frequently, and when I accept the updates, there is a good chance that it breaks something. I usually accept all updates on Ubuntu LTS but that is not a good strategy I have learned.
(In my experience Windows update is way more stable than Ubuntu LTS. For instance, I had yesterday a large Win10 update "This current version of W10 you are using is soon to expire, please accept this big update" - or something similar. I accepted and after 15 min of working the update caused a blue screen. But W10 immediately backed out and restored everything so W10 works fine again. No problems.)
Later I tried the latest Ubuntu, not a LTS distro. And it was even worse. More fragile and more problems. Now I am using Ubuntu 2020.10, and it is more polished, but more fragile. Every time I basically had to reinstall to fix the problems. Here are some problems I had with Ubuntu.
1) Graphics. I accepted an update and the graphics went from 1440p down to 480p. I tried to fix it, and posted questions on forum, but no one knew how to fix it. I guess it was an update changing from Nvidia driver to open source Noveua driver? I dont know, but it was unusable at 480p. Finally I reinstalled Ubuntu and did not accept updates. It did not work to rollback and try an older Kernel update, because the graphics did overwrite the global settings - or something.
2) Lag. For several versions of Ubuntu, my PC was unusable because of heavy lag. It felt like 1-2 fps or so. I suspect the lag had something to do with Spectre Meltdown Intel bug patches? I had to stay on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for several years.
3) ZFS. I have an old SSD disk formatted with Solaris 11 ZFS. It worked fine with Ubuntu. Except. Everytime I boot Ubuntu, it adds an entry to "zpool history":
zpool import -c /etc/zfs/zpool.cache -aN
So I have now over 300 lines in the history. Will it grow to 1,000 lines? Or 10,000 lines? Solaris 11 never added those meaningless entries.
And worse. I yesterday installed Solaris 11.3 and guess what? Solaris refuses to import this ZFS disk. The disk is "unavaible" and weird. I thought that Ubuntu ZFS was compatible with Solaris 11 ZFS? But it is not. I have a large JBOD ZFS3 raid which I access with a LSI2008 SAS card. For several years I was hesitant to try to access my ZFS raid with Ubuntu, suspecting that Ubuntu ZFS would break my raid, so I never tried it out. In hindsight, I made the right decision. There would be a chance that Linux would break my ZFS raid rendering it totally unusable with Solaris 11 or another OS using ZFS.
WARNING! Linux ZFS might render your Solaris ZFS disks incompatible!
OTOH, Solaris 11 has been rock solid through all the years. All updates worked fine, never caused any problems. If I messed up something, I just did a rollback with ZFS "beadm" and the system was back to the previous working state just fine. I now had enough of Linux. I heard that Ubuntu LTS is among the most stable distros, and other distros are even more fragile. Maybe RedHat/CentOS is more stable, because it uses old versions of the software? I dont know. But my experiments with Linux is now over. I gave it a couple of years and there were way more problems than Windows. Windows just works. Just like Solaris. I am now going to install OpenIndiana I think? I heard it is similar to Ubuntu, but a Solaris kernel. That sounds fine. I look forward to a simple rollback of the system if something messes up. Just what I am used to.
Anyone have good experience of OpenIndiana? Or other Solarish distro?
(In my experience Windows update is way more stable than Ubuntu LTS. For instance, I had yesterday a large Win10 update "This current version of W10 you are using is soon to expire, please accept this big update" - or something similar. I accepted and after 15 min of working the update caused a blue screen. But W10 immediately backed out and restored everything so W10 works fine again. No problems.)
Later I tried the latest Ubuntu, not a LTS distro. And it was even worse. More fragile and more problems. Now I am using Ubuntu 2020.10, and it is more polished, but more fragile. Every time I basically had to reinstall to fix the problems. Here are some problems I had with Ubuntu.
1) Graphics. I accepted an update and the graphics went from 1440p down to 480p. I tried to fix it, and posted questions on forum, but no one knew how to fix it. I guess it was an update changing from Nvidia driver to open source Noveua driver? I dont know, but it was unusable at 480p. Finally I reinstalled Ubuntu and did not accept updates. It did not work to rollback and try an older Kernel update, because the graphics did overwrite the global settings - or something.
2) Lag. For several versions of Ubuntu, my PC was unusable because of heavy lag. It felt like 1-2 fps or so. I suspect the lag had something to do with Spectre Meltdown Intel bug patches? I had to stay on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for several years.
3) ZFS. I have an old SSD disk formatted with Solaris 11 ZFS. It worked fine with Ubuntu. Except. Everytime I boot Ubuntu, it adds an entry to "zpool history":
zpool import -c /etc/zfs/zpool.cache -aN
So I have now over 300 lines in the history. Will it grow to 1,000 lines? Or 10,000 lines? Solaris 11 never added those meaningless entries.
And worse. I yesterday installed Solaris 11.3 and guess what? Solaris refuses to import this ZFS disk. The disk is "unavaible" and weird. I thought that Ubuntu ZFS was compatible with Solaris 11 ZFS? But it is not. I have a large JBOD ZFS3 raid which I access with a LSI2008 SAS card. For several years I was hesitant to try to access my ZFS raid with Ubuntu, suspecting that Ubuntu ZFS would break my raid, so I never tried it out. In hindsight, I made the right decision. There would be a chance that Linux would break my ZFS raid rendering it totally unusable with Solaris 11 or another OS using ZFS.
WARNING! Linux ZFS might render your Solaris ZFS disks incompatible!
OTOH, Solaris 11 has been rock solid through all the years. All updates worked fine, never caused any problems. If I messed up something, I just did a rollback with ZFS "beadm" and the system was back to the previous working state just fine. I now had enough of Linux. I heard that Ubuntu LTS is among the most stable distros, and other distros are even more fragile. Maybe RedHat/CentOS is more stable, because it uses old versions of the software? I dont know. But my experiments with Linux is now over. I gave it a couple of years and there were way more problems than Windows. Windows just works. Just like Solaris. I am now going to install OpenIndiana I think? I heard it is similar to Ubuntu, but a Solaris kernel. That sounds fine. I look forward to a simple rollback of the system if something messes up. Just what I am used to.
Anyone have good experience of OpenIndiana? Or other Solarish distro?