Has Modern Linux Lost Its Way? (Some Thoughts on Jessie)

102

For years, I used to run Debian sid (unstable) on all my personal machines. Laptops, workstations, sometimes even my personal servers years ago ran sid. Sid was, as its name implies, unstable. 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. It was the price I paid for the latest and greatest.

For the last number of months, I’ve dealt with a small but annoying issue in jessie: None of Nautilus, Thunar, or digikam (yes, that represents Gnome, XFCE, and KDE) can mount USB drives I plug in anymore. I just get “Not authorized to perform operation.” I can, of course, still mount -o uid=1000 /dev/sdc1 /mnt, but I miss the convenience of doing it this way.

One jessie system I switched to systemd specifically to get around this problem. It worked, but I don’t know why. I haven’t had the time to switch my workstation, and frankly I am concerned about it.

Read more at The Changelog.