Some pain in the neck, or why the hell a l(x)ubuntu 20.04 does boot from an xfs...
No, I'm not an almost-expert user of gnu+linux any more. I used to be in the era between 2.2 and 2.6, happily "running" RedHat and Slackware, doing some work and being almost the best among friends and co-workers, esp. in the art of making old pieces of junk PC actually work. Hence the phrase almost-expert. Which, looking back, I find offensive even to people nowadays regarded as "advanced users." And I don't think that doing the sysadmins' work makes sysadmins as such any better either.
Years passed and I found myself trying to code this or that in Fortran90, practicing some old-style C++, and suddenly having to dive into the world of .NET/C#, the latter strongly requiring using an IDE, which happens to be Visual Studio by Microsoft (I tried using Monodevelop but I can't stand its ridiculous cpu or gpu abuse). This was painful not just because the language itself is huge, but also because my parting with the MsWorld happened just before XP had been introduced. Colliding with Windows-10 is a lot of fun and anger. In a nutshell: it's infinitely times more stable than 98 and a bit more stupid-user-oriented (aka foolproof).
Recently I bought myfelf a new, non-second-hand notebook and went through a really painful procedure of trying to install a "lubuntu" there, keeping Win10. Trying to get this thing running from a jfs / partition results in a seemingly successful installation and then—bang!
grub>
and booting back from dvd, looking at partitions, their flags and what not... Next try: reiserfs. The installation failed at the stage at which it was supposed to: installation of the bootloader. This happened after I read that jfs is a risk if one tries to make it a root filesystem with grub2. Maybe. I'm a LILO guy, after some 10 years with Slackware... Finally—trying to read, copy/paste and try various "solutions", and doing work under Windows, async and tasks is what they call it...—I selected an xfs for a root partition. It did boot, I don't know why, but I'm (almost) happy with lubuntu 20.04 LTS. "I don't know why" being the painful and shameful part of the whole fun...
Don't tell me to RTFM. I've been there. I used to (sometimes in a bullying or hateful manner) advocate this approach, having myself once mastered (more or less) the basics of "administration" of my workstation completely from manuals and trial and error. I even used to laugh at and ridicule the early *-buntu movement, with lots of mentally-lazy kids asking the most basic questions, lots of times... RTFM used to be my answer. In my opinion, the new installation dialog for Lubuntu is just fucked up. Try to do partitioning and set the "esp" flag for a partition—good luck. In fact, kde-partition manager doesn't seem to allow that either, I had to install gparted. Warning about the lack of Internet connection—oh my dear, what am I supposed to do now... connect, and all of a sudden I see it all translated to my native tongue, something that I didn't ask for. And the funniest of all—while experimenting with reiserfs, the bootloader was the first there to be installed. Or, the installer is written in such a way, that when grub-install fails, it wipes away the would-be root partition. Nice one.
Criticizing institution like Canonical is easy, and the criticism may be (and should be) well-grounded. No, I'm not your everyday *buntu-kid, I don't request people's help on the Net (although I read the other people getting advice there, since all the questions are already there, most often with answers) and I did donate to Canonical a few times, and to Wikipedia and Mozilla as well). I don't think I paid that much so as to have any right to demand their high-quality service. But why did they fuck up a distribution that worked for me like a charm in the 18.04 LTS version? My native language has a proverb which literally translated would sound like "the better is the enemy of the good". Or—if it works, don't touch it...
PS You really have to forgive me my English; it's really rusty nowadays and it has never been polished enough. It used to be fluent in the past though. And never close to decent from the point of view of grammar.
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