Author Topic: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful  (Read 45171 times)

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Offline rhbTopic starter

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Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« on: November 12, 2018, 11:33:01 pm »
If you do not recognize the allusion in the subject line or know what an allusion is, *please* just skip this.  I don't really have the patience to deal with the rampant ignorance of millenials.  I fully realize that it is not your fault.  You have been conned by an educational system that is only interested in serving the interests of the faculty and staff.  But it is a major impediment to communication.

I have used more different non-*nix operating systems, more different Unix versions and more Linux versions than I can count without spending a day or two counting them.

My normal environment has been SunOS/Solaris/OpenIndiana for 26 years. I stick with it because it has a tradition of being very conservative about change.  The traditional Unix mindset.

Back in the days of the workstation wars, I ported a 500,000 line VAX FORTRAN package from VMS to SunOs, Intergraph CLIX, SGI IRIX, DEC Ultrix, HP-UX and IBM AIX.  Except for SGI and DEC everyone had a different processor and SGI was big endian while Ultrix was little endian. In those days my .login and .cshrc figured out what I was on and interposed a compatibility  layer to deal with the variations.  I also dealt with strange things like Intel i386 and i860 Hypercubes, Alliants and other now long dead systems.

Gnu/Linux has become just like Windows.  Every release means a new UI, new options to old commands and the removal of old options for those commands. So that complex admin script you wrote no longer works and you're lucky if it doesn't trash your system after you do an update.

We now live in a world where, despite a largely shared codebase, every version of Linux uses a different boot initialization, different UI and completely different utilities, often with the same name, but completely different behavior.  The early Gnu programmers were traditional Unix users.  Adding a feature was OK, but altering existing options, syntax and semantics was "simply not done".

Now the Gnu/Linux crowd have no more qualms about changing *everything* than Microsoft.  Heaven help you if you do an accidental update such as Win 7 to Win 10.  If your system still boots you're facing several months of relearning basic stuff.

I'm working with embedded dev tools and finding a Linux distro that all of them support is simply not possible.  After messing with VMs I'm going back to just swapping hard drives.

It is the most horrible impediment to productivity and general waste of time I can imagine.

I have read extensively the history of computing from the 1930's and 40's to date and was a player in it for the last 40 years.  I have seen the same mistakes repeated so many times it fills me with despair.

I don't care *who* your are.  You are *not* the smartest person in the room.  Human knowledge at this date is far larger than anyone can absorb.

So *please* if you work on programs which have their roots in AT&T/BSD Unix, don't break existing behavior.
 

Offline bd139

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #1 on: November 12, 2018, 11:53:12 pm »
LOL I have had that rant a hundred times in the last decade. Although I think the root cause was actually GNU itself.

Recently the downward spiral started with Freedesktop and the whole gnome3 fork crap. Then Redhat and Poettering came in and took a dump in the middle of the init process under the guise of modernisation and left us with Windows NT event log, service manager with DCOM tying it all together badly. Then everyone went container and cloud mad and now it's all bare metal Linux kernel with static linked binaries and sharecropping with the cloud vendor of the hour (which goes down more often then my sister-in-law's underwear) all orchestrated with a pile of shit written by some dudes who correctly answered how many tennis balls can you get in a school bus.

But let's got a little further back. This stinker started before all this with GNU products. What happened is someone had a userland (Stallman) and someone had a Kernel (Linus) and glued them together with poop, straw and sticky tape. GNU products are generall buggy as hell, sometimes absolutely crazily badly implemented and have so many incompatible extensions that Stallman's vendor lock in comments are nothing but raging comedic hypocrisy.

The FreeBSD and OpenBSD users (and the few remaining NetBSD users) are sitting there watching the world burn around them, carefully extracting themselves from this mire through using decent engineering and slow and methodical removal of GNU and Linuxisms.

The morals are "think before you do" (this is how GNU got where it is now) and "don't let one vendor hire the entire ecosystem's developers" (this is how Redhat got where it is now).

I hope IBM does its usual job with RH and leaves us with FreeBSD on the server where we can have ZFS, MAC, ethernet drivers without excrement splattered all over them and cohesive system utilities, recovery and manual pages.  :-DD

This drunken rant was brought to you via cheapo wine :)
« Last Edit: November 12, 2018, 11:54:49 pm by bd139 »
 
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Offline djacobow

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #2 on: November 13, 2018, 12:03:52 am »
I feel you, but most of the thrashing seems to be on the graphical doodad side of things. I keep my head down and keep to writing CLI software that reads and writes from files and sockets, and life proceeds mostly smoothly.

And I'm almost afraid to say this, but I never liked the rc style init systems, and think that systemd is mostly ok. There are things about it that sucks, such as weird access to logs, but how easy it is to properly daemonize just about anything is very pleasant.

I do agree about VMs, though. I find them much more trouble than they're worth for a desktop system. I bought a doohickey for my puter that allows me to turn on or off the power for a bunch of hard drives with real clicky switches. I just select the drive (and consequently, OS) I want to use today, and I don't deal with VMs, or dual booting for that matter. Simple and easy.

PS -- this is also the reason I don't use IDEs. All the millenials think it's insane that I go without the niceties that IDEs provide (and there are some niceties, indeed) but I just got tired of learning one after another for what seemed like no reason at all. I'm going to stick with vi and make until you pry them from my cold, dead hands. (Actually, I do use vim, so I guess I'm not a purist!)


 
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Online nctnico

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #3 on: November 13, 2018, 12:10:50 am »
The early Gnu programmers were traditional Unix users.  Adding a feature was OK, but altering existing options, syntax and semantics was "simply not done".
I think you are describing the first 2 seconds of GNU / Linux here. Linux is notoriously bad at keeping existing behaviour. If you want to have any chance of creating a Linux application which works on any distribution you have to ship it will a full set of libraries (or link statically) otherwise it simply won't work. Look at Firefox for example. It comes with a full pack of libraries. The whole concept of shared libraries is flawed from the start and it just wastes space instead of saving it.
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 

Offline rhbTopic starter

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #4 on: November 13, 2018, 12:17:29 am »
Much of the rant was related to the surplus of system update utilities, all alike, but with different names, options, etc.

 

Offline djacobow

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #5 on: November 13, 2018, 12:35:09 am »
Much of the rant was related to the surplus of system update utilities, all alike, but with different names, options, etc.

Every time I run apt (that's the flavor of the day for me) from a non-interactive terminal, I get the follow warning:

Code: [Select]
WARNING : apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.
And I think to my self the same thing every time: "F*k, you! You folks need to pull yourselves together and iron that the f*k out because the rest of us need to get on with our lives and do not have time to babysit goddamned package managers."

Seriously, who is responsible for that sh*t and what is wrong with them?

 

Online nctnico

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #6 on: November 13, 2018, 12:59:39 am »
Seriously, who is responsible for that sh*t and what is wrong with them?
Programmer's remorse: a piece of software can always be improved! Some programmers just can't stop working on a piece of software.
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 

Offline rjp

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #7 on: November 13, 2018, 01:21:12 am »
I mostly stick to debian/armbian for headless machines  that require consistency or  stability.

dont have anything to complain about, I consider it a feature that the different distro's experiment with different things and if you want stable, pick the distro that chooses to be stable.
 
 

Offline BradC

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #8 on: November 13, 2018, 01:33:52 am »
Gnu/Linux has become just like Windows.

Actually while I pretty much agree with the gist of your rant, I don't think you could be further from the truth with regards to the quote above.
Windows is a single monolith that in most ways values backwards compatibility over pretty much everything else. Sure over the last 10 or so years they have progressively altered and supplemented their GUI API, but still maintaining backwards compatibility.

Various Linux distributions and associated software stacks have exploded in different directions, completely disregarding backward compatibility (or even compatibility between stacks). People jump on whatever the latest "shiny thing" is with complete disregard for the way things have been done in the past with the consequential issues associated with having done it that way for a reason.

Harry Spencer said it best : "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

As far as Linux goes, I'm a bit of a newbie. I started with Debian 2.x in 1995. Since then I've dselect upgraded, then apt-get dist-upgraded my way to the last-1 distribution until the point where Debian chose systemd (not an argument I want to get into). Until that point everything I ran had a relatively stable interface. I swung across to devuan and apt-get dist-upgraded my way across and things continued to run the way I always ran them. You *can* find stability, you just have to go looking for it.

My conspiracy theory of the day is the churn is generally promoted by the companies that make their money selling support. If things were stable and just worked they'd not have to sell as much support, so it's in their best interest to keep things brittle, fragile and a moving target.
 

Offline rhbTopic starter

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #9 on: November 13, 2018, 01:35:01 am »
As I see it, there are two problems:

No one takes responsibility for anything.  They just want credit.  The Mr. Rogers "you're special" generation.

Almost no one working on any of it has any knowledge of or experience with Unix or *any* other system except Windows and OS X.

The Gnu tools were immensely valuable 20 years ago, especially if you had to deal with everything anyone made.  I threatened to epoxy my NCD to the desk if they didn't keep giving me new hardware with new keyboards.

Now you have a bastard version of Larry Wall's configure.  It was needed then, but now that justification is gone.  My biggest complaint is Octave which I used for many years.  It cannot be compiled on Solaris because the autoconf crap is so screwed up.  At one time, the bug report form listed Windows, Mac, BSD and Linux.  As far as they were  concerned there were *no* other operating systems.  The complete opposite of Larry.

I spent over a week full time trying to make Octave compile and failed.  Not because of issues with the source code, but because the build was broken and Octave blamed autoconf and autoconf blamed Octave.  R is as large and complex as Octave and it built fine.  But the Octave folks would not take ownership of the issue.  I'd known John Eaton for a long time and was extremely unhappy with the new attitude.

For context, I had three contracts which involved taking over an aggregate  total of about 2 million lines of code that would not compile as given to me and fixing it.  On one contract which was about 750K lines I left for another job after about 3 years at which time I told my supervisor they should delete it all.  But I left it all in RCS with very detailed build instructions, a single script did everything.  I was quite horrified when a couple of years later I was asked to help them compile it.  IIRC they could not even find the source code and hoped I had taken a copy which was something prohibited by my contract terms and hence would never do.  They had been bought by another oil company and apparently the IT staff was not very good at their jobs.

My big issue in all this is dealing with embedded MCU & FPGA  toolchains.  So far, I have to use a different distro for each toolchain.

Scott McNeally killed Sun with absurd change of control bonuses, so instead of IBM buying Sun Oracle did.  Whether Solaris survives is an open question.  I don't see the very thin support of Illumos lasting more than a few more years.
 

Offline sokoloff

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #10 on: November 13, 2018, 02:47:15 am »
It seems like most of the heat in this rant is properly directed at the distribution vendors, not at Linux (the kernel) or (most of) gnu utilities.
 

Offline Marco

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #11 on: November 13, 2018, 03:42:44 am »
My biggest complaint is Octave which I used for many years.  It cannot be compiled on Solaris because the autoconf crap is so screwed up.

Would you say Autoconf is such a mess that it would be worthwhile transitioning to something newer like CMake? :)
 

Offline thermistor-guy

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #12 on: November 13, 2018, 04:46:38 am »
It seems like most of the heat in this rant is properly directed at the distribution vendors, not at Linux (the kernel) or (most of) gnu utilities.

I'm building and using my ATE/calibration system using GNU tools: Octave, gawk, nc, ssh. My system is CLI-based, so I know what's going on, and so it runs smoothly on lightweight hosts like rpis and old laptops. Just recently I've automated much of my testing/calibration process using makefiles (make clean; make config; make run; make postrun; make report). The GNU tools, and Linux, have been a godsend.

My focus is thermometry (resistance and optical). Not ready to post any work here yet, but getting close.
 

Offline bd139

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #13 on: November 13, 2018, 07:41:32 am »
My biggest complaint is Octave which I used for many years.  It cannot be compiled on Solaris because the autoconf crap is so screwed up.

Would you say Autoconf is such a mess that it would be worthwhile transitioning to something newer like CMake? :)

CMake is even worse.

Just make. All you need is make. And a clue stick.
 

Offline borjam

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #14 on: November 13, 2018, 09:22:31 am »
How to begin? My journey is similar to yours :)

I was using Unix systems almost exclusively since 1990 more or less. At work I had to suffer the utterly crappy OS/2 doing software development on it but at the University I used SunOS, later Solaris, and at home I had SCO Unix just because I couldn't afford a Sun workstation. Still it was so much better than using Windows.

I remember I had read a series of articles on Dr. Dobb's Journal describing a BSD port to i386.

So. In 1994 or so a friend called me so excited. He had just purchased a magazine with a CD attached. And it had a Linux system. He was having issues to install it and he needed help. I always refused to help with Windows issues but of course this was different. Or not.

There I went. He had messed up something. As he didn't have any meaningful data yet I just reinstalled everything. And wow, what a crappy experience. His hard disk was small, like 200 MB or less, so it couldn't fit everything. I selected the "choose packages individuaally". And that's where hell broke loose. It prompted me wether I wanted diff, make, and a Klingon font for TeX. All of them were packages in the same class. No "operating system" to choose. I remember I had criticized SCO because TCP/IP was optional, NFS was optional, this was crap on steroids!

After an hour answering to Y/n prompts (orders of magnitude worse than inserting 30 5.25 floppies) we had an installed system. Still I was amazed by the level of stupidity. Broken commands such as netstat or ifconfig. Even the System V and BSD camp agreed on them. Not Linux, they pretended to reinvent them. Score so far: crap.

A month later another friend purchased an "Yggdrassil" or something like that distribution. Easier to install but I fell on my ass when, as root, I had a look at the environment variables and PATH was like half the 80x24 screen. Crap again.

And so, in 1995, I learned of something called FreeBSD. I ordered a CD and I tried it once it arrived. Wow! That was the Real Thingâ„¢. Everything was so smooth. Source code installed under /usr/src, neatly organized. Having a friend's Linux system accept 8+ character logins for POP users had required a couple of hours of searching source code in a couple of CDs. It was so stupid, they had turned a CD into a bunch of tar.gz floppy equivalents.

At that time (FreeBSD 2.0.5) I decided that it was the way to go. And it still is, of course.

Where can I start to describe what's wrong with Linux?

Let me describe an example of extremely poor ingeniering done by teenagers in their boiling hormones.

Ethernet negotiation issues. There was a time when plugging twisted pair Ethernet (or Fast Ethernet) was a lottery. As a lottery you had a slim chance of winning, and often you ended up with a mismatched connection. Even in the early 2000s I remember there were plenty of mismatches in so many places. What percentage of the Fast Ethernet connections had a duplex mismatch problem? I remember even a Cisco 7200 connected to a Cisco Catalyst switch always malfunctioned.

At the end, it was easy to solve. Just force both sides to 100/full and problem solved. On FreeBSD it was trivial. ifconfig interface media 100basetx mediaopt full-duplex.

So, Linux? At first you had to fiddle with the source code of the driver and recompile the kernel. A whole surreal experience in which you had lots of useless settings but changing something as important as the equivalent of "maxusers" required editing a */*/*/*/*/*/*/obscure_name.h file. But I digress, so much aggravating idiocy!

Later ethtool arrived. But it was still crappy enginnering. The FreeBSD camp had done the right thing. By adding the media selection and negotiation settings to ifconfig (a core OS command) and adding the relevant functionality to the interface definition of a network interface they sort of forced implementors of device drivers to provide all the services. The result was, most network interfaces obeyed it nicely. Linux? ethtool was an additional package. Some interfaces supported it, most didn't. So it was another lottery.

So on Linux ifconfig served little purpose beyond setting up an IP address. Oh and it was part of a "package" too!

Some people may require an explanation to understand why that's so incredibily stupid, beyond the difference between adding negotiation control functionality to the device interface definition vs not mentioning it and adding a tweaking tool (ethertool) as an  afterthought.

Besides, this is old History. Mismatch problems are a thing of the past so I am an old grumpy guy complaining of a stone edge problem. Or am I? Remember that poor design decisions will keep biting you over and over, no matter how old they are!

Two years ago (yep, that was 2016) I had a problem at work. We were setting up a new "cloud" with Intel 10 GbE interfaces. And for some reason it wasn't possible to use LACP link aggregation with them. It didn't work on FreeBSD (used for storage using ZFS) nor Linux (used as a Xen host). Same problem?

So I begun attacking the problem on FreeBSD. A look at the LACP source code showed that it obeyed the RFC. It requires the interfaces to be full duplex. And indeed the code did it fine, before enabling an interfaces as a member of a LACP group it checked the interface status.

Code: [Select]
ix2: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=e407bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,TSO6,LRO,VLAN_HWTSO,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
ether 0c:c4:7a:X
nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
media: Ethernet autoselect (Unknown <rxpause,txpause>)
status: active

And there it was: media was Unknown. Amazing, because media should at least be something informative like:

Code: [Select]
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)

The funny thing is, the interface worked as a regular interface. Not so surprising after all.

Interlude: What does ifconfig do when showing that particular piece of information? It checks the interface table of the OS, so it reflects exactly how the OS sees the interface.


A 10 GbE is always full duplex but the OS won't assume it. So, transmitting a packet worked but LACP rightly refused to accept an interface not marked as full duplex.

With this information in hand and some suggestions from a FreeBSD committer I was able to chase the problem and identify a spaghetti problem in the Intel driver in charge of identifying the kind of SFP+ plugged. We were using passive DA cables and the spaghetti was confused by a mismatch of vendor specific hacks and the poor dual usage of a variable which was both "manufacturer info" and "interface kind". I was able to fix it so that now it works with DA cables.

ifconfig was so helpful I could even read the SFP+ configuration EEPROM.

Code: [Select]
borjam@nvme1:/usr/src/sys/dev/ixgbe % ifconfig -vvvvvv ix2
ix2: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=e407bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,TSO6,LRO,VLAN_HWTSO,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
ether 0c:c4:7a:X
nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
media: Ethernet autoselect (Unknown <rxpause,txpause>)
status: active
plugged: SFP/SFP+/SFP28 1X Copper Passive (Copper pigtail)
vendor: Intel Corp PN: XDACBL3M-C SN: XXXXXXXX DATE: 2016-05-26
Class: 1X Copper Passive
Length: short distance
Tech: Passive Cable
Media: Twin Axial Pair
Speed: 100 MBytes/sec

SFF8472 DUMP (0xA0 0..127 range):
03 04 21 01 00 00 04 41 84 80 D5 06 64 00 00 00
00 00 03 00 49 6E 74 65 6C 20 43 6F 72 70 20 20
20 20 20 20 00 00 1B 21 58 44 41 43 42 4C 33 4D
2D 43 20 20 20 20 20 20 43 20 20 20 00 00 00 61
00 00 00 00 4D 37 42 30 38 39 37 30 20 20 20 20
20 20 20 20 31 36 30 35 32 36 20 20 00 00 00 42
20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20
20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20

This helped a lot. When I finally fixed the problem ifconfig gave a meaningful and informative "media" description.

Code: [Select]
media: Ethernet autoselect (10Gbase-Twinax <full-duplex,rxpause,txpause>)

And once I reached this point LACP unsurprisingly started working like a charm :)

I know this is a bloody long and boring account, but it's a good way to describe the poor design "decisions" (I don't believe they are even decisions, just random and careless behavior)  that plague Linux.

Does ifconfig give that information on Linux? No.

What information does ethtool return? Does it read the OS interface description or does it query the driver, returning information that probably won't match the operating system state? Back to FreeBSD's ifconfig, we have both kinds of information which makes it easy to spot a mismatch.


Code: [Select]
media: Ethernet autoselect (Unknown <rxpause,txpause>)

and

Code: [Select]
plugged: SFP/SFP+/SFP28 1X Copper Active (Copper pigtail)
vendor: BROCADE PN: 58-1000027-01 SN: CBXXXXXXXXX DATE: 2009-12-11

The final photo, after fixing it, was this:

Code: [Select]
ix0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 9000 options=e407bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,TSO6,LRO,VLAN_HWTSO,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
ether 0c:c4:7a:X
nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
media: Ethernet autoselect (10Gbase-Twinax <full-duplex,rxpause,txpause>)
status: active
plugged: SFP/SFP+/SFP28 1X Copper Passive (Copper pigtail)
vendor: Intel Corp PN: XDACBL3M-C SN: XXXXXXX DATE: 2016-05-26

So, why is all this relevant? Because it illustrates good design in the BSD camp and it highlights a poor decision in Linux. These apparently subtle aspects make for a good design or utter crap. I have many examples but I cannot recall them now.

The worst thing is: Linux is being used as an example in many OS design courses. Amazingly it was written as an operational alternative to Minix. Minix was conceived as a teaching tool setting performance and functionality aside, while Linux was the opposite. And now the dirty hack has become the teaching tool of choice. To me it's like teaching Excel instead of programming and SQL instead of data structures.

I am sure most Linux users will not fully understand the relevance of this example and they will dismiss it as the complaints of a fastidious BSD idiot fanboy.

End of rant, congratulations if you didn't fall asleep!

 

Offline bd139

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #15 on: November 13, 2018, 09:49:29 am »
Haha. This is typical experience yes. And when Linux is broken, getting it fixed is nigh on impossible even if you pay DeadRat lots of money. And that doesn't even cover the crap you have to deal with on top of it with sytemd-networkd or even worse NetworkManager.

FreeBSD was a bit of a revelation. It just works.

Edit: forgot to mention. Had a fun 2 years of hell with Broadcom NIC drivers in a teaming configuration on an HL DL platform + CentOS 6 a while back. It'd just sit there and all network traffic would just stop suddenly every few hours. Eventually we had to stuff an Intel NIC in the box. That worked fine. That was the recommendation from Redhat as well  :palm: ... we don't know how to fix this so buy an Intel NIC. Sounds like 1998 again!
« Last Edit: November 13, 2018, 09:54:32 am by bd139 »
 

Online nctnico

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #16 on: November 13, 2018, 10:02:46 am »
Where can I start to describe what's wrong with Linux?
Nowhere. Everything goes smooth as long as you use a stable & well tested distribution in a PC with hardware which is supported by Linux (the latter is much less of an issue nowadays) and do a training so you know what you are doing. I've been running Linux servers at customers since around 1996 using Debian until I quit doing company networks. However before letting Linux loose on my customers I took a one day hands-on training on how to install and configure a Linux server. Even today Debian is one of the better distributions if you want to do serious work with Linux.
« Last Edit: November 13, 2018, 10:05:49 am by nctnico »
There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.
 

Offline borjam

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #17 on: November 13, 2018, 10:16:11 am »
Haha. This is typical experience yes. And when Linux is broken, getting it fixed is nigh on impossible even if you pay DeadRat lots of money. And that doesn't even cover the crap you have to deal with on top of it with sytemd-networkd or even worse NetworkManager.
Ahh yes, DeadRats. I have more amusing accounts of dealing with Linux admins struggling with trivial problems because of brain dead default settings in pre compiled packages. Apache in Prefork mode (none of the ones I know were aware that it was possible to use threaded MPMs!) and my favourite RH specific one: the most useless and rimbombant piece of documentation: a Performance Tuning Handbook that didn't mention where to change something as important as "maxusers".

 

Offline bd139

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #18 on: November 13, 2018, 10:29:33 am »
Yes been there as well. Typically mail servers are a dick when someone decides arbitrarily not to compile in something you need. That results in hours of fecking around with RPMs trying to get something usable working without breaking the entire dependency tree.

The really big killer that no one seems to mention though is recovery. Literally the moment something goes conko bonko on the box and it wont come back again, it's nigh on impossible trying to work out what to do with a stack of crap you typically see like mdraid and systemd.

The test for me was a number of years ago I was in charge of a large distributed network of Linux boxes all over the East Midlands loosely coupled to each other over public internet via ADSL and VPN. Stuck on my own on a Lincolnshire sausage farm with a down RH box, zero documentation installed, internet connection down, no phone reception.

Older grub / init based systems with hardware raid, no problem. I had their kit back up in an hour.

systemd + mdraid = forget it and go home. It literally fights you like an octopus with 8 knives.
 

Offline borjam

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #19 on: November 13, 2018, 10:47:49 am »
Where can I start to describe what's wrong with Linux?
Nowhere. Everything goes smooth as long as you use a stable & well tested distribution in a PC with hardware which is supported by Linux (the latter is much less of an issue nowadays) and do a training so you know what you are doing. I've been running Linux servers at customers since around 1996 using Debian until I quit doing company networks. However before letting Linux loose on my customers I took a one day hands-on training on how to install and configure a Linux server. Even today Debian is one of the better distributions if you want to do serious work with Linux.
Exactly the same issue is present in Debian or whatever Linux distribution you want to put as an example because the problem is the same.

Intel 10 GbE cards are well supported. Intel maintains the driver, as they do for FreeBSD. But they are human, hence they make mistakes. Check "ifconfig' and "ethtool" on Debian. Are they different? No they aren't.

Now I recall another unfunny anecdote. Setting a fixed IP address on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. Someone decided it should run DHCP always and to use a config file name with such an intuitive name as d-h-c-p-c-d.conf. Wow. As it happened I was setting up a couple of Raspberries shortly after this came out and doing a Google search for the right way to do it was so fun.

Which brings the next widespread malpractice originating in the Linux camp. The poor quality HOWTO and as a corollary the non existant documentation.

The HOWTO. Ahhhhh! So called documents describing the process to configure something, full of collateral and unnecessary, something harmful steps. So a HOWTO describing how to install Apache also told you to change your PS1 to something fancy and to configure "ls" in Technicolor. Just Because.

Or, more recently, the tendency to avoid giving any meaningful instructions for package building.

In the past program documentation contained something like: "To install this you need to add this and that, for package xyzzy make sure that the compilation option dihdah is enabled and the frobnicate option is disabled". So it was smooth. You followed instructions and you had a working program.

Now, "to install this, apt-get install fkejghjkhd e3498 jksdhgjkhdjk djkhgjkhdgfj 4uoiuyoiuyruyio oiuioerutoeio kdgkdjj dkjgkdljgdl rytuioruyrioutoi 8974789546lkajdkla sdjgkjjgkdfg ; ./configure ; make install".

And that's where the fun begins. Which versions? Some packages have significant feature and interface changes between branches. Apache, MongoDB to name a few. There are of course compile time options which aren't mentioned. So the building "instructions" work in the same month as they were regurgitated,  in the same Linux distribution the author used.

Now, you try a couple of months later, even in the same distribution, and KABOOM!. Why? Either the package builder decided to toggle a compile time option (and there's no description of them!) or the package belongs to a new branch and it's incompatible. Lacking any sort of requirements list you are in for a whole research project now!

I won't pick on the latest "curl from-here/instructions.sh | bash" because it's just so much brain dead!


 

Offline TerraHertz

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #20 on: November 13, 2018, 10:56:19 am »
Interesting thread.

My conspiracy theory of the day is the churn is generally promoted by the companies that make their money selling support. If things were stable and just worked they'd not have to sell as much support, so it's in their best interest to keep things brittle, fragile and a moving target.

Not 'conspiracy theory' at all. Churn is the tool of choice for all corporations. Microsoft in particular with Windows. Supposedly MS makes most of their profit from running the Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) courses. In which the qualifications expire. This is why nothing stays put between Windows versions. I guess people were getting tired of that, which may explain why MS is trying to switch to a software rental model.

Btw, has it occurred to you that since MS is the master of churn, and considers Linux the enemy of their business model, that it's highly in Microsoft's favor if Linux dies by churn? Not too hard to arrange... just infiltrate some software developers into the Linux camp. You think that kind of thing never happens? Then I have some newly found Broward ballot boxes for you to count.

I avoided getting deeply into Linux because I could sense the 'million monkeys typing' stench from the few encounters I had. Decided that was not for me. So, FreeBSD doesn't have that effect? (Yet. If a significant movement develops towards it, TPTB (MS etc) will do their best to inject the churn poison into FreeBSD too.)
Collecting old scopes, logic analyzers, and unfinished projects. http://everist.org
 

Offline EEVblog

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #21 on: November 13, 2018, 10:57:10 am »
If you do not recognize the allusion in the subject line or know what an allusion is, *please* just skip this.

I was expecting something SJW related!
 
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Offline borjam

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #22 on: November 13, 2018, 11:00:04 am »
So, FreeBSD doesn't have that effect? (Yet. If a significant movement develops towards it, TPTB (MS etc) will do their best to inject the churn poison into FreeBSD too.)
Not so far or not so much by a very large extent.

Don't be scared if you see commits by Metoosoft on svnweb.freebsd.org. They maintain the support for their cloud services but nothing else. But conspiracy wise I am sure their developers have instructions to be very granular in their commits so that, when they touch anything, you see tens of commits by Metoosoft people ;)

Give it a try. You might well be pleasantly surprised. I was back in 1995 and I haven't looked back. There may be a silly slip now and then, but changes are thoroughly evaluated and weighed before being made.
 

Offline bd139

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #23 on: November 13, 2018, 11:05:39 am »
That's about it.

They do the "design" bit before the "write code"

If you do not recognize the allusion in the subject line or know what an allusion is, *please* just skip this.

I was expecting something SJW related!

That's hilarious  :-DD
 

Offline BradC

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Re: Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful
« Reply #24 on: November 13, 2018, 11:05:57 am »
Btw, has it occurred to you that since MS is the master of churn, and considers Linux the enemy of their business model, that it's highly in Microsoft's favor if Linux dies by churn?

Yes, yes I know all that. As I could see thread was going to go "full retard" I decided to understate the point in order to make a point.
 


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