Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful

[tpowell1830]

While I don't pretend to be a Linux afficionado, I did setup a RH server for my company back in 2002, with the help of a 19 year old contractor that I found locally. The NT 4.0 server that we were using kept eating hard drives and failing miserably, so I had fiddled around with Linux a bit on my home computer and thought that it would be a good server, at the time. The setup was not too difficult and interfacing with all of the Windows desktops that we had (about 10 of them) was easy enough with the kid's help.

However, I had reservations at the time (and still do) about the application support that would come about for Linux, so I abandoned any thoughts about using it for desktop for that reason and I was concerned when I started seeing distro after distro of the kernel with different looking commands and GUIs. To add to my concerns, although the kid helping me at the time seemed fairly knowledgeable (more than me anyway), he mentioned the fact that he had written several of the drivers and support files for the RH distro that I was using, and when I further inquired about how that happened, he mentioned how there were thousands others like him that could volunteer online ( I guess it was GitHub?) in writing support files, just like him. This bothered me at the time.

At that point, along with the added confusion that each distro added, I decided not to start using Linux for my desktop. The server was a spectacular success and continued to run for several years with minimal maintenance until I left the company in 2004. After that I don't know what happened with it.

Bottom line, Linux has had it's chance to evolve into a platform that serves the general user community with application development for over 25 years and the only thing that I see, as a non-user is an order of magnitude more confusion now than 2002. This does not bode well for getting a Linux distro for the public that lends itself to getting some work done in an office environment. I had high hopes for it back 15 years ago, but quickly realized that it was going the way of fragmentation and the applications and a usable working desktop was not ever going to happen. 

It would be nice if the Linux community went back to the original Torvalds distro and started working towards a Windows killer (which is what I had originally hoped for) and used some sort of recognized standards in development for desktop work. Yes, for someone hobbying around with a personal distro of original Linux and creating their own personalized OS for home use it's fine, but until there is a standardized version that is used for work and has usable installable applications by average people, the whole Linux universe will simply dilute itself into oblivion, eventually (perhaps already). But it is a great server platform... if done right. 

Just my 2 cents...

[Marco]

If you don't mind being datamined you can do far worse than use a Chromebook/Chromebox, Linux on the desktop is mainstream. Not Linux as most people think of it, but Linux all the same. QA, fast response to problems and hardware certifications takes money and central organization. The community can develop Linux, but it takes a company to make a mainstream desktop from it.

[Monkeh]

The problem with Raspbian DHCP is that no one is paying the dhcpcd creator to be compatible with /etc/network/interfaces

It's not his job to. No dhcp client is 'compatible' with 'insert arbitrary OS script here' - it is up to the distribution to integrate it.

Meanwhile the other big dhcp client is being created by Redhat

Er, since when do they own the ISC?

[Marco]

It's not his job to. No dhcp client is 'compatible' with 'insert arbitrary OS script here' - it is up to the distribution to integrate it.

Which is a big maintenance headache, now you have to QA your shim each and every update ... because the author doesn't give a shit about breaking it. They don't wanna, I don't blame them.

Er, since when do they own the ISC?

Well that too, but that now generally only runs after systemd has it's claws into things ... and thus you get to setup your static IP in /etc/systemd/network.

[tpowell1830]

If you don't mind being datamined you can do far worse than use a Chromebook/Chromebox, Linux on the desktop is mainstream.

QA, fast response to problems and hardware certifications takes money and central organization. The community can develop Linux, but it takes a company to make a mainstream desktop from it.

I don't know about Chromebook/Chromebox, but just about everyone in all of my current and previous jobs use Windows of some variant exclusively. I believe it is true for most companies in the US because of the thousands of applications available for it. In that respect, I would not call Chromebook/Chromebox mainstream for business use. It's not that I like that MS Windows is the one and only OS used, but it is a fact at the moment.

[Marco]

Chromebooks own K-12 education sales in the US, not that I think that kids need school laptops ... but it's still a sizeable mainstream market.

[mark03]

Please don't blame linux! Blame specific linux distributions! Some think they have to move to the latest and greatest fancy stuff. But you don't have to. I'm running the same non-fancy window manager for ages.

The problem is you have less choice than you think.  Once Debian switched over to systemd, for example, there were precious few alternatives left (if systemd is not your thing), because so many distributions are derived from Debian in some fashion.  Yes, there are orphans; I'm trying "void linux" at home.  But ultimately it boils down to mindshare and effort hours.  Nothing comes close to the breadth and stability of Debian, so if the major distributions run off the rails, staying with Linux is quite difficult as a practical matter.

[bd139]

True.

Distribution is irrelevant. The only difference now is package manager, documentation, updater, crazy vendor specific daemons, turd polish.

[madires]

Linux distributions without systemd: http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Linux_distributions_without_systemd

[bd139]

None of which are party to early disclosure or managed properly.

[Karel]

Linux isn't perfect. The problem is, the alternatives are worse...

[madires]

None of which are party to early disclosure or managed properly.

Like Devuan for example? 

[cdev]

I don't trust systemd.

I don't like logging to binary files.
I think thats the core issue for me.

Linux doesn't need to be a "Windows killer" -  Personally I couldn't care less what Microsoft does as long as they don't do the kinds of things they have been known to do - which I don't expect them to stop as I think the form they exist in, as a corporation, is the core problem. Corporations are inherently amoral and often, evil. We made a huge mistake when we allowed corporations to become legal people and started giving them 'rights' when they are not people.

Here in the US that Supreme Court "decision" (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co. :: 118 U.S. 394 (1886) was not even honest, it was hijacked by a clerk who wrote his own interpretation in the margin notes and that has been given deference when it should never have been.

But to get back to Linux, Linux is best off just being Linux.

[cdev]

In my experience, lesser evil-ism turns out to be a trap almost every time.

The problem is, as computing became more important in the world, Linux and open source which had managed to survive and thrive under the radar for quite some time, likely started to stand out as an uncontaminated control group that really showed how dysfunctional things are becoming everywhere else.

So now ...

[ebastler]

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.
...
Back in the days ...
...
We now live in a world...
...
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.

 

[mark03]

None of which are party to early disclosure or managed properly.

Like Devuan for example? 

I would be very curious to hear your (or anyone's) first-hand experience with Devuan.  When I dropped Debian a couple of years ago I settled on void linux (voidlinux.org) and it has been a decidedly mixed experience.  Does Devuan fulfill the promise of "just like Debian, only without systemd"?  How closely does it track Debian releases?  Does it use Debian repositories?  etc.

[bd139]

Devuan doesn't get close.

Even CentOS which is directly a rebuild of Redhat done under the same roof is delayed by days on critical patches.

[madires]

But still better than MS with their commercial OS. Aren't you amazed how much you get for free?

[Monkeh]

But still better than MS with their commercial OS. Aren't you amazed how much you get for free?

Oh, now you've done it.

[bd139]

Indeed. That's almost invoking Godwin's law in a Linux thread 

[james_s]

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!)

Can't really pin that one on millennials. I'm gen x and even most of the guys my dad's age have been using IDEs for decades. You don't *have* to change to the latest one each year. I've been using the same versions of ISE and Quartus I learned back when I first started messing with FPGAs.

vi is handy for making quick edits but I can't imagine trying to use it to write any serious code. I guess once you know it inside and out it would be fine but sheesh, you'd just about have to be a masochist.

That said, I guess I can't really point fingers. I'm one of the few people I know who still demands a proper manual gearbox while everyone else seems to love computerized slushboxes. With an auto box I hardly even consider that driving, you just sort of aim.

Now get off my lawn! 

[rhb]

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.

Actually, it was going full speed long before Gnu came along.  Prior to the appearance of Linux, the Gnu tools were the only way to ensure consistent syntax and semantics across multiple platforms.

On my first contract job I had automounted  /tool/${ARCH}/bisystem n at /tool/bin along with the rest of the tree. So whether you were on an SGI, IBM. HP, Sun, Intergraph or DEC you had a consistent set of tools available.  I got a really nice note a year or so after I left from one of the admins.  He said he needed to make some massive update across a bunch of these and was dreading the job, but Reg had been here and expect(1) was everywhere. So he was done with almost no effort. 

The compute environment at that company was the wild west.  Every group bought different stuff.  I was not a sys admin, I was a programmer.  But my normal routine was a stop at the admin cubicle on the way to mine to see what was going on so I could reduce the number of redundant calls the admins got,  For my initial task as a contractor I had been given two months to complete a parser.  I'd just spent 6 weeks learning lex(1) and yacc(1) so I was done in 2 weeks of which only about half the time was on my original assigned task,  I had also analyzed all the VAX RTL usage and converted the entire 500,000 line codebase to use a set of replacement routines which we then wrote.  So I walked on water.  It was really pretty funny.  I spent a lot of time trying to disabuse people of the notion I knew everything which I certainly did not.

[rhb]

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.

I'm describing Gnu 1989 to 1995.  It really headed downhill once you had people who had never used a real Unix implementation

[djacobow]

vi is handy for making quick edits but I can't imagine trying to use it to write any serious code. I guess once you know it inside and out it would be fine but sheesh, you'd just about have to be a masochist.

Oh, it grows on you. I write boatloads of code in vim.

It has syntax highlighting and now has a zillion plugins available for syntax checking (syntastic), git integration (fugitive), tab completion (youcompleteme), etc. Also, you can open multiple windows, vertically or horizontally, show diffs, etc. It's a swiss army knife. I think Emacs is more famous for this sort of feature creep, but vim is hot on its heels. And, of course, you don't have to do any of that if you're not interested. When I am faced with a bare minimalist /bin/vi I have a moment of panic, but then realize that everything is gonna be fine.

Now get off my lawn! 

Not before I finish making these donuts with my hotrodded text editor.

[rhb]

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?

I have no data, but I think it is 20 somethings  (which is what I meant by millenials) without adult supervision.  Almost all of us are much too cocky at that age.  So we can really make some exquisite messes.