Gnu/Linux Considered Harmful

[rhb]

I think that sums it up quite well.  We are dealing with terminal complexity.  The only person I know of who is actively addressing this is Andy Tanebaum and the Minix 3 project.

Everyone else just makes everything more complex and blames someone else for the problem.

If Ken Thompson doesn't trust anything over about 10,000 lines of code I don't think there's much hope with multi-million line systems such as we use today.

[cdev]

Linux is far more solid than Windows is these days.

[james_s]

It looks and feels a lot more polished too. That has less to do with Linux improving (though it has) and more to do with the fact that Windows has regressed tremendously, going from the slick and polished Windows 7 to Win10 feeling like crusty open source software from 15 years ago.

[Bud]

Linux is far more solid than Windows is these days.

Nice joke. There was probably no program that i tried that did not crash in Ubuntu. Just like that - puff.... no error message, just vanish.

[Monkeh]

Linux is far more solid than Windows is these days.

Nice joke. There was probably no program that i tried that did not crash in Ubuntu. Just like that - puff.... no error message, just vanish.

And quite how you manage that is a mystery never to be solved.

[james_s]

Hardware fault or bad driver most likely, not much else will cause that. I had Ubuntu on my desktop at a previous job and the uptime was approaching 9 months. It would have been longer but we had a power outage that rebooted it. The machine went years without a crash.

[@rt]

My one experience with Ubuntu has deterred me from using it again.

Ran the test version from the USB stick, downloaded and installed components required to compile a program (including the program source code),
everything worked until the next session it forgot everything as if it was all running in RAM. source or binary for program was also gone.
Why would anyone make a setting they didn’t want to stay on the USB drive? Even something as simple as setting a Web homepage, I’d expect to be saved.

So then tried the proper install, and it wrote over a data SSD it had no business overwriting (didn’t have an OS on it), and wasn’t the drive it booted from.
Ubuntu installer failed at it’s one job, and also ruined all of the data on the 512 Gb SSD. Couldn’t see it in Windows GUI, and formatted it with Command line Diskpart.

That was harmful.

[Mr. Scram]

My one experience with Ubuntu has deterred me from using it again.

Ran the test version from the USB stick, downloaded and installed components required to compile a program (including the program source code),
everything worked until the next session it forgot everything as if it was all running in RAM. source or binary for program was also gone.
Why would anyone make a setting they didn’t want to stay on the USB drive? Even something as simple as setting a Web homepage, I’d expect to be saved.

So then tried the proper install, and it wrote over a data SSD it had no business overwriting (didn’t have an OS on it), and wasn’t the drive it booted from.
Ubuntu installer failed at it’s one job, and also ruined all of the data on the 512 Gb SSD. Couldn’t see it in Windows GUI, and formatted it with Command line Diskpart.

That was harmful.

It was probably running in RAM for people to test the software. You generally get the option what you want upon boot or installation. Volatility can be a useful tool.

[@rt]

That’s what I figured, and then tried it’s installer.
It won’t be running on any of my PCs that have any other drive in them again.

[borjam]

1) If you power down the PC when Linux is still running, 1 out of 5 times you will break Linux. That does not happen with other OS (at least Irix and Windows XP -> 10).

In the old times Linux worshippers liked to brag about the ext2 filesystem speed. How did they achieve the miracle? By mounting it in async mode. 

That's the reason why one in 20 boots or so the system made a full fsck "just in case".

But I think (I hope!) it's a thing of the past!

[borjam]

make V=1

I know, it's not exactly 100% like everything which came before it, so it must be bad.

What I say, death by a thousand of paper cuts.

I guess they never got the meaning of the Principle Of Least Astonishment (POLA).

What's coming next? Changing the options depending on the language settings? So -v (verbose) would become -e (explicito) in Spanish 

Oh god, I just gave a Bad Idea™!

[bd139]

If Ken Thompson doesn't trust anything over about 10,000 lines of code I don't think there's much hope with multi-million line systems such as we use today.

He’s right. You can break the rules on this which is the point.

Make your system lots of 10,000 LOC programs that talk to each other. There are two approaches to this:

1. Unix, pipes, composition, done.
2. Technology of the hour, crack pipes, mud and sticky tape, label it microservices and job never done.

Outcome 2 usually ignores the Unix design principle of “do one thing well” and results in “do an unknown number of things badly”. And that’s modern software

[knapik]

Haven’t seen ext2 for about 10 years.

ext4 / xfs now. Never breaks. Apart from when your resize xfs and it doesn’t up the inode count.

Ironically I’ve lost count of the amount of fucked up NTFS and HFS+ volumes I’ve seen just in the last 5 years. NTFS usually recovers fine though. I really don’t trust HFS+

I had a lot of "fun" not too long ago when I was backing up my files on an NTFS drive while the power went out. I ended up having to transfer ~1TB of data off of the backup drive onto another hard drive, reformat it and then transfer it back, all while struggling to Window's 255 character filepath limit. I don't think I'll be using NTFS again.

[borjam]

And that’s modern software

Yeah.

From lean and simple APIs to uncomprehensible behemoths with tons of documentation.

Next stage, über behemoths with no documentation at all and trial and error plus StackOverflow searches.

But this is not just the Linux world

[borjam]

I had a lot of "fun" not too long ago when I was backing up my files on an NTFS drive while the power went out. I ended up having to transfer ~1TB of data off of the backup drive onto another hard drive, reformat it and then transfer it back, all while struggling to Window's 255 character filepath limit. I don't think I'll be using NTFS again.

I had an amusing experience with NTFS (my only one and just because I was called to the rescue!) back in 2005 or so.

A FiberChannel switch failed and a cluster of two Windows machines lost access to the filesystem. When we rebooted everything the Windows thingies refused to mount at all. No way.

So, what was the rescue? I booted a FreeBSD system off a live CD, set up a ftp server, of course mounted the NTFS in read only mode and the Windows admin, to his astonishment, could recover the files. A 5 minute job.

Still, he had to create manually lots of websites on the infamous IIS because there wasn't a proper configuration file you could just copy.

[bd139]

I'm using ansible to configure IIS at the moment, on windows. Don't go there.

Another typical problem is windows' remote access and admin stuff, WinRM. It's a .Net process which creeps larger and larger until it explodes and then stops responding to requests. The protocol is HTTP and the only way ansible can do it's thing is by using WinRM to upload powershell scripts and execute them.

It's so good, Microsoft built SSH into Windows 2016 

[borjam]

Another typical problem is windows' remote access and admin stuff, WinRM. It's a .Net process which creeps larger and larger until it explodes and then stops responding to requests. The protocol is HTTP and the only way ansible can do it's thing is by using WinRM to upload powershell scripts and execute them.

It's so good, Microsoft built SSH into Windows 2016 

Ahhh, memories!

Back in the 90´s I was doing the 3Com and Olicom Certified Asshole courses. And one of the last days, during lunch, someone mentioned the "insane, complex Unix system". Of course I begun to argue (the rest were Windows users) and at some point someone begun to make really clueless comments. One was something like "how big is a Unix workstation?" And I had to explain him that I had an IPX at home and it was quite smaller than a peecee, Ethernet, sound, graphics accelerator, SCSI and all that even! For someone too young who hasn't seen these, like 3 Mac minis stacked.

Then I commented that there were even Unix laptops. And of course the idiot said something like "surely it weighs 20 Kg or so!". I had to have him look for information about Tadpole machines

And yeah, remote access. Someone else told me to mention one single thing I could do in Unix which was impossible in Windows. I told him to explain me how to login to a Windows machine using a modem, convert the connection to PPP, launch three or four ssh sessions, configure a PPP in debug mode on another ISDN channel and prepare it to receive a call and help a friend who was mad trying to configure a router and didn´t know which authentication mode he was using. All of that without rebooting of course. His answer? THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE! Of course it was just so much routine stuff I didn´t even think about it.

I am not sure Citrix existed at all at that time.

The point of all this, anyway, is. Lots of Linux youngsteers are dismissing the Unix philosophy as something irrelevant from the past. They just are not aware that such a simple philosophy in the core made all kind of complicated tasks just trivial, natural. You didn't think wether something was possible, but how to do it.

[bd139]

Citrix. Kill me.

I always wanted a SPARCbook. Still tempted to buy one if I see one. Sure it’ll run netbsd or something still.

It’s nice looking back at this stuff. Fond memories.

[james_s]

My one experience with Ubuntu has deterred me from using it again.

Ran the test version from the USB stick, downloaded and installed components required to compile a program (including the program source code),
everything worked until the next session it forgot everything as if it was all running in RAM. source or binary for program was also gone.
Why would anyone make a setting they didn’t want to stay on the USB drive? Even something as simple as setting a Web homepage, I’d expect to be saved.

So then tried the proper install, and it wrote over a data SSD it had no business overwriting (didn’t have an OS on it), and wasn’t the drive it booted from.
Ubuntu installer failed at it’s one job, and also ruined all of the data on the 512 Gb SSD. Couldn’t see it in Windows GUI, and formatted it with Command line Diskpart.

That was harmful.

It's by design that it doesn't save anything, it's the USB equivalent of a live cd. The fact that it's a read-only filesystem means it can't become corrupted or infected. This is a case of user error.

[bd139]

Yes sounds like a large case of user error that.

[SiliconWizard]

If Ken Thompson doesn't trust anything over about 10,000 lines of code I don't think there's much hope with multi-million line systems such as we use today.

He’s right. You can break the rules on this which is the point.

There's an old saying stating that a good developer makes approximately 1 bug every 800 LOC.
Obviously it says nothing about a bad developer.
 

[glarsson]

There's an old saying stating that a good developer makes approximately 1 bug every 800 LOC.

After typing in the source code?
After compiling?
After testing?
After delivery to customemers?

[rhb]

Citrix. Kill me.

I always wanted a SPARCbook. Still tempted to buy one if I see one. Sure it’ll run netbsd or something still.

It’s nice looking back at this stuff. Fond memories.

Actually,  Illumos (nee OpenSolaris) has been brought up on SPARC   Whether it includes the SPARCbook is a different matter.

[rhb]

Oh no, not another circle jerk about Linux being unusable 

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?

Oh, please, no.  Gnu make(1)  works just fine if you know how to use it. KISS

Please come back once you had to maintain a large software system that has to be both multi-platform and support multiple toolchains (e.g. Visual C++ and gcc/clang).

Err, excuse me but I was doing of that except the Windows part almost from the day I *started* using Unix 28 years ago. I actually officially started doing that 3 months later when I was hired on to specifcially do exactly that.   Of course I already had a dozen operating systems and 3 years of VAX admin experience by then.

Of course, you may not consider porting 500,000+ lines ov VAX FORTRAN code to SGI, IBM, Intergraph, DEC, HP and Sun systems.  Or maintaining over 2 million lines of other people's undocumented (as in sole comment was author's name) code as adequate credentials.  But *none* of that stuff would compile when I took it over.

[rhb]

I am suffering through the ordeal of getting the mtd kernel modules installed on CentOS.  It's been a long time since I built a kernel and as nothing is the same as it used to be I've been searching for instructions.

The single most glaring issue is the exceedingly poor communication skills of the authors.

They fail to mention what distribution and versions they are using.

They can neither spell nor write grammatical sentences. Those for whom English is not their native language do better than the Americans and Brits.

Something I  find curious about the raging disdain for age and experience in the 20 something crowd.  How do they keep from going crazy knowing, as they are absolutely certain, that every day they are getting stupider and that in 20-30 years they will be helpless?

We were all a bit full of ourselves when we were that age, but the current generation has taken it to a completely new level.

In closing, here's a short tale.
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There was a farmer who had an old rooster.  He was getting a little concerned that age might have diminished his ability to service the hens, so he got a young rooster.

The young rooster was strutting around the barnyard and went up to the old rooster.  "Man, you're just stew meat.  I'm taking over."

The old rooster just looked him in the eye and said, "I wouldn't be to sure about that."

"Ahh, you're just a deluded fool who is over the hill and resting on your laurels."

"Really?  I bet you can't even keep up with me in a foot race."

"You're on, old man.  I'll beat you by a mile."

"OK, then how about giving me  a 15 ft head start?  Does that seem fair for an old guy like me."

"Sure.  Take off and I'll start when you reach the corner of the hen house."

So the old rooster takes of running and as he goes around the corner of the hen house he starts making a huge racket.  The young rooster takes off after the old rooster and as he rounds the corner of the hen house, there's the boom of a shotgun.  The farmer sitting on the porch ejects the empty shell and says, "Damn, that's the third gay rooster I've bought this month."