Heh. Always amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to defend or decry a particular OS, even if the post is on the 1st of April.
To all those who are busy saying ‘hey it takes no time at all’ I suggest you go and work in a proper IT job or a proper software engineering job where you have to do something more complicated than the equivalent of running a command prompt or Notepad or the same daily tasks. Variety is the spice of life, except to computers.
Everything, be it Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, whatever, has bugs, has things that are hard to get right, things that break the next time you upgrade. If you haven’t found something difficult to do yet on your evangelised OS of choice, you’ve not done enough. You can either view it as they’re all crap, or they all have uses and pick the right tool for the right job, stick with it, and ignore the fools who say their way is better.
Heck, if we’re going to talk about simplicity/ease of use to do with PCs, we sit every day at our chosen pile of electronics and bash on a keyboard mouse. Anyone who considers that simple, easy to use, healthy and other such nouns, hasn’t done it for long enough to know what RSI stands for. Of course, simple is in the eye of the beholder.
What’s important to note is that JWZ is a software engineer, retired. And apparently not a great sysadmin if he’s deploying this on kiosks on the club floor. If your design includes scripts to detect massive failures and reboot the entire system, I’d find the entire engineering effort a little suspect.
a href="http://jwz.livejournal.com/846523.html"If you read his post/a, it’s clear he’s really designed much of the system himself. He’s running Netscape binaries of ANCIENT comportment, because it’s cool to be ironically out of date like that. We’re talking a.out binaries that may not even have kernel support anymore. The nail on the coffin here though is LTSP. That’s right, his 1GHz systems for browsing the web are apparently too slow to run ancient Netscape builds, in his esteem. Well, that makes it about a billion times harder to debug, and apparently it’s Ubuntu’s fault he went with that strategy? Also, if he already discovered that EduBuntu is the LTSP rollout of Ubuntu yet, I imagine he would have mentioned it by name.
This might be a colossal failure, but mostly one of overambition and undernourishment. And his blog is finding out the hard way that you’ll probably have to pay someone to care about such a random configuration if you can’t be bothered to care about it yourself.
Well, upgrading is always should be thought off. Debian is the right way for someone who wants they system stable and secure. Of course that not as geeky as running just-out-of-hands-of-developers version which suppose to be bleeding edge in terms of technologies, but that meant to be run by developers who could fix all the issues IN THE CODE and issues are supposed to be there, remember, open source uses you as a tester since they do not have other options.
But if you forget about upgrades than Linux is better choice than Windows since you have more control over the system. Something doesn’t work - there is either an alternative that does the job or a good diagnostic messages you could put in the Google and get the answer. Windows rarely offers you the same, as an example I couldn’t setup IIS on my notebooks OEM Windows XP Pro. It just doesn’t work. No diagnostic, no logs, nothing. Reinstalling didn’t help, neither did upgrading. I have to use Apache with mod_aspdotnet to run ASP sites which are essential for my work. Under Linux I could switch to other distribution that fix my problem but here I just stuck. That’s Windows for you
i have been Linux user since Redhat6, all that i can say is Linux has improved by hugely now, thanks to opensource. Linux user has to know a bit more abt his h/w: the common complaint “my device does not work in XYZ distribution so Linux is bad!” is not helpful. Sound projects like ALSA are good right now. It is not Linux’s fault that you could not figure out the latest distribution for your h/w. I personally liked PCLINUXOS 2007 for its simplicity and stability, followed by Fedora and Ubuntu
Well, Jeff. The results are in. According to the Linux users who have responded, you are a stupid, dishonest, trolling, mendacious, self-serving, inept, incompetent, corrupt MS fanboy. And so is Jamie Zawinski.
Incidentally, the main reason why I will never install Linux on any of my computers is… Linux users! What a loathsome and smarmy bunch.
Is there anyway to get back to your original OS before you upgraded? I have a computer (emachines brand)that came with Vista and it sucked. It came with a disk called Windows Anytime Upgrade and I didn’t know it had a grace period! Now it’s expired and now I can’t use my computer until I buy ANOTHER disk for it…quite expensive too. I really don’t want to buy it but I fear that I have no choice. I’m soooo stupid!! Help?
I don’t know, if he was such a world class software engineer, I would have expected him to fix the bug in the sound system instead of whining that it was broken (which was of course something that shouldn’t have happened). It is open source for a reason, you know? Especially when your business depends on it, it is probably worth the effort.
Of course, if you find another solution that works for you and is “cheaper” then use it. But if you decidedly choose free (as in free beer) open source software without buying any service for it and don’t want to invest something in it, you probably made the wrong choice.
I can’t repeat this enough: OSS lives from individuals contributing to it. If you expect everything to always work as you think it should, then OSS isn’t for you. It doesn’t get better from talking about how bad it is or that it still is so complex or not like this or not like that.
(Of course, I could sometimes rant endlessly about why this or that doesn’t work, but it still is up to me to do something about it)
I cannot help but wonder: Linux geeks stopped bashing Windows on their blogs a long time ago and started doing more constructive stuff. When will Windows geeks stop bashing everything else and return to producing interesting stuff? Since, you know, Windows-bashing and Linux-bashing has been boring for quite a while now…
“I don’t know, if he was such a world class software engineer, I would have expected him to fix the bug in the sound system instead of whining that it was broken…”
See, this is why, when I hear the word “Linux”, I generally think of the words “insufferable prick”. What a ridiculous negative attitude: “If it doesn’t work right, it’s your fault for not fixing it yourself!”
Let me ask you a question: What precisely is Jamie’s incentive to waste potentially several hours or several days digging through code he already knows is shoddy, in order to fix some annoying bug that wasn’t there yesterday? What is his compensation for this incredibly tedious work? The guy has a business to run, for god’s sake, one which I’m sure pays a lot better than, um, nothing.
Oh, right, it’s that warm fuzzy feeling you get from conquering obstacles and making the world a better place for the other 38 users with the same problem. Ha ha. As Jamie says, f**k it.
The story here isn’t Linux - and it’s suspect to say the least the anti-Linux spin you put on it considering some of your sponsors.
The story is more about if you’re writing tons of very, very custom custom code on obscure hardware you should expect some problems at upgrade! This goes for any platform. To some degree the fact that the guy is “A World Class Engineer” makes me think he can also tend to be a bit too clever and do things the rest of us “mere mortals” would never do. Thus he has problems we would never have and have never had (in my case running many production servers - many of which haven’t been rebooted for months, greater than nine months in some cases).
We had the same problems with the move to Win95, XP, Vista (which had huge driver problems and those are at least written by the company), and IE7 “broke the web”. Like I said, the story here isn’t about Linux, but how you should expect problems with your extremely custom work when you upgrade. It makes me sad that the angle on this that was given, and the angle many seem to enjoy taking up is “Ha! I’ve been telling everyone Linux sucks!” Right. Someone had an expected problem and now an entire OS is confirmed to suck. What.
Additionally Fedora is a horrible choice for anything requiring stability. Great general use OS, but it should be regarded as beta honestly. CentOS, Debian, or any other distribution aimed at production.
I need this tattoo’d on my hand. Upgrading for the sake of upgrading is dangerous and I’ve been burned by that myself several times:
I recently upgraded my Debian production box from sarge to etch and along the way, it upgraded MySQL (from 4 to 5). At first blush, everything looked great. But then it wasn’t until typical/normal traffic arrived later that it was apparent that “lazy joins” weren’t supported in MySQL 5 and several things were broken as a result. The mod_auth modules I used had also changed and my authenticated sections of our sites were broken as a result.
I also recently upgraded my MythTV box from 0.20 to 0.21 and it made things worse, too.
I’ve seen it said elsewhere - software doesn’t “rot” over time.
This has been the opposite of my experience over the past 7 or so years of dabbling with various Linux flavors. My first few attempts were disasterous, but more recent installs with Knoppix, openSUSE and Ubuntu have been surprisingly good. Hardware and drivers were automatically detected, and everything just worked. In the Windows world - particularly with Vista - I often have to hunt or wait for drivers from hardware manufacturers, and if they’re bad I’m just stuck.
I’ve been using Linux for quite a few years and have never had the above problems unless I was using some obscure hardware that no one had ever heard of. Especially on Ubuntu, which has the best hardware support I’ve seen yet.
I am an 18 year old college student, working on my GE to eventually get a degree in computer science. I have had 1 formal class in computers, and that was programming java.
I run linux all day, inside and out.
Home desktop? Linux.
Work desktop? Linux.
every server I install at work? you betcha, thats linux.
“I have better things to do” is rather humorous. Just because you failed doesn’t mean its not a simple fix. My home computer has been acting up, so I installed an Alpha of ubuntu on it. it failed miserably. rather than patch it, i went and installed the next beta when it came out 2 days later. works better than ANY system i have EVER seen.
With the release of Vista, I am AMAZED that anyone still have faith in microsoft.
I’ll tell you what. Give me 30 minutes to install and customize ubuntu on ANY system (that time doesn’t include install time, as that could take a bit longer depending on your hardware) and I DEFY you to find a way that vista is faster, more user friends, more stable, or more secure.
Us “mere mortals” just don’t have a God complex, and realize that computers can take time to get set up perfectly. and if you’re smart and want to save time, theres WONDERFUL resources, you can find them on this new thing, called “the internet”.
