Let That Be a Lesson To You, Son: Never Upgrade

Excellent color scheme. Please don’t change it again :slight_smile:

Select All makes this site much more readable…

No surprise about the Fedora upgrade. That’s what Fedora is: a walking timebomb everytime you upgrade it. That’s fine for some, but was too much for me. I moved to the ‘dumbed down’ Ubuntu, as I did not want MS Novell and probably did not consider Debian like I should have. But I’m really happy with Ubuntu and things don’t break at each update.

@Ari: In firefox:
Edit - Page Style - No style.

I find this whole post a little dubious. You make it sound like Linux is at fault, and you appear to be discouraging people from attempting to use it.

Don’t believe the hype, people. Unless you plan to run a Linux-based terminal server setup on obscure kiosk hardware, you won’t have anywhere near the problems this guy had. Not to mention the reams of custom scripts and setup this guy created. I mean, he has a whole section in his “Behind the Scenes” area for “Source Code”. Within that area he describes in detail what he did to create his custom setup, and you might be overwhelmed at just how much custom work he did do.

Here is the kiosk section: http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/

Frankly, the guy did an amazing job with this stuff. And you tell me he could have done any of the stuff with speed and no cost with Windows.

No Jeff, don’t do it! Don’t listen to the madmen that tell you to keep this colour scheme permanently. Ouch, the eye strain!

I know it’s supposed to be easier on the eyes but that only works if everything on your screen has a black background. Most every application uses a white background as a default. After reading this page for a few minutes then switching back to another app my eyes are watering.

To the Linux fanboyz out there: Don’t worry, upgrading is a universal pain, your favourite OS is not being singled out. These days I hate to touch my Windows setup. Small apps, not a problem. Any upgrade of anything major has me in a cold sweat. Our manager has told the sysadmins in no uncertain term they are NEVER to enable Windows upgrades for the developers.

I would extend this phobia to installations as well as upgrades. I won’t install beta software now, after the IE7 beta killed my boss’ Visual Studio and screwed his machine up so badly he had to rebuild. A good installation is likely to take a couple of hours. A problematic one a couple of days. Two days of my life I can never get back! So I avoid any changes like the plague.

Something is wrong if I, as a software professional, am phobic about changes. How must the users feel?

Awesome new theme. Too bad it’s only going to last for a day…

Linux is free if your time is worthless

Well said. And I have to agree that a hearing a sentence such as “I can’t even fathom how such a bug could exist, but that’s Linux for you” from a supposed Linux advocate is a bit… strange. And a refreshing hint that mere mortals still need not apply. (In my wasted tries, I don’t think I ever got sound to work.)

will stop reading it if this horrible usability
issue is not fixed

Drink! (The blog drinking game requires a drink when someone threatens to go away.) Or come back tomorrow. I have a feeling the green will be gone.

Love this post. I’ve been telling people for years how unstable, crashy and plain difficult to configure linux can be unless you are lucky with your hardware. They often counter that “they had no problems” (on their one hardware config which they tried to install one flavour of linux on once, and spent a day or two configuring afterwards).

Out of 6 computers i’ve tried installing flavours of nix on none of them 4 of them were impossible to get anything beyond a command prompt for (i.e. gnome failed to start or give useful errors), free-bsd was fine for 2 of them and debian on one of the same 2. seems to have gotten better recently… or my last 2 computers were particularly nice with their hardware. I don’t have enough data to tell.

My friend once bought “Red hat linux for dummies”, which came with red hat on a disk, no less. The pair of us (both competent geeks I might add) couldn’t get it to work properly after spending a whole day on it. All we got was a command prompt with no graphical OS. Bear in mind this was before the internet was affordable or fast though… I can remember waiting to download the graphics card driver over dial up for it.

I should try linux again… see if its changed much. Its been at least a year since I was last running it and developing for it proper…

On the other hand. Knoppix has worked fine on every machine I have tried… I attribute that to its simple (i.e. none from the user) configuration and minimalistic approach.

I can’t help but be dubious…

Did you write a post about this new look on your blog? I hope that change is a thing that we’ll see more in the future, it’s refreshing. But i would advice against keeping it in the long run. It’s harder to read and more importantly it’s harder to take in the message, i constantly keep getting distracted.

I agree that for a stable system Fedora probably wasn’t the best choice as it is bleeding edge. But on the other hand, that probably means that it has some (limited, non functioning) support for newer hardware as opposed to no support at all.

Perhaps he didn’t delve into the source code because he has, oh, I dunno… better things to do!? Just because he is probably capable, given enough time, to fix the problem does not mean his time is worthless to him. The OSS argument of “fix it yourself” is frankly a pathetic argument that shifts the buck and maintains low quality software. It’s the reason proper polished OSS is very rare.

I think sooner or later OSS developers will have to recognize that all the complaints about Microsoft that they’ve been branding about for years (that it has lots of silly bugs, takes up lots of resourses and can sometimes break one of literally millions of different hardware configurations with a patch) will start to affect them too, especially as user bases grow. And as soon as someone who is using your system as an end user is told to “fix it yourself” they’ll most likely go elsewhere.

The large OSS projects such as Firefox and OOo are already bloated and in OOo’s case it’s not even as polished as MS Office, and that’s with big corporate backing. KDE and Gnome are bloated and slow in comparison to Explorer. It seems that the closer you get to a finished polished, usable piece of software the more bloated it will become to the point where people will notice and complain. And once you’ve finished this polished product you’ll end up having a nightmare to maintain it because the polish in usability and functionality you’ve applied is mostly handling lots and lots of edge cases that make changes and new development Hard.

If the Linux install base on end user systems ever approaches 20% I think those distributions will have a new found respect for the job MS has done in developing software for 90+% of the market for so long. Because as your end user base increases your space for crap excuses reduces significantly.

That’s the problem with Linux - it’s great fun for people who want to fiddle with stuff, but it’s hard to get useful work done unless you’re an expert… and sometimes not even then!

(let the flamewars begin!)

I had to refresh to get the black and green.

Good april fools.

Bad web designer!

Change the names of the files/links etc… even if by a token char. But I guess you knew that already and it was just a little “coding horror”.

We are all terrible programmers after all… :slight_smile:

I’m inclined to consider Jamie’s anecdotes as evidence that software engineers don’t always make the best system administrators, rather than as evidence against Linux.

I’d say it’s a bit like wondering why Jimmy Hendrix couldn’t play the drums. I mean, “if he throws in the towel on percussion instruments, then what possible hope do us mere mortals have?”

  1. JWZ isn’t really a Linux guy, though he does use it for certain things. When I first heard of him he was an SGI guy, and now that SGI has fallen I guess he’s more into Macs. He has long complained about various aspects of Linux.

  2. Those of us who do unusual and difficult things with Linux are the ones most likely to run into unusual and difficult problems with it. Then we decide whether it’s worth our time to fix the problems or take a different approach.

  3. #2 applies to any technology, not just Linux.

I hate Linux, for exactly this type of reason. What stability? What ease of use? What ease of customization? The cake is a lie.

People seem to be forgetting what day it is. lol, nice new css!

Dom, as someone who works with lots of programmers, I think your observation is dead-on.

The comments about Fedora are true - it is RedHat’s ‘bleeding edge, not stable’ playground OS. They put all their effort into stable RedHat ES instead, so if you want a truly stable supported OS, use CentOS (which is RH ES recompiled without the proprietary Redhat branding).

The thing is about Linux and stablilty is that is really is stable - Oracle will sell you a DB and you get a free copy of Linux to run it on. Something like IBM did with AS/400 - buy DB2 get a free As/400 to run it :slight_smile:

VMware uses it for ESX Server, the large-scale, enterprise VMware Server software. Nobody really complains that its unstable.

On the other hand, we have this guy being too clever for himself. He’s running fancy kiosk hardware (fair enough, but wouldn’t an ordinary PC in a different box be ok?), with a ton of self-written scripts. Hmm, and the entire thing stops working when he changes the OS part…

Sometimes people who are professed to be extremely clever are nothing of the sort, they just appear that way.

Ubuntu 10.7? Please, can someone give me a link to download this one?
Sorry for being off topic, but I can’t read anything inhere.