This post is a cheap shot, Fedora is the WinME of Linux distros.
Hey guys, Atwood can’t seem to get a WinME Network to be reliable.
Jeff,
I’m surprised that you decided to go with such a god awful color scheme. While it’s nice and hip and retro, it’s completely unreadable. I tried reading this post, but after the first paragraph, my eyes simply hurt too bad to continue.
I would highly suggest that you change it back because as it is, my eyes can’t take it and I’m way to lazy to change the style sheet myself.
Hope the new scheme is an April Fool’s gag! Blech 
The article is not about upgrading, it is about the fact that one can be a good developper and a bad sysadmin.
Well I used to be a *BSD/linux sysadmin. I can give you a big bucks advice for free regarding free unices stability that he infringed (explaining all his problems) :
Get away from from “eye candy”, so called “easy to use”, and “bleeding edge” distributions.
FC, mandrake, ubuntu, red hat, suse are gap released distributions. Meaning that upgrading is as with windows quite hazardous. These are nice “click-a-click” distribution meant for fitting 80% of the needs. The trade-off for eye candy, and “ease of use” it does not handle well abnormal case (such as having a bios driven fan). These are the prefered distro from windows geeks.
Among stream released* distributions such as the debian testing, and some flavor of BSD not tagged current, avoid. These are meant has beta test distribution. Avoid them, unless you need latest openldap, or handling exotic, new hardware. (normaly a good sysadmin avoid exotism, computer are prone to factorial sensibility syndroma, hubris can kill). These are the prefered distro of people that does nothing else with their computers but reinstall them on a daily basis.
*stream released means there are no such things as an update CD, distribution dont have much of gap to cross to upgrade. You upgrade them in the flow constantly through minor jumps almost in a crontab.
Free Unices are user friendly, not idiot friendly, learning curve is tough, but they are so usefull.
Thanks to using stable linux/BSD distro, I became a developper, and since Active Directory is looking much like an LDAP, that XP is quite POSIX (oh I am already sad of XP end), that I know of kerberos, have insight on mail standard and protocol… some customers asked me where I learnt to be such a windows guru even though I started C# a year ago.
Well, I became what they think a windows hacker, by following my own advices, and learning unices by doing it the cool, long, lazy stable way : being a linux/BSD sysadmin.
This guy might be a good software developper, it seems though he has all wrong as being a sysadmin.
Developers overlook sysadmin’s kill, it is a shame and that cost them a lot. But they are too proud to notice it.
I do have to say something about this and the first comment. Unix and Linux weren’t designed to be reinstalled and upgraded all the time. One of the beautiful things about unix and linux is that once you find a configuration that works, you can trust it will continue to operate. Adding software doesn’t pollute the water in the same way it does in windows operating systems.
Along with this rock solid reliability is the trade off of more complex installation. Admins generally are required to spend MANY MANY hours getting their devices configured properly, OR spend the time to script and installation routine to duplicate their work for them.
In any case, Linux is not designed to be continuously upgraded. The whole Unix/Linux OS family was designed to have near limitless uptime and reliability.
This problem is a case of mistaken identity, or mistaken role for the software. You wouldn’t use Excel as a database application would you? Can it do it? Sure, but that isn’t what it was meant to do.
Ubuntu 10.7 doesn’t exist.
Guy didn’t do any research at all. Did he even try to get it working, or he just assumed it would all work without any input from his end?
There are two sides at play in these comments (two loud sides, anyway):
- Linux sucks and isn’t good for anything but fiddling.
- Linux is the best thing in the world and you should fix your own problems instead of complaining about it, because that’s how open-source works.
Both of these arguments are problematic, because both of them run to extremes that simply aren’t true. I’ll address them one at a time.
Linux sucks if you’re a Windows or Mac user who is not comfortable with using or learning to use a good number of manual methods for system configuration. But this doesn’t mean that it sucks and isn’t useful. Ubuntu is the only flavor I’ve had installed on my own hardware, so it’s all I can speak to, but it was the easiest system I’ve ever used for web application development. Installing PHP and MySQL is a breeze. You don’t need any special bundle (like XAMPP or MAMP, which, in fairness, are bundles that I use happily on Windows and the Mac), and installation works the way that it should.
At my previous job, we used servers running Red Hat (sorry, not sure of the release), and we had no major problems during my time there, even with a fairly green systems guy. Everything worked very, very well, and we had probably about 95% or better up time BEFORE integrating load balancers and dupe servers into our system.
So Linux doesn’t suck. What DOES suck is that certain Linux distros come with problems fresh out of the box. When I upgraded to Ubuntu’s latest on my old Dell lappy, the power-charging interface simply stopped working. No, it wasn’t part of a gradual decline. It was “I’m working with Breezy Badger” followed by “I’m not working with Feisty Fawn” (I might have my animals off…it’s been a while).
Open-source software is meant to be a collaberative process–I will not disagree with that; however, a Linux distro such as Red Hat or Ubuntu is not some DVD encoder that you download from some guy’s Sourceforge page. These are major releases that people have begun to trust. New releases need to be consistently stable (normal new version bugs aside). Yes, it’s nice if a user has the ability to fix a bug him/herself, but that shouldn’t be required. If sound isn’t working in an official release, it should be fixed and released as an update. Including broken features in an OS and then passing the fixing onto the user as some sort of rite of passage is just plain stupid. If you’re going to distribute your software across the globe (and especially if you’re going to tout it as something that all users could benefit from), take responsibility for it and stop passing the buck to the user.
In most cases (including this one), usability problems are not the fault of the user, be he a 97 year-old farmer or a 22 year-old hotshot with crazy hacking skills.
Love the color scheme.
Also check out Every OS Sucks
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2514730680283477734
The CAPTCHA code word for today should have been “green”. Kinda cool for a change. The black background uses less electricity, so it’s “geen” too. lol.
I frankly have better things to do with my time
That is the conclusion I have come to every time I’ve tried to install and use Linux as a first-class citizen on my PC at home. I just don’t have time to mess around with trying to get everything to work smoothly. Last time it was the video drivers for my nVidia card that wouldn’t work in Ubuntu that did it to me.
I’m a programmer, but I do have a life I’m trying to live away from the computer. Spending a week of evenings trying to solve the kind of problem that never happens to me in Windows… It drives me right up the freaking wall.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
It’s amazing how many people fall for that “latest technology” plug.
I always run a gen or two behind, and it applies to vitually everything.
Windows XP out? I was running 2000, now that Vista’s out, I’m running XP.
Websites are supposed to coded in XHTML/XML and the latest CSS. I use older CSS and HTML. Hell, half the browsers out there STILL can’t render all CSS properly.
You’ll find that waiting for a year or two, or in some cases 3, will render what was really buggy next gen tech into rather inexpensive ho-hum standard fair.
But instead of seeing it as boring, see it instead as cheap, effective, and pretty damned universal.
Isn’t that what you REALLY want?
O/T: I love the old-style color scheme. Why don’t you keep it around a while?
The only thing worse than upgrading is living with the same old problems. 
Similarly I hate Linux’s bugs while I use it (every day for work), and windows bugs whenever I have to use it.
We have 2 desktops for the kids to use for games. One runs XP pro, the other XP Media Center. Not all games work on both computers. Some work on each one, with some overlap which work on both. Some crash randomly. One computer powers off at random, and has since new. Who do I blame? My wife blames me. 
The problem with “upgrading Linux” is that you can’t really upgrade from Red Hat to Ubuntu. So he does a fresh install. That lets him loose all of the previous configuration work he had already done. Maybe I am different than all others, but even the “run out of the box” distros like Ubuntu never seem to work very well out of the box and you are always messing around in about 40 startup or config scripts until it is smooth and reliable. Why throw all of that away? Because the “cool kids” are doing it? Are they jumping off of bridges, too? Sounds like he just needs to decide what he is doing BEFORE he does it, then work toward a defined goal.
I agree. The green needs to be a little bit brighter.
Agreed on the non-story. Data is not the plural of anecdotes.
Please keep the jwz-inspired colour scheme around as an option.
To clarify, saying ‘Linux is free if your time is worthless’ is simply not true.
Linux is free if you are willing to learn it and it’s usage patterns with the same effort you originally put into Windows.
Windows does not come intuitively, ask any senior jumping on that bandwagon. In addition, there is an entire industry built around fixing user’s computers, and upgrades with Windows, because the average user cannot infact, fix their system.
My time is worth more than 90% of the free world, to assume it is worthless because I have spent the minimal effort to learn the platform is ignorant.
First, nice new theme, keep it on Jeff.
Yes linux is a working progress. I myself mostly used it (Ubuntu) at home for browsing internet mostly. I agree with you its not the easiest OS to use for multimedia stuff. I still use a lot of WindowsXP to do multimedia thing. If only the multimedia part of linux is as organized as the kernel development.
People, world class Software Engineer != world class Systems Engineer. End of story.
guys.
the phrase “Linux is free if your time is worthless” has been coined by none other than JWZ. thus, saying that he “lives and breathes Linux” is, I strongly suspect, a stretch.