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

When are we switching back to our old theme?
Or should I unsubscribe?

While Windows may be the least stable in general use, it seems to have the best patching. I haven’t had a Windows patch go bad since NT SP4. Linux patches, frequently (especially kernel patches)… Even Solaris which is quite heavily tested regularly has patches that break stuff on my systems.

I still try to keep things up to date, but the more mission critical the box, the less likely it is to be completely current…

What? Linux distributions don’t do adequate regression testing? No way. :slight_smile:

Sure, because I’ve never had any issues with a Windows upgrade, and I’ve certainly never seen it crash…

Seriously, I thought your recent posts have ranged from good to awesome and then we get this. A couple really obvious and pragmatic things come to mind that make you seem very naive here.
First of all, Ubuntu is a distro made for newbies, and hearing someone using ubuntu claim that there is a mysterious bug that ruins linux for them and has no solution is a common occurrance and the rest of us know that its just a newbie and not true. You sound like a clueless tv station doing a “news at 11! find out how hackers could destroy the world!” or "news at 11! how computer slang is hurting your kids education!."
Second, sofware engineering guru != system administration guru, based on that and the first, this guy sounds like some of my very smart CS professors who don’t know to unmount a flash drive before removing it and generally act totally dumb around computers.
Third, In the windows world you can get an OS bug and thats it, theres no fixing it, your simply hosed and theres nothing you can do at all. In the linux world, if something worked before then stoped on an upgrade, that is never the case. There is always a relatively painless path to figure out what is causing the bug and then there is always a reasonable solution. People who claim otherwise are linux newbs. Heres a little path for when you find a linux bug for something that worked before. 1. google it. 2. ask in irc. 3. Search the distro/package bug tracker. 4. go to distro/package forum. 5. Post on that forum/bug tracker, and email the software maintainer about your post. 6. You WILL have found the bug and there are two possible results which are: 1. There is a proper fix. 2 there is a fix by downgrading to a stable version and there is a bug report (or you make one, but its probably already there) and the bug WILL be fixed, or you can fix it yourself since its open source.

Jeff, now that you have all this time on your hands, why not start learning some linux stuff? Ubuntu fails at abstracting the core of the system that depends on the command line and is gnu/linux, so don’t start there. I would suggest starting with cygwin and get to know the basics in any linux reference and some core command line tools, then use a free vitual machine for an actual linux distro.

Also, The color scheme f@#kin rocks! For those who don’t like it, get stylish or force colors in firefox.

Hrm… for everyone who has ever said to me, “Scott, Linux just isn’t stable”, I’ve yet to have a single one of them take me up on my always standing offer; “If Linux isn’t stable, break a Slackware install.” Slackware was my first distro and I fell in love with it - then I tried other distros and finally got what most people were talking about. I’ve got a Sabayon Desktop that I routinely hose… but it’s also bleeding edge; you can’t expect to download source that hit the repos five minutes ago and throw it in to your bleeding edge GCC with bleeding edge libraries that are the foundation of the software you’re compiling.

If you go the binary distro route, well, it’s hit or miss. Mainstream hardware, no wifi, and very few hardware/firmware bugs, and you’ll probably be fine - just don’t drop a buggy north bridge into the equation (I’m looking at YOU NVidia!) or you’ll find out why engineers taking short cuts and not following protocol works 99.9999% of the time, and what happens the other .0001% when your sata controller tries to slice off a few microseconds by not waiting for a reply on the bus before trying to queue more write requests.

Try Slackware; it’s stable, the oldest maintained distro, and relies on the KISS principle… I always hear it referred to as vanilla *nix. The maintainer doesn’t mess with anything (not even the wallpapers on your desktop!). I’ve heard of people who have upgraded from version to version for several years. If you’ve got two minutes, check out Slackware: the classic distro that’s as timely as ever: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/93393/index.html

If you’ve got two more minutes, read the comments about it.

The saving grace that I still totally respect you is that you didn’t totally conclude anything wrong about linux, you just bring up the idea and say what it tends to lead you to thinking.

About Norvig and JWZ, the first version [1] of Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years [2], said: “One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he’s produced a lot of great software and through stock options is no doubt much richer than I’ll ever be.”

This was before Google happened to Norvig. :slight_smile:

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19980206223800/http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

[2] http://norvig.com/21-days.html

@Ian

Right, it’s the passive aggressive approach to software punditry.
a href="http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/"http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com//a

Re: Linux is free if your time is worthless…

I prefer to think of it as “I’d rather spend time than money”. People do tend to forget all the time spent learning Windows - learning Linux is the same sort of thing (ditto for Macs). That learning curve didn’t go away just because you’ve already scaled it.

I used Linux fairly exclusively without any problems in University (the two weeks getting the hang of it was far “cheaper” than buying C compilers for Windows). Switched back to Windows mainly because the new computer came pre-installed and my wife didn’t feel inclined to let me take her GUI away.

With XP ending it’s days, I’m thinking I’ll need to migrate back to Linux. Still want my games, though. Solution: installed andLinux, and I’ll slowly migrate all my software from Windows to Linux as I have time to learn the comparible tool.

For the specific example, it is a little odd for someone to expect that their custom-written application would automatically work, and for a business-critical app, the fact that he didn’t test it first is a little scary. Good thing he’s in the nightclub business and not the space program… :wink:

“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.”

jwz isn’t a linux advocate. In fact he’s been a linux basher for quite some time now. He’s full on apple fanboy these days.

I think that the bit of misplaced logic in your leap from (very smart person cannot administer Linux) to (Linux is hard for people to use) is that it fails to acknowledge the difference between administering a business system and using/administering a personal system. Most of us “mere mortals” are not administering business systems, and, at least given my personal experience, I do not think that the problems from personal use of Linux are much worse than with other systems.

Furthermore, I think that administering business systems is not a task for mere mortals with any OS. Every time a new version of Windows or a major patch comes out, you hear stories of businesses unwilling to upgrade because they know or are afraid that the new software will be incompatible with their critical business applications.

You seem to talk a lot about looking through the fence at open source. What’s the deal with that? Just install Linux and try it out a little already. Who cares what somebody else thought about it, I want to know what you think about it.

What have YOUR experiences with Linux (and open source in general) been? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you mention your experiences, only other people’s.

I’m really getting tired hearing you talk about how everybody is moving to open source while you’re still satisfied with Microsoft.

Good God, man, have you been hacked?

Liked your old page scheme much, much better.

haha!

Jeff, at first I thought, MAN THE LINUX KIDS WILL EAT HIM ALIVE!!! Then I realized that this is just another april fools joke post.

GREAT APRIL FOOLS JOKE! Nice job Jeff!

Please please please go back to your previous color scheme!

Your blog is a great place, the articles are good, the comments are good, there are many links in your article that take the readers to your other posts…so, even if i start with a single article, I end up spending a lot of time on your blog reading comments and other posts.

This new color scheme is actually a hindrance to all this. I feel like avoiding your blog, because the colors are so…i can’t find right word!

I do not actually want the old color scheme. I want something that is easy on eyes. If you do not do that, I might stop coming here.

I know it is not your loss.But it will be my loss, and so I am requesting.

Though it’s a April fools post – and, by the way, I love the reference to JWZ’s website in this CSS revamp --, there’s some truth in it. When I upgraded the Intel wireless driver on my laptop, it just broke, and I had to rollback to the older one (XP’s restore points worked, at least once). And from what I hear about people getting into trouble with Vista’s SP1, history may be repeating…

Apparently after 100 posts, only Jay R. Wren seems to have realized that THE POST ITSELF and NOT JUST THE GREEN SCREEN SCHEME are both an April Fool’s joke.

Shame on everyone who didn’t figure out the joke truly believed Jeff was seriously knocking Linux usage.

The comments pretty much nailed it right to the wall; anyone who tries to do any serious enterprise (or any other kind) of work with Fedora deserves no sympathy; I dumped RedHat very early in the dev process a project I head for reasons that were right out there for everyone to see, and I’m familiar with Jamie and think he should know better. Debian or BSD is waiting for him if decides to use it, and he should have been smart enough to pick one of them, probably Debian, long ago. That the drivers included in most kernels and distros work as well as they do given the problems Micro$oft gives to vendors who support Linux is something of a miracle; as someone mentions, most of it has been written blind.

It’s odd that people will seize on a distributions problems, especially one like Fedora that comes with a screaming-out-loud guarantee that you WILL have stability problems, and then in the next sentence start saying Linux This and Linux That. I’ll bet you had a bad experience with a blond at some point in your life… did you swear off blonds? Ever had a car accident? Did you never ever drive that type of car again because of it? Give up food forever after a tummy ache? Linux is still young, getting better every year and scares MS more than ever.

The fact that you have to “unmount a flash drive before removing it” in Linux is exactly why people are “looking through the fence”.

Last I tried Linux you had to unmount the CD drive before the tray would come out. Absurd. Here’s an idea, how about unmounting it for me when I push the eject button.