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

I have never read so much rubbish in all my life.

a) problems caused by hardware are usually traced to :
arse hole manufacturers either replacing hardware with win-drivers at the buyers expense or refusing to release any info to the oss community driver authors as they are licking the proverbial $ ring piece.

b) installing Red Hat with :
its secret patches and --config cripple precompiled binaries…

c) Forgetting to mention a :
Kernel UpGrade.

That just about sums up a most n00b install.

I don’t understand what the point of this post is. Is it to bash linux? You seem to have jumped to a conclusion about this… Just cause some guy has a problem with trying to update a bunch of machines at a club where he’s probably running a pretty customized and complicated network of stuff doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for anyone to upgrade linux. Windows and OSX can be just as bitchy as Linux. This real point is: computers are bitches, and you’re gonna have to frig around with them if you want them to work properly, regardless of operating system. I’ve had problems with all of the operating systems.

But anyways, it’s just provoking the stupid argument of Linux vs. Windows. In the end, you know what? It’s your choice, so use whichever platform you want, and I’ll use whichever platform I want, and we can all be happy.

I think it’s a miracle that things like Ubuntu (which I love b.t.w) even work at all. It’s composed of so many independently controlled software components that you’d expect some sort of problems with any new release.

Which brings me to the point. I assume Jamie meant Ubuntu 7.10 and not 10.7 which was released October 2007. Personally for something as important as my own business I might try and use an Ubuntu ‘long-term support’ version which is going to be a lot more stable and actually has a scheduled end-of-life date after that of 7.10. But perhaps there were other reasons that he could not do that.

He may be a world class programmer but his linux distribution choices are rather odd.
If he wants a stable distro that’s not outdated like say, debian stable, there are lots of much better choices around than fedora or ubuntu.
He never heard about gentoo maybe ? don’t tell me that a world class programmer spending 4 days trying to install the worst distro around can’t spend 3 tweaking use flags.

People forget why Windows won. It was not good marketing. It
certainly wasn’t the best technology. It was device drivers, and
standards.

There’s a much simpler answer. Windows “won” because it was riding on top of an open system (the commodity PC).

These days the roles are reversed and they are competing against an open system (Linux). Perhaps they can do it, but its not a situation I’d want to be in.

Linux is a server-oriented operating system, it’s is best for POSIX-based network, storage, and embedded systems.

It was never designed for Desktop users in mind - there are NO standards to develop anything there - sound, graphics, etc. are all developed by ‘communities’ and are not really backed by commercial companies. Yes there are standards, but too many standards. Also software releases are not to enterprise standards either.

It is not “plug and play” - if you deploy any software with Linux, you MUST control the entire stack - kernel, glibc, libraries, drivers, etc. and verify your application works. You CANNOT simply upgrade one component without testing the ramifications to the entire system, simply because NO one person can verify a component will work because there is NO SINGLE STANDARD Linux Distribution.

This is WHY YOU MUST use Redhat Advanced Server or Suse Enterprise and only used software qualified to work with those releases. This is what Big Companies do to reduce risk.

Trust me, I’ve developed lots of backend-stuff for Linux, but I wouldn’t use Linux on the user-side unless I controlled all software releases.

Jeff Said:
"Here’s one thing I’ve learned from experience: if your system can’t finish a clean install of Windows, it’s not stable. Period. It’s tempting to blame Microsoft, but the only possible culprit if you have problems at this stage is the hardware (or possibly a scratched DVD). Trust me on this one. "

But sometimes you have to do a custom windows cd (which is not a clean install), like when you have raid HDs or some other specific scenario, speaking of that, you can also put most of windows updates in a custom installation CD so you do not need to install then every single time you format your hard drive. Good for making virtual machines too.

The program I use is nLite (vLite for Vista), it is kind hard to use at first but it is worth the effort.
wikipedia entry on nLite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLite
nLite website: http://www.vlite.net/

use ubuntu: it just works :smiley:
i have actually had less problems with ubuntu hardware than windows.

Wow, that’s an amazing amount of FUD! On the other hand, can’t say that I read Coding Horror for its Linux advocacy. Haven’t heard of Jamie Zawinski before, but it sounds like he is almost as good at jumping to the wrong conclusions based on, what I can conclude as, limited experience with a Linux distro, as some of the commenters here.

A bit more balance in your articles would be appreciated Jeff.

Mark said (stupid “no html” means no italics. ***WHY, Jeff?***):

“I think it is also somewhat disturbing that a software developer of Jamie’s caliber refuses to bust open the source code and at least take a look. Refusing to leverage one of the strongest points of OSS seems kinda…odd.”

Doesn’t seem odd to me. Without tons of existing knowledge about the sound architecture or kernel sound drivers, the amount of effort required to do anything meaningful can’t possibly be compensated for in comparison to “just don’t upgrade” or “go back to what worked”.

His time ain’t worthless, I imagine.

Been installing linux since 1994 (slackware) now. Always gone back to windows again. And I really like Linux, and I really dislike microsoft.

Ever since comp.sys.amiga.advocacy I’ve been a Microsoft enemy. It didn’t take much to jump on the linux train. I’ve come around though, only took me 20 years. Microsoft rules.

Ubuntu was kinda ok after some configuration. Then I tried to upgrade it, and it broke.

Every time I’ve tried to install linux, there has been something not working. It can be wireless, the graphics card, recognizing hard drives… It was fun to fix these things at first, but it got old.

I want a rock solid OS with speed, but it seems there are none. There is no incentive to make one. XP seems to be the closest thing.

Anyway, I decided that customizing and repairing my OS wasn’t really my thing. So I’m back to XP again. XP works out of the box, it is stable and doesn’t break if I decide to upgrade it.

Microsoft has won me over, I’m one of them now.


One frequently faces the choice of whether to update software or not. The gains are some extra features. The out-of-pocket cost may be zero (as with the free iPhone download) or it may be substantial.

But in all cases there can be a substantial opportunity cost of one’s time, a cost that is often much larger than one expects (since in many cases things will not work right away).

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/how-much-does-a-free-iphone-update-cost/

“Software Engineering might be science; but that’s not what I do. I’m a hacker, not an engineer.”

a href="http://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html"http://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html/a

What was purpose of this post?
To drive home that Linux is so damn bad. Don’t dare use it.

I tried Gentoo (64bit, back when they were the only 64bit game in town) - got it working in 3 days flat - kept it for a couple of years, didn’t have working sound support, didn’t care much.

Finally got tired of not being able to watch video and hear the sound, Gentoo was in hospice by this time so I tried Debian - much easier, have all kinds of features now, but the NVIDIA drivers break with every kernel upgrade. I know there’s a way around this, thousands of geeks do it 6 times a year with the kernel updates - but it’s less than 100% obvious to me - what is 100% obvious is just not updating the kernel - I’m sure this will cause me to break something else with an upgrade that depends on a newer kernel someday… but in the meantime I remain blissfully months behind the latest kernel updates and I don’t have to learn that extra little bit of geekdom.

There truly are more important things in life.

“Apparently, Linux is so complex that even a world class software engineer can’t always get it to work.”

Hopefully, it is only an apparence and this sentence is a trully proof of incompetence.

I mean, I’m lazy, and I’m the type of guy that never want to re-install a system. Back in the late 90’s, when every one was re-installing win9k evrey 6monthes to keep a clean stable system, I re-installed only when foreced by to much BSOD.

And you know what ? Now i’m using Ubuntu. Far, far, simplier than Windows. I agree only about the audio system, refactored for upcomming Ubuntu 8.04, we’ll see if it is implier.

I recommand Ubuntu for simplicity. Or Mac OS X. But Yeah, the guy who say “I have no time to waste updating linux” must have a very important thing to avoid spending 20minutes…

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.

Happy April’s Troll Day !

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 :slight_smile: