5 ms·

The trouble with Linux most of the time is that it's a craftsman's OS - full of asumptions that you are proficient at fixing problems and knowing how everything

by seer 10y ago

The trouble with Linux most of the time is that it's a craftsman's OS - full of asumptions that you are proficient at fixing problems and knowing how everything works from the inside out. And if you don't and mess up a bit the problems can be much more severe. I've used Linux as a desktop on and off for years, back from the time before Ubuntu was a thing, and every time I start using it problems begin to crop up that need fixing, especially when there are updates involved. For example my brand new 2016 Ubuntu system magically ran out of disk space after a weekend of being left running unattended. Funny enough it was some silly hardware driver issue that kept firing system errors and the log rotation dilligently zipped those enormous log files till there was no more space left. It turned out to be "normal" and the solution was to just disable the message with some arcane terminal commands. After a decade of trying to solve those kinds of problems I think I'm a bit tired. Sure you have issues with macOS and Windows as well, but they are generally more mild and hardly ever work stopping, even if you are using them for dev. I can live without some new hardware bells and whistles that Apple keeps producing but I can't stand fixing basic OS problems anymore and I think that's the thing that Linux desktop should concentrate the most on - stability, or rather - how to be able to move forward in a stable manner. Despite myself I keep following the development of NixOS - maybe some day...

Theodores 10y ago
I don't see it that way, particularly after reading about how you were able to solve your hardware driver - disk space problem. You were able to use your favourite search engine to get a solution. It was solved. Currently I have a problem with my frontend developer's Mac running MAMP. It takes several seconds for a page to load. It is some simple DNS error, it times out 'looking for itself' on the network. So we tried many things, disabling ipV6, changing the hosts file, re-installing the MAMP software, changing the ethernet connection, disabling the wifi - it goes on. We also realised we had a paid for product and asked for support - config files sent off, no resolution. We also got two people from the company IT dept. to try and resolve it, again to no avail. If you are trying to develop a website where you want every page load to be less than three seconds then it is no good if it takes ten seconds to load a page from your local development box. So this was an important fix. Searching the internet for solutions was no joy, it was as if the answers were were kludges that sometimes worked for some people with no substance to why the fixed worked. There was no underlying knowledge, just 'hacks'. This happens a lot in closed source world. I am okay with arcane terminal commands, they can be reproduced and understood if need be. I don't mind copying and pasting them in, semi-blindly. As per your example, things can be fixed that way. But, at the moment, I find myself frustrated by a paid for bit of 'pro' software on a top-end machine with a 'pro' operating system that has no documented way to fix it. In my specific example my colleague is pleased that a website can be developed on the localhost. 10 second page load times are 'no problem'. However, the same repository on my basic linux box with half the RAM and lame i5 CPU hits the 3 second target load times with no problems. I feel that too many 'users' are happy with what they have - 'wow I can develop stuff locally!' - to not realise that the performance is poor compared to the 'developer' linux solution. They don't see the need to fix the performance problems, they do not imagine better is possible unless it is actively sold to them - 'new, faster computer!!!', 'enterprise version' etc. They are forever beholden to marketeers rather than a community.

by seer 10y ago

Theodores 10y ago

I don't see it that way, particularly after reading about how you were able to solve your hardware driver - disk space problem. You were able to use your favourite search engine to get a solution. It was solved. Currently I have a problem with my frontend developer's Mac running MAMP. It takes several seconds for a page to load. It is some simple DNS error, it times out 'looking for itself' on the network. So we tried many things, disabling ipV6, changing the hosts file, re-installing the MAMP software, changing the ethernet connection, disabling the wifi - it goes on. We also realised we had a paid for product and asked for support - config files sent off, no resolution. We also got two people from the company IT dept. to try and resolve it, again to no avail. If you are trying to develop a website where you want every page load to be less than three seconds then it is no good if it takes ten seconds to load a page from your local development box. So this was an important fix. Searching the internet for solutions was no joy, it was as if the answers were were kludges that sometimes worked for some people with no substance to why the fixed worked. There was no underlying knowledge, just 'hacks'. This happens a lot in closed source world. I am okay with arcane terminal commands, they can be reproduced and understood if need be. I don't mind copying and pasting them in, semi-blindly. As per your example, things can be fixed that way. But, at the moment, I find myself frustrated by a paid for bit of 'pro' software on a top-end machine with a 'pro' operating system that has no documented way to fix it. In my specific example my colleague is pleased that a website can be developed on the localhost. 10 second page load times are 'no problem'. However, the same repository on my basic linux box with half the RAM and lame i5 CPU hits the 3 second target load times with no problems. I feel that too many 'users' are happy with what they have - 'wow I can develop stuff locally!' - to not realise that the performance is poor compared to the 'developer' linux solution. They don't see the need to fix the performance problems, they do not imagine better is possible unless it is actively sold to them - 'new, faster computer!!!', 'enterprise version' etc. They are forever beholden to marketeers rather than a community.