6 ms·

When Miguel de Icaza stopped using Linux

19 points by marcodiego 6y ago

marcodiego 6y ago
More about the same theme here: https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html
- rurban 6y ago
  Yeah, switching to mac happened around 10-15 years ago. But since Apple destroyed both their HW and SW, we went back to Fedora. For me it's something like Suse -> Windows -> cygwin -> Debian -> OSX -> Fedora.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I haven't noticed that they destroyed anything, beyond those that bought into OS X for doing GNU/Linux work finally realising that they should get a GNU/Linux distribution for that. Apple stuff is doing just fine, we just use GNU/Linux for server VMs on Java projects. .NET projects run on Windows, all desktops/laptops are a mix of Windows and macOS.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Fedora 33 here, been on some flavor of Red Hat at home and work for close to a decade now. Not sure what the future will be with IBM, CentOS, RockyLinux, etc. and I've had good experience with Debian. My wife's apple laptop by comparison is a PITA; Linux on $400 business laptops has done me solid.
Daho0n 6y ago
>everyone should just contribute to this single Linux. Something something Systemd.
- majewsky 6y ago
  One of systemd's biggest achievements is paving over tons of stupid inconsistencies between distributions. Even something as simple as the standardized format of /etc/os-release already massively simplifies my applications' install scripts.
  - bcrl 6y ago
    If you mean by adding new and different inconsistencies, sure. Personally, /etc/resolv.conf has worked for decades and I don't see how systemd taking control of that improved anything. I wish it had stuck to launching programs like init, rather than breaking everything in new and exciting ways.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    Just to be clear I was only joking. It was neither pro- or anti-systemd. Stating an opinion on systemd is like discussing religion or politics; best avoided on forums.
ggm 6y ago
There's a BSD version of this story. It terminates in "and then I decided I needed to work mostly with binary release mainly|only software which was starting to struggle with the Linux compatibility shim, and decided to just move to osx" And, like Icaza you will wind up using BSD for in rack server purposes and interact fine with it via terminal access, and be productive and capable. Unlike Icaza you aren't so worried about Open vs Free vs Net vs Dragonfly vs TrueNAS. There are issues, things like pledge() and unveil() which can trap you up, but mostly it's ok. The inter BSD compatibility is not perfect but it's pretty good. OSX being the outlier, but home-brew fixes many problems. That OSX-as-an-Xstation/O365/terminal model, I like.
jqpabc123 6y ago
In other words, the software is "free" only if your time has no value. Amazing how long some really smart people took to reach this really obvious conclusion. What's missing with Linux on the desktop is an overriding vision and guiding force to direct the overall effort toward a clear objective. This open source army has lots of generals but it is missing a commander in chief. Lots of battles being fought and won but the war is not moving any closer to a conclusion.
- pimeys 6y ago
  But what if hacking computers is my hobby? What if I actually get lots of joy digging into an operating system and how it works? Then there are no other options than the free systems... And I have been this way for almost 30 years now... And you can then find your niche from there. For me it's a nixos/sway/emacs/firefox that serves me well and gives me enormous power when I need it. I'm a programmer anyway, so loving linux comes naturally.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I am programming since mid-80s, fail to see why I should naturally love Linux because of that.
    - pimeys 6y ago
      I think what I tried to reply here is to the idea of not liking to play with the operating system. I love it. Systems programming, understanding how your OS works AND being able to go to the lowest level and fix things by yourself. It's a pretty good deal and I'm not doing this just because Apple and Microsoft force their own ideology and tracking down my throat, but because this is my passion... I hope I can stay in my niche for the rest of my life and there's no sudden movement to closed systems that will take it away from me.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        I do exactly the same on Windows, macOS, UNIX and whatever OS I can put my hands on. When I came into contact with Linux, I was already coding for a decade, used Xenix and DG/UX before, it was just a mean to save trips to the university computer center. After graduating, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix, NT/2000 were the OSes I cared about. Then J2ME and Symbian came into play. GNU/Linux became relevant again to me as the other UNIX vendors messed up and it is basically the only option alongside Windows for server deployments. However thanks to cloud language runtimes, the actual OS is becoming irrelevant to me. On the desktop side I rather play with macOS/iOS/Windows/Android stacks. And on embedded, bare metal runtimes for Arduino and ESP32 are where my fun is at. So programming and Linux doesn't come naturally to me, it was just a means to free beer UNIX when I couldn't afford something else. Anyway if that is your fun, enjoy.
paulv 6y ago
The title should be updated to reflect that this post is from August 2012.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  It may be, but that is exactly why MAUI/Xamarin won't support Linux directly, it is up to the community to support it.
- eloisant 6y ago
  Yes, especially the part about backward compatibility on OSX have changed a lot. Microsoft have always cared a lot about backward compatibility, going as far as emulating bugs from older versions of Windows to prevent breaking binary software that was relying on those bugs. Apple on the other hand has been pretty shameless about breaking binary compatibility, the biggest breakage recently being about stopping to support 32bit apps in Catalina. If anything, I don't think breaking binary compatibility is such a bad thing today compared to 10 years ago. When you were buying software license to use a version for life, binary compatibility was important. Now you're mostly buying services with software that comes for free, so sticking with an old version because you don't want to pay for the upgrade doesn't really happen any longer. Also when software is no longer supported by the publisher you're forced to switch to something else anyway.
fartcannon 6y ago
Does Miguel still work for Microsoft? Edit: he appears to be working on something Apple related. He never really understood Linux, did he? He was always trying to sabotage it, or bend it to his will. Worst was when he tried to get people to use dotnet on Linux. Edit2: Apparently he does!
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Yes, and will be part of the new AI research unit, he has recently tweeted about open positions.
- marco_craveiro 6y ago
  I'm not entirely sure that is a fair comment, given his many FOSS contributions. I think Linux is a meeting point of many ideas, and Miguel (and Nat and many others) had their vision. Maybe they saw something like OSX. Others saw (and are seeing) something else. RMS had/has his vision. I think its perfectly fine to do your best to make your vision come to life and when that does not quite workout, do something else. Your contributions will remain, and can be used by others to build on. This is the true power of the FOSS philosophy, that it is the sum of disparate agendas, IMHO.
  - fartcannon 6y ago
    Sure, I'm not saying his contributions were worthless. (Some people even like using Gnome for some reason! - I kid, I kid) But it is his contributions that lend him credence and so when he uses that credence to support Microsoft's soft EEE strategies, it's kind of a let down. Whether Miguel sees it like that or not, it's just how it felt to me during his reign of influence. Clearly so did RMS. For example, he supported standardizing on Microsoft's file formats. The same formats that continue to cause problems for alternatives to excel and word to this day. And his support of dotnet at a time when Microsoft was funding the SCO lawsuits, and calling Linux cancer, rattling patent sabers etc are either tone deaf or disinterested in the freedoms given to use by FOSS. Or maybe he's a saboteur. He definitely worked for Microsoft long enough. :D
- kristiandupont 6y ago
shmerl 6y ago
He is joking, right? OS X / macOS is abysmal in backwards compatibility. Where is 32-bit? Where is OpenGL? Linux is way better in backwards compatibility than macOS will ever be. And it's not a new attitude for Apple. They simply think they know better than the user what the user needs and give no choice in the matter to anyone.
erebrus 6y ago
I hate Apple and since 2010 I started using a macbook and I haven't looked back. I still hate Apple, but I'm far more frustrated with the fact that I don't feel I have a good alternative. It's very much like the post said, I got tired of spending my time fixing issues with the system instead of working on what I wanted to work. For those who want to spend time working on their system, great, but I'd dare say that most developers don't.
- rbreaves 6y ago
  I contend that as of the last year or so it looks more possible to have a system that just works with Linux than any time in the last 10-20 years for sure. I am working to mitigate most issues that remain. I think a combination of remapping keys to be more sensible, RDP, and setting up a script to handle my initial setup for a specific distro, Ubuntu Budgie, that I can really resolve 99% of the issues I have with it and not lose any productivity. I am the author of kinto btw. https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
yakubin 6y ago
I've got an M1 Mac (mini) sometime ago. This is my first mac. What surprised me most is how buggy the OS is. I frequently see crashes of core system services (system settings, app store), night shift with "sunset to sunrise" doesn't work at all, on second boot spotlight search stopped finding any programs whatsoever without giving any error messages hinting what went wrong. And of course resizing windows, something that you don't really think about on Windows and Linux, is something that requires effort and focus. And of course the OS is ugly as hell. What bugged me most though is the keyboard and the mouse (I got myself the official ones). Last week I gave up and decided I'm not using this computer until I get alternative keyboard and mouse, because my hands just can't stand the official ones. I'm writing this, because Mac had a reputation for being polished. But what I'm seeing is a lot less polish than even desktop Linux in 2021 has. It really surprised (and disappointed) me. Coupled with better developer tools, I think Windows is more pleasant to use these days, but we'll see, maybe after changing the keyboard and mouse I'll change my mind.
- rualca 6y ago
  > I'm writing this, because Mac had a reputation for being polished. But what I'm seeing is a lot less polish than even desktop Linux in 2021 has. It really surprised (and disappointed) me. This bears repeating. I have a $2500 2019 macbook pro running macOS 10.14, and a crappy $500 acer running Debian. In the last month alone the macbook crashed more than the acer during the last year.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  All of my Macs have been way more problematic than my Windows and Linux systems. Certain keyboards and mice don't even work on a Mac, so good luck with that. My Mac Pro 2012 wouldn't even boot unless a dual link DVI cable was plugged in, until I upgraded the video card to a rx580 so I could get to Mojave. Also every so often I'll get a macOS update that will just break shit all over the place (I also have a MacBook Pro 2015). My (Manjaro) Linux desktops are the most problem free of them all. Updates just work. Installing new software just works. All of my common hardware works with it. Windows I now use only for gaming and watching streaming stuff on the TV. It works well enough for that. I tried using my old Mac pro for that in my exercise room but it will only wake up with the wired Apple keyboard and not a wireless Logitech K400 which works fine with every other computer in the house. For programming I got sick of all the layers of crap and extra configuration I had to do to deal with Windows. Linux is much smoother for running docker and common web development run times, tools, etc. My Macs are for doing Apple stuff. If it weren't for iOS I would throw them in the garbage.
drno123 6y ago
As an embedded engineer who runs Linux on devices that we develop in our company, I completely understand this. You get used to doing things one way (e.g. /etc/network/interfaces), then you upgrade to new kernel, and now setting up a static IP address doesn’t work the old way any more. This being just one of the examples. I was recently introduced to FreeBSD, and fell in love with its internal consistency. I only wish now that tooling for configuring FreeBSD for ARM becomes better so that we could switch to embedded FreeBSD.

19 points by marcodiego 6y ago

More about the same theme here: https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html

rurban 6y ago
Yeah, switching to mac happened around 10-15 years ago. But since Apple destroyed both their HW and SW, we went back to Fedora. For me it's something like Suse -> Windows -> cygwin -> Debian -> OSX -> Fedora.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I haven't noticed that they destroyed anything, beyond those that bought into OS X for doing GNU/Linux work finally realising that they should get a GNU/Linux distribution for that. Apple stuff is doing just fine, we just use GNU/Linux for server VMs on Java projects. .NET projects run on Windows, all desktops/laptops are a mix of Windows and macOS.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Fedora 33 here, been on some flavor of Red Hat at home and work for close to a decade now. Not sure what the future will be with IBM, CentOS, RockyLinux, etc. and I've had good experience with Debian. My wife's apple laptop by comparison is a PITA; Linux on $400 business laptops has done me solid.

Daho0n 6y ago

>everyone should just contribute to this single Linux. Something something Systemd.

majewsky 6y ago
One of systemd's biggest achievements is paving over tons of stupid inconsistencies between distributions. Even something as simple as the standardized format of /etc/os-release already massively simplifies my applications' install scripts.
- bcrl 6y ago
  If you mean by adding new and different inconsistencies, sure. Personally, /etc/resolv.conf has worked for decades and I don't see how systemd taking control of that improved anything. I wish it had stuck to launching programs like init, rather than breaking everything in new and exciting ways.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  Just to be clear I was only joking. It was neither pro- or anti-systemd. Stating an opinion on systemd is like discussing religion or politics; best avoided on forums.

ggm 6y ago

There's a BSD version of this story. It terminates in "and then I decided I needed to work mostly with binary release mainly|only software which was starting to struggle with the Linux compatibility shim, and decided to just move to osx" And, like Icaza you will wind up using BSD for in rack server purposes and interact fine with it via terminal access, and be productive and capable. Unlike Icaza you aren't so worried about Open vs Free vs Net vs Dragonfly vs TrueNAS. There are issues, things like pledge() and unveil() which can trap you up, but mostly it's ok. The inter BSD compatibility is not perfect but it's pretty good. OSX being the outlier, but home-brew fixes many problems. That OSX-as-an-Xstation/O365/terminal model, I like.

jqpabc123 6y ago

In other words, the software is "free" only if your time has no value. Amazing how long some really smart people took to reach this really obvious conclusion. What's missing with Linux on the desktop is an overriding vision and guiding force to direct the overall effort toward a clear objective. This open source army has lots of generals but it is missing a commander in chief. Lots of battles being fought and won but the war is not moving any closer to a conclusion.

pimeys 6y ago
But what if hacking computers is my hobby? What if I actually get lots of joy digging into an operating system and how it works? Then there are no other options than the free systems... And I have been this way for almost 30 years now... And you can then find your niche from there. For me it's a nixos/sway/emacs/firefox that serves me well and gives me enormous power when I need it. I'm a programmer anyway, so loving linux comes naturally.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I am programming since mid-80s, fail to see why I should naturally love Linux because of that.
  - pimeys 6y ago
    I think what I tried to reply here is to the idea of not liking to play with the operating system. I love it. Systems programming, understanding how your OS works AND being able to go to the lowest level and fix things by yourself. It's a pretty good deal and I'm not doing this just because Apple and Microsoft force their own ideology and tracking down my throat, but because this is my passion... I hope I can stay in my niche for the rest of my life and there's no sudden movement to closed systems that will take it away from me.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      I do exactly the same on Windows, macOS, UNIX and whatever OS I can put my hands on. When I came into contact with Linux, I was already coding for a decade, used Xenix and DG/UX before, it was just a mean to save trips to the university computer center. After graduating, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix, NT/2000 were the OSes I cared about. Then J2ME and Symbian came into play. GNU/Linux became relevant again to me as the other UNIX vendors messed up and it is basically the only option alongside Windows for server deployments. However thanks to cloud language runtimes, the actual OS is becoming irrelevant to me. On the desktop side I rather play with macOS/iOS/Windows/Android stacks. And on embedded, bare metal runtimes for Arduino and ESP32 are where my fun is at. So programming and Linux doesn't come naturally to me, it was just a means to free beer UNIX when I couldn't afford something else. Anyway if that is your fun, enjoy.

paulv 6y ago

The title should be updated to reflect that this post is from August 2012.

pjmlp 6y ago
It may be, but that is exactly why MAUI/Xamarin won't support Linux directly, it is up to the community to support it.
eloisant 6y ago
Yes, especially the part about backward compatibility on OSX have changed a lot. Microsoft have always cared a lot about backward compatibility, going as far as emulating bugs from older versions of Windows to prevent breaking binary software that was relying on those bugs. Apple on the other hand has been pretty shameless about breaking binary compatibility, the biggest breakage recently being about stopping to support 32bit apps in Catalina. If anything, I don't think breaking binary compatibility is such a bad thing today compared to 10 years ago. When you were buying software license to use a version for life, binary compatibility was important. Now you're mostly buying services with software that comes for free, so sticking with an old version because you don't want to pay for the upgrade doesn't really happen any longer. Also when software is no longer supported by the publisher you're forced to switch to something else anyway.

fartcannon 6y ago

Does Miguel still work for Microsoft? Edit: he appears to be working on something Apple related. He never really understood Linux, did he? He was always trying to sabotage it, or bend it to his will. Worst was when he tried to get people to use dotnet on Linux. Edit2: Apparently he does!

pjmlp 6y ago
Yes, and will be part of the new AI research unit, he has recently tweeted about open positions.
marco_craveiro 6y ago
I'm not entirely sure that is a fair comment, given his many FOSS contributions. I think Linux is a meeting point of many ideas, and Miguel (and Nat and many others) had their vision. Maybe they saw something like OSX. Others saw (and are seeing) something else. RMS had/has his vision. I think its perfectly fine to do your best to make your vision come to life and when that does not quite workout, do something else. Your contributions will remain, and can be used by others to build on. This is the true power of the FOSS philosophy, that it is the sum of disparate agendas, IMHO.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  Sure, I'm not saying his contributions were worthless. (Some people even like using Gnome for some reason! - I kid, I kid) But it is his contributions that lend him credence and so when he uses that credence to support Microsoft's soft EEE strategies, it's kind of a let down. Whether Miguel sees it like that or not, it's just how it felt to me during his reign of influence. Clearly so did RMS. For example, he supported standardizing on Microsoft's file formats. The same formats that continue to cause problems for alternatives to excel and word to this day. And his support of dotnet at a time when Microsoft was funding the SCO lawsuits, and calling Linux cancer, rattling patent sabers etc are either tone deaf or disinterested in the freedoms given to use by FOSS. Or maybe he's a saboteur. He definitely worked for Microsoft long enough. :D
kristiandupont 6y ago

shmerl 6y ago

He is joking, right? OS X / macOS is abysmal in backwards compatibility. Where is 32-bit? Where is OpenGL? Linux is way better in backwards compatibility than macOS will ever be. And it's not a new attitude for Apple. They simply think they know better than the user what the user needs and give no choice in the matter to anyone.

erebrus 6y ago

I hate Apple and since 2010 I started using a macbook and I haven't looked back. I still hate Apple, but I'm far more frustrated with the fact that I don't feel I have a good alternative. It's very much like the post said, I got tired of spending my time fixing issues with the system instead of working on what I wanted to work. For those who want to spend time working on their system, great, but I'd dare say that most developers don't.

rbreaves 6y ago
I contend that as of the last year or so it looks more possible to have a system that just works with Linux than any time in the last 10-20 years for sure. I am working to mitigate most issues that remain. I think a combination of remapping keys to be more sensible, RDP, and setting up a script to handle my initial setup for a specific distro, Ubuntu Budgie, that I can really resolve 99% of the issues I have with it and not lose any productivity. I am the author of kinto btw. https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

yakubin 6y ago

I've got an M1 Mac (mini) sometime ago. This is my first mac. What surprised me most is how buggy the OS is. I frequently see crashes of core system services (system settings, app store), night shift with "sunset to sunrise" doesn't work at all, on second boot spotlight search stopped finding any programs whatsoever without giving any error messages hinting what went wrong. And of course resizing windows, something that you don't really think about on Windows and Linux, is something that requires effort and focus. And of course the OS is ugly as hell. What bugged me most though is the keyboard and the mouse (I got myself the official ones). Last week I gave up and decided I'm not using this computer until I get alternative keyboard and mouse, because my hands just can't stand the official ones. I'm writing this, because Mac had a reputation for being polished. But what I'm seeing is a lot less polish than even desktop Linux in 2021 has. It really surprised (and disappointed) me. Coupled with better developer tools, I think Windows is more pleasant to use these days, but we'll see, maybe after changing the keyboard and mouse I'll change my mind.

rualca 6y ago
> I'm writing this, because Mac had a reputation for being polished. But what I'm seeing is a lot less polish than even desktop Linux in 2021 has. It really surprised (and disappointed) me. This bears repeating. I have a $2500 2019 macbook pro running macOS 10.14, and a crappy $500 acer running Debian. In the last month alone the macbook crashed more than the acer during the last year.
wayneftw 6y ago
All of my Macs have been way more problematic than my Windows and Linux systems. Certain keyboards and mice don't even work on a Mac, so good luck with that. My Mac Pro 2012 wouldn't even boot unless a dual link DVI cable was plugged in, until I upgraded the video card to a rx580 so I could get to Mojave. Also every so often I'll get a macOS update that will just break shit all over the place (I also have a MacBook Pro 2015). My (Manjaro) Linux desktops are the most problem free of them all. Updates just work. Installing new software just works. All of my common hardware works with it. Windows I now use only for gaming and watching streaming stuff on the TV. It works well enough for that. I tried using my old Mac pro for that in my exercise room but it will only wake up with the wired Apple keyboard and not a wireless Logitech K400 which works fine with every other computer in the house. For programming I got sick of all the layers of crap and extra configuration I had to do to deal with Windows. Linux is much smoother for running docker and common web development run times, tools, etc. My Macs are for doing Apple stuff. If it weren't for iOS I would throw them in the garbage.

drno123 6y ago

As an embedded engineer who runs Linux on devices that we develop in our company, I completely understand this. You get used to doing things one way (e.g. /etc/network/interfaces), then you upgrade to new kernel, and now setting up a static IP address doesn’t work the old way any more. This being just one of the examples. I was recently introduced to FreeBSD, and fell in love with its internal consistency. I only wish now that tooling for configuring FreeBSD for ARM becomes better so that we could switch to embedded FreeBSD.