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Um, "worse is better" if your only metrics are things like time to market. How many Linux technologies have not been able to surpass their counterpart technolo

Um, "worse is better" if your only metrics are things like time to market. How many Linux technologies have not been able to surpass their counterpart technologies after years of iterating? Two are top of mind: epoll and btrfs. Sometimes designing a system is the best approach. Sometimes iterating on a "worse is better" technology is the right approach. There is no single answer. I think we need to be more rational about the real reasons Linux is/was so successful. Yes, sometimes it was about "worse is better" but certainly not the majority of the time. My guess is -- the reason Linux was so successful can be summarized much more easily as: free as in beer, unpretentious (does not require adopting some high UNIX religion), appealing licensing (I don't love the GPL/licensing religion but lots of people do!), and it was very, very lucky.

pjmlp 4y ago
Since when did epoll got better than Solaris or Windows alternatives?
- mustache_kimono 4y ago
  > How many Linux technologies have not been able to surpass their counterpart technologies after years of iterating? Two are top of mind: epoll and btrfs. I'm saying epoll is an example of a technology which has not been able to surpass its Solaris or Windows equivalents.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Ah sorry, got it the other way around.
  - ajross 4y ago
    Seems like there's a semantic problem here. epoll won. It clearly "surpassed" its competitors by most definitions. Arguments against it aren't grounded in epoll's capability or performance. They're about aesthetics. People used to kqueues think epoll is ugly. Well, OK. I think that's fair. But being beautiful isn't sufficient to declare a software feature as having "surpassed" another, again by conventional definitions. It's just a way to win an argument. Really the epoll nonsense is a perfect microcosm of exactly this kind of argument. For 30 years the BSD folks have been making fundamentally aesthetic arguments into a market that demands practical solutions. And... losing, kinda. FWIW: I think the btrfs argument is rather stronger on a technical level. The problem there is that people stopped caring about local storage filesystems about 10-15 years ago. Local devices are a solved problem, and all the innovation in storage technology is happening in the cloud today, in front of software layers that are only vaguely understood as "filesystems" in the Unix sense.
    - mustache_kimono 4y ago
      I agree there is a semantic distinction to be made re: epoll, but also an unstated premise: Worse is better when you can iterate to good enough. What is good enough? Well I think you may forget another metric: developer experience and ease of building a correct product. Say you're building a web framework or server, how long is that going to take do that correctly with epoll compared to the alternatives?
      - ajross 4y ago
        > Say you're building a web framework or server, how long is that going to take do that correctly with epoll compared to the alternatives. This is still making too much of the subject. Every major server framework was epoll-capable within a few months of the feature landing. Again, epoll won. It's fine. It's more than fine, it's actually pretty great. It's not hard to use, at all (at least relative to other technologies in the same space). It's just not as subjectively pretty as kqueues.
        mustache_kimono 4y ago
        > Again, epoll won. epoll didn't win? Linux won. Which was one point of my post (that you're nitpicking). Linux wins for reasons which mostly have nothing to do with design philosophy ("worse is better"), or technical superiority.
        ajross 4y ago
        I still think you're being way too general here by deploying hyperbole like "technical superiority" or "surpass" to subjects that are just about aesthetics. Adapting it to your frame here, my point was something to the effect of: if kqueues were clearly superior technically, then applications[1] which rely heavily on widely-multiplexed kernel notifications would naturally have migrated to the superior solution. (Ditto for zfs/btrfs, etc...) And... there really are none. For all the yelling, in fact epoll works great. It still works great. Claiming something is "technically superior" to a product that clearly works great in the market is a red flag that you're probably not arguing about technology. [1] Which are MANY! The whole cloud runs on epoll!
- butlerm 4y ago
  > How many Linux technologies have not been able to surpass their counterpart technologies after years of iterating? Two are top of mind: epoll and btrfs. Apples and oranges. No one is required to use btrfs, it is one of many options for filesystems. In my opinion, btrfs is dangerously close to a failed filesystem design for a variety of reasons, but no one needs to use it. That is a good thing - some designs succeed and some not so much, and the successful ones survive and prosper, no need to change operating systems or anything like that.
  - smcnally 4y ago
    Synology NAS devices recommend Btrfs and makes more space available when using it for storage pools. https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/Btrfs https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/Btrfs
Maursault 4y ago
> I think we need to be more rational about the real reasons Linux is/was so successful. I always think there were two reasons, but one of them didn't matter. The first reason, that didn't matter, is that Linux was free. That didn't matter because BSD was also free. The second reason, and the main reason, is that it had the force of popularity, or verve, behind it by a fanatical group known colloquially as the Penquinistas. By and large I believe they were young developers that often crashed their laptops, and they liked Linux because it booted faster. I honestly believe Linux taking over the datacenter in 2012ish was entirely arbitrary. Booting faster is fundamentally a silly metric in the datacenter. But the takeaway is the change to Linux was driven by developers, not systems administrators, who for the most part were caught with their pants down and complained that Linux wasn't ready (to success in 2006 with IBM, which rolled back their global Linux deployment).
- mustache_kimono 4y ago
  > The second reason, and the main reason, is that it had the force of popularity, or verve, behind it by a fanatical group known colloquially as the Penquinistas. Wholeheartedly agree with this, maybe not all your particulars, but yeah agree.
- mikem170 4y ago
  In the first half of the 1990's BSD was sued by Unix Systems Labs, who had bought the rights to AT&T Unix, claiming copyright infringement [0]. It took a couple of years for everything to be dismissed and settled. "Ultimately, the legal drama did not undercut programmers’ ability to use or redistribute BSD. However, it did stunt adoption of the operating system by creating doubts about BSD’s legal future. As a result, it arguably forged an opening that allowed Linux to gain ground despite being developed primarily by an undergraduate in his Helsinki apartment, rather than a team of professional computer scientists at a major American university." I've always heard that this lawsuit was significant, ruining the momentum that BSD had at the time, momentum that ended up shifting to linux. [0] https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-history-why-didnt-bsd-beat-out-gnu-and-linux https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-histo...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
akira2501 4y ago
> sometimes it was about "worse is better" but certainly not the majority of the time. Linux had a heyday with this that matched the growing computer and technology market of the time. The state of the art just happened to be moving fast enough to justify this approach.

pjmlp 4y ago

Since when did epoll got better than Solaris or Windows alternatives?

mustache_kimono 4y ago
> How many Linux technologies have not been able to surpass their counterpart technologies after years of iterating? Two are top of mind: epoll and btrfs. I'm saying epoll is an example of a technology which has not been able to surpass its Solaris or Windows equivalents.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Ah sorry, got it the other way around.
- ajross 4y ago
  Seems like there's a semantic problem here. epoll won. It clearly "surpassed" its competitors by most definitions. Arguments against it aren't grounded in epoll's capability or performance. They're about aesthetics. People used to kqueues think epoll is ugly. Well, OK. I think that's fair. But being beautiful isn't sufficient to declare a software feature as having "surpassed" another, again by conventional definitions. It's just a way to win an argument. Really the epoll nonsense is a perfect microcosm of exactly this kind of argument. For 30 years the BSD folks have been making fundamentally aesthetic arguments into a market that demands practical solutions. And... losing, kinda. FWIW: I think the btrfs argument is rather stronger on a technical level. The problem there is that people stopped caring about local storage filesystems about 10-15 years ago. Local devices are a solved problem, and all the innovation in storage technology is happening in the cloud today, in front of software layers that are only vaguely understood as "filesystems" in the Unix sense.
  - mustache_kimono 4y ago
    I agree there is a semantic distinction to be made re: epoll, but also an unstated premise: Worse is better when you can iterate to good enough. What is good enough? Well I think you may forget another metric: developer experience and ease of building a correct product. Say you're building a web framework or server, how long is that going to take do that correctly with epoll compared to the alternatives?
    - ajross 4y ago
      > Say you're building a web framework or server, how long is that going to take do that correctly with epoll compared to the alternatives. This is still making too much of the subject. Every major server framework was epoll-capable within a few months of the feature landing. Again, epoll won. It's fine. It's more than fine, it's actually pretty great. It's not hard to use, at all (at least relative to other technologies in the same space). It's just not as subjectively pretty as kqueues.
      - mustache_kimono 4y ago
        > Again, epoll won. epoll didn't win? Linux won. Which was one point of my post (that you're nitpicking). Linux wins for reasons which mostly have nothing to do with design philosophy ("worse is better"), or technical superiority.
        ajross 4y ago
        I still think you're being way too general here by deploying hyperbole like "technical superiority" or "surpass" to subjects that are just about aesthetics. Adapting it to your frame here, my point was something to the effect of: if kqueues were clearly superior technically, then applications[1] which rely heavily on widely-multiplexed kernel notifications would naturally have migrated to the superior solution. (Ditto for zfs/btrfs, etc...) And... there really are none. For all the yelling, in fact epoll works great. It still works great. Claiming something is "technically superior" to a product that clearly works great in the market is a red flag that you're probably not arguing about technology. [1] Which are MANY! The whole cloud runs on epoll!
butlerm 4y ago
> How many Linux technologies have not been able to surpass their counterpart technologies after years of iterating? Two are top of mind: epoll and btrfs. Apples and oranges. No one is required to use btrfs, it is one of many options for filesystems. In my opinion, btrfs is dangerously close to a failed filesystem design for a variety of reasons, but no one needs to use it. That is a good thing - some designs succeed and some not so much, and the successful ones survive and prosper, no need to change operating systems or anything like that.
- smcnally 4y ago
  Synology NAS devices recommend Btrfs and makes more space available when using it for storage pools. https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/Btrfs https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/Btrfs

Maursault 4y ago

> I think we need to be more rational about the real reasons Linux is/was so successful. I always think there were two reasons, but one of them didn't matter. The first reason, that didn't matter, is that Linux was free. That didn't matter because BSD was also free. The second reason, and the main reason, is that it had the force of popularity, or verve, behind it by a fanatical group known colloquially as the Penquinistas. By and large I believe they were young developers that often crashed their laptops, and they liked Linux because it booted faster. I honestly believe Linux taking over the datacenter in 2012ish was entirely arbitrary. Booting faster is fundamentally a silly metric in the datacenter. But the takeaway is the change to Linux was driven by developers, not systems administrators, who for the most part were caught with their pants down and complained that Linux wasn't ready (to success in 2006 with IBM, which rolled back their global Linux deployment).

mustache_kimono 4y ago
> The second reason, and the main reason, is that it had the force of popularity, or verve, behind it by a fanatical group known colloquially as the Penquinistas. Wholeheartedly agree with this, maybe not all your particulars, but yeah agree.
mikem170 4y ago
In the first half of the 1990's BSD was sued by Unix Systems Labs, who had bought the rights to AT&T Unix, claiming copyright infringement [0]. It took a couple of years for everything to be dismissed and settled. "Ultimately, the legal drama did not undercut programmers’ ability to use or redistribute BSD. However, it did stunt adoption of the operating system by creating doubts about BSD’s legal future. As a result, it arguably forged an opening that allowed Linux to gain ground despite being developed primarily by an undergraduate in his Helsinki apartment, rather than a team of professional computer scientists at a major American university." I've always heard that this lawsuit was significant, ruining the momentum that BSD had at the time, momentum that ended up shifting to linux. [0] https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-history-why-didnt-bsd-beat-out-gnu-and-linux https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/open-source-histo...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

akira2501 4y ago

> sometimes it was about "worse is better" but certainly not the majority of the time. Linux had a heyday with this that matched the growing computer and technology market of the time. The state of the art just happened to be moving fast enough to justify this approach.