6 ms·

Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not work on the actual study. Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his m

by einr 4y ago

Or keep trying to fix the environment + hardware compatibility issues and not work on the actual study. Or keep editing some random xorg.conf file because his monitor's display suddenly became weird. Or try to fix some other random files since the sound driver doesn't work. He's 10. I was doing this stuff in Linux when I was… well, not 10, but 12. Today I work with computers. What do you think ”tinkering” means? I do sympathize with being a grown adult and having no time for this stuff anymore. But there is a time and place where, for some, the act of making a computer work right and do what you want is fun in itself. Isn’t that why we’re all here?

piyush_soni 4y ago
Not everyone is here to become a Computer Scientist or even a computer professional unfortunately, they want to study their favorite subject, do screen recordings, make nice presentations etc. Our company uses RHEL / CentOS distributions of Linux. And they still suffer from all these weird problems I don't find 'fun' to fix because I have actual work to do, but I have to anyway.
- einr 4y ago
  Sure. But the article here is specifically about someone who wants their child to learn about computers by tinkering and trial and error.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    Uh, the article isn't about that at all. It's about how cluttered, user-hostile, and specifically kid-unfriendly Windows has become in the latest iteration. Linux isn't the answer because it replaces those "features" with different kinds of user-hostility (everything is geared towards people who are on the road to becoming software developers, or are close friends with someone who is).
    - einr 4y ago
      "Uh," maybe we can both be right. Allow me to quote directly: "I want him to be able to dig deeper. To explore. To try things out, misconfigure, crash, fix, and re-install. To get a feeling for how things work below the surface and how they do not work. To learn how to type fast and efficiently. To create things. Maybe, one day, even to learn how to code if he's interested."
      - gjvc 4y ago
        Only when things are broken and in need of fixing, is one forced one to understand how they work behind the scenes. Necessity becomes the mother of understanding for a while... :-)
    - neogodless 4y ago
      No, there are quite a few distributions geared towards working out of the box, and being easy for new users.
- Delk 4y ago
  RHEL/CentOS is probably more likely to run into those kinds of problems on the desktop than some other, less conservative and less enterprisey distros. RHEL (and its kin) is a stable server OS. Some organizations that have Linux-based desktops or laptops then also use it on those, perhaps for the sake of homogenisation. But the longer release cycle and conservative update policies that in part make it a stable and predictable server OS also mean that hardware support may lag by years. This is always a topic on which people will have different experiences. Some people will have everything just working. That's perhaps most likely when the hardware has been chosen with compatibility in mind in the first place. In that case it can be pretty smooth sailing with little tweaking required and with things just working, especially compared to how it used to be, which is probably one reason why people react to claims of endless tweaking being required. Other people will have hit a rough spot, and those certainly still exist particularly with non-specifically picked hardware, especially if that hardware is newer than the distro release. CentOS is probably not representative of most people's experiences of running Linux on a desktop or laptop, though.
- jchw 4y ago
  Not everyone was out to become a computer scientist when microcomputers booted to BASIC, but I don't find many people regretting their time growing up with those computers. I will give you that Linux is needlessly complex due to undesirable issues, but that's the price of admission for a highly hackable system, since there are no serious alternatives. As for kids, I wouldn't underestimate them. If what you want to give someone is a rich and deep experience with computers, it's about all you have right now. On the other hand, and I'm sure this part of my comment will go over swimmingly here, but I imagine... if you start kids out with iPads, what they learn is not that doing interesting things with their computers is challenging, but that it costs a monthly fee.
  - corgihamlet 4y ago
    I have read several stories that Gen-Z students often have serious issues understanding the concepts of files and directories. Their main way of interacting with such things is through "sharing" and links to Google Docs and whatever.
  - vladfr 4y ago
    Interesting takes on Linux and ipads. My 2-year old is interested in typing with colours. I found that the iPad is better in many ways: its size is perfect, the 1st gen keyboard is light and thin, and the touchscreen is a boon. But I'm not going to let her have one when she's older. I now realise that I would love a Linux tablet. Not a small laptop, but a touch tablet, thin, with a light keyboard too. Is there such a thing out there? Or should I start building one now?
- jai_ 4y ago
  It feels like of bleak to discourage childish computer tinkering on a website named "Hacker News". Not entirely sure what this says about the direction of this website.
  - piyush_soni 4y ago
    I'm totally for computer tinkering, but at the age of learning something like 'MIT Scratch' or even C/C++/Python, if they have to deal with all these problems, a lot of potential computer scientists might actually get discouraged and end up giving it all up thinking 'Computers' are very difficult.
    - thealienthing 4y ago
      This is a valid concern, but one thing I find is that using the more modern walled garden OSS like Mac and windows can be prohibitively abstract and difficult for getting into programming. On Mac, you need Xcode installed before you can even run GCC. And I believe you have to jump through similar hoops for windows. They try to rail you into using a complicated IDE like Xcode of Visual Studio when all you need is a text editor and GCC on Linux. It’s got a learning curve as a daily OS, but give a kid a raspberry pi and everything they need to write and run some python or C++ is pretty much there. You can sit down with them for the setup but they won’t need you after it’s set up and they will have a lot to look at before it comes time to get into the weeds with IDEs, make files, system dependencies etc. no solution is perfect (Linux included) but I find the ready to rock state of a fresh Linux distro to be pretty helpful to getting a developer going.
  - safety1st 4y ago
    Honestly the direction of this website in recent years seems to be highly paid wage slaves bitching about not being highly paid enough. It has merely followed the direction of the industry. 15+ years ago the industry was smaller, pay was lower and you still had to be kind of a nerd or an iconoclast or something to get into it. Now it's filled with people who have no love for the tech and frequently even no knowledge of it, just showing up for the buck. So many people on HN now seem like people who would never start a business.
TylerE 4y ago
In a lot of ways it was way easier back then as you didn't have the fragmentation. You ran X11/Xorg (no Wayland), sysv init (no systemd), OSS or ALSA, not pulseaudio, you had sane/not insanely bloated desktops like KDE2 or XFCE. Even unicode wasn't something most really had to care much about...world was still mostly ascii.
- einr 4y ago
  You're right in a way, and I long for those days when it was easier to understand the system, but 90s Linux had its own headaches and really was the embodiment of the "ugh, sometimes you have to edit files to make computer go" meme that still survives to this day. Yes, you had to edit your XF86Config to make your graphics work right, maybe even write your own modeline and be nervous that you screwed up your timings and blew up your CRT permanently. Maybe you had to recompile the kernel to set the proper settings for your Soundblaster. Less fragmentation? Desktop consistency? FORGET IT. A million window managers to choose from. Whichever you go with, your apps will be in a mixture of Motif, Tk, GTK, Qt and/or plain Athena widgets and there are no theme engines that will save you. Just deal with it or write your own. For those without memory of how it was, search up some screenshots of RedHat 5.2 and its stock FVWM95 window manager. That was the easy to use, business-oriented distro of the day. That was considered acceptable look and feel to ship to an end user. But all this? Fun. FWIW I still think a kid could have fun tinkering with modern Linux, it's probably just that they would tinker with different things. (Because contrary to popular belief, video and audio almost always "just work" these days)
- oblio 4y ago
  > sysv init (no systemd) Rose tinted glasses. Each distro had its own scripts and layout. SysV sucked.
- vetinari 4y ago
  > You ran X11/Xorg (no Wayland) It was XFree86 -- with separate server binary for each chipset. Then came XFree86 4.0 with a new, hot thing: modularity. You could load drivers as modules, but that presented an entirely new way to make things more complicated. XFree86 became an OS in itself, including dynamic linker, PCI handling, vm86 emulator... With Wayland, things are much simpler. > , sysv init (no systemd) There was bsdinit at the time. Sysvinit was considered bloated by the same types, who cannot consider systemd today. > you had sane/not insanely bloated desktops like KDE2 or XFCE. There were other topics, like switching from libc5 to glibc2. Again, unicode, localization, nss services, so much "unnecessary bloat".
pjmlp 4y ago
Not everyone wants to tinker when it isn't part of the job description.
- einr 4y ago
  You are talking as an adult with a job, not a 10-year old who likes computers.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    When I was 10 years old, tinkering required going to the library, and if you couldn't find any Spectrum book there, the only tinkering left was LOAD "" or trying to understand what Timex 2068 manual was all about. I also hardly tinkered until I got into programming classes later on the high school, and then it wasn't tinkering, my time spent with Timex, Amiga and MS-DOS was about coding, demoscene and games, not fixing the OS.
    - einr 4y ago
      Tinkering and fun means different things to different people. That's okay. Your idea of fun wasn't to fix the OS -- mine was. I went to the library in '97 and borrowed the Linux Bible, with a CD-ROM copy of Yggdrasil Plug'n'Play Linux that I installed on my 486, and the new world that opened up to me of being able to modify, tune and customize the entire OS to my liking with no restrictions was magic. Today, I work as a Linux sysadmin and I have fun at work. Other people of the same persuasion are the ones who maintain Linux distributions or contribute to the kernel today. The point here is that if a kid finds it fun and creative to futz around with "fixing the OS" then let them -- not only is it its own reward, it might lead somewhere. Don't say "no, this isn't fun in my opinion and you shouldn't have to do it".
- majkinetor 4y ago
  Then accept reality that you have 0 control. You will always be unhappy with whatever setup. Its not realistic that 3rd party will replicate your mind state about how your OS should look like.

by einr 4y ago

piyush_soni 4y ago

Not everyone is here to become a Computer Scientist or even a computer professional unfortunately, they want to study their favorite subject, do screen recordings, make nice presentations etc. Our company uses RHEL / CentOS distributions of Linux. And they still suffer from all these weird problems I don't find 'fun' to fix because I have actual work to do, but I have to anyway.

einr 4y ago
Sure. But the article here is specifically about someone who wants their child to learn about computers by tinkering and trial and error.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Uh, the article isn't about that at all. It's about how cluttered, user-hostile, and specifically kid-unfriendly Windows has become in the latest iteration. Linux isn't the answer because it replaces those "features" with different kinds of user-hostility (everything is geared towards people who are on the road to becoming software developers, or are close friends with someone who is).
  - einr 4y ago
    "Uh," maybe we can both be right. Allow me to quote directly: "I want him to be able to dig deeper. To explore. To try things out, misconfigure, crash, fix, and re-install. To get a feeling for how things work below the surface and how they do not work. To learn how to type fast and efficiently. To create things. Maybe, one day, even to learn how to code if he's interested."
    - gjvc 4y ago
      Only when things are broken and in need of fixing, is one forced one to understand how they work behind the scenes. Necessity becomes the mother of understanding for a while... :-)
  - neogodless 4y ago
    No, there are quite a few distributions geared towards working out of the box, and being easy for new users.
Delk 4y ago
RHEL/CentOS is probably more likely to run into those kinds of problems on the desktop than some other, less conservative and less enterprisey distros. RHEL (and its kin) is a stable server OS. Some organizations that have Linux-based desktops or laptops then also use it on those, perhaps for the sake of homogenisation. But the longer release cycle and conservative update policies that in part make it a stable and predictable server OS also mean that hardware support may lag by years. This is always a topic on which people will have different experiences. Some people will have everything just working. That's perhaps most likely when the hardware has been chosen with compatibility in mind in the first place. In that case it can be pretty smooth sailing with little tweaking required and with things just working, especially compared to how it used to be, which is probably one reason why people react to claims of endless tweaking being required. Other people will have hit a rough spot, and those certainly still exist particularly with non-specifically picked hardware, especially if that hardware is newer than the distro release. CentOS is probably not representative of most people's experiences of running Linux on a desktop or laptop, though.
jchw 4y ago
Not everyone was out to become a computer scientist when microcomputers booted to BASIC, but I don't find many people regretting their time growing up with those computers. I will give you that Linux is needlessly complex due to undesirable issues, but that's the price of admission for a highly hackable system, since there are no serious alternatives. As for kids, I wouldn't underestimate them. If what you want to give someone is a rich and deep experience with computers, it's about all you have right now. On the other hand, and I'm sure this part of my comment will go over swimmingly here, but I imagine... if you start kids out with iPads, what they learn is not that doing interesting things with their computers is challenging, but that it costs a monthly fee.
- corgihamlet 4y ago
  I have read several stories that Gen-Z students often have serious issues understanding the concepts of files and directories. Their main way of interacting with such things is through "sharing" and links to Google Docs and whatever.
- vladfr 4y ago
  Interesting takes on Linux and ipads. My 2-year old is interested in typing with colours. I found that the iPad is better in many ways: its size is perfect, the 1st gen keyboard is light and thin, and the touchscreen is a boon. But I'm not going to let her have one when she's older. I now realise that I would love a Linux tablet. Not a small laptop, but a touch tablet, thin, with a light keyboard too. Is there such a thing out there? Or should I start building one now?
jai_ 4y ago
It feels like of bleak to discourage childish computer tinkering on a website named "Hacker News". Not entirely sure what this says about the direction of this website.
- piyush_soni 4y ago
  I'm totally for computer tinkering, but at the age of learning something like 'MIT Scratch' or even C/C++/Python, if they have to deal with all these problems, a lot of potential computer scientists might actually get discouraged and end up giving it all up thinking 'Computers' are very difficult.
  - thealienthing 4y ago
    This is a valid concern, but one thing I find is that using the more modern walled garden OSS like Mac and windows can be prohibitively abstract and difficult for getting into programming. On Mac, you need Xcode installed before you can even run GCC. And I believe you have to jump through similar hoops for windows. They try to rail you into using a complicated IDE like Xcode of Visual Studio when all you need is a text editor and GCC on Linux. It’s got a learning curve as a daily OS, but give a kid a raspberry pi and everything they need to write and run some python or C++ is pretty much there. You can sit down with them for the setup but they won’t need you after it’s set up and they will have a lot to look at before it comes time to get into the weeds with IDEs, make files, system dependencies etc. no solution is perfect (Linux included) but I find the ready to rock state of a fresh Linux distro to be pretty helpful to getting a developer going.
- safety1st 4y ago
  Honestly the direction of this website in recent years seems to be highly paid wage slaves bitching about not being highly paid enough. It has merely followed the direction of the industry. 15+ years ago the industry was smaller, pay was lower and you still had to be kind of a nerd or an iconoclast or something to get into it. Now it's filled with people who have no love for the tech and frequently even no knowledge of it, just showing up for the buck. So many people on HN now seem like people who would never start a business.

TylerE 4y ago

In a lot of ways it was way easier back then as you didn't have the fragmentation. You ran X11/Xorg (no Wayland), sysv init (no systemd), OSS or ALSA, not pulseaudio, you had sane/not insanely bloated desktops like KDE2 or XFCE. Even unicode wasn't something most really had to care much about...world was still mostly ascii.

einr 4y ago
You're right in a way, and I long for those days when it was easier to understand the system, but 90s Linux had its own headaches and really was the embodiment of the "ugh, sometimes you have to edit files to make computer go" meme that still survives to this day. Yes, you had to edit your XF86Config to make your graphics work right, maybe even write your own modeline and be nervous that you screwed up your timings and blew up your CRT permanently. Maybe you had to recompile the kernel to set the proper settings for your Soundblaster. Less fragmentation? Desktop consistency? FORGET IT. A million window managers to choose from. Whichever you go with, your apps will be in a mixture of Motif, Tk, GTK, Qt and/or plain Athena widgets and there are no theme engines that will save you. Just deal with it or write your own. For those without memory of how it was, search up some screenshots of RedHat 5.2 and its stock FVWM95 window manager. That was the easy to use, business-oriented distro of the day. That was considered acceptable look and feel to ship to an end user. But all this? Fun. FWIW I still think a kid could have fun tinkering with modern Linux, it's probably just that they would tinker with different things. (Because contrary to popular belief, video and audio almost always "just work" these days)
oblio 4y ago
> sysv init (no systemd) Rose tinted glasses. Each distro had its own scripts and layout. SysV sucked.
vetinari 4y ago
> You ran X11/Xorg (no Wayland) It was XFree86 -- with separate server binary for each chipset. Then came XFree86 4.0 with a new, hot thing: modularity. You could load drivers as modules, but that presented an entirely new way to make things more complicated. XFree86 became an OS in itself, including dynamic linker, PCI handling, vm86 emulator... With Wayland, things are much simpler. > , sysv init (no systemd) There was bsdinit at the time. Sysvinit was considered bloated by the same types, who cannot consider systemd today. > you had sane/not insanely bloated desktops like KDE2 or XFCE. There were other topics, like switching from libc5 to glibc2. Again, unicode, localization, nss services, so much "unnecessary bloat".

pjmlp 4y ago

Not everyone wants to tinker when it isn't part of the job description.

einr 4y ago
You are talking as an adult with a job, not a 10-year old who likes computers.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  When I was 10 years old, tinkering required going to the library, and if you couldn't find any Spectrum book there, the only tinkering left was LOAD "" or trying to understand what Timex 2068 manual was all about. I also hardly tinkered until I got into programming classes later on the high school, and then it wasn't tinkering, my time spent with Timex, Amiga and MS-DOS was about coding, demoscene and games, not fixing the OS.
  - einr 4y ago
    Tinkering and fun means different things to different people. That's okay. Your idea of fun wasn't to fix the OS -- mine was. I went to the library in '97 and borrowed the Linux Bible, with a CD-ROM copy of Yggdrasil Plug'n'Play Linux that I installed on my 486, and the new world that opened up to me of being able to modify, tune and customize the entire OS to my liking with no restrictions was magic. Today, I work as a Linux sysadmin and I have fun at work. Other people of the same persuasion are the ones who maintain Linux distributions or contribute to the kernel today. The point here is that if a kid finds it fun and creative to futz around with "fixing the OS" then let them -- not only is it its own reward, it might lead somewhere. Don't say "no, this isn't fun in my opinion and you shouldn't have to do it".
majkinetor 4y ago
Then accept reality that you have 0 control. You will always be unhappy with whatever setup. Its not realistic that 3rd party will replicate your mind state about how your OS should look like.