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Unfortunately, ubuntu becomes less and less "controllable" as they add layers for "user-friendliness" (I'm thinking to hal/dbus, see http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/b

by vorador 18y ago

Unfortunately, ubuntu becomes less and less "controllable" as they add layers for "user-friendliness" (I'm thinking to hal/dbus, see http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/b/archives/2008/10/29/T20_34_21/ http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/b/archives/2008/10/29/T20_34_21/ for a detailed explanation)

pcc 18y ago
Don't know that I buy that argument. Yes there are increasing levels of abstractions, and no its not always clean; but the world changes and its useful to look at different types of abstractions. Linux provides a "playground" for trying out abstractions, seeing what works and what doesn't -- and the stuff that doesn't work does tend to get factored out over time. For example dbus: I've used it in embedded environments (no bearing at all on "user friendliness") because it facilitates a "new, easier" programming paradigm that is lots of work to achieve otherwise, and this happens to have huge advantages in eg modularity, maintainability, etc for the application domain. Yes we could choose to do everything using a traditional "pure" unix file-type approach; but why should we not have the opportunity of trying out more "modern" abstractions, building apps & systems on them and seeing how they play out in the real world?
tvon 18y ago
Totally OT, but... HAL/DBUS are like 5 years old (without actually looking that up), and they come from Freedesktop.org, not Ubuntu. I think they might even pre-date Ubuntu, at least I remember it being in Fedora in the early days before I used Ubuntu. Also, I don't much understand this "Ubuntu is too user friendly" nonsense. That's kind of a main objective of Ubuntu, if you think it's going to cause problems then use Debian. If Debian is too sissified for you, Linux From Scratch isn't going anywhere, give that a whirl, you can 'rm -rf /' til the cows come home (or until you actually run that completely pointless command).

by vorador 18y ago

pcc 18y ago

Don't know that I buy that argument. Yes there are increasing levels of abstractions, and no its not always clean; but the world changes and its useful to look at different types of abstractions. Linux provides a "playground" for trying out abstractions, seeing what works and what doesn't -- and the stuff that doesn't work does tend to get factored out over time. For example dbus: I've used it in embedded environments (no bearing at all on "user friendliness") because it facilitates a "new, easier" programming paradigm that is lots of work to achieve otherwise, and this happens to have huge advantages in eg modularity, maintainability, etc for the application domain. Yes we could choose to do everything using a traditional "pure" unix file-type approach; but why should we not have the opportunity of trying out more "modern" abstractions, building apps & systems on them and seeing how they play out in the real world?

tvon 18y ago

Totally OT, but... HAL/DBUS are like 5 years old (without actually looking that up), and they come from Freedesktop.org, not Ubuntu. I think they might even pre-date Ubuntu, at least I remember it being in Fedora in the early days before I used Ubuntu. Also, I don't much understand this "Ubuntu is too user friendly" nonsense. That's kind of a main objective of Ubuntu, if you think it's going to cause problems then use Debian. If Debian is too sissified for you, Linux From Scratch isn't going anywhere, give that a whirl, you can 'rm -rf /' til the cows come home (or until you actually run that completely pointless command).