Bryan Lunduke Explains Why Linux Sucks in 2020 (youtu.be) 222
Roblimo once called it "a tradition, not just a speech" -- Bryan Lunduke's annual "Linux Sucks" presentations at various Linux conferences. But before you get too upset, in his 2014 interview with Slashdot Lunduke admitted "I love Linux, I have made my whole life around Linux. I work for Linux companies. I write for Linux magazines, but it really blows..."
This year he's releasing a special YouTube version of Linux Sucks 2020, the first time Lunduke has attempted the talk without a live audience, "And it feels really wicked weird." But he's still trying to get a rise out of his audience. "Follow me on this into Journey Into Graphs and Numbers Land," Lunduke says playfully, pulling up one of his 160 x 90 pixel slides showing current market share for Windows, Mac, and then Linux "You might notice that some platforms have a higher market share than Linux does," he says with a laugh, describing one slide showing Linux as "scooping up the bottom of the barrel at 1.6%..."
"But here's the thing. These numbers have been either consistent, or for Linux, slowly dropping." And then he puts up a graph showing the number of searches for Linux. "If you look back at 2004 -- the year 2004, 16 years ago -- that was the high point in interest in searching for the word Linux (or Linux plus other things). 2006 it was about half that -- so about two years later it had dropped down to about half. Here in 2020 it is so low, not only does it not fill up the first bar of pixels there, it's like only three pixels in. That doesn't happen -- that sort of decline does not happen -- unless the platform sucks. That's just the truth of the matter. That's just how it goes, right?"
And there's also some very specific reasons why Lunduke thinks Linux sucks:
One of his biggest gripes is backwards compatibility:This year he's releasing a special YouTube version of Linux Sucks 2020, the first time Lunduke has attempted the talk without a live audience, "And it feels really wicked weird." But he's still trying to get a rise out of his audience. "Follow me on this into Journey Into Graphs and Numbers Land," Lunduke says playfully, pulling up one of his 160 x 90 pixel slides showing current market share for Windows, Mac, and then Linux "You might notice that some platforms have a higher market share than Linux does," he says with a laugh, describing one slide showing Linux as "scooping up the bottom of the barrel at 1.6%..."
"But here's the thing. These numbers have been either consistent, or for Linux, slowly dropping." And then he puts up a graph showing the number of searches for Linux. "If you look back at 2004 -- the year 2004, 16 years ago -- that was the high point in interest in searching for the word Linux (or Linux plus other things). 2006 it was about half that -- so about two years later it had dropped down to about half. Here in 2020 it is so low, not only does it not fill up the first bar of pixels there, it's like only three pixels in. That doesn't happen -- that sort of decline does not happen -- unless the platform sucks. That's just the truth of the matter. That's just how it goes, right?"
And there's also some very specific reasons why Lunduke thinks Linux sucks:
"I have a piece of software now, and I want to run it five years, 10 years in the future. Why shouldn't I be able to? Part of the beauty of open source is that the source code is available, so it's easier to keep software alive, so software doesn't die when someone stops maintaining it. Except maintaining the software on Linux is becoming such a massive challenge -- it might as well as be closed source, half the time. Because you're just not going to be able to get it to run in any reasonable amount of time, unless you're a developer, and even then it's going to take a lot of headaches, and you're going to break something along the way."
Having expressed the ultimate heresy, he breaks out some examples -- Civilization: Call to Power, Railroad Tycoon 2, and Sim City 3000 -- all games that were ported over to "our beloved Linux platform...
"I own those three boxes... They do not run on any modern Linux system I've tried them on. I managed to get Railroad Tycoon 2 to run after a ton of hard work. And the net result, is that system couldn't run hardly anything else. It was just a disaster. It was an epic disaster. So that means that those games -- unless I want to specifically have a retro Linux PC, with an old version of Linux that never got updated, no repository updates, no distro update, nothing, in order to run them -- they're dead to me. I can't use them. That's what that means."
There's several other gripes. (For example, "I'm not saying Linux is bad because there's committees of people involved. But it is...") Lunduke argues the best free and open source projects "are fiefdoms, ruled over by a singular dictator... Those are the ones that you see the biggest advancement on. You see the best marketing work, you see the best design work, you see the best usability, you see the coolest features, you see just the most laser-focused vision..."
"If all of that bums you out..." Lunduke concludes, "just remember, at least Linux backwards compatibility really sucks. So we've got that going for us."
Systemd (Score:5, Insightful)
A nice example that too many people that do not understand Unix are part of the Linux community now and are making it worse.
If systemd was good (Score:5, Insightful)
> too many people that do not understand Unix
So much this. There are advantages and disadvantages to the *nix way, but the Unix way is lotsnof small, simple tools that be combined together. For example if you want a sorted list if everything that matches a particular pattern, you use grep | aort. One tool does pattern matching, another does sorting - and only sorting.
You can easily sort ANYTHING, without any special support for sorting that thing, because "sort" sorts *anything*. All the tools take textual input on stdin and output textual and stdout, so they can be combined any way you want.
Searching in a file is exactly the same as searching in a partition is the same as searching bytes on a drive or image, is rhe same as seaeching the output of any other string of commands - grep searches anything and everything. That's all grep does, search whatever you want it to search.
Some people think systemd is good. Undoubtedly there are some good things about systemd. Maybe systemd is a great thing - for Windows. Whether its good bad or bad, it's definitely not in any way *nix-y. It uses the same design philosophy as Microsoft Office and old versions of Windows. Whatever the advantages of such a philosophy might be, it's the opposite of the Unix philosophy, so it's not a good fit for a Unix-like system.
Re:If systemd was good (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah `sort` can sort "anything" as long as it's one data record per row with a fixed number of white-space separated columns, on the local machine, you don't care about performance, and you are sorting by one of the methods supported by your local sort utility.
if it's not, you're going to (at the very least) be writing your own wrapper around sort anyway, at which point frankly you might as well just use a framework if one exists.
tl;dr: just because you have an awesome swiss army knife, doesn't mean that you wouldn't benefit from a food processor too.
Re: (Score:3)
yeah `sort` can sort "anything" as long as it's one data record per row with a fixed number of white-space separated columns, on the local machine, you don't care about performance, and you are sorting by one of the methods supported by your local sort utility.
The performance of unix sort utility is nothing short of magical.
Re: If systemd was good (Score:2)
GNU sort yes. The BSD sort included in MacOS has somewhat inferior performance.
There are quite a few implications of the standard unix tools and not all are created equal.
Re: (Score:2)
You said:
> yeah `sort` can sort "anything" as long as it's one data record per row
Hmm, sounds like a problem.
Then you said:
> The unix philosophy" includes an informal standard of piping that around between processes.
Yep, every tool uses the same record separator, line feed. So it's not a problem.
Why in the world would you want each tool to randomly select different characters for the exact same meaning, the same purpose - end of record? That's incompatibility for absolutely no gain whatever.
Line feeds in a field (Score:2)
Yep, every tool uses the same record separator, line feed. So it's not a problem.
Why in the world would you want each tool to randomly select different characters for the exact same meaning, the same purpose - end of record?
One needs to distinguish the line feed that separates records from line feeds within a field. For the twelve years that I worked in data interchange for online toy retailers, this was quite common especially in long description fields.
Re: (Score:2)
anyway, if you're actually worried about open source maybe you should be more concerned about microsoft and google being well on their way to embracing, extending, and extinguishing linux once and for all (hiding in plain sight even!). systemd is a non-issue for almost everyone.
Re: (Score:2)
If Microsoft was going to take over Linux and turn it into Windows, here is what they could do.
They could get the Office developer team to re-write some important part of Linux in the Windows / Office way. By "the Windows way" I mean basically big and "full featured"/complicated. For example MS Word has several hundred buttons buried in several levels of menus. Word takes about 2,000 MBs, vim is about 2-10MB. Also complex binary file formats like the old OLE-based MS Word files rather than simple text fil
Ps - people like Windows (Score:2)
Ps - when I say "turn it into Windows" - a lot of people LIKE Windows. People buy MS Office because they want something like Windows. I'm not saying the Windows way is *bad*.
Ice cream also isn't bad. It's yummy. And if I order a pizza and somebody delivers ice cream instead I'm not going to be happy. If I buy pizza, I want pizza, not ice cream. If I install Linux, I want Linux, not Windows. If and when I want a Windows-style system, I'll install Windows. When I install Linux, I don't want all the sy
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft already has a framework of hell -- it is called dot Snot. And a "shell" that meets your requirements. It is called PowerSmell and is a dot Snot thing.
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Re:If systemd was good (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is saying that it is. What we are saying is that when the entire toolset is built around the Unix Philosophy, tools that are built completely ignoring that philosophy tend to be a poor fit.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Unix(-like) systems are not the best match for all tasks. But badly done imitations of Unix fit nothing well.
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What we are saying is that when the entire toolset is built around the Unix Philosophy, tools that are built completely ignoring that philosophy tend to be a poor fit.
Just as well the tools don't ignore the Unix philosophy then. I mean you can't argue it both ways. Systemd attempted to replace the entire shebang with one integrated solution which ensures that it fits well together as an init system.
Now people will attempt to point out that systemd doesn't fit the rest of the console toolset, but that is ignorance not fact. Sure you execute journalctl -xe you end up in a database listing, if however you dare to use your unix philosophy toolset and attempt to pipe the outp
Re: (Score:3)
first, it's funny how emotional you've gotten over something so trivial. i can imagine your frothing and it amuses me.
You seem to be very non-perceptive and have an overactive imagination.
Re: (Score:3)
first, it's funny how emotional you've gotten over something so trivial. i can imagine your frothing and it amuses me.
Reminds me of Kingsley Amis' famous comment about academic disputes being so bitter because the stakes are so small.
Re: (Score:3)
first, it's funny how emotional you've gotten over something so trivial.
He didn't look very emotional to me. He just pointed out that you were talking crap. Simple observation, and accurate too.
Re:If systemd was good (Score:4, Interesting)
There are advantages and disadvantages to the *nix way, but the Unix way is lotsnof small, simple tools that be combined together.
A classic double edged sword that should not be present in an init system. You shouldn't have to have an init system that fires hundreds of custom written scripts, each different, each dropping PID files because the parent system is too dumb to track what processes are running, kick off multiple additional daemons each which manage hardware event based software changes and other daemons to handle network related launching of service, all of which have no idea what software is or isn't running any any given time because this patchwork of gangrenous shit literally can't do the one thing it's meant to: track which services are running.
There's a place for lots of simple individual tools, and there's a place for a large too that does the job properly. The other example is the GUI, and the same debate in Xfree vs Wayland. Lots of tools sounds good until you realise you have 100x the latency from all these patchwork tools talking to each other than if you just had one program vertically integrated and simple. Sure I can't pipe the output of GLXGears frame by frame to my printer anymore like I could in xfree86 thanks to it being just a bunch of simple tools, but then let's face it even if I could ...
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, in a way, "lots of little tools" is not the core meaning or philosophy. The true meaning is closer to, a system I can adapt and reorganise in new ways to solve my problems, and if it turns out to be a surprising way, then all the more satisfying.
This is why old Apple Mac OS 9 was such a joke for tech in the enterprise... you couldn't reconfigure it to anything novel, its philosophy was much more towards being an easy appliance. And why its best stuff was things like HyperCard.
This is why adding real s
Re: (Score:3)
A classic double edged sword that should not be present in an init system. You shouldn't have to have an init system that fires hundreds of custom written scripts, each different, each dropping PID files because the parent system is too dumb to track what processes are running, kick off multiple additional daemons each which manage hardware event based software changes and other daemons to handle network related launching of service, all of which have no idea what software is or isn't running any any given time because this patchwork of gangrenous shit literally can't do the one thing it's meant to: track which services are running.
I don't buy your premise - which is that there's nothing between an init system that has no idea what's going on and a monolithic system daemon - written by idiots - that represents a single point of failure.
And there's no real basis for claiming that any software on a linux system doesn't know what's currently running, whether the init process or any other.
There's a place for lots of simple individual tools, and there's a place for a large too that does the job properly. The other example is the GUI, and the same debate in Xfree vs Wayland. Lots of tools sounds good until you realise you have 100x the latency from all these patchwork tools talking to each other than if you just had one program vertically integrated and simple. Sure I can't pipe the output of GLXGears frame by frame to my printer anymore like I could in xfree86 thanks to it being just a bunch of simple tools, but then let's face it even if I could ...
Again, you're setting up a strawman. Lots of tools sounds good when you need them. A vertically integrated system that can't let me open a remote appli
Re: (Score:3)
There are advantages and disadvantages to the *nix way, but the Unix way is lotsnof small, simple tools that be combined together.
A classic double edged sword that should not be present in an init system. You shouldn't have to have an init system that fires hundreds of custom written scripts, each different, each dropping PID files because the parent system is too dumb to track what processes are running, kick off multiple additional daemons each which manage hardware event based software changes and other daemons to handle network related launching of service, all of which have no idea what software is or isn't running any any given time because this patchwork of gangrenous shit literally can't do the one thing it's meant to: track which services are running.
You make some good points. However it's very easy to modernise the init system without all the shortcomings of systemd, though. Take, for example, Solaris' SMF (Service Management Facility). Uses the same concept as systemd to launch registered services, tracks processes, tracks startup milestones and service dependencies. However, it does it in a neat, clean and open way, that is easy to debug and diagnose issues. Log files are in text format. It does one thing (init system) and does it well. Perfec
Re: (Score:2)
For example if you want a sorted list if everything that matches a particular pattern, you use grep | aort.
Surely you meant grep | cav?
Re: (Score:3)
You can easily sort ANYTHING
Except structured data formats like JSON and XML. In fact you can't really sort anything except text files with certain character sets and one data item per line.
Re: (Score:2)
A nice example that too many people that do not understand Unix are part of the Linux community now and are making it worse.
If desktop users need to have any significant interaction with the init system that's already a failure in itself. By all means if you want to talk sysadmins and such but then it seems to me Linux is doing quite well in the server space particularly all the SaaS bits as spinning up and down Windows instances is a licensing nightmare. If Microsoft delivers on WSL2 with GUI support & GPU acceleration I think a lot of people will skip the barebones Linux install completely.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Come one, the future of Linux is to narrow down the user-base to the 2 people who are elite enough to use it and are also the maintainers of the code.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is technology, not religion. Worship doesn't belong in tech, and advancement shouldn't be restrained by blind adherence to tradition.
I don't care one bit if it's Unix Philosophy adherent or not. What matters is whether it works (it does), and whether it allows me to get stuff done faster (also does).
Re:Systemd (Score:5, Interesting)
Except it is kinda like religion. Scratch that, it's *exactly* like religion.
When systemd came along suddenly everything I'd known for decades about how the system boots up and manages services was obsolete. That kinda sucked, but I got used to it and life went on more or less as before. But as with any religious dispute I was surrounded by people vehemently insisting that by golly I *was* better off/worse off, I simply didn't *understand* that I'd been through a life-changing transformation/trauma as the case may be.
But this was not my first rodeo. I started off with Unix v7, and almost immediately the world split into East Coast (System III) and West Coast (BSD) Unix. Then Linux came along with a suite of GNU utilities and it wasn't really one or the other, which was annoying, but ultimately *that did not matter*.
As my aging brain gets fuller and fuller, I'm more sympathetic than I used to be to the angry reaction of people confronted with what they see as pointless change. They ask, why the hell do people have to keep changing things that were working perfectly well? But from experience, I know the answer: it's just what people do. Someone making efforts to improve things, only to be surprised by a vehement philosophical backlash is the most Unix thing imaginable.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you think SysV works great, you've just not dealt with it and its pitfalls enough. Many of those just got incorporated into "stuff an Unix admin is supposed to know", such as the dirty hacks and workarounds SysV often involves, and how to deal with them.
The reason why systemd took over so suddenly is because the people who dealt with that every day were the people building distributions: people who worked on dozens of startup scripts and bumped into those issues quite often, and whose job it was to figur
Re: (Score:3)
I am agnostic on this. I *assume* systemd is much better for some people, otherwise all the major distros wouldn't have gone that way. The alternative would be to believe there was some kind of conspiracy.
But the problem you state notwithstanding, is a clean-sheet reimagining of so many things really the *only* way to deal with those, or is it the most *interesting* way?
Still, it's not really that hard to live with, not that anyone has a choice. You just occasionally have to remind yourself "it doesn't wor
Re: (Score:2)
I would say systemd was a case of looking at the problem from scratch, and in light of the current state of technology rather than what was there in the 60s. Patching up SysV was already done and not really making anybody happy.
For instance systemd was made to be completely unapologetically Linux centric, taking advantage of cool features Linux has, but which weren't getting a lot of use, and making them a requirement, which ensured systemd users could count on those things being there and reliably take adv
Re: (Score:2)
What always strikes me in these debates about systemd is that despite it apparently being so awful no-one has come up with anything better. Distro maintainers and a lot of users voted with their feet and switched to systemd and despite Pottering being a bit of an ass no-one has managed to do any better than he has.
Re: (Score:3)
They ask, why the hell do people have to keep changing things that were working perfectly well? But from experience, I know the answer: it's just what people do.
Well you really have to think of it like evolution. People experiment and make changes. Some changes are really useful. Some are innocuous. Some create problems. Mostly the changes aren't all good or all bad, but there are trade-offs. The thing you think it best may not always be the thing that wins out, but you're not going to get progress without change.
Re: (Score:2)
They ask, why the hell do people have to keep changing things that were working perfectly well? But from experience, I know the answer: it's just what people do.
Fundamentally this is the question asked by everyone of every new technology, but you took away the completely wrong answer. People almost never do change for changes sake. They fill a need or address a shortcoming. That may not be *your* need, but it is one none the less.
The first car on the market was slower than the horse and everyone criticised them for it.
My Unix history doesn't go back far enough to understand the split or why it happened, but something people don't seem to realise is that the change
Re: Systemd (Score:3)
So what then is the 2020 OS? I remember in the early days, Linux was aspiring to catch up to Windows, but now? Catch up to some kind of more universal form of Android? What should it be?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
A nice example
Yeah a great example of attempted forward progress actually getting somewhere, rather than the 10 other sysvinit replacements that failed to live up to the task. I guess the Unix way is putting up with a 20 year old system held together by bandaids because you're too afraid of change.
Tell me, can I still send the output of X frame by frame to a printer? Because well that's just how flexible and outright mindfucked good old Xfree is.
Re: (Score:2)
Tell me, can I still send the output of X frame by frame to a printer? Because well that's just how flexible and outright mindfucked good old Xfree is.
Eh, what?
I don't recall X ever being able to do that. And being able to incidentally assemble silly stuff with tools isn't an example of something being bad. I mean if the only argument for something that's not X is that you can't do certain things, that's a pretty poor argument.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm a linguist, and it took me about 8 tries to parse your sentence. Can you re-write it in English? Here's what I *think* you're saying:
Too many people who do [did?] not understand Unix are now part of the Linux community and are making Linux worse [by their contributions? coding? ideas?]. This [post? situation? author?] is a good example of this problem.
I'm also not clear what you mean by "Unix". I don't think you mean the pre-Linux OS, I think you mean Master Foo's Unix Nature.
Anyway, three pounds of
Re: (Score:2)
Given that systemd is now firmly embedded in Linux, its turned into Windows anyway.
I guess the issue is really that nobody cares about the platform any more. Its all web, or tech that runs on it. The days when you said "is there a version for mac, or Linux" are well over, today its all on all platforms and most of them are mobile anyway.
Here's five reasons (from Lunduke) (Score:5, Informative)
His last reason is just that "Linux people are dumb" -- calling out that time in 2017 when a presenter on the "Year of the Linux Desktop" did the whole presentation from his Mac!
Re: (Score:2)
And if any of it was Linux, you'd have a point. But instead you've moved the goalposts to Unix, and then again to a very specific, commercial-only version of Unix maintained solely by Apple.
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Except that Mac OS is not Linux and it has never been Linux. It is closer related to BSD.
Maybe what you said would make sense if they presented from a Windows 10 PC with Windows Subsystem for Linux installed. That at least runs the Linux kernel (though not back in 2017).
Re: (Score:2)
Running Linux on a Mac is therefore historically correct, but running MacOS is not for OpenSource purists.
What am I missing here? (Score:4, Informative)
These days if you have a bit of software that doesn't run on the OS version you have it is simple enough to fire up a VM that runs the required version and run the application in that.
I have a CentOS box that is hosting I think about 4 different OSes. One of them is an early Windows/NT. The dozen or so VMs on that system are all running the legacy of a business that closed down years ago but occasionally someone wants to get into the applications. The Windows/NT box runs some obscure licensing server I forget the name of but the CAD software and accounting software the company used needs it.
If sucky Linux can handle all that what scenario are we looking at that it can't?
Who is Bryan Lunduke? (Score:4, Insightful)
And why should I care about his opinion regarding Linux, one way or the other?
As far as I can tell, he mainly seems to be known for this particular annual presentation...
Re: (Score:3)
As far as I can tell, he mainly seems to be known for this particular annual presentation...
Ah, the old "famous for being famous" sort of person. It's good to know that Linux is keeping up with the Kardashians.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Because you're engaging in an ad hominem fallacy rather than addressing any of the substance of his argument.
You're paying attention to the wrong thing.
Re: (Score:3)
Because you're engaging in an ad hominem fallacy rather than addressing any of the substance of his argument.
If I had to spend time dissecting every random person's opinion on every random topic, I'd have no time for anything else.
Give me a reason why this person's opinion on Linux is worth listening to any more than that of any other single one of the 7+ billion people on this planet. There doesn't appear to be one.
Re: (Score:2)
Give me a reason why this person's opinion on Linux is worth listening to any more than that of any other single one of the 7+ billion people on this planet. There doesn't appear to be one.
Agreed.
Linus Torvalds... I know.
Bruce Perens.... I know.
This guy...... *shrugs*
Re: (Score:2)
He's got a Slashdot article and you're the guy repeatedly commenting under it while doing everything possible to avoid the substance of his complaints, or even the substance of the summary.
But tell me about your precious time...
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Incompatibility with old games huh? (Score:2)
Good thing that doesn't happen on Windows. *cough*DOSbox*cough*Compatibility modes*cough*
Linux Desktop GUI SUCK (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not linux the OS that suck, it's the Desktop GUI's like Gnome 3, Unity ect that driven people like me away over the years.
I'm a fan and awlays will be of Gnome 2, but will I install a linux distro using Gnome 3?
Hell no. I'ld rather continue using Windows Xp/Windows7 than that pile-of-shit called Gnome 3.
Re: (Score:2)
Agree about Gnome 3. That is why I stopped using Ubuntu. I was hugely disapointed.
I'm happy enough using MATE.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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You are not forced to use gnome3, there are several widely available alternatives and even more niche ones.
Windows users are much worse off, with all the enforced changes between 7->8->8.1->10 etc...
It's quite telling that you say you'd rather use windows xp/7 than gnome 3, this implies that you don't like the later windows interfaces any more than you like gnome 3.
Why I hate Linux (Score:2)
(Note, I use it on several systems, quite happily, with some glaring exceptions)
Linux claims to be superiour to other OSes, yet slavishly copy the UI of a certain other mainstream OS.
Stop that, stop trying to Xerox that other OS, you claim your different, show me.
Re: (Score:2)
Claiming that Linux copies of the UI of another OS is nonsensical. Linux has a dozen or so different well-maintained UIs. If most people happen to choose one that looks like a popular OS they're familiar with, that's up to them. If you slavishly choose what other people are choosing instead of what you want, that's on you.
Drupal === CMS as Linux === OS (Score:2)
In short, if you're a web dev and still wonder why Linux "sucks" to so many people, just ask yourself how you feel about Drupal (something I've worked with for a decade now and still have a love/hate relationship with). That's probably how most people feel about Linux. You can swap out Drupal below with Linux down below when describing it:
* If you get Drupal, you're thinking, "Drupal is a great, powerful tool to do anything I want." And you don't quite understand the hate for it. For those who don't speak D
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I forgot to say, that's why Drupal/Linux sucks.
Does it suck to you the enthusiast? No. But it does to everyone else that doesn't share your feelings about it.
Re: (Score:2)
What is a Drupal? Is that your native state when you forget to take your viagra?
Linux... (Score:5, Insightful)
..Only runs on phones, supercomputers, internet servers, SpaceX rockets, raspberry Pi, and a few desktops ...
Unix runs on most of the other phones, and all Macs
Desktops still run Windows ... or so I am told ...
Re: (Score:2)
Gosh, is that why people talk about "the year of Linux on the desktop"?
Why not use BSD? (Score:3)
I ran FreeBSD for a while. There is a lot to like. But I got tired of not being able to use the newer versions of application. Also, don't like not having a dropbox client. Also, FreeBSD does not work well with many OSes. FreeBSD barely works with NTFS.
Again superficial as ever (Score:2)
two reasons (Score:3)
1) Snap
2) Docker
Democratic Development == Great Compromise (Score:3)
A while back I was following a discussion about where should Linux have the "close app", "X" button in the GUI window, on top right like Windows, or top left, like Mac OS. After the poll it ended up being something like 56% wanted it on the right, 44% on the left, so someone suggested a that a fair compromise would be to put 16% to the right of the center. The suggestion was made partly as a joke, but it perfectly illustrated the "everyone must have a voice" spirit of community development I have seen in a number design-by-comity projects - they often end up being great compromises, which nobody actually wants, like the X button on the center of the window example (which of course didn't happen, but there are other similar decisions made out there, or in some cases 2 polar opposite visions make 50% decisions each, resulting in a complete mess).
Democracy is a very poor and inefficient leadership model. Winston Churchill once said "the best argument against democracy is a 10 minute conversation with an average voter". He also followed it up by saying that unfortunately it's the best system we know. This is true for leading nations, however in software, there is no moral dilemma about having dictatorships - the one who pays your paycheck can decide what you should implement and how. Dictatorships are very efficient, and we can see high profile success stories such as Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk, or Bill Gates - someone driving a strong vision helps get there faster, without compromises, and without never-ending discussions on how something should be done, because there are 50 million ways to do the same thing and considering them all takes an immense amount of time and in the end there are still many alternatives left with about equal value, but you can't get everyone to agree on one. A good dictator leader can cut through all that crap, and make decisions quickly. Of course the large drawback of this model is that the product is only as good as the dictator, so if the dictator sucks, the product sucks, but if the dictator makes good enough decisions 80%+ of the time, the product ends up with a consistent vision and is developed significantly more efficiently than a design-by-comity. The biggest problems is that there aren't that many good dictators out there, but this is why for example Windows, which costs money, beats out free Linux on the desktop in terms of market share - you'd think free would win, yet it does not.
To wrap this up, notice that there are a number of commercial products based on Linux out there, which are a lot more successful in terms of grabbing market share in their category than Linux by itself is. Those commercial products often have clear dictator style leadership, which may not be 100% right, but provides consistent vision, eliminates a lot of inefficiencies, and it makes sure that less than glamorous jobs that most people don't want to do for free (like thorough, methodical QA) get done.
Re:Democratic Development == Great Compromise (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not central leadership which results in a larger market share for windows...
By that reckoning, everyone should be using macs because there is a consistent dictator controlling both the hardware and software to make a coherent experience.
What makes commercial products successful is the fact they have a marketing budget and sales team, linux has neither of these things. Linux does well in areas where the people making the decisions are technically literate and will do their own research rather than being swayed by a sales pitch.
What keeps windows around is inertia and lock-in...
People don't like change, even if that change is for the better.
People hate change even more the longer those benefits take to show.
The cost of replacing windows is high and immediate due to lock-in, most companies don't care far enough ahead to consider long term savings.
People are often not aware that alternatives exist.
People in east germany would join a multi year waiting list to buy a trabant, people in west germany could choose between vw, audi, bmw, mercedes and many other brands and have a superior vehicle available to them quickly. Once germany reunified and east germans gained access to the same choice their west german counterparts had, very few people chose to buy trabant anymore and many people abandoned them by the roadside.
People don't choose windows, they're stuck with it.
Everyone's mileage is different. (Score:3)
Having expressed the ultimate heresy, he breaks out some examples -- Civilization: Call to Power, Railroad Tycoon 2, and Sim City 3000 -- all games that were ported over to "our beloved Linux platform..
I have mission-critical LAMP applications that were developed in the mid 90's that still run today without modification or dicking around of any sort.
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10 last minutes of the talk are spot on (Score:5, Insightful)
You should watch the last 10 minutes of the talk, I think it's spot on.
TL; DW: The Linux community has become a corporate controlled committee of people who don't use Linux and dislike ideas. The evidences of that are kinda compelling, especially in the last 5 years.
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I wish i had mod points.
It is, in my opinion, the worst part. The community had been infiltrated by hateful people who act as mobs. They don't agree to disagree, they hate the people who do not share their morals and want to kill them by banishing them from Open Source and their own jobs. It is a cancer. And it is not only about politics.
Linux sucks ... (Score:3)
... and licks my fingers over every line of code I put in!
CIV (Score:2)
I have a boxed copy of Civilization: Call to Power although i've not tried running it lately... This game was released for linux in 1999, they also made windows, beos and macos versions of it.
Windows games of a similar vintage often have problems running too, and macos games aren't going to run at all due to a completely different OS and processor architecture...
There are posts online of people having trouble running CIV:CTP on windows 7 too, for example:
https://www.gog.com/forum/gene... [gog.com]
With one user sugges
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This sounds like a job for containers. Theoretically someone could put together a pretty short Dockerfile that lets people run it reliably on all the Linux distros. I don't know if it is a reasonable substitute, but Call to Power II is open source. I'm not sure how close CTP2 is to CIV:CTP
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docker is a cancer almost as bad as snap
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I almost read that a "almost as bad as the clap" ...
That would depend on if it is simply clap or antibiotic resistant clap, I should think.
I'm a nerd, and I hardly use it (Score:2)
Good for experts, useless for everyone else (Score:3)
The Linux learning curve is too steep to be practical for most people. Unless you are an expert programmer, everything takes longer and is more frustrating in Linux, because it is not user friendly.
File under r/obvious
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Its not meant to be taken personally, I don't understand anyone getting that impression. Its meant to provide thoughts on where things could be better. I love Linux too but to imply it doesn't have faults that can be improved is myopic.
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I completely agree his focus on the old school and retro is too much. How many people really want to run a 20 year old piece of software?
Count me as one. I use multiple software programs written last century daily.
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"How many people really want to run a 20 year old piece of software?"
I do. And not everything runs on emulators. I do play games because they are enjoyable. Chess was enjoyable 25 years ago, i still play chess on the same chess board now. I see no reason for my games to become unplayable, computer or not. I still pay on an Amiga.
My appliances last 20 years or more. I don't "upgrade" my vacuum cleaner nor do i update it. I love Linux but the maintenance on computers is a clearly a defect.
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Tie Fighter doesn't work on my windows 10 laptop.
You can buy Tie Fighter on GOG [gog.com] for Windows, Mac, or, yes, Ubuntu. You can also buy it on Steam [steampowered.com].
Not sure why anyone would expect a 20-year-old disc to work in the first place, but if you're willing to pay a whopping $10 to a maintainer (or $2 on sale), it's no problem to run it on a modern OS. This is true of most old games - there are a few trapped in IP Hell (dammit I want Star General), but most have found a maintainer to sell it to you for a modern OS for a trivial price.
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To the point of TFS: he's missing how "stuff still works" on modern OSs. I mean, I get why he wants to play the old games, but beyond some number of years, it's about maintainers or emulation, not about backwards compatibility. And you can play lots of old games, far more now on Linux than back in the day.
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I don't wanna play Tie Fighter, whatever the hell a "Tie Fighter" is.
Re:If the TOYS he cites mattered they'd be updated (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me break it down for you:
I haven't tried it personally, but odds are pretty good that at least one of those programs works out of the box on Windows, and the others will probably work in a compatibility mode. Worse comes to worst, Windows 10 Pro ships with Hyper-V and running older versions of Windows can be done with a first party applications that enable their use.
Odds are pretty good that he chose those particular titles, not because Linux should be the go-to platform for retro gaming, but because they were familiar examples of commercial programs that, at the time, treated Linux on par with Windows. Yet, closed source, evil M$ can keep old software running far better than Linux can.
Making it possible for Linux to run old software for the platform helps everyone. If a company is going to spend gobs of resources trying to make their program run on Linux, only for that program to stop working a very short time later, it's going to have a chilling effect on other commercial applications. Now, you might say, "we don't need no stinkin' commercial applications", and that's fine...but desktops are still the default in business settings, and the more options that are available, the viable Linux will be on the desktop.
"But Voyager, I already said idgaf about desktops!" Fine. Let it live on those supercomputers, used by the few thousand people who have access to them. Happy gatekeeping. Servers, I mean, yeah, the LAMP/LEMP stacks are pretty popular, but you know what was a fantastic server OS? OS/2. Seen one recently? BSD is inching up on the server stacks. Phones? You're really going to argue that Android or ChromeOS are the sort of OS environments worth heralding as the best Linux has to offer? Appliances? Because routers and Blu-Ray players and Roku sticks that are 'technically Linux, except that end users never meaningfully interact with them and sure as hell don't have a meaningful level of freedom to tinker with them' are where we want Linux to be?
No, desktop Linux still has its place, as does backwards compatibility and commercial software. If it didn't, none of those platforms you specified would have gained any level of popularity.
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A quick google search reveals people having trouble running those old games on windows 7 too, for example:
https://www.gog.com/forum/gene... [gog.com]
Worse comes to worst, Windows 10 Pro ships with Hyper-V and running older versions of Windows can be done with a first party applications that enable their use.
Only the pro version? So users with a lesser version don't get this feature?
Running older versions of windows is only legal if you have licenses for it, also running older versions of xp can be a pain because they might not be able to activate anymore.
All linux systems have KVM, not just "pro" versions..
You can install any old linux distro you want inside of KVM, for fr
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From your quick google search installing a missing video codec worked for someone who has no issue playing said game on Windows 7.
Only the pro version? So users with a lesser version don't get this feature? Running older versions of windows is only legal if you have licenses for it
Yes only the Pro version has Hyper V available. But your license claim is false. Running a prior version of Windows in Hyper-V is specifically allowed by MS's licensing terms without an additional license, and even if they didn't specifically allow it, and even if they didn't specifically offer those downloads in the form of an "XP mode" for Windows 10, the you could still abuse
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If his pwecious desktop was important it would have more devs.
Implying there aren't many thousands of devs around the world focused solely on the Linux desktop, be they Gnome devs, KDE devs, those who maintain the window system, or even those working for whole distributions that are dedicated to running a desktop
Did you get hacked? Because your UID is way to low to be quite so ignorant of the efforts to have Linux adopted as a desktop OS.
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And SpaceX rockets now that you mention it.
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The Year of Linux in Space came before Linux on the Desktop.
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So does linux (the kernel), what's missing are the userland libs...
You can manually provide all the outdated libs and things will run just fine on a modern kernel on modern hardware.
Windows provides backwards compatibility libs by default, because running old binaries on windows is a common activity - but running old binaries on linux is not, most software used by the majority of linux users is open source and has been compiled for the latest set of libs so it's more efficient not to include all these old l
Re:Linux server is great, for desktop not so much (Score:5, Interesting)
EVERY single year I try to use the latest Ubuntu LTS/Desktop, after some weeks, not later than 2 months struggling with the desktop, I always go back to windows 10. Linux is just barely usable as a desktop for normal users, great for compiling blockchain projects but not for power users. And it is just SLOW, not as efficient as windows which is funny ;-) I remove desktop Linux because I use more time to fix my issues by googling at home in the evening than enjoying the trouble-free experience of Windows (I google already enough at work :-)
I just want Linux to have more market share on the desktop, but it is not going to happen if we continue voting on the next wallpaper, new buttons instead of having more applications, a real appstore, and fewer discussions if flatpak is better than snaps, appImage, same for systemD/initD. Windows file explorer is just working better than any nautilus, konqueror, file commander dot.
My Setup is NOT usual and may explain all my issues
Dual 40'' 4k screen -> yeah 80'' inches of desktop, need that for multiple IDEA, Browser and terminals
AMD 32 cores threadripper
Geforce 1080 Ti with binary or nouveau driver
Lot of you will say I'm just no competent but this is just not true:
I'm a software engineer, DevOps for 20 years, run 12 WordPress blogs using Linux since 2000 on my dedicated root server, and won't use something else. I'm open-minded as well: I use macOS on the go and maintain multiple open source project.
We just need to do what is required to get more market share, and more non-geek people using desktop Linux.
I will document next time all my issues, but not before Ubuntu 20.10 comes out :-)
I'm forced to use Windows 10 at work. Every single one of those complaints are something I would level at Windows and not Linux. Did you find some other Linux rant and then copy/replace Linux for Windows or something? Maybe you just don't know know what Synaptic is or something? Or you try to configure your X by hand? A real app store? You mean the place the app store was invented doesn't have a *real app store* but Windows does? WTF? Trouble free??? Dev on windows? Seriously, whatever you are smoking, stop it...And I seriously doubt you even know how to use that expensive piece of hardware. Installing the real nvidia drivers is a single command that you do once. And the problem with nvidia support on Linux is nvidia's fault, not Linux. And since they now make more $$ on Linux than Windows (thanks to NN training and other uses now being their main markets), their drivers are actually better. I also think your not a dev and are making mistakes in analysis. I see it in Windows ops all the time when they have to move to the cloud. Now either die off you dinosaur or adapt. War's over, your side lost.
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Amateur vs professional military (Score:2)
There is this dictum that amateurs debate military strategy; military professional work on logistics.
Seriously, it doesn't matter which OS you have installed, including macOS, which they tell me is a 'nix, provided it can run Office.
One usually thinks of Apple when it comes to human factors and the subtleties of the user interface, but anyone who has used Excel enough will come to appreciate how highly engineered it is in relation to Libre Office Calc. Sure, Libre Office can substitute of the Microsof
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Turn off the GUI shit. GNU/Linux works much better without it. (Though a cannot say this for sure about African Linux, it does apply to other distributions of GNU/Linux).
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Meanwhile Granny's Android is Linux. You can install Termux (without root) or use Linux Deploy to install a complete distribution-sans-kernel (with root) and run Linux applications - graphically, using VNC or an X server. So the power of Linux is right there, lurking beneath the surface. And it's often leveraged by apps using the NDK.
I only wish that Android could run atop a normal kernel, alongside a normal desktop install, on a normal PC. That would really be the best of both worlds.
I guess the next best