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Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers

22 pointsby cmpitgabout 9 years ago

21 comments

gboudriasabout 9 years ago
&gt; I mean, I have a really rather high IQ (just look at the web page below), and I have patience that is perhaps unmatched.<p>I&#x27;m guessing you didn&#x27;t write this, but don&#x27;t write this.<p>One, your IQ is irrelevant, it&#x27;s an outdated way to measure anything practical. Two, patience is relative (and vague). Three, it makes you sound like a conceited jerk.<p>&gt; We need to figure out what is going wrong, not just at the technical level, but at the social and political level<p>This is not a constructive criticism.<p>All in all this post is one of many examples of non-constructive criticism that plagues the open-source world. <i></i>We know it&#x27;s supposed to just work.<i></i> We know it doesn&#x27;t. Rants don&#x27;t add value.<p>By the way:<p>&gt; Its supposed to be a holdiay weekend. I&#x27;m not being paid to run these servers.<p>Then <i></i>don&#x27;t<i></i>. What are you even doing? You&#x27;re either working for free or expecting others to, both of which I believe to be a detriment to the free software cause.
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rlpbabout 9 years ago
The curse of Free Software. You are root. You can do anything on your own machine. This means that you have the freedom to break it.<p>The problem with traditional distributions today is that the packaging gives you something, but you are expected (particularly on a server) to take that packaging and then modify your system configuration to suit.<p>Unfortunately, it&#x27;s then impossible for the packaging to cover every case on upgrade, since packaging can&#x27;t possibly know what you did. Suddenly upgrade path code has to magically cover every conceivable use case and more. This route is doomed to fail.<p>Distributions are working on this problem, but it requires a huge paradigm shift that will leave behind traditionalists kicking and screaming. Take Ubuntu Snappy, for example, with its read-only filesystem and image-based updates. But this sort of thing is the only sensible way forward if you want upgrades to work without failure.<p>Alternatively, as a user you can take a different course. Make your deployment &quot;immutable&quot;, and manage any necessary state independently. In other words, define your deployment as a delta to be applied over the distribution default. If things go wrong, don&#x27;t try to recover; instead blow it away and redeploy. Manage your delta in version control, and make it easy to test and deploy. This is what the configuration management crowd are doing, as well as the Docker crowd, and just about everyone else.<p>Of course, this is a little crazy on a desktop system, which is why Ubuntu is doing Snappy.<p>Or, stick to doing things the traditional way, but don&#x27;t expect your experience to change.
cwyersabout 9 years ago
I mean, most people don&#x27;t have that many problems with Ubuntu and Debian boxes, right? My first thought is, what is the author doing that most people aren&#x27;t? Maybe stop doing that?
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vessenesabout 9 years ago
Ad hominem attacks on this page notwithstanding, he&#x27;s not wrong.<p>The reliability and simplicity of &#x27;getting to a shell prompt&#x27; out-of-the box for ubuntu also seems to me to be on the decline over the last ten years.<p>And going much farther back, I would say that inscrutability of boot problems might be at its all time worst.<p>I have ubuntu systems that will hang for 60 seconds on network failures, or sometimes just refuse to boot. It is very, very frustrating.<p>And, I&#x27;m not a linux newbie -- the first linux kernel I installed was 0.99pl14 on a floppy(!) based slackware system, and I spent years overseeing slackware, then redhat, then ubuntu systems.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a big surprise that CoreOS is so appealing; there&#x27;s just an awful lot of magic and surprise baked into your standard ubuntu install right now.
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Mikeb85about 9 years ago
Blah blah blah, things changed, blah blah.<p>Ubuntu is a better experience than ever. Open source web browsers are better than ever. Maybe this guy thinks he&#x27;s more clever than he is, and fucks around with too many things. Maybe he hates change. But, trying to be as objective as possible, this post comes across as whining for the sake of whining.<p>PS. I haven&#x27;t seen such an ugly website since the 90&#x27;s...
carapaceabout 9 years ago
&quot;We are all Microsoft Windows, now.&quot; Oh, how that hurts. And he&#x27;s not wrong. I&#x27;ve been putting off buying a new machine because for the first time since school I don&#x27;t know what OS to put on it. It&#x27;s not going to be Linux. :( Sad, sad panda.
alexandrerondabout 9 years ago
tl;dr A rant from a guy who manages servers like it was 1995 complaining how he can&#x27;t reboot and how things were much better back then.<p>I reboot, upgrade and recreate machines on a daily basis. The Linux Servers and Desktops work pretty well these days, despite Systemd, Gnome 3 or Unity.<p>If you need days to boot a server, it might not be the server&#x27;s fault... just saying...
neoCrimeLabsabout 9 years ago
Was that page deliberately designed to be unreadable?<p>I am honestly trying not to troll. Tried to read and had to give up.
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emdog4about 9 years ago
There is a lot going on under the hood in a Desktop Environment to make everything work as you would expect from MS Windows or OSX. Gnome has gotten a lot better in the past 3-4 years. When gnome 3 came out along the same time as Unity, both were a terrible mess. Gnome has come a long way since then. That being said, I dont use gnome. Yes, if you don&#x27;t understand dbus or systemd or udev or any of the other Linux conventions for that matter, it&#x27;s going to be frustrating if you upgrade and your system suddenly won&#x27;t boot. Who uses busybox anymore anyways? I&#x27;m not sure how this man&#x27;s rant got upvoted to the FP of HN. It sure seems like a lot of ignorance and complaining on his part. Systemd has made &quot;managing&quot; or &quot;administering&quot; Linux systems much easier for me and I could in no way see how going back to init scripts could be better or make your system more reliable to boot? An analogy that comes to mind is automotives. Engines and transmissions have come a long ways in the past 20 years. Drive by wire, variable valve timing, direct injection, dual-clutch automatic.. These new technologies come with a learning curve clearly but have definite advantages. I&#x27;m not sure why this guy is complaining, if he understands Linux as he claims, he shouldn&#x27;t be having these trivial problems or much less spending time ranting on the internet. I&#x27;m not sure if anyone will take him seriously.
sampoabout 9 years ago
&gt; There&#x27;s also the nuttiness known as gnome-shell and unity.<p>I wish more people knew about Xfce (Xubuntu). It offers a better Gnome 2 -like experience than Gnome 2 ever did.<p>Although, the ouf-of-the-box theme, and look and feel, of Xfce&#x2F;Xubuntu looks very dated. Changing the theme, desktop background picture, adding some transparency, is easy for a geek, and gives you a nice modern-looking desktop. But the default theme with gray and blue colors gives a somewhat Windows XP -like feeling.
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smoyerabout 9 years ago
I don&#x27;t seem to have any of these problems ... on desktops or on servers. I guess I don&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s so hard. (And I haven&#x27;t lost the ability to boot since the advent of ReiserFS and Ext4.)
blackflame7000about 9 years ago
I will say it is awfully annoying to have the Ubuntu boot process freeze because some USB external hard drive didn&#x27;t initialize it time. Just skip it for god sakes, don&#x27;t make me have to find a keyboard plug it into the machine just to press S to skip mounting and boot.
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thescribeabout 9 years ago
I feel the same way every time I have to work with systemd.
cdevsabout 9 years ago
I think I would have the same hatred of someone forced me to work on a Windows 8 machine or Microsoft server. You seem to have some buggy boxes why not throw your servers on linode.com and take a snapshot of everything when it&#x27;s &quot;working&quot; unleSs your line of work requires some physical access constantly but I can&#x27;t imagine something I can&#x27;t stream to a server from some backend connection.
anthkabout 9 years ago
&gt;And its not just the low-level stuff, either. There&#x27;s also the nuttiness known as gnome-shell and unity. Which crash or hang or draw garbage on your screen. And when they do work, they&#x27;re unusable, from the day-to-day usability perspective. This wasn&#x27;t a problem with gnome2. Gnome2 rocked. It was excellent. Why did you take something that worked really really well, and replace it with a borken, unusable mess? What happened, Gnome and UI developers? What were you thinking? In the grips of what madness? In what design universe is it OK to list 100 apps, whose names I don&#x27;t recognize, in alphabetical order? Whoever your design and usability hero is, I am pretty sure they would not approve of this.<p>Just use Slackware. Or FreeSlack if you are a GNU zealot like me.<p>&gt;Its spreading, too. Like cancer. Before 2013, web browswers worked flawlessly. Now, both mozilla firefox and google chrome are almost unusable. Why, oh why, can&#x27;t I watch youtube videos on firefox? Why does Chrome have to crash whenever I visit adware-infested websites? What&#x27;s wrong with the concept of a web browser that doesn&#x27;t crash? Why does googling my error messages bring up web forums with six thousand posts of people saying &quot;me too, I have this same problem?&quot; When you have umpteen tens of thousands of users with the exact same symptoms, why do you continue to blame the user?<p>uBlock.<p>&gt;I can understand temporary insanity and mass hysteria. It usually passes. I can wait a year or two or three. Or maybe four. Or more. But a trifecta of the Linux boot, the Linux dekstop, and the Linux web-browser? What software crisis do we live in, that so many things can be going so badly, so consistently, for so long? Its one thing to blame Lennart Poettering for creating buggy, mal-designed, untested software. But why are the Gnome developers creating unusable user interfaces at the same time? And what does any of this have to do with the web browser?<p>Gnome works really well on sysadmins workstations. No more cluttered taskbars any more.
vmorgulisabout 9 years ago
I would switch to a BSD if I had his troubles.
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edoceoabout 9 years ago
None of these issues affect my Gentoo box that was first built in 2003. Been upgrading since. Avoided PulseAudio, systemd, use Xfce, stable and boots the same every time. Hardest part was quad monitor setup (Nvidia) - took almost 4h (once a 3yr period)
Glyptodonabout 9 years ago
I want to have sympathy, but I don&#x27;t. Get a UPS. And after seeing the website I have to believe the other problems are as much a symptom of the man&#x2F;setup as anything.
sparky_about 9 years ago
The page background makes it difficult to even read the article.
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hnmcsabout 9 years ago
(2015)
awinter-pyabout 9 years ago
linas != linus?