Security. They have so much ass backwards and it is the hill everyone who matters will die on. Even android with all the turd polishing they donis still a wasteland. Strawman arguments and whataboutisms are a hard drug.
Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
81–90 of 173 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
You probably already know this, but "a capability-based microkernel written in Rust" describes RedoxOS. http://redox-os.org/
I can't see how it is 'capability-based'. The system call interface has no capability operations. https://docs.rs/redox_syscall/0.3.4/syscall/call/index.html
I was mostly just parroting Jeremy Soller's response here (he's jackpot51 and the creator of Redox):
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#83I think the linux dev community and foss developers in general could be much more aggressive about going after government grant money. Open source software is used in everything from biomedical research to fundamental science, to industry, to defense. Somehow, these key shared resources are still run on a budget that's barely a rounding error by comparison. I know writing grant proposals sucks and everyone wants to b…
You're not wrong about defense however there is a huge caveat. From what I'm told, when a company in defense (in the US) uses FOSS they must sign a waiver saying that they will be responsible for all updates and vulnerabilities discovered with said library. This also means that if the library stops being maintained, the company is responsible for maintaining the library. I know that the reason why RHEL is preferred o…
Ubuntu also has paid support, which will provide 10 year support which naturally include EOL packages.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#84Not the kernel, but the OS. Backwards compatibility and having GUI libraries LGPLed. The Linux kernel has a rule not to break users, and for the most part, it is followed. This is not followed in userland where glibc and GNU GCC C++ library do break users with they accidentally do not follow the spec. GUI libraries like GTK and QT break binary and source compatibility every decade or so. Windows tries it's best to ke…
> The Linux kernel has a rule not to break users, and for the most part, it is followed. This is not followed in userland where glibc and GNU GCC C++ library do break users with they accidentally do not follow the spec.
I do think it's a bit harder when the spec is an external standard rather than just a de facto standard of your existing behavior. The kernel doesn't claim or aim to be fully POSIX compliant, so they "just" need to guarantee that they don't break their existing functionality. This isn't a small task by any means, but C and C++ compilers need to do this on top of ensuring that their behavior also conforms to the standards; it's essentially another guarantee they have to uphold beyond what Linux has to deal with. I don't have anywhere close to enough expertise to make any assertions of whether they've done a good job at upholding even the base guarantee of backwards compatibility though, so this point might be moot.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
A proprietary driver that works is better than an open-source one that doesn’t work or doesn’t even exist.
Disagree but not because of philosophical reasons like “I want to fix my driver and know what it is doing”, but actually practical reasons — tons of companies make a driver plus hardware and end up semi abandoning it.. but some people in the community with open source drivers will often fix it.. then after some time people end up realizing the way they fixed it is better than the original driver and now the companies…
This a hundred times. Windows drivers are fine until the day the piece of iron they manage becomes obsolete, which often happens to still modern and perfectly functional hardware. It's not uncommon to see hardware that isn't supported anymore by Windows since years working perfectly under Linux. I should have ditched most of my audio cards ages ago if I didn't use them with Linux.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#86Linux's fundamental, unsolvable problem is that it's not an operating system. Instead, it's a kernel, with a bunch of other systems stapled to it. This creates headaches both for new members ("Which distro should I use?") to users with a bit of experience ("Should I use X11 or Wayland?") to the admirable people down in the trenches ("alsa or pulseaudio?"). Linux prides itself about its flexibility, but all this does…
So Linux is worse because you are more familiar with Windows?! Also I am running into all kinds of problems every day with Windows and end up on Google all the time with way worse answers, no way to deeply debug most things and worst no way to fix them myself. I am way to often depending on some big capitalistic company to fix my problems and hope they feel like doing it. Linux is DIY capable. If I have the abilities…
With Windows, even if I don't know the exact steps to do something, I can figure it out because some smart people have done a lot of UI design work to make that so. Off the top of my head, I can't tell you the exact steps on how to change the mouse speed on either Linux or Windows - I don't do that often enough to memorize the process. But I know in Windows, it will involve navigating to the Settings app, so I go there. The mouse is a device, so I click on "Bluetooth and Devices" in the left taskbar. I then click on "Mouse, which takes me to the mouse speed. The process in Linux depends on your DE. If you use something like KDE, the process is similar to Windows; but if I'm using i3, I'll probably need to go into the x11 settings. But I can't google "how to change mouse speed in Linux", because again, Linux isn't an OS even though it gets treated as one.
So the end result is the same, I can change the mouse speed in both OSes. But Windows definitely required no prior research, whereas Linux may or may not have required research depending on how the user set up their machine. And if I was new to Windows, I could google "how to change mouse speed on Windows" and get a straightforward answer. You could argue that on linux, I should have googled "how to change mouse speed in Ubuntu/Pop OS/KDE Neon/etc". The problem with that is that sometimes I can use generic Linux instructions, and sometimes I use distro-specific instructions. People actually point non-Arch users to the ArchLinux wiki!
Incidentally, I looked at the general recommendations page on the ArchLinux wiki [1], and found it seems to recommend alsa as a default and pulseaudio if you want some more complex features. Maybe this is wrong, maybe there are differing opinions in the community. Again, there's no way in Windows that you would run into two competing ways for sound to be sent from programs to your headphones/speakers because of the unifying force of the company. (Personally, I've always wondered why audio isn't just part of X11 or Wayland, since X11 and Wayland seem to control everything else the user interacts with.)
I also know from personal experience that Vim vs NeoVim is a complicated discussion and full of a lot of drama over the maintainers of Vim being hard to work with - yet another problem that wouldn't happen at Microsoft because you have a management structure that can deal with these sorts of problems without defaulting to the lazy open-source solution of "just give the customer more options."
1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations#Sou...
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#87Linux's fundamental, unsolvable problem is that it's not an operating system. Instead, it's a kernel, with a bunch of other systems stapled to it. This creates headaches both for new members ("Which distro should I use?") to users with a bit of experience ("Should I use X11 or Wayland?") to the admirable people down in the trenches ("alsa or pulseaudio?"). Linux prides itself about its flexibility, but all this does…
So Linux is worse because you are more familiar with Windows?! Also I am running into all kinds of problems every day with Windows and end up on Google all the time with way worse answers, no way to deeply debug most things and worst no way to fix them myself. I am way to often depending on some big capitalistic company to fix my problems and hope they feel like doing it. Linux is DIY capable. If I have the abilities…
To your first point, yes this is a downside of Windows. And if I was in IT I'm sure there are many things about Windows that make it a pain for deeply debugging these problems. But the dark days of Vista are long over - my PC rarely crashes, and when it does it's pretty obvious what program crashed it. If not, Task Manager is hard coded into the OS to try its best to open. Linux has the shell, but the WM can freeze to the point where I cannot get to a shell to start troubleshooting. If I can, hopefully I have my phone on me to google the commands I need, because (perhaps luckily) my computer doesn't crash often enough for me to need to know the commands.
"DIY capable" to me is code for "we didn't finish designing the system, so you have a bunch of choices to make that you wouldn't need to make on another OS." Yes Linux is great for those that love to tinker. But I don't, I just want a PC that works the way I expect it to.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#88How Linux freezes under high memory usage, Mac OS and Windows both handle such situations well without requiring a hard reboot.
Use earlyoom: https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#89Linux's fundamental, unsolvable problem is that it's not an operating system. Instead, it's a kernel, with a bunch of other systems stapled to it. This creates headaches both for new members ("Which distro should I use?") to users with a bit of experience ("Should I use X11 or Wayland?") to the admirable people down in the trenches ("alsa or pulseaudio?"). Linux prides itself about its flexibility, but all this does…
So Linux is worse because you are more familiar with Windows?! Also I am running into all kinds of problems every day with Windows and end up on Google all the time with way worse answers, no way to deeply debug most things and worst no way to fix them myself. I am way to often depending on some big capitalistic company to fix my problems and hope they feel like doing it. Linux is DIY capable. If I have the abilities…
> you want to use Pulseaudio, alsa has no usecase on a desktop
You'd be surprised how many people still swear by alsa-only. Other people prefer jack, and now you can add pipewire to the mix... plus the few people who like OSS4. At least old school OSS is dead for good.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#90Most of the things that go wrong, don't happen in the kernel. Kernel development is pretty awesome and although there is always room for improvement I can't see something revolutionizing the work done there.
You might say: Let's rewrite it in Rust to ensure memory safety - well, rust support is on the way and while I think it is a good thing, it will not fix everything.
In my opinion writing a completely new kernel would not benefit from the huge effort and experience that has gone into the current kernel - so it must be inferior in many ways for a long time.
If you ask for the things Linux needs the most "polish", in my opinion this would be mostly about the desktop and the community of hating each others work. Many projects are fighting each other instead of working together to fix things, but this also might be a good thing in terms of "competition". The things I would work at are:
UI
Security
Apps
I remember the "Linux Touchpad like Mac" article that made me believe again, that people really care... and nowadays with libinput, gnome and libinput-config, the touchpad really works... it is still hack-ish, not anywhere like macOS, but pretty good, and I'm a nitpicker on this.