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Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

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Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#111

Post by atmosx »

rrss wrote: post #59
atmosx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guessed as much but I stand by my statement… If there was a serious problem, we would know by now.

We do know by now, which is why the LKML thread I linked is titled "the elephant in the room."

original answer:

Ok. I got it. Literally speaking there are two (maybe more?) known bugs. Do we know how many are there for Windows and macOS? I get freezes every now and then under macOS, so there _might_ be memory management issues there as well.

My point stills stands because I believe that the bugs you posted are largely inconsequential. Bugs could be very well been patched by now (or not). My guess the fix won't uptick the % of linux in desktop or server market.

IMHO "the truth is in the pudding": if the largest share of mobile OS's is based on linux (android) and largest % in servers in again based on linux, memory management is overall good enough - otherwise the market share would have dropped considerably.

UPDATE: Revisiting the thread question... I'm barking at the wrong tree. The question wasn't about relevance and market %. Your comment is to the point.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#112

Post by atmosx »

rrss wrote: post #60
atmosx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=macOS+ So? What’s the point here?

I linked threads on LKML that are directly relevant to this subject, about how this (system becomes nonresponsive under memory pressure) is a real problem that people really experience, with a lot of people agreeing that it is a problem and suggesting various mitigations. Most of those ideas presuppose that memory pressure leads to stalls and are about figuring out how to detect when the system is stalled and making…

> [...] is a real problem that people really experience, with a lot of people agreeing that it is a problem and suggesting various mitigations [...]

tl;dr: I believe you are overblowing the importance of the bugs. In the bigger scheme of things they're more likely inconsequential.

(see my other reply for more)

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#113

Post by jraph »

sallystarace wrote: post #105
jbirer wrote: post #97

The Linux kernel is as good as it gets, in my opinion. Desktop Linux is another story though. On one end, you have GNOME devs who try to imitate macOS without the UX design knowledge and taste, and KDE that is buggy and crashes a lot. If these teams merged they could create something that will rival Windows. I guess fragmentation and lack of good desktops it is.

I don't like that GNOME seems to force itself into situations as something more than a desktop environment. I mean all the extra libraries that somehow end up being dependencies in my non-GNOME system. And gconf, i.e. the Linux Registry, or whatever it has been rebranded to. Similarly, GNU Info pages when well-written man pages suffice. Split by topic - there's already a mechanism for this. I don't want to compile a…

> Sqlite is good, but a database is simply unnecessary in many cases, because filesystems are very optimized and perfectly useable for many cases. This encourages hacking and interoperation. I could comfortably browse through my bookmarks in a mature native file system explorer of my preference, instead of struggling with a tricky scrolling menu within a browser

SQLite is very good indeed. It's fast and offers a nice querying API. You can use SQLitebrowser if you want to browse this data outside the browser UI, and we could always have a FUSE filesystem for sqlite database if we really wanted to be able to browse this data with a file manager. Since SQLite is used everywhere, the effort would be shared. One of the many good things about SQLite is that it is (de-facto) standard, way more than regular configuration files.

> Systemd: Binary log files. I should be able to configure my system with `sed` and `awk` scripts that easily modify text configuration files.

Configuration files are still regular text files, and are way easier / simpler than before systemd / upstart. You are also a command away from having a text representation of the logs, and that's journalctl, which can be piped into the regular unix tools, so I have not found an actual situation where it matters.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#114

Post by jraph »

Nextgrid wrote: post #40
xt00 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the topic of open-source vs closed-source drivers: Maintaining an open-source kernel driver is extremely complex and not user-friendly for the individual, so the complexity level is in practice similar to doing black-box reverse-engineering on a closed-source Windows driver, in both cases you need significant resources. If you need to have a team of experienced kernel developers to maintain a driver continuously,…

> On the topic of lack of stable ABI under Linux, I find that closed-source Windows drivers have a much longer shelf-life than their Linux equivalents, so in practice I feel like the downside of drivers being closed-source in Windows is less of a problem because in practice you're less likely to have to modify it.

I recently helped a friend with her Mac and her "old" Wacom tablet. She now has to download an old version of the drivers for the tablet to work, with some manual configuration to do related to security. It took us long to figure out, and actually she wasn't figuring it out on her own. Plus, how long will she be able to use her tablet on Mac, since the driver is not maintained anymore?

I plugged the tablet on my Linux computer and it worked out of the box without doing anything. I trust this tablet will still work on Linux for a very long time.

I trust the stability of the Windows ABI more than the Mac one, but on Windows you would still have to install some old unmaintained binary that could have security issues to make this tablet work.

Do you have an actual example of an open source Linux driver that stops working when the closed Windows one still works? Are there many of these examples? How many against the opposite situation?

> Distributing drivers is also a massive difference between the two models. With Windows, if someone builds a driver, that binary can be installed by any Windows user on a modern kernel (depending on what "level" of the ABI they're building against, the same driver can work all the way back to Windows 7). Once built, any Windows user can just install the binary, where as with Linux the built binary will only work for that very specific kernel version. The user-experience is definitely much better.

What actually happens on Linux most of the time is that the driver comes with the kernel and the user does not need to install anything. This is unbeatable.

> Maintaining an open-source kernel driver is extremely complex and not user-friendly for the individual, so the complexity level is in practice similar to doing black-box reverse-engineering on a closed-source Windows driver, in both cases you need significant resources.

I'm very surprised. Fixing API breakage to make an open source work again seems way easier than reverse engineering the whole thing.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#116

Post by rrss »

atmosx wrote: post #111
rrss wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do know by now, which is why the LKML thread I linked is titled "the elephant in the room."

original answer: Ok. I got it. Literally speaking there are two (maybe more?) known bugs. Do we know how many are there for Windows and macOS? I get freezes every now and then under macOS, so there _might_ be memory management issues there as well. My point stills stands because I believe that the bugs you posted are largely inconsequential. Bugs could be very well been patched by now (or not). My guess the fix won't…

> if the largest share of mobile OS's is based on linux (android)

Android has had a variety of downstream patches over the last 5-10 years to address this problem. ChromeOS too.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#117

Post by jraph »

glandium wrote: post #89
SuperSandro2000 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PipeWire is a solution for people who want it all though. It's replacing PulseAudio and Jack. It should simplify the stack. OSS4 seems anecdotal in the Linux world. People can still use ALSA directly, but people who don't care will have something that works well out of the box without having to care.

Thanks to PipeWire, I can use my midi keyboard with no delay, still use my browser and music player at the same time, all this without having to tweak any configuration, messing with Jack and/or PulseAudio.

Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?

#118

Post by rrss »

atmosx wrote: post #112
rrss wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I linked threads on LKML that are directly relevant to this subject, about how this (system becomes nonresponsive under memory pressure) is a real problem that people really experience, with a lot of people agreeing that it is a problem and suggesting various mitigations. Most of those ideas presuppose that memory pressure leads to stalls and are about figuring out how to detect when the system is stalled and making…

> [...] is a real problem that people really experience, with a lot of people agreeing that it is a problem and suggesting various mitigations [...] tl;dr: I believe you are overblowing the importance of the bugs. In the bigger scheme of things they're more likely inconsequential. (see my other reply for more)

These links are not just two simple bugs.

The first link is a report that the system becomes nonresponsive under memory pressure and a discussion of that report. In that thread, there was not really any agreement about whether this was a bug, let alone what the bug was, or what the fix would be.

The second wasn’t a bug at all, it was a patch proposed set of knobs to allow users to avoid the problem.

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