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The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

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Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#11

Post by FooBarWidget »

jakobe wrote: post #8

While I don't quite understand the specifics the author describes, I can relate very well to the general problem: Open Source software often depends on packages that are common on the Linux Desktop. This quickly gets you into dependency hell if you try to compile the program/library on a different platform. An example I was recently confronted with was libmdb, a library that reads Microsoft Access databases. For some…

The alternative would be for libmdb to implement that stuff themselves. That would increase development time, increase the amount of bugs, increase the size and decrease developer happiness.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#12

Post by jay-pinkman »

darklajid wrote: post #3

I really would like to understand/get feedback (if the author is reading here as well or someone agrees with the rant) - what 'services' on a server really depend on NetworkManager I cannot imagine that a server would actually need it (although, on my _desktop_ I most certainly want it and love it). From my vps (granted, not LTS. But did they actually _remove_ a dependency here? I highly doubt that): darklajid@neulan…

honestly i didn't get the NetworkManager thing either. since my Arch Linux days i remember that it's manageable from cli. although i never used that cli.

but the thing that touched me is that there are standards like POSIX for the cli world and there are standards like DBus for the gui world and lack of any sane standards for both of them. POSIX-based software and DBus-based software took quite different paths in their evolution. so different that they look now like creatures from two different universes. it's always nice to see how devs from GNOME and KDE develop standards that help interoperability. i wish someone would look into interoperability between the gui world and the cli world too. i originally moved to Arch from Ubuntu because the latter looked quite noisy to me - too many desktop components that i never used, to many system resources waisted on activities that i consider useless or harmful. i've created a very minimalistic environment built around some cli tools and a few very simple gui components that didn't depend on a whole desktop. and it worked quite well until it started to fall apart - every program that didn't belong to the cli world tended to either crash or work with some limitations. mostly because of the problems with DBus. most of these problems were caused by differences between the actual DBus interfaces provided and what those programs were expecting to see. and of course there were some missing components that depended on a ton of other components from either GNOME or KDE. so now i'm back to square one - i'm back on Ubuntu and i feel like an alien. most things indeed work out of the box but it's not a linux that i understand, can easily learn, fix and customize myself.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#13

Post by loftsy »

tl;dr - Author tries to patch together his/her own distribution; and fails.

To provide a good user experience you need to know if the network is up or down; and when it changes. UNIX does not provide this. This is why NetworkManger is now part of the "Linux Platform".

The biggest myth in open source: "Linux is about choice".

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#14

Post by fl3tch »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #9

Network manager is particularly annoying. It doesn't seem to like static IP addresses at all, sure the GUI will allow you to assign them but it doesn't actually seem to affect the system at all. I tried disabling NetworkManager since on my development box I like to have a number of static IPs assigned to it for testing on the LAN. However I also want to be able to easily connect to wireless networks and I can't find…

Kind of limited with VPNs too. It would be great if you could simply import an OpenVPN configuration file, but in some cases the only solution is to skip Network Manager and start/stop the service from the command line.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#15

Post by wisty »

tl;dr

Linux is getting to be a mess, with all kinds of dependencies.

I guess it really comes down to your distro (since Linux is just the kernel, it's the distro which adds in all the bits). He's complaining about using RHEL and Ubuntu on a router. I think those are meant to be run on big servers. I'd guess Slackware and Gentoo are better bets for running a small server. There are also distros designed to be used on routers, if that's what you're after.

Big distros are big. They sometimes have a few bits which are over-engineered, because over-engineering makes sense to the people who join GUIs together.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#16

Post by darklajid »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #9

Network manager is particularly annoying. It doesn't seem to like static IP addresses at all, sure the GUI will allow you to assign them but it doesn't actually seem to affect the system at all. I tried disabling NetworkManager since on my development box I like to have a number of static IPs assigned to it for testing on the LAN. However I also want to be able to easily connect to wireless networks and I can't find…

Did you file a bug for that behavior? It sure doesn't seem to behave like that for me.

While I cannot and won't claim that you're wrong, this is not supposed to be the case (and isn't in my private and professional experience).

You acknowledge that NM is 'easy' for wifi, but try hard to abandon it for reasons that are unclear. Except for tracking down the real error/filing bugs: Why couldn't you just set up a simple rule on the dhcp server (which I assume you have, at least for your wifi connections) to hand out static leases for your dev box?

Mentioning 'sound' in the end, in this way and out of context, is borderline trollish (I might be wrong, but I assume this is a suppressed pulseaudio rant there).

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#17

Post by rabbidroid »

I have also been annoyed by the way Ubuntu handles the network management, I was setting up an nfs server at home, a task that should've taken no longer than 10 minutes, ended up eating up a few hours, not to mention the fact that I had to reconfigure the network reboot which I blamed on myself but now blame on networkmanager.

I have been using Solaris 11 at work for the past few months, even-though I dislike Oracle, I was surprised by the way they implemented their networking, its a pleasure using it and its the most flexible and configurable networking in all OS's Ive used before.

I will still use Linux at home for personal use, I still envy Enterprises that have the financial ability to get these servers running Solaris 11. I know that It's not open source, and that Oracle is the most evil company, I still love their product (which was developed by sun, and was open-source till oracle stuck their nails in-to it) and I hate myself for loving it.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#18

Post by repsilat »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #11
jakobe wrote: post #8

While I don't quite understand the specifics the author describes, I can relate very well to the general problem: Open Source software often depends on packages that are common on the Linux Desktop. This quickly gets you into dependency hell if you try to compile the program/library on a different platform. An example I was recently confronted with was libmdb, a library that reads Microsoft Access databases. For some…

The alternative would be for libmdb to implement that stuff themselves. That would increase development time, increase the amount of bugs, increase the size and decrease developer happiness.

Or they could link statically. They're both under the LGPL, and it seems like the sensible thing to do if they're only using the library for hash tables...

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#19

Post by nodata »

wisty wrote: post #15

tl;dr Linux is getting to be a mess, with all kinds of dependencies. I guess it really comes down to your distro (since Linux is just the kernel, it's the distro which adds in all the bits). He's complaining about using RHEL and Ubuntu on a router. I think those are meant to be run on big servers. I'd guess Slackware and Gentoo are better bets for running a small server. There are also distros designed to be used on…

Fedora is constantly working to reduce dependencies. They seem to be doing quite a good job.

Re: The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

#20

Post by repsilat »

jay-pinkman wrote: post #12
darklajid wrote: post #3

I really would like to understand/get feedback (if the author is reading here as well or someone agrees with the rant) - what 'services' on a server really depend on NetworkManager I cannot imagine that a server would actually need it (although, on my _desktop_ I most certainly want it and love it). From my vps (granted, not LTS. But did they actually _remove_ a dependency here? I highly doubt that): darklajid@neulan…

honestly i didn't get the NetworkManager thing either. since my Arch Linux days i remember that it's manageable from cli. although i never used that cli. but the thing that touched me is that there are standards like POSIX for the cli world and there are standards like DBus for the gui world and lack of any sane standards for both of them. POSIX-based software and DBus-based software took quite different paths in the…

> honestly i didn't get the NetworkManager thing either

I'm on Arch and I get by well enough with wicd (at the command line) for my network management needs. It could be that my needs aren't as great as the author's, though.

As for DBUS... A couple of years ago I started using wmii and missed having email notifications in my status bar. I didn't want to run a stand-alone status bar, so I tried to hack up something with dmenu and my GUI mail client via DBUS. It was horrible, just awful. A lot of the problem was a poor and undocumented interface, but using DBUS itself wasn't great.

I've heard people mention 9P as an alternative that's ready to play nicely with the rest of the landscape, but I can't believe a sensible UNIX-like solution will ever gain mainstream adoption.

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