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Life is too short to depend on unstable software

blog.sidebits.tech

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Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#101

Post by l0b0 »

This is "unstable" as in "recent versions", not as in "broken". Anecdotally, "unstable" is a complete misnomer. Arch Linux (rolling distro, upgraded on my machines almost every day for ~6 years) was far more stable than Ubuntu (8.04 through 14.10 or so, 18.04 and 20.04) ever managed.

My pet hypothesis is that the core developers of any system are spending 95%+ of their time working on the latest release, and that (understandably, since that earns all the credit) hardly anybody wants to spend any more time than necessary to support older versions of anything. This goes doubly for combinations of two or more old systems which maybe ten people world wide might be using.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#103

Post by smoldesu »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #74

Honestly, I've had better luck on the bleeding edge. Newer Linux kernels almost always are better (and when they're not, it gets fixed quickly). Wayland is definitely better than X. Newer Gnome is better than old Gnome. Ruby 3 and 3.1 is definitely better than 2.7. Rails 7 is way better than 6, even in alpha state. Deno is nicer than Node (although the ecosystem needs to catch up). Hell, V8 and then Node led to a boo…

I agree with this mostly, but the new GNOME releases are almost universally a design regression IMO. Pretty much everything that they added was doable with extensions in 3.38 (most of which are now broken with GNOME 40), and the only substantial changes that I can discern is the shift to libadwaita and forcing people away from things like custom stylesheets and shell extentions, which were the only things that made GNOME tolerable for many people, myself included.

Combined with the overall hostility and 'my way or the highway' mentality that's been pervasive throughout the GNOME team, I didn't feel too bad dumping their DE for KDE Plasma. I respect the constant desire to improve things, but their refusal to kill sacred cows and infatuation with destroying people's workflow doesn't really inspire me to spend more time with their software. It's especially ironic when you consider that they recently re-wrote their CoC to be vague enough for the developers to systematically silence anyone who makes feature requests they disagree with, or post bug reports for stale issues. If this mentality continues to spread across the rest of desktop Linux, it will probably be dead in the water. It's no surprise to me that Valve decided to eschew all that GNOME drama with the Steam Deck and just shipped it with Plasma. QT is a genuinely terrible toolkit by many metrics, but at least it doesn't have developers that call you fascist for enforcing a custom stylesheet in their open source software.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#104

Post by dathinab »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #99
Mikeb85 wrote: post #74

Honestly, I've had better luck on the bleeding edge. Newer Linux kernels almost always are better (and when they're not, it gets fixed quickly). Wayland is definitely better than X. Newer Gnome is better than old Gnome. Ruby 3 and 3.1 is definitely better than 2.7. Rails 7 is way better than 6, even in alpha state. Deno is nicer than Node (although the ecosystem needs to catch up). Hell, V8 and then Node led to a boo…

Right but I feel like you're missing the point of the article, since the latest version of something as long running as the linux kernel is unlikely to be flakey.

It's not that simple.

I'm using pure Arch Linux since ~8 years by know and for me it's the best suited distro.

BUT two times after a kernel update my system didn't boot because of some bug in the kernel. Sure, not a problem for me, I can just boot the recovery system, downgrade the kernel temporary and all is fine (and the bug gets fixed fast).

But still, even the latest stable release of the Linux kernel sometimes has problems (through that where the only problems I ever ran into with the kernel and it was at the vendored-efilinux boundary, and now that I think about it it might have been efistub, so maybe not even there kernel).

Anyway I have in general less problems with software not working on arch then I had on ubuntu.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#105

Post by mattarm »

dimgl wrote: post #61

I've been thinking about learning Crystal recently and using it for a personal project. However, now that I have lots of experience with Node.js, Golang and others, I'm torn between the "use what's mature" and "learn a new language" decision. Sure, I'm using Crystal now to learn a new language, but what if this becomes a serious project? Anyhow, I agree with this blog post somewhat but it's always good to expand your…

I code in a new/unfamiliar language if I want to learn something new about the "art" or "science" of programming and have fun doing it.

I code in an established language if I want to I'm more interesting in solving a specific technical problem.

As for "what if this becomes a serious project?" question, remember that a rewrite always goes faster than the original.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#106

Post by Mikeb85 »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #99
Mikeb85 wrote: post #74

Honestly, I've had better luck on the bleeding edge. Newer Linux kernels almost always are better (and when they're not, it gets fixed quickly). Wayland is definitely better than X. Newer Gnome is better than old Gnome. Ruby 3 and 3.1 is definitely better than 2.7. Rails 7 is way better than 6, even in alpha state. Deno is nicer than Node (although the ecosystem needs to catch up). Hell, V8 and then Node led to a boo…

Right but I feel like you're missing the point of the article, since the latest version of something as long running as the linux kernel is unlikely to be flakey.

Lol the Linux kernel is super flakey. But it moves quick enough it gets fixed when it does flake out.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#107

Post by mattarm »

intrasight wrote: post #78
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have nay more details on this? I am very curious.

I still have the Mac. It's now over 35 years old! Remember that the computer only had 128K of memory. There were like three applications. MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw. MacDraw was the most crash-prone. What else might you like to know? I'll have to dust off some old neurons.

I had the same Mac. It crashed sometimes -- enough that "save often" was a habit, but I don't remember it being a productivity problem for me. My grade in English went up from B to A because I have always had trouble spelling and MacWrite had spell check. If the machine had a negative impact on my grades at all it was the distraction it caused by me learning Turbo Pascal on the thing. :-)

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#108

Post by zufallsheld »

hsn915 wrote: post #37
yoyohello13 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absurd sweeping generalization. There are many FOSS projects that value stability and quality. Just like there are many closed source projects that don’t.

The only one I'm aware of that does a good job of this is the Go language project, but it's not really your typical FOSS project; it's a Google project, and Google relies on it internally, so the incentive to make it stable and high quality is as high as it will ever get. They don't sell it to others, but they themselves rely on it as a core part of their own business.

When was the last time the Linux kernel or the gnu utils broke for you?

For me? Can't remember.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#109

Post by LaLaLand122 »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #74

Honestly, I've had better luck on the bleeding edge. Newer Linux kernels almost always are better (and when they're not, it gets fixed quickly). Wayland is definitely better than X. Newer Gnome is better than old Gnome. Ruby 3 and 3.1 is definitely better than 2.7. Rails 7 is way better than 6, even in alpha state. Deno is nicer than Node (although the ecosystem needs to catch up). Hell, V8 and then Node led to a boo…

The thing is that the blog entry mixes up, as too frequently happens, the two often used meanings of "stable":

- Rock solid/reliable/"good"

- Not changing

And they are completely independent!

- Windows 95: It's definitively not rock solid. But is it "stable"? Sure! You will have a hard time finding something more "stable". When was the last time it received an update/changed? It's "stable", but not "stable".

- RHEL: Rock solid? I don't really have a lot of experience with it, but let's say yes. And its whole business model is about changing as little as it can. It's "stable" and "stable".

- Fedora: Rock solid? Let's say yes. Does it change? All the time. It's not "stable", but it's "stable".

- Linux in 1991: No idea. But I'm guessing it was crashing all the time. And it surely was changing fast. It was not "stable" and not "stable".

"Stable" software can be not "stable" on purpose. You may want to avoid changing so much that you may want to keep the bugs, people rely on that buggy behaviour!

Not "stable" software may have shitty QA and not be "stable"; or it may be so well tested that even changing all the time, it never fails.

If I have a contract with the government for a software that needs to provide a service for the next 5 years, I surely will target RHEL X. Not because I think it's specially good, but because I don't want to find myself in court about whether the contract said I need to keep supporting them every time they update the OS. I will deliver something working better or worse today and once accepted... it will keep working the same, bug by bug, relying on the same CentOS X bugs, in 5 years because the underlying system has not changed a bit.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#110

Post by gpderetta »

ludocode wrote: post #50
md8z wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not sure I understand, it sounds like a solution exists and both Steam and Flatpak are working towards it. I don't see why nvidia can't also do the same things. I hope you can see that "keep libraries backwards compatible forever" is not really a good option either and is probably orders of magnitude more work than just doing all the things you said. In some situations, it is also impossible: if there are b…

The "solutions" are hacks at best. This is not the way to build stable software. > I hope you can see that "keep libraries backwards compatible forever" is not really a good option ??? Why would I be able to see that? You've given zero explanation or evidence for why that would be the case. I see a whole lot of people in this thread in addition to the article explaining why backwards compatibility is good. Nobody is…

To be fair the equivalent of libstdc++ on Windows has broken the ABI on every MSVC release until very recently.

The difference is that Windows applications historically shipped with the appropriate version of the C++ runtime bundled in (and there wa no guarantee that one was provided by the OS), while Linux app usually rely on the system .so.

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