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Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers

linas.org

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Re: Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers

#41

Post by marcosdumay »

zanny wrote: post #15
vessenes wrote: post #11

Ad hominem attacks on this page notwithstanding, he's not wrong. The reliability and simplicity of 'getting to a shell prompt' out-of-the box for ubuntu also seems to me to be on the decline over the last ten years. And going much farther back, I would say that inscrutability of boot problems might be at its all time worst. I have ubuntu systems that will hang for 60 seconds on network failures, or sometimes just ref…

I think a lot of it boils down to the Linux ecosystem worship of C99. Almost everything underneath your GUI (and often times, it even is your GUI, cough Gnome...) is written in C. C is good for micro-systems where you do not want to implement all the abstractions higher level languages require. It is good for implementing low level functionality in other languages (like Python) or for writing a first-try compiler in…

Most of the delays, problems and incompatibilities do not happen in C code.

It happens because nobody stopped to think about an interface, or because a configuration file or shell script does not handle an error correctly, or because, since nobody wanted to create a sane error handling system, an script has no option but just keep trying and trying.

I do agree that most of the software on one's computer shouldn't be written in C, but those are not the problems this migration would solve.

Re: Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers

#43

Post by edoceo »

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)

Re: Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers

#44

Post by anthk »

>And its not just the low-level stuff, either. There'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're unusable, from the day-to-day usability perspective. This wasn'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't recognize, in alphabetical order? Whoever your design and usability hero is, I am pretty sure they would not approve of this.

Just use Slackware. Or FreeSlack if you are a GNU zealot like me.

>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't I watch youtube videos on firefox? Why does Chrome have to crash whenever I visit adware-infested websites? What's wrong with the concept of a web browser that doesn't crash? Why does googling my error messages bring up web forums with six thousand posts of people saying "me too, I have this same problem?" When you have umpteen tens of thousands of users with the exact same symptoms, why do you continue to blame the user?

uBlock.

>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?

Gnome works really well on sysadmins workstations. No more cluttered taskbars any more.

Re: Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers

#45

Post by digi_owl »

zanny wrote: post #15
vessenes wrote: post #11

Ad hominem attacks on this page notwithstanding, he's not wrong. The reliability and simplicity of 'getting to a shell prompt' out-of-the box for ubuntu also seems to me to be on the decline over the last ten years. And going much farther back, I would say that inscrutability of boot problems might be at its all time worst. I have ubuntu systems that will hang for 60 seconds on network failures, or sometimes just ref…

I think a lot of it boils down to the Linux ecosystem worship of C99. Almost everything underneath your GUI (and often times, it even is your GUI, cough Gnome...) is written in C. C is good for micro-systems where you do not want to implement all the abstractions higher level languages require. It is good for implementing low level functionality in other languages (like Python) or for writing a first-try compiler in…

> I think a lot of it boils down to the Linux ecosystem worship of C99.

Hardly. If anything it stems from a dual attempt at Linux user space devs to turn Linux into a merger of OSX and Solaris, while applying copious amounts of NIH-ism and second system thinking.

They are far too willing to throw away whole generations of software and concepts over some esoteric corner case or other, and keep chasing platonic ideals that will never stand up to an encounter with actual usage.

And likely when Torvalds steps down, and thus no longer hold the kernel devs to the "do not break user space" mantra, we will see the kernel fall to the same mentality quite quickly.

its CADT cubed.

Re: Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers

#46

Post by digi_owl »

vessenes wrote: post #11

Ad hominem attacks on this page notwithstanding, he's not wrong. The reliability and simplicity of 'getting to a shell prompt' out-of-the box for ubuntu also seems to me to be on the decline over the last ten years. And going much farther back, I would say that inscrutability of boot problems might be at its all time worst. I have ubuntu systems that will hang for 60 seconds on network failures, or sometimes just ref…

> I don't think it's a big surprise that CoreOS is so appealing

Hilarious, given that his complaints can be blamed squarely on the core (heh) part of CoreOS, systemd.

Re: Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers

#47

Post by dekhn »

cwyers wrote: post #9

I mean, most people don't have that many problems with Ubuntu and Debian boxes, right? My first thought is, what is the author doing that most people aren't? Maybe stop doing that?

I run a bunch of debian and ubuntu boxes.

The kinds of problems he's reporting are more consistent with hardware failure that exhibits only after a reboot, or with misconfiguration of his software, than defects in the OS boot mechanism.

I have a lot of respect for Linas (I used his Extrusion code to make the glextrusion xscreensaver) but I think in this case he's doing things to his machines that cause these problems, and it's not usually debian or ubuntu's fault.

Re: Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers

#48

Post by dekhn »

voltagex_ wrote: post #29
blackflame7000 wrote: post #18

I will say it is awfully annoying to have the Ubuntu boot process freeze because some USB external hard drive didn't initialize it time. Just skip it for god sakes, don't make me have to find a keyboard plug it into the machine just to press S to skip mounting and boot.

This seems to be an odd systemd problem. I'm not sure what makes it decide that this USB drive / SD card / SMB share is so utterly critical that it's worth hanging the boot for 3+ minutes. A brand new Debian install on an SSD with UEFI can get me to the desktop in about 4 seconds. Please keep it that way.

this predates systemd on ubuntu- ubuntu has done this for some time. I don't know why. To fix this, you would have to configure this with nobootwait.

Re: Open Letter to Debian and Ubuntu Developers

#49

Post by jcastro »

vessenes wrote: post #11

Ad hominem attacks on this page notwithstanding, he's not wrong. The reliability and simplicity of 'getting to a shell prompt' out-of-the box for ubuntu also seems to me to be on the decline over the last ten years. And going much farther back, I would say that inscrutability of boot problems might be at its all time worst. I have ubuntu systems that will hang for 60 seconds on network failures, or sometimes just ref…

> The reliability and simplicity of 'getting to a shell prompt' out-of-the box for ubuntu also seems to me to be on the decline over the last ten years.

It has literally been the same for ten years. Ctrl-Alt-T or ctrl-alt-fkeys.

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