Posted on 02/15/2023 10:57:59 AM PST by ShadowAce
I love that graphic. It shows how Linux geeks behave just like sheep.
It is possible to over-think things.
Early UNIX was tailored to a proprietary hardware platform offered by each vendor. The hardware was tightly controlled. The software was highly optimized to the proprietary hardware. The tight control of hardware/software generated a high performance system with few bugs.
Linux tries to be Windows and UNIX. The hardware platform is massively broad and not controlled. The OS source is open source. Instead of one hardware/one OS, you have a plethora of hardware configs and a plethora of tailored configurations (distros) seeking to please everyone. Sometimes you are blessed with both a good hardware and good distro pairing, but it's a crap shoot.
Apple is patterned more like early UNIX. They tightly control the hardware platform and create a highly optimized UNIX OS with a pretty UI.
Isn’t this a problem that “docker containers” are supposed to solve?
You can create a virtualizable “container” that gets a task done, and all the funky linux choice and special linux config and extra library installation is localized to the container.
A server farm set up to run containers has computers with their “bare-metal” Linux properly set up to run Docker or whatever virtualization solution is called for. Docker / Kubernetes (container orchestration system ) simply fires up a particular container, that container’s Linux setup oddities are essentially quarantined, it processes data, and then gets shut down.
That’s my understanding, at least.
Very much agree. The distro maze has made Linux a very schizophrenic OS akin to multiple personality disorder, coupled by too much free software riddled with bugs that go unpatched and security vulnerabilities that often go ignored. If you are trying to break into Linux as a user, get ready to get ignored or told, arrogantly, by the community to Read the f’ing manual (which usually doesn’t exist in any meaningful detail because coders wanna code, not write docs), and even if you did that, fix or patch whatever feature into the project yourself. There are exceptions,
of course, but they’re rare. Outside purpose built appliances or devops, Linux just ain’t worth the trouble.
I met Linus online in the early 1990’s. We ported everything from SCO to Linux. At one point we put Linux on a stack of floppy drives and sent it to some guys to look at that were running their stuff on some commercial version of Unix. Maybe I built one of the first “Distros”, lol.
Linux has been great. We had one Slack server running in a corner for years we never touched. I don’t think it was cycled for 3-4 years and it was running DPT drives arrays under load all the time.
They miss you.
Nope, still going on today.
Ping.
I still sacrifice a goat once a month to give thanks for not having to “./configure, make, make install” for every piece of software I want to install.
I used to be a big Fedora and Ubuntu user for years. Loved the stability and maturity of Fedora and the driver support and package manager of Ubuntu - made learning new projects a snap. Now that Fedora is expensive and Ubuntu has embraced gathering telemetric data from it’s users I’ve fallen out of love with both distros - Not a fan of Fedora core. I’ve moved back to Debian - 3rd time now. Each distro has pros and cons and I wish there was an industry standard for driver and package managers as that would make adoption of Linux so much wider for general users. I know why this standardization will likely never occur, but I can dream.
I definately don’t miss the days of trying and often failing to compile source code and creating kernal hooks to get some software running.
Thank you my friend!
I mostly love my Linux Mint 20 distro. I see no reason to upgrade to whatever the current version is. It just works (mostly). The only problem I run into is some of the video and photo editing software I like, doesn’t work in Linux which is really stupid but it is what it is so I have a dual boot machine with Winblows10 on the other drive. A separate drive. I have a 3rd drive that is formatted to be able to be read by Win10 and Linux so that’s where I put files I want to mess with after booting into Winblows.
Other than some kind memory leak that developed when using Firefox which requires me to close FF, this Linux machine can stay running for a month or two between reboots sometimes. It’s that stable.
I hate when I boot into winblows and it wants to update all kinds of stuff or verify this or that. A real time waster. I wish I could just turn all that stuff off permanently.
Mac/Apple is okay. No complaints but I never took a shine to it. Too proprietary. The iPhones are nice and stable too. Then again so is Android on the Samsung phones I’ve had. Great cameras and the OS just works.
And that is why you should probably stay away from the Big leagues of Linux. You first need to be able to tell the difference between a Penguin and a Sheep...
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