
Linux Sucks 2020 [video] - tosh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZN5n6C9gM4
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0x006A
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23346567)

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mattbillenstein
I watched this a couple weeks ago and it just seems to have so little
information density - like this guy talks and talks and talks and the actual
content is like 15 minutes of this.

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nix23
Yep, that!

Maybe you have some fun with BSD-Lore (Kirk McKusick):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEEr6dT-4uQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEEr6dT-4uQ)

Or Solaris/illumos (Bryan M. Cantrill):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)

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MaxBarraclough
The Illumos talk is fantastic. I especially enjoy his take on Oracle, 36:30
through 39:00.

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nix23
The lawn mower ;)

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dschuetz
I have found it especially worrying that IT giants increasingly encroach OSS
instead of developing their own solutions. Devices remain closed while using
95% OSS code (yes, Android, the other 5% are hardware vendor firmware). It's
not exclusively their fault, as Lunduke correctly points out. If the Linux
Foundation is selling seats at the board of directors instead of granting them
for outstanding support, well then Linux is the sucker here.

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dTal
I struggle to understand how a TiVo-ized device running a mixture of GPL2 and
proprietary code isn't a license violation. The code is distributed to the end
user as a single uninspectable blob, i.e. the firmware image. Yes, "under the
hood", there are separate binaries - but this is purely an accounting fiction
that holds no relevance for the user. Is any combination of GPL and non-free
code allowed, so long as it emulates a Unix OS at some level?

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foobar_
Reasons start ~ 30 min mark.

Linux backward compatibility really sucks. I still don't understand why fedora
binaries can't run that easily on debian.

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morsch
I got that huge bundle of games the other day, many of which have native Linux
binaries. Binaries that probably worked fine in lots of distributions when
they were released.

Tried three games so far -- Cook, Serve, Delicious 2 (2017), Nuclear Throne
(2013) and uh, another one (201x): all of them refused to start, lacking one
shared library or another.

I got CSD2 to start by copying .so files around and using LD_LIBRARY_PATH but
it still did not work properly. Whatever. Bizarrely, it may be easier to get
the respective Windows binaries to start in Wine. But I'm really past "getting
things to work", there's enough stuff out there that doesn't require those
kind of summoning rituals.

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foobar_
Is it a disadvantage of the bazaar model ? In a cathedral so to speak old
things are valued. In a bazaar things are sold based on trends. I see this a
lot with open source software, where things are not made with the mindset of
making things last a long time.

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morsch
It's a fun application of the metaphor. But I can still apt install nethack, a
thing that was made in 1987. Or apt install lynx, a text mode browser first
released in 1992. Or apt install midnight-commander, a Norton Commander[1]
clone first released in 1994. All of these still receive updates, so I guess
they don't qualify as _old things_ per se, but that's the point: as long as
there is still a use for them, they keep getting updated.

If CSD2 or Nuclear Throne had been released as open source software, chances
are somebody would have updated their dependencies and they'd run fine. Heck,
I'm a developer, I could probably have fixed it myself. But they're
proprietary, and have gotten stale, and are a pain to get working. So I guess
it's more of an incompatibility between the two models than an attribute of
the bazaar.

[1] an old thing that's valued in the Cathedral, if at all, then only as a
curiosity

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foobar_
That's true. Well to stretch the metaphor ;) some shops in the bazaars become
boutiques to differentiate from other competitors. Boutiques price their
uniqueness and that's certainly true of things like vim which is certainly an
old software.

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butz
At least Linux in 2020 sucks a bit less than other operating systems.

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nix23
Sounds like the decision between democrats and republicans ;)

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ur-whale
Super happy finally to see someone call out backward compatibility (around
31:20)

Linux is _terrible_ on this axis, way worse than Windows.

EDIT: and statically linking your app doesn't cut it.

First, it's barely possible to do that with "modern" glibc.

Second, glibc itself breaks old apps.

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megous
> Linux is terrible on this axis, way worse than Windows.

Maybe GNU/Linux, but I can run binaries cross-compiled with GCC 10 on Arch
Linux on some weird MIPS PoS terminal that's running Linux 2.6.30 without
issues, as long as I don't use then non-existent syscalls, so I'm quite happy
how Linux kernel handles backwards compatibility.

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pantalaimon
The Linux Kernel holds backwards compatibility to a very high regards. It's
userspace that throws all this out of the window.

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ttz
Linux sucks up your time, yes. But once it's setup, it's unparalleled, if you
can stand minor GUI annoyances.

However, the set of people willing to invest that time to reach that stage of
setup that I'm aware of, is currently only me. The other professional linux
users in my circle are dual booters, hobbyists, or use it through ssh off a
Mac/PC.

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Jonnax
There is no money in Desktop Linux.

However there is money in running Linux for infrastructure.

Because of this Server linux is great.

The exception is Android but it does a lot of things on its own.

Unless that changes it's not going to be good on the desktop.

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kgraves
Whats the state of Linux on the desktop in 2020? What distribution do you
recommend for a normal person to use?

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arexxbifs
> Whats the state of Linux on the desktop in 2020?

Pretty decent for anyone who can tolerate default Gnome and has the right
hardware. So, no, still not ready to be a drop-in Windows replacement for
casual users.

> What distribution do you recommend for a normal person to use?

What's normal? Normal HN reader? Probably Debian-nonfree, which has all the
good parts of Ubuntu and almost none of the bad. Soccer mom pinterest poster
though? Windows or Mac.

IMHO, Linux on the desktop is still for those with an above-average interest
in computers. Hardware support is getting pretty damn good and software
support is great, provided you know about the FOSS options. However, you're
also pretty likely to run into some kind of snag that you will either have to
just tolerate, or fix yourself by gradually learning how to poke about in the
terminal.

Openness leads to diversity which inevitably makes standardization harder.
Thing is, I prefer that to the ever-increasing user disempowerment in Windows
and MacOS.

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aspaviento
> Soccer mom pinterest poster though? Windows or Mac.

Why? If she is going to use the browser almost exclusively, she wouldn't even
notice what OS she is using.

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chousuke
This has been my experience after I installed Fedora on my folks' laptops.
Pretty much the only support they've required is the occasional major version
upgrade I do for them when I visit. Regular patches get autoinstalled.

They'll use Wi-Fi or USB tethering with their phones for internet browsing and
my dad will occasionally connect the laptop to the TV set to watch some
videos, and it all just works.

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bachmeier
Isn't this a repost of a discussion from a few days ago?

Wouldn't be so bad if the talk and the discussion here provided any value...

