(Interesting new retro scheme)

I've tried Linux a few times over the years, but as I can always do what I need to do under Windows I've never been drawn in.

I did leave Linux on my Eee PC for a few months, but in the end I found it easier to install XP.

My brain is already overloaded trying to keep up to date with the latest Microsoft technologies, I can't take in all the open source things too! Maybe that's their plan :)

As far as I recall, for personal use Jamie moved to OS X fairly early on.

He does seem to have a lot of trouble with Linux, but at the end of the day, it's all anecdotal. Anyone can pull out horror setup stories, and it doesn't say a lot except what Jamie did at the top of the post you linked: "Stupid computers".

And is every site doing the horrible colour scheme for April's fools? Yours isn't so bad, but some of the others make me want to gouge my eyes out. Here in the future, April 1st was yesterday. Get with the times, sheesh.

As has been said, Linux is free if your time is worthless.

Almost nobody in the Western world shops at real-life bazaars either, because they are dodgy, unsafe, and unregulated. And in the Western world, we like things to be reliable, working, safe. So cathedral it is. Even our flea markets aren't bazaars, really, they're just knock-off cathedrals.

I will say though, Linux audio is _horrible_. And that's coming from someone who uses it as his platform of choice. It does seem to be getting better.

After working with Windows professionally for over 10 years, I found Linux to be a lot easier to deal with, although certain areas are not as streamlined as Windows or Mac OS X.

The reasons have nothing to do with Linux itself. When you install a product in Windows, the manufacturer wrote the driver. When you install a product in Linux, somebody wrote the driver in their spare time, possibly by reverse engineering, and possibly by reading the spec provided by the manufacturer, which may or may not have been accurate. Then these drivers were picked up and maintained by Red Hat or the other linux distro companies.

The areas (like webcams and wireless) where Linux has difficulty have more to do with the inability or unwillingness of manufacturers to do the same for Linux that they do for Windows.

Granted, very few people are using Linux the way that Jaime is using it, so it's certainly possible that even given manufacturer support, there would be difficulties doing what he wants to do. I myself would still prefer OS X or Windows for audio stuff (I'm a musician and I've done a fair bit of sound engineering), but Linux has been improving in that area, particularly.

Also, it's not like that upgrade problem is limited to Linux--it's a broad phenomenon that spans all areas of engineering, not just computers, even.

-Max

Not all Linux distributions are the same. A distribution with a long release cycle is more adequate for situations that require stability over several years. All of that can't be found with Fedora which is a playground for Redhat developers. IMHO it can't be updated securely. I would have recommended a Debian maybe with a backport of the audio system.

Please fix the horrible color scheme in the pages, dark green on black is unreadable. Light green on black (as in old monitors) is fine, though.

Yes, I have used green on black monitors at 80's and they are kind of vintage and cool but this website is now unusable for me and will stop reading it if this horrible usability issue is not fixed.

I don't know, if he was such a world class software engineer, I would have expected him to fix the bug in the sound system instead of whining that it was broken (which was of course something that shouldn't have happened). It is open source for a reason, you know? Especially when your business depends on it, it is probably worth the effort.

Of course, if you find another solution that works for you and is "cheaper" then use it. But if you decidedly choose free (as in free beer) open source software without buying any service for it and don't want to invest something in it, you probably made the wrong choice.

I can't repeat this enough: OSS lives from individuals contributing to it. If you expect everything to always work as you think it should, then OSS isn't for you. It doesn't get better from talking about how bad it is or that it *still* is so complex or not like this or not like that.

(Of course, I could sometimes rant endlessly about why this or that doesn't work, but it still is up to me to do something about it)

I think it is also somewhat disturbing that a software developer of Jamie's caliber refuses to bust open the source code and at least take a look. Refusing to leverage one of the strongest points of OSS seems kinda...odd.

Excellent color scheme. Please don't change it again :-)

Select All makes this site much more readable...

No surprise about the Fedora upgrade. That's what Fedora is: a walking timebomb everytime you upgrade it. That's fine for some, but was too much for me. I moved to the 'dumbed down' Ubuntu, as I did not want MS Novell and probably did not consider Debian like I should have. But I'm really happy with Ubuntu and things don't break at each update.

@Ari: In firefox:
Edit -> Page Style -> No style.

I find this whole post a little dubious. You make it sound like Linux is at fault, and you appear to be discouraging people from attempting to use it.

Don't believe the hype, people. Unless you plan to run a Linux-based terminal server setup on obscure kiosk hardware, you won't have anywhere near the problems this guy had. Not to mention the reams of custom scripts and setup this guy created. I mean, he has a whole section in his "Behind the Scenes" area for "Source Code". Within that area he describes in detail what he did to create his custom setup, and you might be overwhelmed at just how much custom work he did do.

Here is the kiosk section: http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/

Frankly, the guy did an amazing job with this stuff. And you tell me he could have done any of the stuff with speed and *no cost* with Windows.

Awesome new theme. Too bad it's only going to last for a day...

> Linux is free if your time is worthless

Well said. And I have to agree that a hearing a sentence such as "I can't even fathom how such a bug could exist, but that's Linux for you" from a supposed Linux advocate is a bit... strange. And a refreshing hint that mere mortals still need not apply. (In my wasted tries, I don't think I *ever* got sound to work.)

> will stop reading it if this horrible usability
> issue is not fixed

Drink! (The blog drinking game requires a drink when someone threatens to go away.) Or come back tomorrow. I have a feeling the green will be gone.

Love this post. I've been telling people for years how unstable, crashy and plain difficult to configure linux can be unless you are lucky with your hardware. They often counter that "they had no problems" (on their one hardware config which they tried to install one flavour of linux on once, and spent a day or two configuring afterwards).

Out of 6 computers i've tried installing flavours of nix on none of them 4 of them were impossible to get anything beyond a command prompt for (i.e. gnome failed to start or give useful errors), free-bsd was fine for 2 of them and debian on one of the same 2. seems to have gotten better recently... or my last 2 computers were particularly nice with their hardware. I don't have enough data to tell.

My friend once bought "Red hat linux for dummies", which came with red hat on a disk, no less. The pair of us (both competent geeks I might add) couldn't get it to work properly after spending a whole day on it. All we got was a command prompt with no graphical OS. Bear in mind this was before the internet was affordable or fast though... I can remember waiting to download the graphics card driver over dial up for it.

I should try linux again... see if its changed much. Its been at least a year since I was last running it and developing for it proper...

On the other hand. Knoppix has worked fine on every machine I have tried... I attribute that to its simple (i.e. none from the user) configuration and minimalistic approach.

I can't help but be dubious...

Did you write a post about this new look on your blog? I hope that change is a thing that we'll see more in the future, it's refreshing. But i would advice against keeping it in the long run. It's harder to read and more importantly it's harder to take in the message, i constantly keep getting distracted.

I agree that for a stable system Fedora probably wasn't the best choice as it is bleeding edge. But on the other hand, that probably means that it has some (limited, non functioning) support for newer hardware as opposed to no support at all.

Perhaps he didn't delve into the source code because he has, oh, I dunno... better things to do!? Just because he is probably capable, given enough time, to fix the problem does not mean his time is worthless to him. The OSS argument of "fix it yourself" is frankly a pathetic argument that shifts the buck and maintains low quality software. It's the reason proper polished OSS is very rare.

I think sooner or later OSS developers will have to recognize that all the complaints about Microsoft that they've been branding about for years (that it has lots of silly bugs, takes up lots of resourses and can sometimes break one of literally millions of different hardware configurations with a patch) will start to affect them too, especially as user bases grow. And as soon as someone who is using your system as an end user is told to "fix it yourself" they'll most likely go elsewhere.

The large OSS projects such as Firefox and OOo are already bloated and in OOo's case it's not even as polished as MS Office, and that's with big corporate backing. KDE and Gnome are bloated and slow in comparison to Explorer. It seems that the closer you get to a finished polished, usable piece of software the more bloated it will become to the point where people will notice and complain. And once you've finished this polished product you'll end up having a nightmare to maintain it because the polish in usability and functionality you've applied is mostly handling lots and lots of edge cases that make changes and new development Hard.

If the Linux install base on end user systems ever approaches 20% I think those distributions will have a new found respect for the job MS has done in developing software for 90+% of the market for so long. Because as your end user base increases your space for crap excuses reduces significantly.

That's the problem with Linux - it's great fun for people who want to fiddle with stuff, but it's hard to get useful work done unless you're an expert... and sometimes not even then!

(let the flamewars begin!)

I had to refresh to get the black and green.

Good april fools.

Bad web designer!

Change the names of the files/links etc... even if by a token char. But I guess you knew that already and it was just a little "coding horror".

We are all terrible programmers after all... :)

I'm inclined to consider Jamie's anecdotes as evidence that software engineers don't always make the best system administrators, rather than as evidence against Linux.

I'd say it's a bit like wondering why Jimmy Hendrix couldn't play the drums. I mean, "if he throws in the towel on percussion instruments, then what possible hope do us mere mortals have?"

1. JWZ isn't really a Linux guy, though he does use it for certain things. When I first heard of him he was an SGI guy, and now that SGI has fallen I guess he's more into Macs. He has long complained about various aspects of Linux.

2. Those of us who do unusual and difficult things with Linux are the ones most likely to run into unusual and difficult problems with it. Then we decide whether it's worth our time to fix the problems or take a different approach.

3. #2 applies to any technology, not just Linux.

I hate Linux, for exactly this type of reason. What stability? What ease of use? What ease of customization? The cake is a lie.

People seem to be forgetting what day it is. lol, nice new css!

Dom, as someone who works with lots of programmers, I think your observation is dead-on.

I cannot help but wonder: Linux geeks stopped bashing Windows on their blogs a long time ago and started doing more constructive stuff. When will Windows geeks stop bashing everything else and return to producing interesting stuff? Since, you know, Windows-bashing and Linux-bashing has been boring for quite a while now...

The comments about Fedora are true - it is RedHat's 'bleeding edge, not stable' playground OS. They put all their effort into stable RedHat ES instead, so if you want a truly stable supported OS, use CentOS (which is RH ES recompiled without the proprietary Redhat branding).

The thing is about Linux and stablilty is that is really is stable - Oracle will sell you a DB and you get a free copy of Linux to run it on. Something like IBM did with AS/400 - buy DB2 get a free As/400 to run it :)

VMware uses it for ESX Server, the large-scale, enterprise VMware Server software. Nobody really complains that its unstable.

On the other hand, we have this guy being too clever for himself. He's running fancy kiosk hardware (fair enough, but wouldn't an ordinary PC in a different box be ok?), with a ton of self-written scripts. Hmm, and the entire thing stops working when he changes the OS part...

Sometimes people who are professed to be extremely clever are nothing of the sort, they just appear that way.

Ubuntu 10.7? Please, can someone give me a link to download this one?
Sorry for being off topic, but I can't read anything inhere.

Linux audio is the reason I gave up Linux as a /desktop/ OS in 2000. And again in 2002. And once more in 2006.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me three times and I'll put up with half a dozen Putty windows on my Windows desktop for development...

I'm a mediocre software "engineer" at best. And I hate the phrase engineer, it does a disservice to all real engineers.

However, I am a fantastic Linux administrator. There're plenty of people I know who are fantastic developers, but when their box stops behaving, they come to me, because I know all the tricks to make various distributions behave themselves.

They're two different worlds.

Also, I like the black & green. :(

> When will Windows geeks stop bashing everything else

Heh - it really is April 1. As if Windows geeks bash anyone with anywhere *near* the frequency as Mac or Linux geeks.

Man... this is really the same discussion as someone saying oh asp is so much better than php.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

"I don't know, if he was such a world class software engineer, I would have expected him to fix the bug in the sound system instead of whining that it was broken..."

See, this is why, when I hear the word "Linux", I generally think of the words "insufferable prick". What a ridiculous negative attitude: "If it doesn't work right, it's your fault for not fixing it yourself!"

Let me ask you a question: What precisely is Jamie's incentive to waste potentially several hours or several days digging through code he already knows is shoddy, in order to fix some annoying bug that wasn't there yesterday? What is his compensation for this incredibly tedious work? The guy has a business to run, for god's sake, one which I'm sure pays a lot better than, um, nothing.

Oh, right, it's that warm fuzzy feeling you get from conquering obstacles and making the world a better place for the other 38 users with the same problem. Ha ha. As Jamie says, f**k it.

@simon

I think your comment about rewriting the drivers was kind of the point. His time is more valuable than that. In fact, if you make money, your time is valuable. Time you spend writing drivers is time you are not spending making money. Thus, you are LOSING money. This is why Linux is more expensive than windows. The cost of the software is negligible in comparison to the IT hours saved.

There's a lot of wisdom in this post. I worked in a shop years ago that was running an MS-DOS based EPoS system. It worked perfectly - but was upgraded to Windows 95 all the same... the problems started flowing thick and fast! I won't go into details, but let's just say it sucked _really_ badly!

I like the new CSS... it allows childish moron's like me to post ASCII art... ahem...

_--~~--_
/~/_| |_\~\
|____________| Help Me Obi Wan.
|[][][][][][]|:= . You're my only hope!
__| __ |__ \ ' . /
| ||. | == | | \ ' . /
(| ||__| == | |) \ '<
| |[] [] == | | \ '\|
| |____________| | \ |
/__\ /__\ \ / \
~~ ~~

Your new color scheme stinks. I feel like I'm working on an AS/400 again. :)

By the way, thanks for the fun theme, I enjoyed it :)

Damn... filtered the spaces... lol

I like Jamie's colour scheme actually :)

As for sound on linux I agree it's tricky but getting better.
I notice the proprietry linux apps like skype, java browser plugin,
flash browser plugin, ... tend to use the older OSS interface rather
than the newer ALSA interface. This practically means that
they hog the sound device while running which is very annoying.
They're fixing this in newer versions thankfully.

As for all systems there are config/upgrade problems.
Personally I switched from windows to linux 8 years ago because
of the type of thing Jamie is ranting about, and I had no
control over. With Linux it's not all perfect but it is better,
and one always can fix the problems where it's not.

Ultimately it's just an attitude.
If you really want to engineer a working system you will.
Jamie's attitude has switched form being proactive to whining
a long time ago. That's fair enough as his focus has changed,
and he's rightly whining that things are not yet good enough.

Free software sucks.

> Apparently, Linux is so complex that even a world class software
> engineer can't always get it to work.

How exactly are you making the leap from "Jamie had trouble" to "It all Linux's fault"? I've certianly had similar trouble with Windows updates in the past. Should I blame Windows? No, the fact was I had oddball badly supported hardware. I quit buying hardware from that manufacturer and the problems (mostly) went away.

Unless Jamie bothers to track down the problems to their true source, which it looks like he has no intention of doing (his time, his choice), I don't think you have enough information to draw any such conclusions.

Nice central point to the post. pity about the examples used. Or rather, it's a pity that we're all so sensitive we can't approach the topic with any amount of emotional detachment!

Out of curiosity - would it be possible to do what he does with a windows install? I've never really used it that much, so I don't know..

For a stable server with reliable hardware support as given word and without annoying versioning-fetish, try a BSD-Derivate.

Using Fedora or Ubuntu as a "has-to-be-absolutely-stable" server-OS is not "world-class". Maybe he had to many drinks at his bar recently? ;)

Wow new theme, anyway..

This is common issue about Linux unfortunately another good example from Eric S. Raymond another good programmer, - http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

In case you missed it.

The story here isn't Linux - and it's suspect to say the least the anti-Linux spin you put on it considering some of your sponsors.

The story is more about if you're writing tons of very, very custom custom code on obscure hardware you should expect some problems at upgrade! This goes for any platform. To some degree the fact that the guy is "A World Class Engineer" makes me think he can also tend to be a bit too clever and do things the rest of us "mere mortals" would never do. Thus he has problems we would never have and have never had (in my case running many production servers - many of which haven't been rebooted for months, greater than nine months in some cases).

We had the same problems with the move to Win95, XP, Vista (which had huge driver problems and those are at least written by the company), and IE7 "broke the web". Like I said, the story here isn't about Linux, but how you should expect problems with your extremely custom work when you upgrade. It makes me sad that the angle on this that was given, and the angle many seem to enjoy taking up is "Ha! I've been telling everyone Linux sucks!" Right. Someone had an expected problem and now an entire OS is confirmed to suck. What.

Additionally Fedora is a horrible choice for anything requiring stability. Great general use OS, but it should be regarded as beta honestly. CentOS, Debian, or any other distribution aimed at production.

I hate the mistaken belief that if something is free/open, any problems with it are somehow not as important because it is free. That is nothing more than hubris.

/me tires of 'finding' memory leaks in Pidgin, one of the star projects of OSS.

/meta-me: 50% chance someone says "they're probably in the GTK runtime, so its not Pidgin's fault!"

Well, RedHat has never really been nice about upgrades and versioning, they've never been shy to release broken stuff as a stable release.

And I wouldn't have chosen Ubuntu for a kiosk or other non desktop install... but...

Anyway don't blame Linux. Would he be able to do all the stuff he does if they were running Windows (and without paying a lot for licenses, software add ons, etc.)

Zawinski famously abandoned Linux a year or two ago for OS X because he wanted a system that 'just works'. Can't blame him for that, but it suggests that 'software engineer' isn't an accurate description of what he does.

I thought the install of Fedora Core was fairly easy. But, alas, I stick to Vista for my own development. It does what I need it to do. (which is nothing, but no one knows about that)

Another way to look at the situation of unreliable software is this. People with no family to support and no career taking the rest of their time have the time to "fiddle" with experimental stuff. When I was a teenager, I could spend hours/days on the computer coding and figuring stuff out just for the sake of computing. As an adult with responsibilities, I don't have time to spend on such things. Granted, this guy was trying to do something beyond what normal users do, but it brings up the bigger point - adults don't have the time or inclination to waste time fiddling with partially working solutions (except for those few individuals who substitute human relationships with technology).

P.S. This dark green text is totally unreadable on my laptop :(

You can usually get pretty far by making a point of buying hardware with Linux in mind. Also, if you just want stability above all else, Debian Stable is your friend.

If you're looking for a quality Linux desktop or notebook, Dell sells systems preloaded with Ubuntu nowadays, and you can get them with support.

Niklas Eriksson I totally agree with your insight. There are so many out there that are professed as "geniuses" and they are nothing of the sort.

If Linux in a nutshell was sooo unstable why would so many institutions such as the government, universities, and law enforcement use it to do simple daily tasks to large complex data retrieval. I have used multiple versions/flavors of Linux. Each has its unique purpose and each has its pitfalls, but I would rather work with something that I can enhance than a black box like MS.

> adults don't have the time or inclination to waste time fiddling with
> partially working solutions

Which is why Linux folks should cease trying to push it onto mortal users' desktops. It ain't ready. A pretty desktop is of no use when the sound doesn't work and the user has to rip their hair out sifting through man pages for a solution.

> /me tires of 'finding' memory leaks in Pidgin, one of the star
> projects of OSS.

Ouch, and I like Pidgin a lot. I left the Mac a month ago and I haven't found a great chat client yet.

some people completly missed the point of this story (hint look at the title). This is not about linux is bad or linux is worse than windows or windows is great etc.

So
he made a bad choice of which Linux Distro to use as a base
He heavily customised it
He upgraded the OS and it broke his system....

Please repeat with MacOS, Windows, SunOS, BeOS etc ... and get the same results ...

Operating system upgrades WILL break something
Your hardware is not as standard as you think

"Nothing Fucks Up Productivity Like Installing Linux" - Zed Shaw

Yawn.

Another "if this smart guy couldn't use it, how could the rest of the world" post.

I expected more from you, Jeff. Especially now that this is your whole gig.

If you are a long time reader of JWZ's, you'll see that he does a hell of a lot of personal customizations to make the software run "just so" on those kiosk machines (and he releases it to the public, which is awesome." That sort of thing is prone to breakage, especially when the were made on a bleeding edge distribution that is 5 years old!

If JWZ read his own posts from back then, he'd see all the pain that it took to do those sorts of customizations in the first place.

But he got it working.

Tell me how he could do the same things on some other OS for the price point that he was looking at (it was a factor for these public machines in his first go round).

There isn't a story here, but good try at making it into one.

At least you'll get a lot of Slashdot traffic and hopefully some click-thrus on your ads.

Please change the colour scheme back, feint green on black is totally unreadable (especially as you can't type with ctrl-a selected!) Thanks.

You can always back up what you have built using rsync, then reverse that from a secure server and hourly write out the "good" version back to the servers using rsync. If nothing changes it only takes a minute or so, and you can email reports of what changes there are, if any.

Wow Pandora's box Jeff. It's been found an opened. Now to await the inevitable Linux tribe come to defend their deity.

I am sure no one is really reading the comments this far into the post, but I figured I'd chime in anyway.

I have stable open source Xen virtual servers running on a few hardware boxes that host a full range of applications. These range from manufacturing production environment support, database servers, accounting server, web server, backup, etc to user desktops served to thin clients. The whole setup allows me to have dev, test, and production environments in a small footprint for the price of the hardware. My time would be spent irregardless of whether or not if I was running Windows (I do have a two of windows machines to support AutoCAD and CNC equipment) or Linux.

Oh, yeah I also do some audio on my laptop for fun. So please don't tell me what I can't do with linux.

This post is a cheap shot, Fedora is the WinME of Linux distros.

Hey guys, Atwood can't seem to get a WinME Network to be reliable.

Jeff,

I'm surprised that you decided to go with such a god awful color scheme. While it's nice and hip and retro, it's completely unreadable. I tried reading this post, but after the first paragraph, my eyes simply hurt too bad to continue.

I would highly suggest that you change it back because as it is, my eyes can't take it and I'm way to lazy to change the style sheet myself.

Hope the new scheme is an April Fool's gag! Blech ;-)

The article is not about upgrading, it is about the fact that one can be a good developper and a bad sysadmin.

Well I used to be a *BSD/linux sysadmin. I can give you a big bucks advice for free regarding free unices stability that he infringed (explaining all his problems) :

**Get away from from "eye candy", so called "easy to use", and "bleeding edge" distributions.**

FC, mandrake, ubuntu, red hat, suse are gap released distributions. Meaning that upgrading is as with windows quite hazardous. These are nice "click-a-click" distribution meant for fitting 80% of the needs. The trade-off for eye candy, and "ease of use" it does not handle well abnormal case (such as having a bios driven fan). These are the prefered distro from windows geeks.

Among stream released* distributions such as the debian testing, and some flavor of BSD not tagged current, avoid. These are meant has beta test distribution. Avoid them, unless you need latest openldap, or handling exotic, new hardware. (normaly a good sysadmin avoid exotism, computer are prone to factorial sensibility syndroma, hubris can kill). These are the prefered distro of people that does nothing else with their computers but reinstall them on a daily basis.

*stream released means there are no such things as an update CD, distribution dont have much of gap to cross to upgrade. You upgrade them in the flow constantly through minor jumps almost in a crontab.

Free Unices are user friendly, not idiot friendly, learning curve is tough, but they are so usefull.

Thanks to using stable linux/BSD distro, I became a developper, and since Active Directory is looking much like an LDAP, that XP is quite POSIX (oh I am already sad of XP end), that I know of kerberos, have insight on mail standard and protocol... some customers asked me where I learnt to be such a windows guru even though I started C# a year ago.

Well, I became what they think a windows hacker, by following my own advices, and learning unices by doing it the cool, long, lazy stable way : being a linux/BSD sysadmin.

This guy might be a good software developper, it seems though he has all wrong as being a sysadmin.

Developers overlook sysadmin's kill, it is a shame and that cost them a lot. But they are too proud to notice it.

I do have to say something about this and the first comment. Unix and Linux weren't designed to be reinstalled and upgraded all the time. One of the beautiful things about unix and linux is that once you find a configuration that works, you can trust it will continue to operate. Adding software doesn't pollute the water in the same way it does in windows operating systems.

Along with this rock solid reliability is the trade off of more complex installation. Admins generally are required to spend MANY MANY hours getting their devices configured properly, OR spend the time to script and installation routine to duplicate their work for them.

In any case, Linux is not designed to be continuously upgraded. The whole Unix/Linux OS family was designed to have near limitless uptime and reliability.

This problem is a case of mistaken identity, or mistaken role for the software. You wouldn't use Excel as a database application would you? Can it do it? Sure, but that isn't what it was meant to do.

Ubuntu 10.7 doesn't exist.

Guy didn't do any research at all. Did he even try to get it working, or he just assumed it would all work without any input from his end?

There are two sides at play in these comments (two loud sides, anyway):

1. Linux sucks and isn't good for anything but fiddling.
2. Linux is the best thing in the world and you should fix your own problems instead of complaining about it, because that's how open-source works.

Both of these arguments are problematic, because both of them run to extremes that simply aren't true. I'll address them one at a time.

Linux sucks if you're a Windows or Mac user who is not comfortable with using or learning to use a good number of manual methods for system configuration. But this doesn't mean that it sucks and isn't useful. Ubuntu is the only flavor I've had installed on my own hardware, so it's all I can speak to, but it was the easiest system I've ever used for web application development. Installing PHP and MySQL is a breeze. You don't need any special bundle (like XAMPP or MAMP, which, in fairness, are bundles that I use happily on Windows and the Mac), and installation works the way that it should.

At my previous job, we used servers running Red Hat (sorry, not sure of the release), and we had no major problems during my time there, even with a fairly green systems guy. Everything worked very, very well, and we had probably about 95% or better up time BEFORE integrating load balancers and dupe servers into our system.

So Linux doesn't suck. What DOES suck is that certain Linux distros come with problems fresh out of the box. When I upgraded to Ubuntu's latest on my old Dell lappy, the power-charging interface simply stopped working. No, it wasn't part of a gradual decline. It was "I'm working with Breezy Badger" followed by "I'm not working with Feisty Fawn" (I might have my animals off...it's been a while).

Open-source software is meant to be a collaberative process--I will not disagree with that; however, a Linux distro such as Red Hat or Ubuntu is not some DVD encoder that you download from some guy's Sourceforge page. These are major releases that people have begun to trust. New releases need to be consistently stable (normal new version bugs aside). Yes, it's nice if a user has the ability to fix a bug him/herself, but that shouldn't be required. If sound isn't working in an official release, it should be fixed and released as an update. Including broken features in an OS and then passing the fixing onto the user as some sort of rite of passage is just plain stupid. If you're going to distribute your software across the globe (and especially if you're going to tout it as something that all users could benefit from), take responsibility for it and stop passing the buck to the user.

In most cases (including this one), usability problems are not the fault of the user, be he a 97 year-old farmer or a 22 year-old hotshot with crazy hacking skills.

Love the color scheme.

Also check out Every OS Sucks
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2514730680283477734

The CAPTCHA code word for today should have been "green". Kinda cool for a change. The black background uses less electricity, so it's "geen" too. lol.

O/T: I love the old-style color scheme. Why don't you keep it around a while?

The only thing worse than upgrading is living with the same old problems. :-)

Similarly I hate Linux's bugs while I use it (every day for work), and windows bugs whenever I have to use it.

We have 2 desktops for the kids to use for games. One runs XP pro, the other XP Media Center. Not all games work on both computers. Some work on each one, with some overlap which work on both. Some crash randomly. One computer powers off at random, and has since new. Who do I blame? My wife blames me. :-(

The problem with "upgrading Linux" is that you can't really upgrade from Red Hat to Ubuntu. So he does a fresh install. That lets him loose all of the previous configuration work he had already done. Maybe I am different than all others, but even the "run out of the box" distros like Ubuntu never seem to work very well out of the box and you are always messing around in about 40 startup or config scripts until it is smooth and reliable. Why throw all of that away? Because the "cool kids" are doing it? Are they jumping off of bridges, too? Sounds like he just needs to decide what he is doing BEFORE he does it, then work toward a defined goal.

I agree. The green needs to be a little bit brighter.

Agreed on the non-story. Data is not the plural of anecdotes.

Please keep the jwz-inspired colour scheme around as an option.

To clarify, saying 'Linux is free if your time is worthless' is simply not true.

Linux is free if you are willing to learn it and it's usage patterns with the same effort you originally put into Windows.

Windows does not come intuitively, ask any senior jumping on that bandwagon. In addition, there is an entire industry built around fixing user's computers, and upgrades with Windows, because the average user cannot infact, fix their system.

My time is worth more than 90% of the free world, to assume it is worthless because I have spent the minimal effort to learn the platform is ignorant.

First, nice new theme, keep it on Jeff.
Yes linux is a working progress. I myself mostly used it (Ubuntu) at home for browsing internet mostly. I agree with you its not the easiest OS to use for multimedia stuff. I still use a lot of WindowsXP to do multimedia thing. If only the multimedia part of linux is as organized as the kernel development.

People, world class Software Engineer != world class Systems Engineer. End of story.

guys.

the phrase "Linux is free if your time is worthless" has been coined by none other than JWZ. thus, saying that he "lives and breathes Linux" is, I strongly suspect, a stretch.

A bit of a pointless story. You can come up with anecdotes all day long of famous guru/wizard/hacker X giving up on software/OS/language Y and still it won't mean a thing.

It comes down to spending time to find the right tool for the job and knowing when to try a different approach.

This seems to have completely devolved into the usual windows vs linux arguments.

I had to stop myself from contributing more. :)

Its a shame everyone defends everything so rigorously instead of realising and analysing the problems. Everyone who has said things to the effect of "it would be easier with Windows" or "Linux is stable" is just winging it imo. Have you actually done it yet? Do you have data to back it up? Is it anything more than a passionate love for /your/ OS of choice?

There... I contributed anyway. :P

Jeff... turn on the lights!

Is this some odd object-lesson on how to turn a navigable, legible site into a hard-to-read eye-straining text-collision? If so, I appreciate the education offered... now can you switch the scheme back so that I can enjoy your posts again?

Here's the real deal: none of the OS options are good! They all suck. It's just some people have a tolerance for certain types of suckiness over others.

I need this tattoo'd on my hand. Upgrading for the sake of upgrading is dangerous and I've been burned by that myself several times:

I recently upgraded my Debian production box from sarge to etch and along the way, it upgraded MySQL (from 4 to 5). At first blush, everything looked great. But then it wasn't until typical/normal traffic arrived later that it was apparent that "lazy joins" weren't supported in MySQL 5 and several things were broken as a result. The mod_auth modules I used had also changed and my authenticated sections of our sites were broken as a result.

I also recently upgraded my MythTV box from 0.20 to 0.21 and it made things worse, too.

I've seen it said elsewhere - software doesn't "rot" over time.

This has been the opposite of my experience over the past 7 or so years of dabbling with various Linux flavors. My first few attempts were disasterous, but more recent installs with Knoppix, openSUSE and Ubuntu have been surprisingly good. Hardware and drivers were automatically detected, and everything just worked. In the Windows world - particularly with Vista - I often have to hunt or wait for drivers from hardware manufacturers, and if they're bad I'm just stuck.

I'll agree that audio on Linux is a weak point.

We've all had similar problems. I've been struggling to come up with a stable install of Vista for over a year. My new laptop crashes repeatedly if i use certain software due to (get this) a bug with *cursor rendering* in the NVidia drivers. Given the right (wrong) hardware and the right (wrong) OS release, you're gonna have issues no matter how good you are with this stuff. Unless you actually do sit down and write it all from scratch... and then you have two problems.

I have to wonder about the hardware he's installing the Linux on. Sounds to me like something's strange about the kiosks. As far as the audio goes, I got nothing.

Giving up on a technical problem isn't always due solely to technical difficulties...

Sometimes you have better things to do with your time.

Shog9: Major problems exist in the Vista drivers from nVidia -- in fact, I believe there's a lawsuit out there now.

This Jamie guy seems like a world class prick. Bugzilla comments...

Comment #4 From Jamie Zawinski on 2006-03-31 23:26 EST

> I hope it was the last change in FC4.

Yeah, I hoped so too, but it wasn't; you fucked it up again in alsa-lib-1.0.10-3.FC4 / alsa-
utils-1.0.10-1.FC4:

alsactl: set_control:886: warning: numid mismatch (15/18) for control #15
alsactl: set_control:888: warning: iface mismatch (2/2) for control #15
alsactl: set_control:890: warning: device mismatch (0/0) for control #15
alsactl: set_control:892: warning: subdevice mismatch (0/0) for control #15
alsactl: set_control:894: warning: name mismatch (AC97 Playback Volume/AC97 Playback Volume) for
control #15
alsactl: set_control:896: warning: index mismatch (0/0) for control #15
alsactl: set_control:894: warning: name mismatch (AC97 Capture Volume/Front Capture Volume) for
control #16
alsactl: set_control:896: warning: index mismatch (0/0) for control #16
alsactl: set_control:898: failed to obtain info for control #16 (Operation not permitted)

So out of curiosity -- do you think my complaint and recommendation are silly, or do you just not
*care* about the inconvenience this causes for people who are actually trying to get work done? This
costs me like half a day of fucking around every time I upgrade this machine.

It's really, really getting tiresome.

Comment #5 From Martin Stransky on 2006-04-14 05:30 EST

These changes come from kernel, not from alsa-lib nor alsa-utils so don't update
your (fucking :-)) kernel...

Come on! I run Linux as my desktop PC. I love it and I would NEVER go back to windows, even if I got paid. Sure, the learning curve is really something, but once you get there, everything else is just myths. And I have my system up to date.
Linux is the OS that best fits my needs. I use windows and I program for windows at work, but I would never go back to it for my personal use. I hear Vista users cursing against their OS everyday. I have ZERO of the problems they talk about on my home PC.

And, by the way, I know some guys who are not precisely "WORLD CLASS SOFTWARE ENGINEERS" who ARE actually able to keep their Linux machines, working perfectly and up to date in a total painless way. It's still not as easy as windows, but it's not that hard either. Besides, face it, it doesn't have MANY of the problems windows has.

Anyway, all this argument makes little sense... Everyone has to pick the OS that best fits their needs and that's all.

And, Jeff, you DO seem to like MS a bit too much sometimes... :)

Wait, wait, this is not a Linux argument. This guy is running Linux, not MS software. Jamie is one of the good guys.

There is a business lesson in this post. Don't upgrade. It is a pointless waste of time to stay on the cutting edge. Do an update when you start a new project. Once it works, leave it alone!

I worked with a good boss who was an asshole about this. Our tool of choice was the MS x86 C compiler the company bought in 1992. It worked, we know where the bugs were and how to find and work around them. An upgrade cost money. In the end, if all goes well, you are right back where you started with a working system. Far better to spend time adding to the product than chasing the bleeding edge.

Another lesson from the same company. We spent gobs of $$ chasing a contract with Wallmart. Why? If they install our system in all the stores we will be rich. The lesson is that they do not upgrade. No real company will pull out and replace working equipment. The best case is they will install your stuff in new stores.

Anytime someone says "they will replace the old with our new stuff" they are full of it. Also, people who do real work do NOT want the automatic update feature. It is the automatic break feature.

What color scheme are you talking about??? I see the same as usual. Except in some images like the captcha.

At least Windows Update never gave me any headaches. Well, except for that crappy Genuine Advantage, but you know, that is supose to give you headches.

ohh, firefox was caching the css...

@Jheriko on April 1, 2008 08:38 AM

Yes. I run it in production environments and Linux is far more stable than anything else we run. We regularly see year long or more uptimes unless we have kernel updates that we have to apply. I also use it every day for my personal and professional desktop. The only problem I have is with Firefox sometimes locking up when I open 30+ tabs.

No biggie... IE can't handle any more either. I have used the latest build of Firefox 3 beta and it does not have this problem.

Again, JWZ does a lot of customizations that don't come out of the box. Those aren't going to transfer easily from one distro to the next as they were a pain to bring into being in the first place. Read his own material on the subject (and that's because his use case, a public night club, is a rarified environment for almost any Linux distro I would argue).

JWZ is also the guy that left Mozilla because he thought it was taking too long and was totally against a rewrite of the software. Mozilla's decision to go with a rewrite turned out to be the correct one.

So, he's great, but he's not God.

I suppose this is an april fools theme

Has anyone mentioned already that this "color scheme" is a homage to JWZ's home page?

While Windows may be the least stable in general use, it seems to have the best patching. I haven't had a Windows patch go bad since NT SP4. Linux patches, frequently (especially kernel patches)... Even Solaris which is quite heavily tested regularly has patches that break stuff on my systems.

I still try to keep things up to date, but the more mission critical the box, the less likely it is to be completely current...

What? Linux distributions don't do adequate regression testing? No way. :-)

Sure, because I've never had any issues with a Windows upgrade, and I've certainly never seen it crash..

Seriously, I thought your recent posts have ranged from good to awesome and then we get this. A couple really obvious and pragmatic things come to mind that make you seem very naive here.
First of all, Ubuntu is a distro made for newbies, and hearing someone using ubuntu claim that there is a mysterious bug that ruins linux for them and has no solution is a common occurrance and the rest of us know that its just a newbie and not true. You sound like a clueless tv station doing a "news at 11! find out how hackers could destroy the world!" or "news at 11! how computer slang is hurting your kids education!."
Second, sofware engineering guru != system administration guru, based on that and the first, this guy sounds like some of my very smart CS professors who don't know to unmount a flash drive before removing it and generally act totally dumb around computers.
Third, In the windows world you can get an OS bug and thats it, theres no fixing it, your simply hosed and theres nothing you can do at all. In the linux world, if something worked before then stoped on an upgrade, that is never the case. There is always a relatively painless path to figure out what is causing the bug and then there is always a reasonable solution. People who claim otherwise are linux newbs. Heres a little path for when you find a linux bug for something that worked before. 1. google it. 2. ask in irc. 3. Search the distro/package bug tracker. 4. go to distro/package forum. 5. Post on that forum/bug tracker, and email the software maintainer about your post. 6. You WILL have found the bug and there are two possible results which are: 1. There is a proper fix. 2 there is a fix by downgrading to a stable version and there is a bug report (or you make one, but its probably already there) and the bug WILL be fixed, or you can fix it yourself since its open source.

Jeff, now that you have all this time on your hands, why not start learning some linux stuff? Ubuntu fails at abstracting the core of the system that depends on the command line and is gnu/linux, so don't start there. I would suggest starting with cygwin and get to know the basics in any linux reference and some core command line tools, then use a free vitual machine for an actual linux distro.

Also, The color scheme f@#kin rocks! For those who don't like it, get stylish or force colors in firefox.

The saving grace that I still totally respect you is that you didn't totally conclude anything wrong about linux, you just bring up the idea and say what it tends to lead you to thinking.

About Norvig and JWZ, the first version [1] of Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years [2], said: "One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software and through stock options is no doubt much richer than I'll ever be."

This was before Google happened to Norvig. :)

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19980206223800/http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

[2] http://norvig.com/21-days.html

@Ian

Right, it's the passive aggressive approach to software punditry.
http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/

Re: Linux is free if your time is worthless...

I prefer to think of it as "I'd rather spend time than money". People do tend to forget all the time spent learning Windows - learning Linux is the same sort of thing (ditto for Macs). That learning curve didn't go away just because you've already scaled it.

I used Linux fairly exclusively without any problems in University (the two weeks getting the hang of it was far "cheaper" than buying C compilers for Windows). Switched back to Windows mainly because the new computer came pre-installed and my wife didn't feel inclined to let me take her GUI away.

With XP ending it's days, I'm thinking I'll need to migrate back to Linux. Still want my games, though. Solution: installed andLinux, and I'll slowly migrate all my software from Windows to Linux as I have time to learn the comparible tool.

For the specific example, it is a little odd for someone to expect that their custom-written application would automatically work, and for a business-critical app, the fact that he didn't test it first is a little scary. Good thing he's in the nightclub business and not the space program... ;)

"And I have to agree that a hearing a sentence such as "I can't even fathom how such a bug could exist, but that's Linux for you" from a supposed Linux advocate is a bit... strange."

jwz isn't a linux advocate. In fact he's been a linux basher for quite some time now. He's full on apple fanboy these days.

You seem to talk a lot about looking through the fence at open source. What's the deal with that? Just install Linux and try it out a little already. Who cares what somebody else thought about it, I want to know what you think about it.

What have *YOUR* experiences with Linux (and open source in general) been? I don't think I've ever heard you mention your experiences, only other people's.

I'm really getting tired hearing you talk about how everybody is moving to open source while you're still satisfied with Microsoft.

Good God, man, have you been hacked?

Liked your old page scheme much, much better.

haha!

Jeff, at first I thought, MAN THE LINUX KIDS WILL EAT HIM ALIVE!!! Then I realized that this is just another april fools joke post.

GREAT APRIL FOOLS JOKE! Nice job Jeff!

Though it's a April fools post -- and, by the way, I love the reference to JWZ's website in this CSS revamp --, there's some truth in it. When I upgraded the Intel wireless driver on my laptop, it just broke, and I had to rollback to the older one (XP's restore points worked, at least once). And from what I hear about people getting into trouble with Vista's SP1, history may be repeating...

Apparently after 100 posts, only Jay R. Wren seems to have realized that THE POST ITSELF and NOT JUST THE GREEN SCREEN SCHEME are both an April Fool's joke.

Shame on everyone who didn't figure out the joke & truly believed Jeff was seriously knocking Linux usage.

The comments pretty much nailed it right to the wall; anyone who tries to do any serious enterprise (or any other kind) of work with Fedora deserves no sympathy; I dumped RedHat very early in the dev process a project I head for reasons that were right out there for everyone to see, and I'm familiar with Jamie and think he should know better. Debian or BSD is waiting for him if decides to use it, and he should have been smart enough to pick one of them, probably Debian, long ago. That the drivers included in most kernels and distros work as well as they do given the problems Micro$oft gives to vendors who support Linux is something of a miracle; as someone mentions, most of it has been written blind.

It's odd that people will seize on a distributions problems, especially one like Fedora that comes with a screaming-out-loud guarantee that you WILL have stability problems, and then in the next sentence start saying Linux This and Linux That. I'll bet you had a bad experience with a blond at some point in your life... did you swear off blonds? Ever had a car accident? Did you never ever drive that type of car again because of it? Give up food forever after a tummy ache? Linux is still young, getting better every year and scares MS more than ever.

The fact that you have to "unmount a flash drive before removing it" in Linux is exactly why people are "looking through the fence".

Last I tried Linux you had to unmount the CD drive before the tray would come out. Absurd. Here's an idea, how about unmounting it for me when I push the eject button.

Jeff, you are just trolling.

People forget why Windows won. It was not good marketing. It certainly wasn't the best technology. It was device drivers, and standards.

With Windows, you had a standardized GDI, and you could submit your device driver to Microsoft, who essentially QC'd it for you, and get it distributed by them, for free. There were enough copies around for the market to be worth something, so people started making their peripherals work with Windows, which turned out to be more cost-effective than doing it in DOS.

Linux, for all its advantages, still has not gotten together a *standardized* set of installers, graphics interfaces, audio interfaces, or other peripheral interfaces.

Until that happens, and installs and plug-and-play work everywhere on all flavors of Linux, it will be forever an also-ran.

P.S. The green text is sweetly nostalgic, but I've got work to do.

Hi Jeff, nice new theme... I can't stop giggling reading this post and comments...

No, I'm not some caliber software engineer like Jamie... but I like coding and I also don't have much time to fix some unnecessary bugs on my OS as it keeps automagically updating. Anyway, I've used RedHat, Mandrake, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu. Now, I stick with Ubuntu on my dual boot Laptop. Yes, I do have Microsoft Windows XP on my other partition but since I have no more VBA nor VB task anymore, it seems that I haven't booted to winxp for about 5 months now.

You won't believe this. Linux is getting better. And please, there is no Ubuntu 10.7 yet... kekekeke... this Jamie guy really make me laugh... Maybe, Fedora 5 sucks but there is Fedora 8 now and they are also getting way far better than before... come on Jeff, try the upcoming Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) scheduled to be officially launched on 24th April 2008. You can download it for free at http://www.ubuntu.com

For me, I won't bias on which OS is better... all OS are made to fulfill our computing task. I use Mac for my graphic design work, I use Windows for some VB programming and I use Ubuntu Linux for my daily computing (surfing, email, chat, writing, scripting, coding and so on)... please, try linux yourself and see...

I don't know if the post or only the theme is the april's fool, but what disturbs me is that this kind of "anecdotical evidence" aka trolling is that common, even with the "better" it crowd that consider themselves engineers or scientists.

Programmers, that, if it comes to OSes don' seem to know that theres a difference between the OS and the software running on it.
Administrators, who usualy complain about the ignorance of the users, saying things which boil down to "i installed YOUR os, didnt work, must be the OSs fault, even if i never dealt with it i'm pretty sure".
Bloggers, who take their own, special case experiences and generalize it to "apperently $OS sucks".
And I hate to turn into such a troll myself, when i feel urged to reply.

With all the complaining about "it's too hard to read", there's an article about gamma curves just waiting to be written. I can read this just fine on *this* monitor, but I'm sure my other computer would make it painful.

For the FF2 users out there who value their eyes: View -> Page Style -> No Style.

Linux is a component, not an operating system, which why generalizations like this never lead to much good.

As has already been pointed out, the Fedora system is specifically intended to keep pushing the cutting edge of Open Source server and desktop software; it isn't intended to provide you with a stable or easy to upgrade platform for free, nor to host old software. Some other distributions are specifically engineered for ease of maintenance, and do support online upgrades very effectively. The trade-offs are that they sometimes bundle older software, and the distribution developers have to do more work to ensure smooth transitions.

"The black background uses less electricity,"
Umm - sorry, try again:
http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/does-a-darkened-google-really-save-electricity-104/

All distros are not equal.

I hate Red Hat too.

Try out Ubuntu.

One of my favourite JWZ quotes is:

"I think I still enjoy writing software, usually. But what I end up spending almost all of my time doing is sysadmin crap. I hate it. I have always hated it. Always. If you made a Venn diagram, there would be two non-overlapping circles, one of which was labeled, "Times when I am truly happy" and the other of which was labeled, "Times when I am logged in as root, holding a cable, or have the case open."

All distros are not equal.

I hate Red Hat too.

Try out Ubuntu.

Addendum. Linux has never been jwz's "platform of choice". This is a guy who was quoted at length in the Unix-Haters Handbook. That "Linux is only free if your time has no value" quote is actually HIS, in an essay he wrote ten years ago ranting about the OS:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/linux.html

Mmmmmm. Linux doesn't suck. I haven't actively used in in a few years, but when I did I used an older machine as a home server. file, email, etc. Thing never crashed and it ran on an old measly underpowered computer with a dribble of ram. Uptimes of over a year, and only then it's because I moved. I can't even remember the distro, maybe Red Hat.

I have a Mac, and OSX sucks. I have a PC and Windows sucks. Vista sucks. XP sucks. Win2000 sucked. All computers suck. The fact that XP eventually degrades itself and requires a reinstall really sucks.

I found that Linux worked better with slightly older, very common hardware (lets say 1 year). It makes sense since the nice people who fix the bugs and write drivers probably already fixed the bugs for the older hardware.

Jamie not fixing bugs doesn't make him more or less of a developer. Just because I develop software doesn't mean I have the arrogance to think I can sit down and track a bug in sound hardware drivers in a reasonable amount of time. I also have a life, and I'd rather relax with a brew. Apparently Jamie did what anyone else would do -> look for a newer version.

Upgrades - any OS upgrade is a hassle. Any software component upgrade is a hassle. Any framework upgrade is a hassle.

If anything, Jamie just mirrors what most 'software engineers' are like when they get older ... they don't want to spend their time fiddling with stuff that should work. It's why I haven't played a PC game in years and don't give a hoot what graphics card is in a machine. Consoles are inferior, but they're commodities that work.

Still. I'd rather develop software than be a lawyer.

Seriously Jeff, your blog is going downhill. The ratio of original to quoted content keeps going down and down.

I say this because I am concerned. I enjoy this blog, and I'm beginning to lose interest.

I've been using Linux for quite a few years and have never had the above problems unless I was using some obscure hardware that no one had ever heard of. Especially on Ubuntu, which has the best hardware support I've seen yet.

ps.the orange is green

April Fool color scheme? :-)

Linux distro is a matter of preference, but Fedora is highly experimental. That's its design objective. You should use something more conservative. RedHat Enterprise and CentOS are in the same family, but without the experimental elements.

I don't know about audio, but for my work (computational fluid dynamics), I rely on Linux heavily. It's rock solid.

"Heh - it really is April 1. As if Windows geeks bash anyone with anywhere *near* the frequency as Mac or Linux geeks."

Hehe, that might have something to do with the lack of "Windows geeks" - after all, who would be enthusiastic about using Windows?

Anywho, Jeff, it seems like you're just writing this post as another attempt at Linux-bashing. I'm sure there are better things to blog about than your bias towards Windows, which everyone is already well aware of.

Being a world class software engineer does not make someone suddenly an expert at everything. jwz's ability to deal with things better is demonstrated, but "linux" as it is bandied about these days is many things (kernel, gnu projects, distributions, ...) and _no one_ is ever going to be readily deft across the board.

Your (and Jamie's) main point about the perils of upgrading is on the mark though. Needless to say this is certainly not an issue exclusive to open source. At least there is the option of diving in to fix problems in that case.

You've jumped the shark.

Articles that pose "topics of deep interest", such as the purpose of middle mouse buttons. Numerous self-links, etc, which garner numerous mindless replies. Baffling, but so is the reality of why some people still cook with Crisco.

Today some garble about some guy, and a link to his "lounge" with a picture of one guy appearing to bugger another.

Real quality Jeff, I think you've prostituted yourself to page-rankings.

Geez...

The *real* april fool's day prank was starting the linux vs. windows flame war, of course. The new style is just a red herring.

well, I'm not sure this post is an April's fool product. It does seem like one, but putting it in context, I have though a number of times that some of these posts are paid by MS... well, it's not so strange that I heard about this blog for the first time when listening to an interview to a MS executive.
Anyway, many of Jeff's other writings are great, and that's why I keep reading his posts.

No Jeff, don't do it! Don't listen to the madmen that tell you to keep this colour scheme permanently. Ouch, the eye strain!

I know it's supposed to be easier on the eyes but that only works if everything on your screen has a black background. Most every application uses a white background as a default. After reading this page for a few minutes then switching back to another app my eyes are watering.

To the Linux fanboyz out there: Don't worry, upgrading is a universal pain, your favourite OS is not being singled out. These days I hate to touch my Windows setup. Small apps, not a problem. Any upgrade of anything major has me in a cold sweat. Our manager has told the sysadmins in no uncertain term they are NEVER to enable Windows upgrades for the developers.

I would extend this phobia to installations as well as upgrades. I won't install beta software now, after the IE7 beta killed my boss' Visual Studio and screwed his machine up so badly he had to rebuild. A good installation is likely to take a couple of hours. A problematic one a couple of days. Two days of my life I can never get back! So I avoid any changes like the plague.

Something is wrong if I, as a software professional, am phobic about changes. How must the users feel?

jwz actually prefers Mac OS X to Linux. These days, he even develops xscreensaver on Mac OS X.

Thank MOZ for the Firefox Developer Toolbar and its ability to disable styles. =) I tried hard, even knowing the date, to read the comments but it was actually killing me. LOL God, how did we deal with this crap in the old days?

me too amarok... I don't know why I keep reading this posts and the comments... I just love to read all Jeff's and his readers thought, maybe...

Fedora I think, is not really good at some kiosk or embedded system. You can clearly see those embedded devices are majorly based on Debian Linux which is popular to it's stability and among the oldest linux distribution. I'm also using Debian on my Rain Gauge system board. I'm happy with the stability.

Well, there is more than hundreds linux distributions out there... you may wish to try before bashing em all... ehehehe... :P

Nobody seems to get it.

It is not about who is better. It is about choice!!

No options, no choice. It's that simple!

Loved the new color scheme.
Totally cool. :)

Hey, MattH, you do realise that you have to do the exact same thing in Windows and Mac, right? Right?!?!

When I mentioned all the other OS's suck, I neglected to also mention that Linux sucks just as bad.

There are things I know, and things I don't know. Upgrades are hell, and MS Beta's are not to be installed on a machine unless you are prepared to reinstall everything.

Due to the retro colors and copious amounts of coffee, I'll now devolve into lamenting the loss of OS/2. A super stable and very cool OS at the time. It had a native TCP/IP stack, a GNU C compiler, and had a nice feel to it. Far ahead of Windows 3 and Win95. Too bad it was a betamax in the end.

I've been using Linux for several years now and, though I've had my problems, I've never had any problem that was worse than any windows bug.

As a matter of fact, if you compare the percentage of bugs in all the Linux bug reports that are marked "RESOLVED" to the percentage of those fixed in Windows, you'll find that the Linux developers at least care enough to fix them.

Granted, Linux has the advantage that it's easier to say "Hey guys, this bug is fixed in cvs" than try to help all the Windows users out there get the proper windows update.

The thing is, all OS's have bugs. The thing that makes me use Linux is that I personally find the bugs in Linux less annoying than the bugs in Windows. Other people find the opposite to be true. That's why we have a choice.

> I frankly have better things to do with my time

That is the conclusion I have come to every time I've tried to install and use Linux as a first-class citizen on my PC at home. I just don't have time to mess around with trying to get everything to work smoothly. Last time it was the video drivers for my nVidia card that wouldn't work in Ubuntu that did it to me.

I'm a programmer, but I do have a life I'm trying to live away from the computer. Spending a week of evenings trying to solve the kind of problem that _never_ happens to me in Windows... It drives me right up the freaking wall.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

It's amazing how many people fall for that "latest technology" plug.

I always run a gen or two behind, and it applies to vitually everything.

Windows XP out? I was running 2000, now that Vista's out, I'm running XP.

Websites are supposed to coded in XHTML/XML and the latest CSS. I use older CSS and HTML. Hell, half the browsers out there STILL can't render all CSS properly.

You'll find that waiting for a year or two, or in some cases 3, will render what was really buggy next gen tech into rather inexpensive ho-hum standard fair.

But instead of seeing it as boring, see it instead as cheap, effective, and pretty damned universal.

Isn't that what you REALLY want?

jwz is my hero. All you haters just don't understand.

Egoboo to the guy who figured out the colour scheme was an homage to jwz's home page.

lol at "some guy and his 'lounge'"

Jeff: why can I never select text on your page? So. Annoying.

To the poster who pointed out it was really about choice. Thanks. You’ve changed my perspective.

> A clean install of an operating system on a new hard drive -- for kiosks running controlled hardware, no less -- that's as good as it gets.

It escapes me how new hard drives help. In my experience, hard disk technology has always been one of the most stable, trouble-free parts of any computing system. And if they're going bad, you can tell. And if you are tired of their contents, you format them. Works pretty much the same in all operating systems. Jamie didn't say anything about having trouble with his hard drives.

I do wonder what you mean by "controlled hardware". Presumably, these kiosks are on Jamie's premises and indeed fully under control. Perhaps you meant "commodity"? That would stray a bit from the facts - kiosk systems are generally specialized, and contain components not commonly seen in, say, your average desktop system. They are engineered with compromises to reduce their size and power consumption, and fewer of them are produced. You would, in fact, *expect* more difficulty with such hardware.

You said a lot about Linux in this post. How about a corresponding article, such as:

* J. Random User installs Ubuntu on its target hardware - a modern desktop, laptop, or server system.
* Jane Doe attempts to install Windows Vista on a 1992 Kiosk system with an 800GHz CPU from VIA technologies, 512 MB RAM, and 20 GB of hard disk space.

It does pain me to hear of the unfortunates spent on the “leading age” operating SYSTEMS of our age (Gate, Jobs, et al) Open you mind to the possibilities of true interactivity based on custom designed operating system F.L.O.W.

Based on the one true math of the hexagon, F.L.O.W. runs on bare metal using only those opcodes compatible with natural geometry. Designed from the ground up to enable improvement of the human nature environment surrounding us all (SOCIETY OF INFORMATION.)

Reviewed in SIGCHI and New York Times, etc

When are we switching back to our old theme?
Or should I unsubscribe?

Hrm... for everyone who has ever said to me, "Scott, Linux just isn't stable", I've yet to have a single one of them take me up on my always standing offer; "If Linux isn't stable, break a Slackware install." Slackware was my first distro and I fell in love with it - then I tried other distros and finally got what most people were talking about. I've got a Sabayon Desktop that I routinely hose... but it's also bleeding edge; you can't expect to download source that hit the repos five minutes ago and throw it in to your bleeding edge GCC with bleeding edge libraries that are the foundation of the software you're compiling.

If you go the binary distro route, well, it's hit or miss. Mainstream hardware, no wifi, and very few hardware/firmware bugs, and you'll probably be fine - just don't drop a buggy north bridge into the equation (I'm looking at YOU NVidia!) or you'll find out why engineers taking short cuts and not following protocol works 99.9999% of the time, and what happens the other .0001% when your sata controller tries to slice off a few microseconds by not waiting for a reply on the bus before trying to queue more write requests.

Try Slackware; it's stable, the oldest maintained distro, and relies on the KISS principle... I always hear it referred to as vanilla *nix. The maintainer doesn't mess with anything (not even the wallpapers on your desktop!). I've heard of people who have upgraded from version to version for several years. If you've got two minutes, check out Slackware: the classic distro that's as timely as ever: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/93393/index.html

If you've got two more minutes, read the comments about it.

I think that the bit of misplaced logic in your leap from (very smart person cannot administer Linux) to (Linux is hard for people to use) is that it fails to acknowledge the difference between administering a business system and using/administering a personal system. Most of us "mere mortals" are not administering business systems, and, at least given my personal experience, I do not think that the problems from personal use of Linux are much worse than with other systems.

Furthermore, I think that administering business systems is not a task for mere mortals with any OS. Every time a new version of Windows or a major patch comes out, you hear stories of businesses unwilling to upgrade because they know or are afraid that the new software will be incompatible with their critical business applications.

Please please please go back to your previous color scheme!

Your blog is a great place, the articles are good, the comments are good, there are many links in your article that take the readers to your other posts...so, even if i start with a single article, I end up spending a lot of time on your blog reading comments and other posts.

This new color scheme is actually a hindrance to all this. I feel like avoiding your blog, because the colors are so...i can't find right word!

I do not actually want the old color scheme. I want something that is easy on eyes. If you do not do that, I might stop coming here.

I know it is not your loss.But it will be my loss, and so I am requesting.

"I will say though, Linux audio is _horrible_. And that's coming from someone who uses it as his platform of choice. It does seem to be getting better."

I recently switched to Linux, and my sound quality has actually improved: sound card seems to have much better signal to noise ratio now :) Same deal with open source firmware for my MP3 player

I kindly disagree, sir!

Wherever did you get the idea that Linux is his "platform of choice"? I've never heard him say anything nice about it.

Irix seemed to be his platform of choice, before SGI self-destructed, and then he played with Linux for a little while (enumerating the countless ways it sucks compared to Irix), and then gave up and bought a Mac.

And I find it weird how you conclude that "Linux is so complex that even a world class software engineer can't always get it to work", but nothing else was ever actually tried. Did he have more luck with Windows, or Mac OS, or Irix? Why are you calling attention to a constant? Isn't the more accurate conclusion that "*Computers* are so complex even a world class software engineer can't get it to work"? Unless you have an alternative operating system that would have worked well on his PC for his uses, you can't exactly say Linux is bad -- it's the best we've got, sad as that may be.

P.S., I'm going to have a party next month to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the latest major release of Irix, the Unix OS that was so awesome even Linux could kill it.

Wow one small april fools joke and you unleashed the style police here!

> Linux is free if your time is worthless

Windows is only the price you paid for it if your time is worthless.

There's one Windows computer here that will randomly bluescreen if a certain Windows update is allowed on it. It has taken me days to figure this out. It takes hours to do a full reinstall of a Windows system. Every time I installed Linux it's been much quicker. Even my laptop is fully up and running - including wireless access, graphics acceleration and synaptics trackpad options - in less than an hour on Ubuntu but Windows requires downloading drivers (which aren't always easy to find or even correct on the manufacturer's website) and many reboots.

It does take time to do anything whether you are using Linux, Windows, Mac, or whatever.

Nice post Jeff,
I have also given up trying linux on my home PC as well as on my development server. Configuring Java development server with services like SVN, Artifactory, Tomcat, etc. proved out to be a real pain. We have been trying to set it up with my collegue for a week, but then just put XP on that box and everything works fine now (and much faster).

PS: Fool's day is over now, please be kind to your reader's eyes and use some more sensible theme... (preferably black text on white background)

Please fix this theme. I love reading this blog but will stop reading it in these awfull colors.

Let That Be a Lesson To You, Son: Never Upgrade !

this post seriously disappoints me.

I am an 18 year old college student, working on my GE to eventually get a degree in computer science. I have had 1 formal class in computers, and that was programming java.

I run linux all day, inside and out.

Home desktop? Linux.

Work desktop? Linux.

every server I install at work? you betcha, thats linux.

"I have better things to do" is rather humorous. Just because you failed doesn't mean its not a simple fix. My home computer has been acting up, so I installed an Alpha of ubuntu on it. it failed miserably. rather than patch it, i went and installed the next beta when it came out 2 days later. works better than ANY system i have EVER seen.

With the release of Vista, I am AMAZED that anyone still have faith in microsoft.

I'll tell you what. Give me 30 minutes to install and customize ubuntu on ANY system (that time doesn't include install time, as that could take a bit longer depending on your hardware) and I DEFY you to find a way that vista is faster, more user friends, more stable, or more secure.

Us "mere mortals" just don't have a God complex, and realize that computers can take time to get set up perfectly. and if you're smart and want to save time, theres WONDERFUL resources, you can find them on this new thing, called "the internet".

> I feel like avoiding your blog, because the colors are so...i can't find right word!

I think the word you are looking for is.. "bad"! Don't worry, it was a one-day only April Fool's joke.

> a link to his "lounge" with a picture of one guy appearing to bugger another

LOL. DNA Lounge is a great club, but it depends what event/band is scheduled. I'm extremely partial to the Bootie (mashup) shows myself:

http://www.bootieusa.com/bestofbootie2005/
http://www.bootieusa.com/bestofbootie2006/
http://www.bootieusa.com/bestofbootie2007/

Really outstanding stuff. If you're ever in the SF Bay area, I recommend checking it out. It's a true geek club, and I mean that in the best possible way.

> Addendum. Linux has never been jwz's "platform of choice". This is a guy who was quoted at length in the Unix-Haters Handbook.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/linux.html
"But I'd rather run Unix than Windows or MacOS any day, because Unix sucks less. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck."

Surely OS X or Windows *could* have worked on the kiosk machines? I have always had success installing Windows on controlled hardware -- unless there's faulty hardware. Still, I find it hard to believe that all the kiosks would have faulty hardware.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000907.html
"Here's one thing I've learned from experience: if your system can't finish a clean install of Windows, it's not stable. Period. It's tempting to blame Microsoft, but the only possible culprit if you have problems at this stage is the hardware (or possibly a scratched DVD). Trust me on this one. "

Jeff, before i contribute to the war so far, i'd advise you do something about the captcha on your blog. or i might just be tempted to write a script to spam it ;) your blog is well-known, as is the captcha on it. maybe your should randomize the word? that's done, on to the war!
the OS/database/app/browser/* wars are bull, because humans are rarely impersonal about anything. "Mac OS 'just works'"? i have a friend that has had issues with his Mac. *serious* issues. the same can be said for Linux, Windows or anything in this world. while i don't always agree with my boss, i feel that his approach - which is wait until the guy can't open the door, then give him a key that works - is the best thing anyone can do. Linux works for you? great! advocate it, but quit being insufferable and saying everyone else is an idiot. you're using Mac OS? great! tell people what you got good in it, and *maybe* they'll fall in too. Windows works for you? nice! tell people it works, and *show them what you did with it*. people can argue with your methods, but your results are the one thing people can't argue with - especially if they're consistent.
it's a sad thing that a large number of FOSS users are really elitist and act like they're the only right people on earth (as the saying goes, those of you who think you know everything are annoying to those of us who actually do). right now, i have Wings 3D and Softimage XSI Mod Tool installed on my machine and i keep wondering why XSI seems so 'non-intuitive'. nobody's telling me to do my modeling in Wings - but i'm doing it. yet not all my experience with FOSS has been that good. Ubuntu 5 didn't work on my laptop (AMD Turion 64 processor), yet so many people praise it.
gentlemen, the war isn't worth it. let's devote our time to making the world a better place where we can. and it doesn't really matter what software we use doing it - once we get it done.

Re: Linux is so complex that even a world class software engineer can't always get it to work.

Heh. Linus Torvalds on Fedora: "youtube no workee - fedora 9 not usable for wife"

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439858

I have never read so much rubbish in all my life.

a) problems caused by hardware are usually traced to :
arse hole manufacturers either replacing hardware with win-drivers at the buyers expense or refusing to release any info to the oss community driver authors as they are licking the proverbial $ ring piece.

b) installing Red Hat with :
its secret patches and --config cripple precompiled binaries...

c) Forgetting to mention a :
Kernel UpGrade.

That just about sums up a most n00b install.

I don't understand what the point of this post is. Is it to bash linux? You seem to have jumped to a conclusion about this... Just cause some guy has a problem with trying to update a bunch of machines at a club where he's probably running a pretty customized and complicated network of stuff doesn't mean that it's impossible for anyone to upgrade linux. Windows and OSX can be just as bitchy as Linux. This real point is: computers are bitches, and you're gonna have to frig around with them if you want them to work properly, regardless of operating system. I've had problems with all of the operating systems.

But anyways, it's just provoking the stupid argument of Linux vs. Windows. In the end, you know what? It's your choice, so use whichever platform you want, and I'll use whichever platform I want, and we can all be happy.

I think it's a miracle that things like Ubuntu (which I love b.t.w) even work at all. It's composed of so many independently controlled software components that you'd expect some sort of problems with any new release.

Which brings me to the point. I assume Jamie meant Ubuntu 7.10 and not 10.7 which was released October 2007. Personally for something as important as my own business I might try and use an Ubuntu 'long-term support' version which is going to be a lot more stable and actually has a scheduled end-of-life date after that of 7.10. But perhaps there were other reasons that he could not do that.

He may be a world class programmer but his linux distribution choices are rather odd.
If he wants a stable distro that's not outdated like say, debian stable, there are lots of much better choices around than fedora or ubuntu.
He never heard about gentoo maybe ? don't tell me that a world class programmer spending 4 days trying to install the worst distro around can't spend 3 tweaking use flags.

> People forget why Windows won. It was not good marketing. It
> certainly wasn't the best technology. It was device drivers, and
> standards.

There's a much simpler answer. Windows "won" because it was riding on top of an open system (the commodity PC).

These days the roles are reversed and they are competing *against* an open system (Linux). Perhaps they can do it, but its not a situation I'd want to be in.