So at work I get a new computer and have to install Linux on it. I am quickly reminded why I gave up on Linux in disgust lo these many years ago. I’m installing a distro with a cutesy African name (that English-speakers universally mispronounce, making me cringe every time) that is universally received as the ultimate in desktop-friendliness (as much as that means anything in Linux-land).<\/p>\n
Now one of the criticisms leveled at, say, Windows, is that there’s often no way to diagnose a problem, and trouble-shooting simply consists of reinstalling pieces until things sort of work again.<\/p>\n
So I install from the very latest ISO on the website, and things seem to work OK. However, there’s some update program yammering for my attention, so I check it, and there’s evidently 280 pieces that need updating. That’s quality control for ya. So I run the update, which automagically chooses the slowest possible mirror to use — 30 kilobytes per second, for crying out loud.<\/p>\n
Now that the updates are done, the window manager crashes and burns. Luckily, since Linux is so much better than Windows, I can tell exactly what’s causing it to crash. Well, it can’t seem to find a function ISNGBdiugjnooruwojhdwIgHDUWHGUdh in a shared library. Now I actually happen to know what this means. I also happen to know that I can do exactly squat about it, because the vaunted package manager that is supposed to keep all those picky dependencies straight can’t actually be arsed to do its job.<\/p>\n
A quick Google finds that lots of other people have encountered this problem, and that the recommended solution starts like this:<\/p>\n
Remind me how much better than Windows this is?<\/p>\n And to top it off, when I do run this recommended command, the computer has conveniently forgotten that it ever had a network card, so my download speed is now, let’s see, nothing times nothing, carry the nothing…<\/p>\n This is why I’d far rather run an operating system whose development includes at least some pretense to a QA process, and which I can use to get something resembling work done in less than a week of setup, rather than Linux, which is “Open Source”, meaning a random pile of poorly-coordinated contributions by people working on little bits of things that they happened to feel interested in during their off hours, and thus resembles nothing less than a terrain feature you’ll often find behind a farmer’s barn.<\/p>\n I weep for the thousands of hours I wasted on Linux in my youth before I discovered OpenBSD.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So at work I get a new computer and have to install Linux on it. I am quickly reminded why I gave up on Linux in disgust lo these many years ago. I’m installing a distro with a cutesy African name (that English-speakers universally mispronounce, making me cringe every time) that is universally received as … Continue reading “Why Linux (oh, and Open Source too!) is a Big Fat Pile of Steaming Excrement”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[187,40,41],"class_list":["post-759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-rants","tag-computing","tag-linux","tag-operating-systems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=759"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":774,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions\/774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}apt-get --reinstall ...<\/code><\/p>\n