Background: I bought a new used CF-51 semi-rugged Toughbook to replace the ailing and failing CF-R1 [1]. I've wasted entirely too much time trying to get all of my crap moved over to a new OS install on the new machine.
The history of which OSes I've tried and what I've done to them has gotten quite long now, but most recently, I blew away CentOS and stuck Slackware back in as CentOS couldn't even compile its own kernel. I cursed CentOS as being stupid and decided I'd deal with the limited number of packages afforded by Slackware. So I go to build a kernel in Slackware because there's always something you need that's disabled... and lo, exact same problem. I had just been Googling for the problem with the word "centos" tacked on but I got curious and dropped any mention of any vendor and discovered that Gentoo and other systems had floods of bug reports of the same problem:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8132
... every Linux vendor on Earth took a broken GCC and shipped a major release version that's not capable of building its own kernel.
Linux went non-self-hosting and most people never noticed.
There's no Slashdot headlines.
Perhaps we're still distracted with the flood of security announcements and still reeling from the profound ways that RedHat fucked up Perl, and Debian fucked up ssh, and so on. Perhaps our smashed expectations for Linux vendors to deliver a working desktop that we stopped caring that there's supposed to be a *Unix* *like* operating system under neigh. All we care about is that it has "Linux Inside". We don't care how much more convulted the init system is than HP/UX or how many more pointless CPU eating extensions it has than Solaris... only that it's Linux. It'll take ages for these idiot OS vendors to undo all of the good will and tarnish the reputation of Linux. As long as it's pretty, no one will look under the hood. They'll happily reinstall Linux over and over again to fix all of the stupid problems.
I'd love to make a serious effort to migrate to DragonFlyBSD since we have a possibly non-fucked-up BSD again now [2] but now days, "open source" software doesn't even build cleanly on Linux. Someone somewhere gets it to build just once at great effort and then it gets packaged into a .deb and never builds again. Try to build on something other than Linux and it's a huge project. Back when people ran shit like AIX2 it was easier to get a random package to compile for your random system. Making something compile on Ultrix was easier than getting something to compile on BSD. Infinite numbers of operating specific build crutches portability does not make.
I just want to say right now, all of you suck. This is the kind of crap that makes me just want to go work for Microsoft. Fuck you all.
Footnote 1: The cute, tiny CF-R1 is six or so years old now and the microswitch for the left trackpad button doesn't return any more. This same microswitch is soldered to the main board. Also it's maxed at 256 megs of RAM. It's also not as rugged as I'd like -- it's on it's third screen, though both were broken in events such as my being hit by a car. I really want a laptop I can use as a weapon against motorists... also Xorg doesn't seem to like the SiliconMotion video hardware on the CF-R1 and the 2.6 kernel had some problems.
Footnote 2: Previous rants were about how NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD each, mostly out of fear and envy of Linux, screwed the pooch and made themselves obsolete by giving up the only thing that they had that Linux didn't: stability and sanity.
-scott
i recommend checking the system that does constantly native builds on most of the existing architectures out there and doesn't support the blob nonsense. It's portable, doesn't lie about the number of supported platforms by just cross-compiling for them and last but not least is secure. Additionally it has superb wireless support.
I'm only telling it because i made similar experiences and tried a lot before i found a satisfying system.
At least i'm using it for over 8 years now and it's getting better with every single commit and i even had a lot of chances to contribute and made it fit my needs even more so
Being able to work constantly without interference is a great experience!
Operating systems should just work, which makes it a pleasure to use them.
Re:Hrhr...
scrottie on 2009-11-11T18:13:12
I'm sorry, checking which system?
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8132
could that silence be because the bug you linked was in 2002, is marked resolved, and was last updated in 2005?
do you browse the Perl 4 or SQL 87 bug logs too ?
Re:check date ?
scrottie on 2009-11-11T18:15:22
That's one example of many. It was re-opened repeatedly and had a large number of duplicate tickets folded in. As I said in my post, I Googled. I'm not browsing Gentoo bugs. If you can't be bothered to read my post, why the fuck should I be bothered to read your replies? Go away. Get off my blog and don't reply ever again. Thanks, bye.
I guess rants are meant to be hyperbolic, but what the hell? You might want to ask yourself whether your wounds are self-inflicted. Frankly, it sounds to me like you're the cause of your own problems.
Re:Exaggerate much?
scrottie on 2009-11-11T18:19:06
Yes, I struggle with that question -- to what degree my problems are self inflicted. As I said (either here or previously), I've tried very hard to do exactly what other people do and just run Debian and let it update itself. I don't know why things that just work for other people don't work for me. Maybe I push them harder. Maybe my mindset is different. My brother and I used to hang out in an arcade and we know how to crash half a dozen of the games there. It's well known that programmers make terrible testers of their own software. It's just too difficult to be caught up in the minutia of the implementation of it all and to keep the larger picture in mind at the same time of how people are going to try to use the whole thing. Vast numbers of Windows users swore that NT 3.5.1 was stable, and that NT 4 was rock solid, and so on. Turns out that they are if you rationalize away all of the crashes as some how being your fault and accordingly constantly modify your behavior so as not to provoke the OS. I think there's some of that same mindset going on in the Linux camp.
-scott
