Linux Sucks: If It's Not Broken Don't Fix it

[Deleted member 9563]

In particular, Linux runs on the vast majority of large cloud providers or internet data centers; most of those machines are not visible to the public.

A few years ago the London Stock Exchange was running Microsoft code and on the projected busiest day of the year, the system went down for 5 hours. Up next .... Linux to the rescue. I thought that was funny.

Personally, I have great disdain for Microsoft, but that's personal and I have to admit that the OS works just fine for lots of people - including some professionals. The only real point that I can make to bolster my opinion is that Microsoft is proprietary and closed source. There is much to say about that, but at least going that direction the issues are arguable outside of personal opinion.

PS, ralphbsz although I agree with everything you said, the real reason for upvoting you is that I couldn't resist tipping your reaction score from 999.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

I actually hope Microsoft keeps their successful desktop PC reign and the users locked behind their walls; away from us and what remains of GNU/Linux.

Every time Microsoft swallows some Linux program or embeds Linux into its core, Linux users on reddit and other hobbyist forums jump with glee. So I question how long before Windows becomes another Linux distro and all those users flock to Microsoft Windows--Linux Edition.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

ralphbsz I completely agree with your last paragraph. I started working on a project for a local company that involves Linux. I can take my time with it but it's frustrating as can be--and I'm not really entirely noobish. But when I switch that off and go back to my FreeBSD workstation and server, I sense of relief from sensibility comes over me.

 

[ralphbsz]

(talking about supercomputers ...)

Those are highly modified custom versions of Linux.

Nope. The one I worked on (about 2 years ago) ran stock RHEL 7.1 at the time. Exactly as delivered from RedHat. With a RedHat support contract, delivered through a big computer company.

(talking about Google running Linux ...)

When asked why, one of the founders said, "Cause it's what we used in school. It was what we were used to." And no other reason.

The two founders of Google made technical decisions about 20 to 15 years ago. Since then Google has grown enormously, so several hundred thousand employees. Somewhere I read that 70K software engineers work at Google. The decision which OS to run is not made by what the two founders ran when in graduate school; I bet it is made by a committee of 20 people, who look exactly at technical and financial advantages. If running operating system "FOO" could save Google a buck or two per computer, I'm sure they would switch.

All the rest of your post I agree with.

But when I switch that off and go back to my FreeBSD workstation and server, I sense of relief from sensibility comes over me.

EXACTLY! I spend an enormous time (in my office) working on Linux machines. I am not a system administrator, so I don't have to deal with setting them up or managing them, but I still use them as programming platforms. In a previous job, I wrote kernel code and file system code for Linux. At home, I have a handful of RPIs running Linux; I even had to configure a new systemd service and administer it. It's doable. Sometimes painful, but usually just boring and productive. It's a job, and the Linux part is not the fun.

BUT: Whenever I get to administer my FreeBSD server, it "gives me joy" (to quote the TV star who helps people unclutter their lives). On *BSD, things seem logical, they are well organized, and it is easy to use. Documentation is clean and clear. It probably has a lot less functionality than other systems, but it happens to have the functionality I need. But I don't pretend that my personal taste should apply to other people. Nor that the my requirements and problems are similar to other uses. I assume that using it as a desktop machine would give very different results, but (for good reason) I don't even try that.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

Nope. The one I worked on (about 2 years ago) ran stock RHEL 7.1 at the time.

Well, when I last read about it, all of those were modified to some extent so...

The decision which OS to run is not made by what the two founders ran when in graduate school

I paraphrased what either Sergei or Larry Page said in an article somewhere years ago where they said that was the only reason. Maybe I'll search for the article later.

EDIT: Spent a minute looking. The first one I found--but not the one I read--only partially iterates what I said:

We had all kinds of computers: HPs, Suns, Alphas and Intel's running Linux. So, we gained a lot of experience with all of those platforms.

When we started Google, we had to make the decision of what we wanted to use. Of course we chose Linux, because it is the most cost effective solution.

Given the choice, Linux was free and the others weren't.

 

[ralphbsz]

It is correct that Linux can be free, and was free in 1998-99. Today, it is often not free: A large fraction of commercial (not internet data center) users of Linux run fully supported versions, such as RedHat and Suse. As I said above: the supercomputers that I know well run RHEL with a support contract from RedHat.

The important thing is this. Linux (the artifact, the OS one can download or buy in various distributions) is neither evil nor broken. It is a good tool, better at some things than at others. Exactly the same is true for Windows, MacOS, the various *BSD, and a few others: they are tools, good at certain things, and not so good at others. If somebody (like badbrain above) wants to become emotional about them and love them or hate them, that's his right, but he is being crazy and/or stupid (in reality, I think he's just a troll). Now some of the people involved in creating these OSes may very well be evil; in cases like Steve Ballmer, Linus Torvalds, or Lennart Pottering there is considerable evidence for that. Now, people who purchase an OS may decide to boycott some versions, as a value judgement on the evilness of the people involved. I have no problem with that, and actually applaud them taking an ethical or political stand. But we need to be clear that this is not a technical judgement.

It is also possible to make technical judgements. For example: I have WiFi card model ABC, and there are drivers for it in operating system X but not operating system Y, and therefore I run X. That's fine. But that doesn't mean that operating system Y is broken or evil.

 

[aht0]

Not the first time Linux has messed up like this. It happens time to time. I tried to install Ubuntu Server some years a go and stumbled on same issue. Swapped through 4 keyboards before I got convinced problem is not in "my end".

Problem of moving too fast and cutting code/changing code to radically I guess.

 

[ralphbsz]

I'm sorry, but your suggestion that a version of Ubuntu server does not support keyboards in general is laughable. Millions of machines run Ubuntu. The company that creates Ubuntu survives by selling commercial support services for their OS. If it in general didn't support keyboards, they would be out of business, because (a) their support costs would skyrocket, and (b) once the news got out, people would stop buying their services. But that hasn't happened.

Now I'm no doubting what you're saying. It's quite possible that you didn't manage to get any keyboard to work on your Ubuntu server installation. I've had similar problems. For example, I had to give up on using OpenBSD (because of too many Wifi issues), and then had to give up on using FreeBSD as a WiFi access point. But I'm not going to claim that OpenBSD can't do WiFi, or that FreeBSD is generally unusable as an AP, only that in my particular situation it wasn't doable or worth doing.

 

[aht0]

I'm sorry, but your suggestion that a version of Ubuntu server does not support keyboards in general is laughable. Millions of machines run Ubuntu. The company that creates Ubuntu survives by selling commercial support services for their OS. If it in general didn't support keyboards, they would be out of business, because (a) their support costs would skyrocket, and (b) once the news got out, people would stop buying their services. But that hasn't happened.

Now I'm no doubting what you're saying. It's quite possible that you didn't manage to get any keyboard to work on your Ubuntu server installation. I've had similar problems. For example, I had to give up on using OpenBSD (because of too many Wifi issues), and then had to give up on using FreeBSD as a WiFi access point. But I'm not going to claim that OpenBSD can't do WiFi, or that FreeBSD is generally unusable as an AP, only that in my particular situation it wasn't doable or worth doing.

It was this one https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1244176
Satisfied?

 

[Sevendogsbsd]

You don't have to hope, they will! It is the users that keep themselves locked behind those walls, not Microsoft.

Yep, they all drank the koolaide back in the 90's and it's all they know so stick with it, warts and all. Those of us that are enlightened have already ventured off the path years ago

 

[lauri]

I had my first proper experience with BSD using FreeNAS couple months ago.
Basically we had to set up storage for our KVM hypervisor hosts and
NFS/ZFS seemed the most logical way to go.
After exploring the command line I realized that most of the userland is the same.

I've been in the Linux scene by now more than 10+ years.
Lately a lot of disturbing stuff is happening ranging from nonsensical engineering choices to GPL copyright infringements by the companies listed as Linux Foundation members.
I find myself more and more time debugging trivial OS upgrades.

1. One of the culprits of course is systemd. Stuff like mounting USB stick with udev doesn't just work as it did with Ubuntu 18.04. I basically spent half a day googling with no relevant howtos available. Plugging in USB key and having it mounted should not be a rocket science but now it is. There are numerous other annoyances - cron being swapped out for systemd, having machines hang arbitrarily during reboot due to systemd etc etc etc.

2. Now the latest invention in Ubuntu 18.04 is netplan. Idea is great and all, but it just doesn't work. First experience configuring slightly more complex network config - netplan apply finishes without errors but changes are not deployed. During boot the config doesn't come up. No complex scenarios documented the internet, the moment you explore a bit more esotreic config you're left with essentially nonfunctional system. Last time I checked setting MTU 9000 on a bridge doesn't work properly under netplan.

3. Local storage options suck for Linux. If you need to pool bunch of disks, have SSD-s to accelerate reads/writes and have snapshots then you're out of luck. I've been actually insane enough to try to use Btrfs in production but the list of bugs is neverending - out of disk space errors, pools becoming unmountable after reboot, kernel hangs etc etc. I also used my fair share of LVM with a more classic filesystems but it still doesn't feel right.
ZFS does snapshots, dedup, compression, SSD acceleration and more.

It seems the cloud is priority no 1 for Linux now and using it on bare metal servers is real pain.
Couple days ago I played with chyves and iocage. I am seriously considering swapping out Ubuntu/KVM as my hypervisor host and use chyves instead. I was especially surprised about not having to have graphical console to the VM-s and seeing GRUB over SSH just made me smile.

 

[ralphbsz]

It was this one https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1244176
Satisfied?

OK, so it only applies to "old hardware" (not specified, but it looks like using 32-bit machines in 2013, which is about 10 years outdated), but that use USB keyboards. Plug in a PS2 keyboard, problem solved. I bet it only affected a very small (percent?) subset of Ubuntu Server customers. This does not mean that Ubuntu Server is broken because it can not use keyboards, that statement is probably 90% or 99% false.

Now, I readily admit that this is bad enough. And that a commercial product that people pay money for (which Ubuntu can be, if you buy support) should have better quality control. But you can't leap from that to "Linux sucks" as a general statement.

 

[aht0]

Did I stated "Linux sucks" anywhere? It might have been 32bit iso, my machines themselves are all 64bit compatible and were back then. But when it had <4Gb Ram I often didnt care if software was 32bit.

For me it was pure sloppiness releasing obviously untested images and it's a word I have been associating with Linux for a long time. With rare exceptions like RHEL and Debian Stable. Cram in latest biggest features as fast as possible, experimental or half tested - does not matter - churn out iso's and let users be lab rats.

 

[ralphbsz]

3. Local storage options suck for Linux. If you need to pool bunch of disks, have SSD-s to accelerate reads/writes and have snapshots then you're out of luck.

Why not use ZFS on Linux? It pretty much has feature parity with ZFS on FreeBSD, and actually the two ZFS versions are getting closer to each other. I hear good things about it, but have never tried it myself (since I only use ZFS at home, and there my server is FreeBSD).

There are also commercial file system options available for Linux. They tend to cost big money. In my humble opinion, if your storage is important and big enough (meaning you are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on disk drives), then buying a dozen K$ worth of storage software can be a good investment.

I've been actually insane enough to try to use Btrfs in production but the list of bugs is neverending

Don't do that. BtrFS has a horrible reputation; it is fundamentally a machine for destroying data. It was an interesting experiment, and I know a few of the people involved pretty well personally (they are smart and hard-working). But in the end, it wasn't possible to productize it into a functioning system, and the (serious) bugs have been killing it.

It seems the cloud is priority no 1 for Linux now ...

I actually doubt it. There is not a single entity that controls Linux, and that can set coherent priorities. There is Linus and a small group of kernel developers, who have some control over the kernel; there is Lennart, who has taken over all decisions about integrating init-relatived stuff; there is the Linux Foundations, and its donors (all of which have different goals), there is RedHat (now a division of IBM), as the 400-lbs gorilla of Linux distributors and companies that make good money off of Linux, there are companies such as IBM, SAP, Oracle, HP, Dell, that need Linux because they need to have a functioning OS for their (systems/hardware/middleware/services) customers to run, and there are the big FAANG cloud companies that need an OS for their zillions of servers. They all have different priorities, and all limited influence.

 

[badbrain]

ralphbsz Don't mind my post. Most people said Btrfs works for them or they've never lost data with Btrfs or something like that indeed are hobbyist and run Linux as a desktop OS on their PC. Don't mind their opinions, since they have no authority to judge about server class quality requirements. I myself use Ubuntu Mate with root on Btrfs since 14.04 with no problems, it's a single 160gb disk with one big Btrfs partition and 4gb swap. We can't put swapfile on Btrfs.