Nobody Understands the Word "Uninstall"

[bgavin]

I fully support the idea of containers or virtual machines.

My VMs run on ESXi and I GHOST their images to a file server.
These are great sandboxes and excellent for work that doesn't require high end GPU or dual monitors.
Each compiler runs on its own VM, same as Turbo Tax and others that I don't want on my main workstation.

Restoring the VM from an image is easy-peasy and quick.

I was lazy when I was forced to migrate from Win7 to Win10, so I took the in-place upgrade.
A fresh install of Win10 with my complicated environment is one I wanted to avoid due to length of down time.
In retrospect, it would be a WHOLE lot cleaner with a fresh install instead of the upgrade.

Win10 installed just fine, but there was a ton of old Win7 baggage accumulated over the 10 years it ran on my workstation.

 

[ShelLuser]

I have a feeling most people using Containers don't care since the mess is restricted to the container, which I feels carries-over to other similar consumer tech (Flatpaks, Lutris, even stuff in Steam through Proton; it's all isolated prefixes letting people who don't know what files are not be concerned with stuff all over the place)

You're not wrong, but the mindset itself dates from long before that. I mean... I'm old enough to have (briefly!) worked with CP/M and back then an application was essentially its own directory which contained everything needed to run (and sometimes also build) the application.

Bit of the same thing: keep everything in one folder, and when done you just remove the whole thing in one go.

 

[Espionage724]

Bit of the same thing: keep everything in one folder, and when done you just remove the whole thing in one go.

I like Wine prefixes for that! For new games I work on configs and DXVK stuff to where it gets messy, and once I have some one-liners down I wipe the prefix with a quick folder delete and re-set it up cleanly. Windows's mess off-Windows is kept contained within a folder

 

[ralphbsz]

Yeah, I don't install FreeBSD on a monthly basis, either. Well, I do play with VMs (I have my reasons for that), but my daily driver usually lasts about a year or so.

My main server at home has been running FreeBSD since about 2012. It has been installed 3 times: Once the original installation. Then I decided to reinstall it since I had skipped all upgrades from roughly version 8 to version 11, and a full install was going to be more efficient than a long series of upgrades. And recently I had to reinstall it because the i386 platform was deprecated, and I had to put an amd64 install on it. I'm still upset about that most recent one: the decision to deprecate i386 I think was wrong, but given the manpower available for the project unavoidable.

I have been using Macintoshes as my daily driver since 2008 (at home) and 2010 (at work). In the time, I've had 2 personal laptops, 2 personal desktops, and 3 work laptops, all Macs. None have ever had to have their OS reinstalled from scratch, as far back as I can remember. Both one of the desktops and the oldest laptop had their system disk replaced (going from spinning rust to SSD), but without reinstalling the OS, instead I transferred things over successfully.

I would refuse to use an OS that required reinstalling every year, unless there is no alternative. The "no alternative" situation exists for me for embedded Raspberry Pi, where Linux (Raspbian = Debian) doesn't survive major version upgrades, forcing me to re-install them roughly once a year. This is painful and I hate it, but (a) I have the process down to just a few hours, using a spare micro-SD and a spare computer, and (b) I don't know any other OS that would work well enough on that hardware (and yes, I've tried FreeBSD, and things are either outright unsupported or require too much effort to make work.

I mean... I'm old enough to have (briefly!) worked with CP/M and back then an application was essentially its own directory which contained everything needed to run (and sometimes also build) the application.

On cp/m, I had many "system" floppies for the A drive, which contained the "OS" (the loadable BDOS and CCP), and a few system utilities like pip, plus whatever tool chain was needed for a project, like the Pascal compiler, or the assembler and linker, or the C (!!!) compiler, or dBase, or an editor like Wordstar. In a nutshell, the whole personality of the computer changed depending on what project I was working on. Many hours were spent creating all these "system" disks. The actual project was then always on a floppy in the B drive.

cp/m didn't really have a concept of directories; it has 16 user numbers, and most people had patched the CCP so user 0 was always readable. This allowed having multiple "projects" or "system disks" on the same floppy. But given the very limited space (I was using 3.5 inch floppies that had about 1.4 MB capacity), it was in practice impossible to pack for example C, Pascal and Fortran onto the same floppy, so user numbers weren't really useful for me. On the other hand, people with 10 or 30 MB disk drives used them extensively, instead of changing floppies.

 

[blackhole]

Why?
Because I'm curious if poor developer practices are restricted to Windows, or more universal in the 'nix and other worlds.

FreeBSD is somewhat at the mercy of the FOSS ecosystem, which to all intents and purposes is basically the Linux/systemd ecosystem.

If you use the base OS only, that is FreeBSD - once you start installing from ports, you're pulling in essentially the same stuff your typical Debian or Ubuntu or Arch Linux user would have installed. At that point you are subject to almost the same mess that is "Linux".

I would say that remnants can have a value. If I have broken dependencies, then it's good to be able to fix those, remove packages, reinstall, etc and for my data to still be there.

If you reinstall mysql, it's nice if the package removal doesn't nuke your configuration and innodb.

 

[recluce]

It is interesting that ‘nix systems have similar problems with droppings same as windows. Certainly makes a strong case for fresh installs or system image restore.

I disagree here for FreeBSD. This is the beginning of the bsdinstall_log in the /var/log folder of my home server:

DEBUG: Running installation step: auto
DEBUG: dialog.subr: DEBUG_SELF_INITIALIZE=[]
DEBUG: UNAME_S=[FreeBSD] UNAME_P=[amd64] UNAME_R=[10.0-RC5]
DEBUG: common.subr: Successfully loaded.
DEBUG: Began Installation at Fri Jan 17 01:39:18 UTC 2014

After more than 11 years and every update from FreeBSD 10.0 to 13.5-STABLE, on two generations of hardware, there is still no notable accumulation of "crud" or any impact to the server's performance. I do fully reinstall ports for major system upgrades. For my HTPC with tons of packages on it, I am now at more than six years...

 

[bgavin]

My hope is the 'nix community having higher standards of cleanliness than Windows developers.

It is estimated that Windows has some 50 million lines of code, all told.
The endless number of security holes guarantees endless service packs, which guarantee endless hot fixes.

I am very accustomed to having to deep dive in client's workstations to clean the endless droppings and orphaned DLLs left behind.
HP started providing scrubber utilities to clean up their droppings after an uninstall.
Most others do not.

 

[cracauer@]

My hope is the 'nix community having higher standards of cleanliness than Windows developers.

It is estimated that Windows has some 50 million lines of code, all told.
The endless number of security holes guarantees endless service packs, which guarantee endless hot fixes.

I am very accustomed to having to deep dive in client's workstations to clean the endless droppings and orphaned DLLs left behind.
HP started providing scrubber utilities to clean up their droppings after an uninstall.
Most others do not.

Can you articulate more cleatly what files (or other artifacts) FreeBSD's ports leave behind that bother you?

 

[POSIX.1]

... same as windows. Certainly makes a strong case for fresh installs or system image restore.

As I have read similar recently in another thread, where I could resist answering, some clear words have to be spoken.

The "fresh install" advises even on MS-Windows are poor man's last resort of DIY rescue, where proper admin's knowledge lacks. Does it solve most problems? Sure, but mostly not adequate.

Advocating "fresh installs" on FreeBSD without a very good reason (broken beyond repair, i.e. filesystem related) is IMO ill-advised, because FreeBSD as well on the other BSDs there is nice location separations between Kernel, base and /usr/local/, where packages have their living and user configurations. If you have problems with packages/ports there is no need to touch the base installation.

BTW I do a fresh installation only when upgrading to a major release if there are upgrades to the filesystem.

 

[bgavin]

Can you articulate more cleatly what files (or other artifacts) FreeBSD's ports leave behind that bother you?

None at all.

At the start of this thread, my observation is from that of being a windows user/developer.
I'm here on FBSD simply because I enjoy what it does for my NAS.

As an ASM coder, I've been in the game long before the GUI was a reality.
I have a great appreciation for robust command line operating systems.

I was curious if 'nix heavies find the same left-behind clutter and droppings that windows developers leave behind.

 

[kpedersen]

The endless number of security holes guarantees endless service packs, which guarantee endless hot fixes.

Sadly Microsoft is no longer able to support service packs. Deterministic and organised update cycles are a thing of the past. Now it is Windows Update chaos or sifting through your own micro-updates via WSUS.

 

[bgavin]

I am not at all surprised.
Each machine can be so unique, they require a real-time analysis of that machine to determine which updates are required.
For example, the dependencies created by multiple versions of a single runtime for Visual Studio XXXX are staggering.
In short: a real mess.

I am *SO* thankful to be retired.