Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
A rant on religiousness about OSes
40hz:
(this was triggered by a near-religious linux post in a thread about windows XP. I figured I wouldn't pollute that with my rant and will just rant where people can ignore it easier)
-iphigenie (December 09, 2008, 05:31 AM)
--- End quote ---
Umm...ok.
Could you provide a link to the specific post you mentioned, so I can better understand what you're responding to?
(Nice post BTW :))
Edvard:
All OSes are insecure in the hands of an uninformed user. Granted, some are safer because an uninformed user cannot even begin to use them.
--- End quote ---
Hehe- which is where Linux Elitism begins...
Iphi, this is one hell of a post and one I will be linking to next time I spot a Holy OS War.
At the very least, I will post Iphi's Law in bold and all caps... :Thmbsup:
As much as I love Linux, I have to admit. 7 years in, I still sometimes tear my hair out and say (softly to myself under my breath...) "If this was Windows, I'd just do this".
But now that I've gotten used to it and have taken advantage of the benefits I have with Linux, I shudder at the thought of having to deal with Windows' shortcomings in the same area.
All in all, kudos for a great post. Now, about this problem I have with 'pon'... ;)
iphigenie:
Could you provide a link to the specific post you mentioned, so I can better understand what you're responding to?
--- End quote ---
Well that was the reason I posted it elsewhere, because i am not really responding to it. The thread today was the "is windows xp really that good" post - but nothing in that thread ends up deserving the kind of rant, it's just that I have seen it so many times much louder and worse (thankfully not here, we're all too clued up for it most of the time), so I started responding in there, thought "that's silly, nobody in there deserves that" and posted in a new thread.
Still, I guess this morning someone had p****ed on my cornflakes since I have gone on my soapbox 3 times today, twice here and once on friendfeed.
:D
iphigenie:
All OSes are insecure in the hands of an uninformed user. Granted, some are safer because an uninformed user cannot even begin to use them.
--- End quote ---
Hehe- which is where Linux Elitism begins...
-Edvard (December 09, 2008, 10:30 AM)
--- End quote ---
hehehe, i had BSD in mind with this one - but many linux distributions might also qualify. Never saw it as a virtue myself.
Although as someone who learned a lot of things in unix, I am very much someone who is almost more at ease with a console than a windowed environment, when trying to get work done, from there i can figure out things from the ground up. Kind of always have to do it, as I have used too many things, how the heck can i remember where slackware puts its network config or where debian puts its package files. There's man, locate, grep for these.
Currently trying to set up an open solaris server for fun, but not sure at all how to make sure stuff i installed via the pkg install is started automatically etc. Thankfully I dont have a deadline (currently between jobs, taking contracts if anyone knows someone, either as super experienced sassy tech leader, dev team manager, web project manager, or single-person build team. Also bored enough I might help with your project for fun/trade) so without a deadline it is fun to poke (but I am wasting a lot of time, letting it sit for days. how do people stay motivated when dabbling?)
Iphi, this is one hell of a post and one I will be linking to next time I spot a Holy OS War.
At the very least, I will post Iphi's Law in bold and all caps... :Thmbsup:
-Edvard (December 09, 2008, 10:30 AM)
--- End quote ---
Yay! go ahead, make me famous! I'll tell the author of Nebbe's rule I plagiarized him. He won't mind (it comes from the ada world and slighly forgotten)
As much as I love Linux, I have to admit. 7 years in, I still sometimes tear my hair out and say (softly to myself under my breath...) "If this was Windows, I'd just do this".
But now that I've gotten used to it and have taken advantage of the benefits I have with Linux, I shudder at the thought of having to deal with Windows' shortcomings in the same area.-Edvard (December 09, 2008, 10:30 AM)
--- End quote ---
Yes, there is a lot each could take from the other. I have that a lot, comes right after the "how the heck do you do this on this OS again?" moment, the "why can't they do it like windows/linux/bsd?" moment.
And why the heck can't it be called ipconfig on *EVERYTHING* since they are all using the same layer?
And so many things NONE of them does right yet. Memory management, file systems (although sun's latest gem is extremely promising, and open source!), navigation & launch (cascade menus suck and docks are not much better!), dealing with I/O, dealing with multiple sound/media paths, removable devices - there's just plenty we haven't figured out how to do right, and we could do with having a good look at old interfaces like next, os/2 and more to see whether there were better ways we forgot (probably nostalgia rose tinted idea but...).
And why have we lost the truly excellent xpipeman somewhere along the way? No OS should be complete without a pipe and a marble game (sorry, personal wish, and one i am probably the only person in the universe to have)
All in all, kudos for a great post. Now, about this problem I have with 'pon'... ;)
-Edvard (December 09, 2008, 10:30 AM)
--- End quote ---
Oh poor thing. We have routers for that kind of stuff...
Last time i had to deal with ppp it was ISDN dial up and it was DEFINITIVELY NOT FUN. I ran a gateway built myself for a while, mostly for mail (postfix, teapop, if anyone is curious) then decided it was "too much like work" (was still doing a significant bit of sysadmin at the time), put a connection sharing shareware on one of the windows boxes (was actually super excellent stuff!) used that for a while.
When i switched to cable I went back to a linux box as the gateway/server, which was my mail server (postfix, teapop and dovecot by then) and also a backup DNS for the web agency I was a director in. I later decided it was a ridiculous use of energy and bought a cheap wireless router, moved my mail to fastmail and my backup DNS to xname. The cheap router was first netgear, but that didnt work with World of Warcraft all that well, then an ASUS router. Had 2 of those for 3 years now (one on the top floor bridging to one on the ground floor), won't bother.
But we are doing work on our old house, and wiring everything with cat6 cable, have a rack in the basement with a nortel box (off ebay) and patch panel - all nicely gathering dust next to the ebayed sun sparc machine etc etc. When the top floor is finally painted and carpeted (might presuppose me taking a job or contract again) we will connect all this up and get a basement server...
perhaps...
Whenever i get tempted to set up a DNS or mail or file server in house again, i go get some fresh air and wait till it passes.
f0dder:
iphigenie: I ran Arch for a while on my server, but found that the pacman package manager gets ridiculously slow pretty fast (solution is to copy all it's files elsewhere, nuke the source files, and move the copied files back... no FS fragmentation on linux? ;)), some packages don't get updated often enough (and I can't be bothered maintaining packages or doing unmanaged build-from-source), plus parts of the system get changed around pretty radically every now and then. Doesn't feel "stable" enough for my likings, so I switched to gentoo :)
I used to run slackware for years, but it feels a bit "dusty" imho - very slow progress. And after the whole drama when Patrick Volkerding was seriously ill, I got the feeling that slackware might die when he does, or at least be left in somewhat of a limbo - that isn't too reassuring either. I also never found a good package manager, and the system as a whole felt a bit arcane. It's not a distro I'd recommend anybody today, but it did sit on the server at my mum's place doing it's job for... what, 5 years?
Personally, I don't have time (nor desire) to muck around just to much around (and get a bit annoyed when I have to much around to get seemingly simple stuff working), and for the stuff I use linux for I don't want to risk ending up with an unsupported distro... so no fringe distros for me.
I'm considering setting up and hosting my own mail, btw, since I'm already running a 24/7 fileserver. I'm tired of having mail outages a few times per year, and I feel it would rock having IMAP running on the LAN - might be fast enough to even use it for archiving all my mails, and having the stuff backed up via rsnapshot.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version