It points out everything that is wrong with the Linux community. Much of what is written in these essays are among reasons I despise Linux ... although I do try to recognize Linux's good points.
You mean you despise the community, not linux itself, right? Because all of those essays only criticize the community, not linux itself. Despising linux because you dislike the community is like despising Windows because you dislike Microsoft or Bill Gates. Although I do find disliking the community to be a valid reason for disliking linux (same for Microsoft / Bill Gates and Windows), I just wanted to point this out.
I warn those who read this post ... it can be offensive, but these are my opinions and you do not have to share them.
Yes I despise its community, but I also despise Linux.
Here are a few reasons:
- I have never seen a system where 3 new kernel versions can be released in a single day
- tools like 'modprobe' ... there is no reason drivers shouldn't be smart enough to load their own dependencies
- the growing non-portable monster /proc and /sys ... boy its ugly to see
FILE *file = fopen( "/proc/lame", "r" );
fread( garbage, 1, sizeof(garbage), file );
/* Now we need to parse system data as ASCII instead of defining some interface to return data CORRECTLY */
/sys is even worse!
- documentation is awful, it is extremely lacking, especially in essentials like ifreqs!
- udev ... you call that an improvement over devfs? There is NO reason you should need to use mknod anymore. Last I remember in Linux device drivers class, I had to mknod my device nodes specifying a major and minor number. Why the hell is udev a daemon if it provides kernel services?
- ALSA ... its very nice to program ALSA drivers ... on the other hand, ALSA is a pain to use and its not portable! There is a standard called OSS but Linux developers often seem to forget standards and other Unix flavors.
- GPL ... The G
PLague...it is a different flavor of evil...instead of closing the source, it
forces everyone to open it. Its starting to bite Linux users in the ass as ZFS is going to be a userland driver (its CDDL) and Intel currently provides a userland driver for IPW3945 ... they do this for license incompatibilities and to avoid GPL.
- wheel? What's that?
- A nitpick thing here...ever wonder why Linux kernels are compressed? Because the retards who wrote Linux decided to do a two stage boot forgetting that the second stage could only load limited amount of data into ram.
- Linux isn't Windows and it shouldn't try to be Windows ... its nice to see Ubuntu/Fedora Core/Mandriva/other Windowsy distro users so ignorant of the system they run, that when it breaks they have no idea how to fix it. They often don't even know what X is ... They shouldn't have even been able to boot it to start with!
What is Linux? it is a Unix clone Linus wrote to play with Unix on his PC...not to start some hippyish open source software revolution or compete with Microsoft. He didn't write it thinking about enterprise quality and it really shows, and this is mentioned quite frequently in the LDD book.
Compare that to BSD or Mach ... these were research operating systems that were written with care by Berkeley, AT&T, and MIT. Many modern OS features were born on BSD, including TCP/IP and VM. Mach currently sits in OS X and is a Unix microkernel. These are high quality systems.
What I will say though, Linux has a lot of neat features and hardware support ... you have perhaps millions of users contributing to Linux. By comparison, you have perhaps thousands of users contributing to FreeBSD and fewer to Net and OpenBSD. In the end it seems, the uglier system Linux will survive and become the future...how unfortunate.
Here is my favorite quote:
During our short lived stint of attempting to run SDF under 'linux' on
IBM compatibles the system was compromised a number of times, but the
individuals who did it were much more secretive and malicious. For
each case users were forced to change their passwords and patched
software was installed (though this of course introduced other bugs
that could be found later on)
After dumping linux and x86 in favour of return to real computers, we
have not had any major security issues. We are however, just as vigilant
to be sure that your account here on SDF is safe and that any security
issues are resolved quickly before public announcements (cert, et cetera)
http://sdf.lonestar.org/index.cgi?faq?MISC?03This is by SDF, a Public Access Unix system that has existed since 1987. It currently runs NetBSD of which I have observed no compromises (go figure, since, say, CERT entries on BSD systems are so rare).
