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Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey
tim1980 writes "Derek Croxton has written a rather long editorial on how he sees the Linux and Open Source communities, and his personal experiences with Linux, the editorial is titled Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey and is over 3,500 words. Excerpt: 'A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless command prompt with no idea what to type; or, as so frequently happens, knowing a command that he copied verbatim from a document discovered on the internet somewhere, but with no idea of what it means or how to alter it if it doesn't behave exactly as advertised.'"
$how do i read a file from my floppy? "mount?" who woulda thought.
The problem is knowing where to look sometimes. I am still learning useful commands.
Now wouldn't it be nice if a standard were made and users could be assured that, for the most part, regardless of what distribution they're using:
Of course, every time I bring up the idea of standardizing important parts of Linux distributions the lynch mob comes after me, because consistency and distribution-neutral package installation goes against the spirit of Open Source or something ("stifles choice", I've heard).
I mean, wouldn't it be nice to tell someone "just use apt-get and do X, Y, and Z" instead of "[Install Debian] and use apt-get to do X, Y, and Z"?
I have a hard time with man - yes, it's full-on documentation, but 19 times out of 20, I don't need the 15 highly obscure switches for a command, I just need the command in its simplest form.
What man is missing is an example section, e.g., "To find all files with mary in the title, use ls -R *mary*" or whatever; "to find all files modified in the last 10 days do..."
I will say right out that perhaps such a facility exists, but I am unaware. I am a GUI user of Linux (SuSE 9.1 X86_64) and my command line skills have rusted since I lived in VMS 20 years ago...
The problem with the apt-get approach is that it's like living in a town with only one supermarket. OK, so it's a really big supermarket but still:
- If you can't find the food you want in there, you're stuck
- If you can but it's stale, damaged or out of stock, you're stuck
- You are totally dependent on the people running the supermarket
- The larger a supermarket is, the harder it becomes to find things in it. Just imagine taking your grandma to a supermarket where the aisles stretched as far as the eye could see!
To stretch the analogy a bit further than it can really go, just imagine if getting tired of this one supermarket you travelled to the next town and bought a lampshade from a shop there. Bring it all the way back, put it in your house and suddenly your TV explodes.
What happened? "Oh, you mixed different repositories". All centralised systems suffer this but Fedora worse than most - you're fine as long as you stick to the core repositories but if you add others (and you do need to do that, if you want a big enough collection to be useful) things will randomly break due to "conflicts". Just imagine trying to explain that to grandma!
Oh yeah. There are a bunch of other problems as well. I've seen a lot of 3rd party packages of software that are totally broken. Often the users don't connect the problems they are seeing with the packages. This happens a lot with complex software like Wine, Mono etc ... I've seen quite a few packages of Wine that won't even start! It's pretty clear that many 3rd party packagers hardly test what they produce at all, especially in the case of "new release, I'll just bump the number in the spec and rebuild". I'd estimate that about 40-50% of the tech support problems I deal with in Wine are due to incorrectly built packages. It's not even hard! Just configure, make, make install but people still cock it up mightily - using badly done wrapper scripts and moving files around from where they're supposed to be are the most common, but bad builds happen too.
Apt-get has other problems. You have to duplicate this huge effort over and over again for each distro. This doesn't happen so you get vendor lockin - the very thing we're trying to all get away from, no? I've met more than one person in my life whos number 1 reason for using Debian was "I can apt get lots of software". It was not due to the merits of the distribution itself, it was not due to have a nice installer, slick default desktop, solid PAM setup etc etc. It was because installing software was not a pain in the ass.
Apt-get works great as long as you are willing to throw infinite manpower at the problem. We don't have infinite manpower, duh. So centralised packaging cannot be a scalable, sustainable way forward for our community outside of certain use cases like servers (where it works well).