It's official: Linux has become Microsoft Windows

Coleman Kane ckane at colemankane.org
Fri Oct 16 11:11:53 EDT 2009


On Fri, 2009-10-16 at 10:59 -0400, Tom Buskey wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 10:47 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>          This is actually from 2005, but I just found it now:
>         
>         https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/desktop-bugs/2005-August/002500.html
>         
>          Yes, that's right.  Rather than fix broken software, the
>         sanctioned
>         course of action is to reboot the system if HAL or DBus need
>         to be
>         restarted/refreshed.
>         
>          Can anyone recommend a Free, Unix-like operating system that
>         supports a wide variety of hardware?  That used to be Linux,
>         but it
>         now fails on the second item.
>         
>  
> NetBSD comes closest, especially for CPU architectures.  FreeBSD might
> beat NetBSD for peripherals.  I'm not sure if OpenBSD is head of
> OpenSolaris.  Darwin is another possibility.
> 
> Of course, these are Unix systems and you asked for Unix-like (which
> linux technically is).
> 
> Haiku probably isn't unix-like enough.  Is Hurd far enough along yet?
> Debian on BSD or Hurd?
> 
> What about a Linux distro that doesn't use HAL or DBus.  Slackware?

I think you're confusing "all of Linux" with Ubuntu. The subject should
be "Ubuntu has become Microsoft Windows", or maybe even "GNOME has
become Microsoft Windows".

In my case, I am not using GDM or XDM or any of the other *DMs, and
instead just run X from the command line. If I upgrade hald or dbus, I
simply log out of X11 (Using GNOME's "System->Log out ..."), then run
startx again. No reboot necessary. This is running on FreeBSD, of
course. Some of you might argue that this amounts to a reboot. Let me
assure you, from a time-consumed perspective it most certainly does not.

Ubuntu gratuitously seems to want a reboot for any upgrade of a service
process running in X, or in the init system. This seems to be a
heavy-handed anti-foot-shooting measure intended to ensure a stable
experience at the expense of some efficiency.

As far as all the complaints go in that issue, there is still one
striking difference between Ubuntu and Microsoft Windows: You, the user,
are empowered to fix the behavior if you don't like it so much, because
you have access to the source code to the whole system. Ubuntu doesn't
*have to* be restarted after every invasive upgrade, if you would just
add the code to those packages that would fix the problem. I'm certain
that there's even a boilerplate recipe out there for this exact problem
that applies to both hald and dbus.

The only reason Ubuntu opts for this is the same 80/20 rule that
Microsoft employs: For 20% more rebooting, you can avoid 80% of the work
that would need to be performed to achieve a fully
no-reboot-necessary-on-upgrade OS.

-- 
Coleman Kane



More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list