It's official: Linux has become Microsoft Windows

[Ben Scott]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Coleman Kane <ckane at colemankane.org> wrote:
> I think you're confusing "all of Linux" with Ubuntu.

  Read the link target again.  The HAL/DBus people in Ubuntu wanted to
do the right thing, and just restart the daemons.  All the upstream
package maintainers -- the people writing the apps -- can't be
bothered to write proper code.  I don't know if this is because they
grew up on Windoze and that's just the way they think computers work,
or if they're just more generally brain damaged, but that's the
environment we've got these days.  Normally, I'd just dismiss them as
some brain damaged programs that's not effecting me, but as Martin
Pitt observes, there's this big push to infect everything on the
system with this stuff.  You can't compile hello.c without linking in
DBus these days, it seems.  :-(

> 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.

  I start into X, but only so I don't have to wait for it to load.
And I use X primarily to open lots of xterms.  :)

> If I upgrade hald or dbus, I simply log out of X11 ... 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.

  If all you're counting is the time it takes for the system to
reboot, sure.  I dunno about you, but I actually use my computer for
stuff, and like to leave lots of windows with stuff I'm working on
open until I finish it.  Having to close all that down, and then open
it all back up after -- *that's* the big cost for me.

> You, the user, are empowered to fix the behavior ...

  Sure.  But when you see the entire community infected with defective
thinking, like some kind of semantic plague, one quickly finds oneself
in the position of trying to bail out the ocean.  :-(

> ... work that would need to be performed to achieve a fully
> no-reboot-necessary-on-upgrade OS.

  Of course, there's a whole hell of a lot more than this to just not
rebooting.  A system which can properly recover from suboptimal
conditions is a robust system.  These people are instead building a
system that will fall down if you look at it the wrong way.  :-(

-- Ben