• 2 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Any large enterprise still running RHEL 5 in Prod (or even, yes, older RHEL versions) has fully accepted the risks

    It is more like ‘involuntarily end up riding the risks of using unsupported old software’. RHEL 7 and RHEL 5 are in the right order.

    RHEL sells an unrealistic expectation that you don’t need to worry about the OS for another 10 years, so the enterprise gets designed around it and becomes unable to handle an OS upgrade, ever.


  • I am not. I worked hard to make our application support RHEL 8 and then RHEL 9. And then the politics takes over and the big wigs start an extended bickering over who should pay for the OS upgrade… which never happens. Sometimes hardware partners don’t support the upgrades, which means OS upgrades also end up requiring new hardware.

    I blame Redhat.




  • There is no way legacy projects are going to switch to Deno. Even when Deno is 100% compatible, the only advantage Deno provides is slightly higher performance. Node’s complexity problem? All those configs needs to be supported for compatibility anyway. Typescript? The project already has tsconfig.json set up, so they might as well continue to use tsx. Security? I bet users will just get tired and use -A all the time.

    To benefit from Deno, Node’s legacy needs to be shed.

    Wine is a different case. The reason Wine makes sense is because Windows is so much worse than Linux that even with scrappy game compatibility, Linux offers a better experience. For Linux users, the alternative to Wine is not switching to Windows, it is not being able to play games. On the other hand, legacy Node projects have a very easy alternative… just continue to use Node.

    And btw Bun is making the same mistake.



  • Through compatibility, Deno established an upgrade path.

    Sure, but Node compatibility needs to work, and it needs to work reliably. Which means every last detail of Node needs to be supported.

    This is what I am trying to convey… the engineering effort to make an objectively better JS runtime while being Node compatible is likely too much effort. Many popular Node projects are already having issues with Deno. Now imagine how the compatibility scene will look like with every single proprietary Node project out there.

    So instead of trying to replace NodeJS or offering an upgrade path for existing Node projects, incentivize formation of ecosystem around Deno.




  • I am sure there are Linux users that don’t ever use ssh and would look at you quizzically if you asked them about bash.

    Pretty sure these users are few and far between. I haven’t found any of them.

    Now it is possible that where you live, there is an abundance of Windows/Powershell experts and novice Linux users who only use Facebook. I’ll accept if that is your reality. All I can observe is that curious/enthusiast types tend to use Linux whereas others use Windows. People who want to better their situations tend to switch to Linux.

    You should criticize Windows,

    That never went well for me. Criticizing Windows is like talking them down for buying a car or calling their baby ugly. If you criticize Windows, Windows users will defend it.

    What does work is to just stay silent and let Linux be better at getting my job done. Curious ones will observe and switch to Linux on their own. Others will continue using Windows.

    Pretending that it doesn’t have excellent built in tooling doesn’t help your case.

    Tooling can be installed. It is not a big enough factor in choosing an operating system.

    And pretending that Windows doesn’t have built in tooling totally helps my case. Windows users have different expectations from their operating system. Windows is expected to be GUI based, so why will it have an SSH client? (except that it does) And why will it have a decent scripting language? (except that it does) And all software is installed by double-clicking on an .exe (except that Windows has a package manager)

    My case is about people, not operating systems.

    For me, Windows hasn’t fixed its myriad of reliability, performance and trust issues in over a decade, no amount of built-in tooling will make me return to Windows. Windows users on the other hand will tolerate the issues, or at most make it only as severe as previous Windows version. You see how difference between the users is playing out, right? The enthusiast types observe that a better experience is possible with Linux and become Linux users, and remaining users stay with Windows, mostly tolerating whatever Microsoft adds to Windows updates. Over time, Linux users and Windows users drift apart and become very different.


  • I bet very few people know that there’s an openssh client already installed in Windows.

    Same with Powershell, I have heard it is quite capable but in practice Windows users tend to not know powershelI. I haven’t found anybody IRL who knows Powershell.

    My goal wasn’t to criticize Windows, I wanted to show how much our experience is different from Windows users. It is not about windows vs Linux, but about how windows users usually do things vs how Linux users usually do things. Relatability is a powerful social force that I hadn’t accounted for, and now it just bites me.


  • I miss the human connection with those around me who use windows. After years of using Linux almost exclusively, I now miss being able to relate to them. Sometimes I feel lonely because of it.

    Colleagues get to resonate with all the windows slowness and reliability issues, and I can only stay silent.

    “Hey, how can I do this obscure thing?” “Oh yes that’s easy… err… no, I don’t know.” So many methods that are easy on Linux are basically impractical on windows. E.g. many text file processing tasks are doable swiftly with simple shell scripts or even bash one-liners; what will a windows user do? Telling them to automate something means suggesting them to create a new Java project. Opening an SSH session means using Mobaxterm which limits the number of sessions you can create.