ou've waited, you've wondered, you've lain awake at night asking
yourself that burning question: should I dump Windows and switch
to Linux like everybody else?
Well, yeah, why not? But soon that question will be irrelevant. As Windows becomes more like Linux, Linux becomes more like Windows. Soon they'll converge and you'll be able to run the same software on either one. It'll be hailed as a brilliant achievement. Of course some of us will say we could switch from VAX VMS to UNIX way back in 1986 just by typing a simple command. But no one will believe us.
The biggest advantage of Linux is that it's much easier to re-install your apps when you upgrade the OS. Most people keep their home directory on a separate partition. You keep your apps there along with the source code and just reinstall them whenever—no need to download them, search for your old cd/dvd/flash drive, or dig through a pile of dongles.
Then one day something like this happens:
> ./des my-critical-encrypted-file
error while loading shared libraries: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
> ldd /usr/local/bin/des
linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7f75000)
libc.so.6 => not found
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7f77000)
What is going on? des is an old and now obsolete encryption
algorithm. A while back I used it to encrypt some critical information.
Then one day it just stopped working. Reason: des was not
statically linked as I had thought, and a library was missing. Not a big
deal if you still have it, but if you don't, your file is gone forever.
If you can't trust your decryption software to continue to work, that means
that encryption is, for all practical purposes, simply not
a thing in Linux.
It turns out that almost every program in Linux—including most of the
“statically linked” essential programs in
/usr/sbin—is dynamically linked. dhcpd
depends on ten dynamic libraries, reboot needs 13.
fsck needs 11. arp needs 3.
Dynamic linking makes your programs smaller, but it also means they will stop running if something happens to your dynamic libraries. You will not even be able to reboot. Windows users are used to this idea: MS calls this a security upgrade but it's really an excuse to stop the old stuff from working so you have to buy something new.
Indeed, in Windows if you move to the latest version, you may have to buy all new software. New versions of a lot of Windows stuff, including tax software and Office, no longer install in W7. Adobe Illustrator and Office are now mostly subscription-based, which means you have to pay and pay and pay and if you ever stop paying they stop working.
For whatever reason, young people are okay with that. They do it for streaming and happily lease their car. It's convenient, but it's also a form of perpetual childhood where your parents can throw all your toys away whenever they want and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Last week I updated an old Linux spreadsheet program that I'd written using Motif. I had forgotten what a royal pain it was. The OSF/Motif Programmer's Manual was 1670 pages, not counting the appendix, and Volume 6B of the O'Reilly X Windows Reference, which covers Motif itself, was 908 pages and just as useless.
Nowadays, of course, most distros don't even include Motif. If you need
Motif for something, you have to download the source and compile it.
That brings us to problem #2: more often than not, it no longer
compiles. There's a whole ecosystem out there on how to compile old
stuff like xmgr, the only good graph-drawing program ever
written, to accommodate the constantly moving surface of gcc.
Thanks to ambitious young recruits, there are almost as many graphical APIs in Linux as there are forks of Firefox, the latest of which, a wolf-themed one, immediately caused Cinnamon and Xorg to seize up on my PC, followed by a spontaneous reboot of the Linux kernel.
Linux fans may claim that never happens, but nowadays I have to reboot
it almost monthly thanks to those updates that automatically install
themselves every day. Between the updates and that abomination called
systemd, Linux is now approaching what Windows used to be,
reminding us why we left.
Don't get me wrong: If you use Windows, you know why you hate it. Just one example: one of our Windows boxes refuses to copy an 85k Excel file, claiming that there's not enough space, so I have to copy it using a thumb drive. The registry is even more of an abomination than systemd, but between systemd and ext4, Linux on another machine now takes half an hour to boot after it crashes. There's no indication of what if anything is happening. No, it just prints an uninterpretable error message about 20 times, then hangs for thirty minutes as it checks the hard drive for errors.
That might remind Linuxers of the good old days, and there's a simple reason for it, I'm sure, but I guarantee if our computer consultants saw it, they'd say it was hosed and tell us to move to something “more modern.” I have to admit I'd have trouble refuting it.
jun 03 2022, 5:41 am
