[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2012 08:12:50 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> Reformatting and reinstalling, though, is a matter of course on any
> Windows installation that I've ever seen. I've heard of such things as
> stable Windows installations, but as far as my experience goes those
> are mythical beasts. Things just fail the moment you start doing
> something non-trivial, like anything besides read email, watch
> youtube, and browse the 'Net. I've been spared this pain for the most
> part 'cos I swore off Windows and have been running Linux as my main
> OS for at least 10 years, but I do still get requests for help to fix
> broken Windows installations. Most of the time, the thing's either
> unfixable (hood is welded shut) or not worth the effort to fix 'cos
> reformat + reinstall is faster (shudder).
> 

My desktop's XP installation (SP2 even) has been aces for years. And
years ago, when I did have to reinstall, it was just because of
something stupid I'd done.

I've seen plenty of screwed up Win boxes (even Win7), but it's always
owned by someone who doesn't even know what a "web browser" is, so
I figure chances are it's due to one of two things:

A. The user doing something stupid.

B. The user not using the web the way I do: with Adblock Plus
installed, and JS and Flash disabled by default.


> That's not to say that Linux doesn't have its own problems, of course.
> The libc5 -> libc6 transition is one of the memorable nightmares in
> its history. There have been others. X11 failures can get really ugly
> (back in the days before KVM, a crashed or wedged X server meant your
> graphics card is stuck in graphics mode and the console shows up as
> random dot patterns -- good luck trying to fix the system when you
> can't see what you type).

Oh man, I can't even tell you how many times I've had X suddenly fail
to startup with some errors for *no* apparent reason (and once that
happens, X *stays* dead, unless you happen to be a Linux guru). Luckily
this isn't so common anymore though, it was mostly about ten years ago.
That was one of the main reasons I swore off linux for years, until
just a few years ago I got back into it.

> Once I accidentally broke the dynamic
> linker, and EVERYTHING broke, because everything depended on it. The
> only thing left was a single bash shell over SSH (this was on a
> remote server with no easy physical access), and the only commands
> that didn't fail were built-in bash commands like echo. So I had to
> transfer busybox over by converting it into a series of echo commands
> that reconstituted the binary and copy-n-paste it. It's one of those
> moments where you get so much satisfaction from having rescued a
> dying system singlehandedly with echo commands, but it's also one of
> those things that puts Linux on some people's no-way, no-how list.
> 

Ouch.