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Comment by nileshtrivedi | Hacker News Reader

Linux can be so amazing when configured especially for some tasks. For example, Jack on linux can deliver audio latencies under 2ms! The problem is that configuring Linux like this almost requires a CS degree.

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Pretty sure even most people with CS degrees could not configure Linux. It's pretty specialized knowledge as far as I can tell.

>Pretty sure even most people with CS degrees could not configure Linux.

It certainly does not take a degree of any kind to "configure Linux". Not even if you're below average IQ.

Has nothing to do with intelligence. This is just a different knowledge domain, and there is shockingly little overlap with a traditional CS education.

To expand on this, its the difference between knowing a field of knowledge, lets take cooking, and how to use a tool, lets say a knife. While you can learn a lot about how to use a knife by going to culinary school much of the knife and the process surrounding what makes a good knife, good and bad knife, bad is very specific knowledge. The analogy kinda falls apart because you need to touch on the topics and metallurgy and industrial process but hopefully that paints a reasonable pictures. Linux is a tool, a very complicated tool with specific features. CS/SE/IS education is a very general set of skill which should apply across not just Linux but most/all of computing.

I once had a brief conversation (via Reddit) with a guy using JACK for a commercial (embedded Linux) networked audio system. I wasn't aware of the exact specifics but I understand it was Sonos-style, embedded boards inside speakers. He wasn't particularly interested in talking about the work his team had done :P

I think that proves your point.

> He wasn't particularly interested in talking about the work his team had done :P

As in, he tried to keep the secrets secret, or it seemed to be trivial and uninteresting to him?

more likely the former

This is a quite paradoxal phenomen that happens to some open source projects. The code is open and free, but some of the experts hold their knowledge very close to their chest. It's totally understandable since they of course need to make a living somehow, but it kind of defeats some of the benefits with open source.

Roughly speaking it levels the playing field. With Open Source smart people and companies that attract smart people get an edge.

Good point! But the hazard is that the we risk getting FOSS software that is unnecessarily complex to configure because of this.

In my experience proprietary software is often far more complex, in fact in another league than most FOSS SW for now (source: have installed and reinstalled so many Oracle databases, Enterprise Manager and APEX installations I have lost count.)

Depends on the software and author. Case in point: sendmail; virtually everything ever made by RedHat (the software is free, but there's no useful documentation if you're not a paying customer… cf. NetworkManager, PulseAudio, GlusterFS … only systemd seems an exception, for now).

Good point! However, I would agree that server/system software that is "best-in-breed" tend to be FOSS. But I'm afraid I have no studies or other hard facts to support my case.

Configuration can be a pain. Sane defaults help and smart UIs help not to mention good documentation.

I've been playing with some software over the last week that has wiki for documentation and an active user forum with people willing to help. But it's completely disordered and incredibly hard to discover. Half the battle with usability is making it easy to use and understand.

Some contracts are worded very... weirdly, so to speak, which makes talking about projects potentially dangerous.

It doesn't have to be ill will, or even will. Something like JACK is a component of a system. Maintaining this component as open source is fairly simple -- but capturing and sharing the understanding the complex interplay of components and the tradeoff needed to achieve certain ends in the wider system is really, really hard.

Linux might be free and open source software, but it's not a failure of anything that it doesn't come with a free systems administrator education.

I don't think it's such that the person in question doesn't want to share the knowledge, it's that imparting the knowledge is time consuming and draining.

Why would a latency of 2ms be considered good unless it was for packets traveling across a country?

He is talking about (worst-case) scheduling latency. See https://lwn.net/Articles/404993/.

Jack is what forced me to from a beginner to an intermediate Linux user as a teenager, and I still don't understand it.

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