Linux and Reliability
deepankar.posterous.com
deepankar.posterous.com
Bold new interfaces, new APIs, and complete reinventions of the desktop metaphor are really exciting hobby projects for these brave volunteers.
Perfecting backwards compatibility, re-implementing buggy behaviour from prior versions, and ensuring ABI stability do not make exciting projects. These are the torturously painful, labor-intensive foundations of Microsoft's success.
Enter Dependency Hell.
It's still not working, and now several other things are broken. It looks like I'll have to provide a complete re-install, but it's unclear that I can find a version of Linux that still works on the hardware.
I hate system administration, and more and more I'm forced to tinker with machines.
Rhetorical Question: Why can't they "Just Work" ?
I'm seriously considering moving to a Mac and trying to get everything I want working there. Joy. Another month of tinkering instead of producing.
You have to have extraordinary quality control and testing on silent updates like that, and quite frankly, if OSes with a very limited number of variations on hardware can't get it right, how can we expect PC distributions to?
I had a G5 imac that I used for over 5 years without every having to reinstall the OS. I finally had to go through the pain of a fresh install when I bought a new imac this past year, but once every 5 or 6 years is fine. I'm still using my first gen macbook pro. I really want to use linux, but I value my time enormously now that I have 2 kids, this means I use macs.
Also, it sounds like there is a discrepancy between how you initially installed Flash, vs. how you're trying to do it now. If you have the Flash repository, it should be a simple update. "Should be," but since it's not, it sounds like you're using a different method now.
If you keep /home on its own partition, re-installing the distro should be trivial (although definitely overkill).
In terms of why the browser can't leave feedback anymore, nor play videos, those are bizarre breakages which makes me think you can't be sure it's not the hardware (perhaps run "dmesg" just to see if there's anything interesting, always do Memtest86+ to make sure you have good RAM).
With regards a different browser, that may yet be what I do.
With regards a reinstall, it's older hardware, so there's every chance a newer version won't run - I've had that happen before.
And I have tested the hardware quite thoroughly - it's fine. Flash breaking is something I'm seeing on several platforms, including my Windows laptop, where Chrome regularly says "Oh look! Flash Crash!" (or something).
I love programming, I just hate computers. I wish I could go back to embedded work. I enjoyed fitting TCP stacks onto new chips with 100 bytes of RAM.
I would assume that's a typo, but then again your description of updating doesn't sound like any recent Linux experience I've had. And you do mention the hardware is too old for a modern distro.
If she was using that version, and the only thing that broke after all this time is Flash then that's pretty good going.
I don't plan to consider returning until Ubuntu Desktop Edition "stabilizes" a bit. But that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon, what with the impending switch to Unity, and the rumored switch to Wayland, and ever tighter integration with Canonical's proprietary offerings...
GNU/Linux is already rock solid at the base system level, but some distros just ruin the Desktop experience.
If you want an environment with long term stability, you might want to move to Debian Stable, which exists for this very purpose, and these days is typically as easy to install as Ubuntu.
I also have to ask what is this immature software as default you talk about?
For example, Ubuntu Natty Desktop Edition will come with Unity as the default UI, which is a relatively immature platform that Canonical is trying to push hard. Linux Mint will probably stick with GNOME and KDE though.
Of course it's always possible to switch to something that is more stable, but that's not exactly "It works out of the box."
Here's where linux fails on this front. Often it doesn't just work out of the box. I have to figure out how to install proprietary drivers, then I had to figure out how to configure it to get basic visual features like the drop shadow around the top most window. There is still an obnoxious flicker when I use desktop switching, the sound stops working after I do an update, etc. This all happened to me on the last two versions of ubuntu on a dell optiplex. So I went back to my mac.
Talk to companies like Broadcom or AMD / NVIDIA about making their components work much better with Linux, first. A lot of the issue is on their end, with not providing interfaces and drivers for distros to include.
Canonical, Novell, and everyone else try their best to include what they can for their distros but it's hard when the companies making these computers don't help much.
Boxee, Google TV, and such are able to license Netflix and use their technology because it's much harder to hack them. Netflix has been fighting movie companies for years now to get full Linux support because Silverlight is the only player technology with the DRM to satisfy the studios that movies can't be copied from the stream, and Microsoft obviously has no intention of making it available on mainstream Linux distributions.
I believe that Boxee, Google TV, and 360/PS3 all use other technologies, but that can be inherently less secure because it's harder to get inside of them. Also, they can afford to pay the monstrous fees to work with Netflix and develop a solution that will satisfy all of Netflix's backers.
Licensing technology, especially with all of the patent stuff that's been going on lately, is an incredible undertaking and costs a lot of money, and many companies are unwilling to license to companies like Canonical because Linux is a huge administrative headache due to its openness and peoples' desire to have open systems.
At least, that's how I understand all of this. I could be wrong.
The desktop distro teams can't organize enough to get support from major companies, and the enterprise companies can't push into desktop because it's financial suicide to try and support normal desktop users who can barely use Windows.
Secondly, how would they license? Most of the code they could license requires a charge per copy. RedHat , Ubuntu and most Linux distros encourage the free redistribution of their disks. You can download it for free(aside from bandwidth charges which RedHat is not involved with. They don't even know how many copies are really in use. So, either they would have to change their whole distribution model or they would have to pay for something that is fairly nebulous. Fluendo has published a version of the MP3 codec that can be distributed for free. They purchased a license that has no per copy costs, but that is unusual to even have that as an option.
Finally, the RedHat company produces the RedHat distro for commercial use and the Fedora distro for home use. There is an active community of Fedora users who happily use it after 5 PM and you can find how to get most codecs working in Fedora, if you search a bit. The freedoms associated with Linux make it much more pleasant to use that any proprietary solution available today. I would also say Linux is more powerful and easy to use, but I can see how not everyone would agree about those, since your experience and workflows can drive those comparisons. OpenSolaris was making good progress. It is a shame it was killed a little before it got to the point where it was usable for everyday duty for the average person.
I agree. However it's MUCH easier to just work if there is only one hardware platform to develop for. This has been responsible for a huge share of Apple's reputation for "just working" and reliability since the beginning.