Linux distributions are becoming irrelevant (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Linux distributions are becoming irrelevant (2017)

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13 pointsmooreds7 comments

Linux distributions were always "irrelevant". Linux distros have always just bundled together standard Linux ecosystem components. The "Linux Standard Base" is just a formalization of this effect, not the cause of the effect.

However, I use "irrelevant" in quotes above, because they're not at all irrelevant. It's an incredible amount of work to wrangle all of the pieces of a functioning Linux system and present it as a shippable distro. Anyone who's tried Linux from Scratch has experienced this. This is also why so many distros are "debian-based" or "fedora-based" or "arch-based". Those distros did the hard work of picking and choosing a subset of components that will work together, and building them from source into combinable packages, now all your downstream distro has to do is remix them in some way.

When it comes to Maven Central Repository, PyPi, NPM, Ruby Gems, etc. I'd say that Linux is irrelevant.

That is, people use those systems to install software on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Insofar as those systems are effective they are cross-platform, I can develop on any of those three OS and not (usually) think very much about the OS.

Systems like that also fundamentally disagree with distros in that they scope libraries to the application rather than the system.

Probably the worst thing that happened to Python was getting incorporated into Linux distributions such that (1) people felt entitled that you could type "python" and get Python 2, and (2) essential system scripts were written in Python 2. All this held back Python 3 by 12 years, which is more like 120 years in internet time!

(I was the engineer embedded in a data science team and I could never get some of the members to be disciplined about how they maintained their Python. Today it's close to being possible to make a system that "just works" but you often find the people who built the distribution were vandals who configure the character encoding in some strange way that makes the system work OK in development but when you really run the script against an 80GB file it blows up because some incorrectly coded text gets passed to print by a library you don't control.)

I like Ubuntu precisely because I don't have to think about it. I was piling up a backlog of problems that I didn't have easy solutions for with Fedora and one day I installed Ubuntu and... it just worked! I'm likely to stay with Ubuntu as long as that's the case and move on when it isn't, that's the basis for my "loyalty."

As an open-source developer it's unimaginable that I'm going to make package files for a large number of distributions: I might make one for the one I use, but unless I have volunteers to do it for me there are too many distros out there for me to be bothered.

Abstractions always leak somehow. For example at work we had specific OS related python issues (dependent libraries to vizualize and save plotly graphics) despite everyone using conda to set up the python environment.

After a year of using it heavily I came to see conda as more a problem than a solution. For one thing, compressing the files with bzip made installations of large packages really slow. Then there was the time I found that things were breaking all the time because the prima donna data scientists were still doing

   pip install --user

which was breaking all of their conda environments. (Granted it's a problem that affects normal virtualenvs but it was one of many of the real problems that conda left unaddressed.)

The one thing I liked about conda was that it could install optimized versions of libraries like numpy but really the right answer for that is that you should be able to tell the package solver that "numpy-mkl" satisfies "numpy". It was definitely a blast to make conda packages for different versions of the NVIDIA drivers (100% userspace libs!) so I could run models written in various versions of Tensorflow without having to fight with NVIDIA's installers... Even if it took way too long to decompress the bzip files. It was a shame that conda wasn't given permission to do the same because it would have been a real selling point.

>I'd say that Linux is irrelevant..

>I was piling up a backlog of problems that I didn't have easy solutions for with Fedora and one day I installed Ubuntu and... it just worked!

I'm lost completely, completely different distros.

Until there is something unified that satisfies everyone (never), there will be distributions (forks). People will try solve the same problem in different ways from what they consider more important. Distributions are a way of avoiding conflict, providing choice to the communities, and allowing the best solutions to develop and eventually prevail

No user needs to wait for 100% of someone else's problems solved

Even if you unified the packaging which seems impossible as there will always be someone that thinks they know better to come up with a new one, probably lacking something. There would be other differences technical and ideological. Some people want fast, others stable, others secure...

* Server/work/gaming * Systemd/OpenRC/Sheppard/... * Frequently updated/stable * Prettier/functional * Batteries built-in/fully customizable * Traditional/innovative (guix/nixos)

I would first trust Debian's distribution of Docker than Docker's itself

Even something closed like Windows has distributions, Ghost spectre superlite/compact, Ameliorated, LTSC, home, pro, server... And MS are now creating their own package distribution competing with Chocolatey and everyone else...

I find it personally amusing that the author is/was a Gentoo developer. Since 1995 I've played with most distros, and used 2 or 3 or so (deb based). The only distro I repeatedly gave up on during installation was Gentoo. This is probably a measure of my incompetance, but highlights, IMHO, why multiple distros existing is important.

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