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No serious systems administrator is going full Gentoo on their entire setup. It's a waste of time and effort to do so.
Obviously the author knows they could compile Firefox themselves. It's not even that hard, you just need to download a whole bunch of dependencies to your machine and wait for half an hour. That's not how sysadmins people get their software, though.
Being an amateur who landed a job and being someone who is qualified for the title are not the same.
>> No serious systems administrator is going full Gentoo on their entire setup. It's a waste of time and effort to do so.
This is a total strawman argument, but I'll knock it down anyway. There are professionals who actually do use Gentoo on their local machine. The local machine (a laptop) doesn't do any compiling, there is a server that builds the packages.
I was actually using Gentoo myself for a couple years and all my packages were automatically built by a cluster of servers using distcc, so any build job was done with something like "make -j128"
Because I knew how to use Unix-like systems properly and having a dedicated build server, Gentoo didn't cost me any time, quite the opposite actually, because Gentoo is flexible with package versions and everything tends to just werk.
>> That's not how sysadmins people get their software, though.
For those of us contending with PowerPC and ARM, it is half of how we get our software, the other half is we have already automated the process and a cicd pipeline has built the software often before we as humans notice a new version is out.
The base system packages are exempt from the stipulation I posted above.
Come on, that's too harsh. We're not all Gentoo users, most sysadmins use packages provided by the distros.
There's also the issue of close-source software, that only supports certain distros and architectures.
Whether this is "harsh" or not doesn't change that it is true.
The range of ARM64 binaries in the various repositories has been increasing in the last years.
Just like in the Unix world of old before the rise of open source, many system administrators never compile any binary. And that is fine.
Given there's always been a chronic shortage of qualified and experienced technical staff, isn't the the "real" real-world problem here the raising of the barriers-to-entry for sysadmins jobs? I think most companies would rather employ someone who can at-least try to get something done rather than having no-one at all.
One of the reasons why "the cloud" is so popular among businesses today is because it frees them up from having to run their own systems and infrastructure (who needs a *nix sysadmin when the AWS and Azure portals let you do everything through a GUI?) - whereas I'm sure many (most?) of those same businesses would honestly prefer retaining possession and sovereignty over their data and applications (especiallly latency-sensitive stuff) - and we all lament how the cloud giveth and the cloud taketh-away - but here we are.
Compiling and making versioned, packages of them (for example, in /opt/corp/prod/lang/gcc/12.3.0/... ) means that there can be a known good set of tools independent of operating system version and when the latter is upgraded, users can still build their products using the same paths and versions.
This is before the widespread use of containers, but doesn't change the advantages of having a reliable set of installed tools where users are in control of what versions they use.
Hint: Chris Siebenmann has administered closed source Unices.
Another hint: Chris Siebenmann's posts to comp.unix.wizards can still be found.
If you quote only half of the sentence, it suddenly means something else! When used to attack it’s a variation of the venerable ‘straw man’ debate technique.
Nice if Mr Siebenmann made insightful comments on a Usenet group about Unix but that doesn’t mean his comments about ARM computers are indisputable.
How about you summarize the points in the blog post that you agree with?
What the author wrote objectively demonstrates a lack of essential skills and also a lack of temperament for what could be called a sys-admin, and therefore they are ultimately disqualified.