On Friday, September 13, 2013 23:55:53 Iain Buclaw wrote:
> On 13 September 2013 23:32, Andrei Alexandrescu
> 
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:
> > On 9/13/13 3:09 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> >> Actually, my biggest problem with linux is how terrible the operating system is compared to DOS and Windows. I'm not even kidding, the unix terminal debacle sucks (maybe good when you had various hardware, but it is weak next to what the PC hardware offers), the available system facilities suck (Win32 is plenty usable and reliably there! Even on linux, using a Windows .exe tends to work better than using a linux binary - exe's just work there thanks to wine, whereas linux binaries always have some incompatibility).
> > 
> > Sure... wait, what?
> > 
> > It's like I woke up and it's backward day :o).
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backwards_(Red_Dwarf_episode)
> 
> I too am confused. I'd say it is the complete opposite too (in my
> experience :-)

I guess that it's a matter of perspective. Personally, I find the Windows/DOS shell to be completely unusable and use git-bash when I'm forced to use Windows. Windows definitely has some things going for it (e.g. its graphics engine creams the horror that is X.org IMHO), but on the whole, I find that Linux is just way better for a power user like myself. Windows doesn't even come close to cutting it.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Friday, September 13, 2013 15:48:55 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 06:06:50PM -0400, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > Vim's learning curve is quite nasty, but I definitely think that it was worth it.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Yeah, I hated vi and all its ilk for the longest time. I used to rant about the counterintuitivity of modal editors all the time on online discussion boards, until one day I steeled myself to actually learn it, and now I wouldn't use anything else. I like the way Justin Whear describes it: it's not so much a set of keyboard shortcuts for common editing operations, as a *language* for describing editing operations. A language requires much more effort to learn than a set of shortcuts, but in the end, it's far more expressive and powerful.

I don't think that it was ever described quite that way to me, but the co- worker/mentor I had who was really into vim and got me to learn it did explain the importance of learning each of the individual commands so that you could then combine them rather than learning things like the fact that dd deleted a line or that yy copied an entire line.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Friday, September 13, 2013 22:24:19 Justin Whear wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 18:06:50 -0400, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > I don't actually use any of the GUI controls. It's just useful to have vim in a window that I can resize (you also get better color choices than in the shell).
> 
> Yeah, my .gvimrc is basically just turning off all the GUI elements, the very first thing I did when I started using it..

I should try that.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 19:48:18 UTC, Namespace wrote:
> Just out of interest.
>
> I use Sublime 2, Notepad++ and as IDE currently Mono-D. But I will try this evening VisualD.

i use vim or gVim depending where i am.

On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 22:32:30 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Sure... wait, what?

Download a random binary off the internet. Odds are, if it is an exe, it will work. Even if you're on linux, you can run it with wine.

If it is a linux binary, good luck. Even a relatively simple program like dmd can't be relied upon: on the CentOS box at one of my jobs, I had to build from source due to a libc incompatibility.

And if it is a gui program, whew, all bets are off! I even have programs on my desktop that worked last year, and segfault now. Apparently an unrelated update had an ABI incompatibility in gtk. Gimp still works (and works quite well), but qemu's new gtk gui segfaults, a video game emulator I have runs but the menu all of a sudden overlaps the game video, and abiword refuses to start.

These aren't even off the internet, these are things I compiled myself less than two years ago!


Contrast to Windows, where programs I wrote while using win98 still tend to work.



Then, get into features. Contrast the Windows support with the linux support in my terminal.d
https://github.com/adamdruppe/misc-stuff-including-D-programming-language-web-stuff/blob/master/terminal.d


The first several *hundred* lines are dealing with random incompatibilities in unix terminals, from keys sending different sequences (and, of course, the infamous nonsense in differentiating the user pressing the esc key from something like F1 or another input escape sequence) to dealing with random output rules. The KeyRelease event is never fired there, and the KeyPress for various keys doesn't actually work either, despite the actual PC hardware sending those codes.

And there's features not present either: determining the current color so you can get better contrast. Gotta depend on the user setting an environment variable. (You can't even use palette entry #3 and expect dark or light yellow depending on the bg which adjusts the whole system palette. Nope, it will happily put light yellow on a white background and you can't tell if it is doing that.) Oh, and the fad of semi-transparent terminal windows. Please, give me a break. But that's user silliness, not the OS, so I'll forgive it.

Anyway, you also can't resize the cursor well, say to indicate insert vs overstrike mode. The PC hardware supports it.... but Linux assumes you're on a random glass terminal, and accessing the actual capabilities of PC hardware is clunky at best.

(You could spin this as a benefit, "look, cross-hardware compatibility!" And that's great, it really is, but it could be done so much better with graceful degradation techniques, not saying "sorry PC users, you can't do that".)


And drawing, oh my. Long story short, coming from DOS or Windows to the glorious land of various buggy, incompatible vt100 emulators is such a shock.


Wanna talk about audio or GUIs, whether high performance or just asking for a consistent user experience to grab some basic data? Prepare to descend directly into hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200.



PS I've used exclusively Linux on my desktop for about a decade now. I like a *lot* about it, especially now that I have so many hacked up programs (custom taskbar, slightly modified Blackbox window manager, a hotkey listener, my own libraries, etc. etc. etc.).

But at the same time, using it for all this time after having so much fun in the DOS+Windows world has made me see a lot of faults. And many of them have gotten worse - what the hell is PulseAudio anyway?

On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 22:34:44 UTC, Justin Whear wrote:
> This is a distribution problem; I've stuck with Debian or Debian-based distros over the years and never had issues like this.

I've used them too... ever have a proprietary requirement that only works with, say, php 5.2, but only php 5.1 is available in the repo?

Or a custom built thing the company relies upon.... but no longer has the source, and their old server just died? Or, has the source, but it only compiles with one specific setup anyway.

I've had to deal with stuff like this several times, and the package manager fights me every step of the way.


Or, on my home computer, someone wrote something cool.... but of course they don't offer a package for my system. (At home, I use Slackware.) So it is time to build from source. Great, but then it is time to track down a hundred tiny libraries (seriously, a 10 kb library, why didn't you just include that in your own source?), of course matching the version too. What a hassle!


Hence my first comment: I prefer to just grab the Windows version and run it in wine. That usually just works.

On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 22:29:28 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> The only time I've actually had trouble with linux binaries is when there's a problem with libc upgrades

The biggest offender for my home computer is gtk and glib. libc can be painful too - especially with work computers that stick to a particular version in the name of stability (I don't blame them, updating software is an exercise in pain. Even when they don't outright break things, so often they've changed it, now it sucks.).

But all those glib whatevers really kill me.


> On Windows, when
> installing stuff I used to always get messages like "this installer

That's not such a problem anymore since Vista. The system does some magic rewrites so those naughty programs think they are writing to system folders, but are actually pretty isolated.

Still worries me on Linux though! "just run sudo make install", and trust you not to do anything wrong? Nope!


On both systems, I don't like installing programs. Whenever I can, I like to keep the application in its own folder and run it as my limited user account only (e.g., unzip dmd.zip, run ./dmd2/linux/bin32/dmd. it just worked! and any versions can live side by side! and it didn't overwrite anything else another program might rely on! WIN!)

> Having said that, though, linux *is* more geared to building from source than anything else

That'd be great if you didn't have to recreate the original author's environment on your computer, or wait seemingly forever for ./configure to run, then wait forever again for make to run, just to see if the program even does what you want it to do.

This is why my D programs usually just have a few files you can drop in. So I say "get my simpledisplay.d and color.d" and you don't have to install it, you don't have to download the same libraries I have, you just grab those two files and

dmd yourapp.d simpledisplay.d color.d

and boom, it *should* work. While I do have some other libs installed, various C headers and so forth, I think it is unreasonable to ask you, my user, to have all that too.


If modularity and DRY are at odds, I prefer to err on the side of fewer dependencies.

> but linux's customizability means

eh to an extent yes, but my custom window manager shouldn't mean your notepad program doesn't work. Maybe some special features won't be the same, but my preference in one location shouldn't break core functionality in another. There is a reasonable common denominator here - people don't customize their ELF loaders (much). They don't hack their kernels so the syscall numbers don't match. Those things actually work, so nobody really cares.

Why do people use other sound servers/modules or gui libraries? Because the default is broken. Not because they disagree, but because it is *broken*. So then everyone does their own fixes to work around it... and that leads to pain.

So it isn't end user customizability that cause the problem. It is mid-user patching a broken core.

> Isn't this thread already [OT]? ;-)

yeah but it wasn't meant to be a rant thread! oh well.

On 9/14/2013 4:48 AM, Namespace wrote:
> Just out of interest.
>
> I use Sublime 2, Notepad++ and as IDE currently Mono-D. But I will try
> this evening VisualD.

Sublime 3

On 9/13/2013 5:39 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> And drawing, oh my. Long story short, coming from DOS or Windows to the glorious
> land of various buggy, incompatible vt100 emulators is such a shock.

Yeah, I've thought about taking the tty/kbd code from ME and making a phobos module out of it. So many annoying problems that can be abstracted away.

On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 19:48:18 UTC, Namespace wrote:
> Just out of interest.
>
> I use Sublime 2, Notepad++ and as IDE currently Mono-D. But I will try this evening VisualD.

I find Mono-D to be very good now-a-days, particularly in regards to editing. There are some very annoying bugs like sometimes local variables not being detected, and numbers triggering code completion (the latter in particular *really* annoys me), but overall I find it to be a really nice editor. Comparing VisualD to Mono-D, I'd say Mono-D feels more C#-like and Visual D feels more C++-like. I haven't had a chance to try Visual D in a while though, since I'm using Linux at the moment.

For simple edits, I agree, Sublime Text is excellent. I replaced Notepad++ with it, and it's quite a bit nicer. It also supports high DPI natively with Sublime Text 3, so that's a nice plus on a 2880x1800 laptop.