On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:28:03 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> On Windows, when
> installing stuff I used to always get messages like "this installer
> wants to overwrite the file C:\\windows\system\asdf1234.dll, proceed
> (y/n)?" -- which totally freaks me out.

I use windows basically every day, and I haven't seen that happen since the 90's.

> 
> Building from source, OTOH, tends to work pretty well, if you can get the thing to compile at all. (Thanks to apt-get, this is relatively painless nowadays, once you figure out which libraries are needed...

That last part is the real problem though. Typing "wget
http://blahblah && unzip blahblah && cd blahblah && ./configure && make
&& make install" may be easy(-ish), but not when you're collecting all
the libs (or worse: non-lib dependencies, which then leads you into
recursion), and the right versions of all, until the
sllloooowwww ./configure or make process finally quits bitching about
shit.

(And why the freak do I need to re-./configure for every single program that needs compiled? Shouldn't something in autotools already *know* my system details and not have to re-detect *everything* every single time? "Checking X...", "Checking Y...", "Is Z sane..."...? Why? Every other damn autotools-based project *already* checked those every time I compiled them! It's like opening my car door twenty thousand times to make sure "Yup...it's still a car!". If certain changes might go unnoticed then fine, give me a way to force a re-check if really needed.)

When I discover I need to build a linux program from source and can't just apt-get it or something, I usually just turn away and look for something else. Discovering an alternate program that *is* in the repo is faster and easier than playing "dependency scavenger hunt".

Before tools like apt-get/yum came around, I had actually sworn off Linux entirely, largely because of those sorts of problems (which were only *slightly* less painful with rpm/deb).

On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 06:37:49 +0200
"dusr" <dusr@d.usr> wrote:

> > Like I said, I've been a Linux user for a long time, and that's by choice! But I still envy a lot of what Windows gets right and still long for the good old days of DOS where it was just you, the hardware, and a little tiny helper library that was there if you needed it.
> 
> I've used debian from woody to squeeze, then I moved back to
> windows7.
> Windows is better.

Heh, I'm sort of the opposite. I've been using Windows from 3.11 through 7, and from Vista onward I've started to really hate Windows more and more (If I wanted to be running a Mac, I'd have gotten a Mac, not two versions of "New Windows: Apple-Envy Edition" followed by "Microsoft UI-Of-The-Month Club").

Meanwhile, I've been using Linux more and more for testing and servers, and I'm looking at switching my main OS over to...probably Debian 7, with wine and VirtualBox for the occasional things that don't come in Linux flavor. I just wish I could get a Linux file manager I liked.

On Saturday, 14 September 2013 at 05:54:10 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:28:03 -0700
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
>> 
>> On Windows, when
>> installing stuff I used to always get messages like "this installer
>> wants to overwrite the file C:\\windows\system\asdf1234.dll, proceed
>> (y/n)?" -- which totally freaks me out.
>
> I use windows basically every day, and I haven't seen that happen since
> the 90's.
>

1

>> 
>> Building from source, OTOH, tends to work pretty well, if you can get
>> the thing to compile at all. (Thanks to apt-get, this is relatively
>> painless nowadays, once you figure out which libraries are needed...
>
> That last part is the real problem though. Typing "wget
> http://blahblah && unzip blahblah && cd blahblah && ./configure && make
> && make install" may be easy(-ish), but not when you're collecting all
> the libs (or worse: non-lib dependencies, which then leads you into
> recursion), and the right versions of all, until the
> sllloooowwww ./configure or make process finally quits bitching about
> shit.
>

2

2 is just as true as 1.

On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 05:36:53AM +0200, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Saturday, 14 September 2013 at 02:59:49 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> >Unless you enjoy spending hours on end removing viruses from your system. :)
> 
> Meh, do you actually review the source of everything you compile? I betcha if I made a makefile
> 
> install:
>     root_this_box
>     actually_install
> 
> I could pwn hundreds of linux boxes before the many eyes even took a look at it.

If you were on Windows, I could pwn your box just by sending you an appropriately-crafted email and having Outlook automatically execute an untrusted script without your knowledge or permission, and by you not even needing to open the message, just seeing it in the preview pane. I'm reasonably confident that I'll get a lot more windows boxen than you could get linux boxen. ;-) There are a LOT more windows users who use Outlook without any clue about its security vulnerabilities, than linux users who know how to run make.

(But you do have a point about clueless linux users who run make as root without batting an eyelid. They deserve what they get, frankly.)


> (except i used spaces there instead of tabs. Thwarted by make's
> silly syntax once again!)

I hate make. It's an antiquated hack on top of a patch on top of a naïve implementation of a simple design stretched far, far beyond its original intentions. Do yourself a favor and use a *real* build system.  Like SCons, or tup. Or the many other alternatives out there.


T

-- 
My program has no bugs! Only unintentional features...

On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 20:49:03 -0700
Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:

> On 9/13/13 5:39 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> > On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 22:32:30 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >> Sure... wait, what?
> >
> > Download a random binary off the internet.
> 
> Nope :o).
> 

Meh, all the hip blackhats are doing browser drive-by exploits, session hijacking and specially-corrupted-data exploits. Trojans and exe-infection is, like, soooo 90's, dude.

But more seriously though, I run exes off the net all the time and I haven't dealt with those problems on my own Win computers in probably a decade. It just takes some common sense. Meanwhile, I've been shanghai'ed into "fix my computer!" duty from my Mom, my sister and my Dad all within the last two years - and they barely even know what a "program" or a "file" is, let alone how to download one and run it. (Seriously, I've watched both my parents on their computers - there's no freaking way those two would have been capable of downloading and running an installer even if the site gave dumbed-down "assume the user sets their coffee in the CD tray" instructions.)

On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 06:03:01AM +0200, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Saturday, 14 September 2013 at 02:56:52 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> >So then recompile after you do a distribution upgrade.
> 
> Of course there's ways around it, but talk about an enormous hassle.
> 
> >I'll be sure to look, but one bad thing doesn't mean everything's bad
> 
> Like I said, I've been a Linux user for a long time, and that's by choice! But I still envy a lot of what Windows gets right and still long for the good old days of DOS where it was just you, the hardware, and a little tiny helper library that was there if you needed it.

I remember those days too. :) But I dunno, IME, when Windows 3.1 came along, it had so many gratuitous limitations that I said to myself, this sucks! So now I can't have direct access to hardware in the name of "protection", and what do I get in return? Nothing but being straitjacketed into a system that can't even do what I want. So I stuck with DOS until Win95 came along, and it became pretty clear that the days of DOS are numbered. I hated Win95 just as much for the same reasons: the hood was welded shut in the name of "protection", but little protection was actually offered, and a lot of lack of functionality. I clung on to DOS until its dying days, then somebody suggested Linux. I wasn't too pleased to hear that either -- I had been using Solaris in my CS classes in college, and I wasn't particularly impressed with it. But I did decide to try it. I gave up after a while, 'cos of the sheer difficulty of actually installing a system that worked (this was in the days before linux installers existed.)

Some time later, as all hopes of DOS-style programming faded away, I decided to seriously look into finding a Linux distro that I could live with. I chose Debian. It was a bit of a challenge to get it to work -- this was before the days of apt-get. But when I finally did get it to work, I was actually quite pleased with it. It offered one thing that Windows and most of the other distros at the time offered: the ability to install a bare minimum system that could still function without *requiring* X11, and (the beginnings of) a sane package management system that doesn't suck -- I could, for example, specify that I *don't* want fvwm (which was all the rage at one point) installed by default, and the packaging system would actually take that and *work* with it instead of saying "you don't want the defaults? OK, then you're on your own, if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces", like most other distros were doing at the time. It allowed me to select a different default shell from bash without totally collapsing into a heap of mess, unlike some other distros that I tried, that simply assumed /bin/sh == /bin/bash.

Anyway, long story short, I found that while Linux, like any other modern OS, required sacrificing some flexibility -- you don't deal directly with the hardware anymore -- it also offered a lot in return: protection of programs from each other, so that X11 crashing (which was a frequent occurrence in those days) doesn't bring down the entire system, and typing the wrong command as a user won't delete system files. Customizability. The ability to reach inside the innards of the system and modify stuff. Personalize it to the point nobody else knows how to use the system. Sure, things weren't perfect. But at least you had the fighting chance to do something about it. Whereas on Windows, I had to sacrifice the same flexibility, yet what I get in return was a system that can be easily brought down by a misbehaving program, typing the wrong command(s) can delete system files and require a full reinstallation, a straitjacketed "you-have-to-use-a-GUI-or-else" design mentality that makes it impossible to customize things without literally *everything* breaking left right and center, and a hood that's welded shut 'cos obviously you, a puny user, aren't qualified to look under the hood, and sure as heck don't know how to *fix* anything the MS couldn't fix.

For all of its flaws, I still prefer the freedom of choice I get with Linux.  I never looked back ever since.


> >if you remember the days when you'd be listening to music but couldn't hear any sounds from sauerbraten
> 
> Actually, that's still the way things are on my system (there is the alsa stuff, but the OSS emulation actually works better. Get that.).... and over the years, I've come to see it as a feature!
> 
> See, I would keep one program running just to thwart random Flash crap from spewing noise. Now I use noscript, but still I've come to like locking the speakers with another program.

o_O What system *are* you using?? I've been using Debian's default ALSA installation for the last, oh, decade? -- and I've never had a problem with two (or more!) programs simultaneously producing sounds getting perfectly blended together without any one locking out the other. In fact, I've actually tried spawning 50-odd copies of mpg123 before, and it actually manages to blend ALL of the outputs without any sign of distortion. I'm honestly quite surprised you're having so much trouble with it. It's like your system was frozen in time in 1998 when these things were still being sorted out (judging by the fact you still use OSS), 'cos that was about the last time I remember having issues of this sort.

No wonder you're having issues that none of the rest of us linuxers experience, if you insist on using 15 y.o. software that hasn't been maintained for who knows how long. ;)


T

-- 
Why can't you just be a nonconformist like everyone else? -- YHL

On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:15:06 -0700
Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote:

> On Saturday, September 14, 2013 06:56:10 Paulo Pinto wrote:
> > Am 14.09.2013 00:06, schrieb Jonathan M Davis:
> > > .... The features that an IDE has that
> > > vim doesn't typically just aren't worth it. e.g. if I'm stuck
> > > doing Windows
> > > programming, about the most that I even do with VS is use the
> > > debugger. I even build from the command line rather than open the
> > > IDE.
> > > 
> > > Vim's learning curve is quite nasty, but I definitely think that it was worth it.
> > > 
> > > - Jonathan M Davis
> > 
> > You mean things like:
> > 
> > - Semantic refactoring
> > - WYSIWYG design of user interfaces
> > - code navigation, even across binary modules (call graph, derived
> > class, overridden methods, call sites, ...)
> > - graphical representation of code relationships
> > - UML design
> > - visual XML tooling
> > - background compilation showing where there are issues
> > - background static analysis while coding
> > - code completation with documentation popups
> > - integrate source code control with task management software to
> > track code changes to project tasks
> > - map failed unit tests to code lines
> > - ...

I find most of that stuff to be "nice, but not that big a deal" (and a few I just plain don't care at all). I used to be a big IDE guy, but I've done enough development on various immature platforms and ecosystems that I can get by just fine as long as I have:

- Basic editing that's solid, fast, robust
- Highlighting
- CLI compiler

I've had to debug things using as little as one LED. So printf debugging is perfectly comfortable to me, and I've gotten to the point where I even find it preferable to a full debugger in many cases.

The rest is just icing (or gravy if you prefer).

> 
> I honestly find almost all of that to be useless or nearly so. The only one that I'd actually be much interested in would be better code navigation (particularly the ability to hop to the definition of a function). And having poor code editing capabilities would hamper me quite a bit. So, for me, vim wins hands down.
> 

Yea, the basics of code editing are the real #1 thing. If I can't "be one with the cursor and text-edit control", so to speak, then no amount of extra features can make up for it. (Of course, for me that means *not* vi, although I just haven't cared enough to get through the learning curve - but that's just me.)

Am 14.09.2013 01:56, schrieb Jonathan M Davis:
> 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
>

Powershell

On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 02:14:49AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 06:37:49 +0200
> "dusr" <dusr@d.usr> wrote:
> 
> > > Like I said, I've been a Linux user for a long time, and that's by choice! But I still envy a lot of what Windows gets right and still long for the good old days of DOS where it was just you, the hardware, and a little tiny helper library that was there if you needed it.
> > 
> > I've used debian from woody to squeeze, then I moved back to windows7.  Windows is better.

To each his own, I guess. For me, I couldn't stand 5 minutes of using *any* version of Windows (unless putty was installed on it :-P).

The caveat, of course, is that I don't use what the "typical" user uses, like GTK or KDE or whatever it is that comes by default on Debian these days.  The first thing I do in the installer is to unselect all X11-related packages and do a minimal GUI-less install, then hand-install a bare bones version of X11, selecting the absolute minimum packages to be just enough to run ratpoison, and go on from there. So my experience is probably rather different from yours. :)


> Heh, I'm sort of the opposite. I've been using Windows from 3.11 through 7, and from Vista onward I've started to really hate Windows more and more (If I wanted to be running a Mac, I'd have gotten a Mac, not two versions of "New Windows: Apple-Envy Edition" followed by "Microsoft UI-Of-The-Month Club").
> 
> Meanwhile, I've been using Linux more and more for testing and servers, and I'm looking at switching my main OS over to...probably Debian 7, with wine and VirtualBox for the occasional things that don't come in Linux flavor. I just wish I could get a Linux file manager I liked.

A Linux file manager? You mean bash? ;-)

OK, OK, I kid. Bash does have its annoyances, I admit (my latest bash pet peeve is broken bash_completion scripts that break tab-completion so you can't autocomplete filenames anymore where a filename is actually expected).  What about midnight commander? The only file manager I could tolerate back in the old DOS days was Norton Commander, which MC was modelled after. You might like it. Maybe. (But I haven't really used it that much since I came to do things purely in the shell instead, as the shell can handle just about everything MC can, and much more. DOS was a cartoon caricature of what a *real* shell can do, by comparison, so NC was quite the relief from the suffering when using DOS. But on a full-fledged shell, MC kinda loses that necessity. So you may or may not find MC that much better after all. YMMV, caveat emptor, etc., apply.)

Or, failing that, you could write a killer file manager app in D, and we could take over the world. :-P


T

-- 
For every argument for something, there is always an equal and opposite argument against it. Debates don't give answers, only wounded or inflated egos.

Am 14.09.2013 08:14, schrieb Nick Sabalausky:
> On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 06:37:49 +0200
> "dusr" <dusr@d.usr> wrote:
>
>>> Like I said, I've been a Linux user for a long time, and that's
>>> by choice! But I still envy a lot of what Windows gets right
>>> and still long for the good old days of DOS where it was just
>>> you, the hardware, and a little tiny helper library that was
>>> there if you needed it.
>>
>> I've used debian from woody to squeeze, then I moved back to
>> windows7.
>> Windows is better.
>
> Heh, I'm sort of the opposite. I've been using Windows from 3.11
> through 7, and from Vista onward I've started to really hate Windows
> more and more (If I wanted to be running a Mac, I'd have gotten a
> Mac, not two versions of "New Windows: Apple-Envy Edition" followed by
> "Microsoft UI-Of-The-Month Club").
>
> Meanwhile, I've been using Linux more and more for testing and servers,
> and I'm looking at switching my main OS over to...probably Debian 7,
> with wine and VirtualBox for the occasional things that don't come in
> Linux flavor. I just wish I could get a Linux file manager I liked.
>

The main problem with Linux distributions, is that even in 2013, it won't work properly in laptops.

Wireless chipsets, battery use and graphic cards (specially hybrid like optimus) are still a problem.

Personally I only use Linux on servers, VMs, or laptops sold with Linux support.

As an example, last April, an Ubuntu update borked my wireless driver, because of religious FOSS. Ubuntu developers changed the binary broadcom driver, working flawlessly, for the open source one, which was still half done.

There is a discussion about it on their forums, if you want a link for it.

So nowadays I rather use systems for work, that value my up time.

--
Paulo