SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 23, 2010 22:52 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
In reply to: SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure by drag
Parent article: SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

> * Currently; If you do not need 64bit compatibility now you will probably
> want to install only 32bit binaries. However if in the future you run into
> software that requires 64bit compatibility. With the status quo it would
> require you to re-install the OS

When you get a new computer, normally you reinstall the OS and copy over your /home directory. For all but a few highly technical users, this is the norm. Windows even has a special "feature" called Windows Genuine Advantage that forces you to reinstall the OS when the hardware has changed. You *cannot* use your previous install.

Anyway, running a Linux installer and then doing some apt-get only takes an hour or two.

> * Application developers (both OSS and otherwise) can devote their time
> more efficiently to meet the needs of their users and can treat 64bit
> compatibility as a optional feature that they can support when it's
> appropriate for them rather then being forced to move to 64bit as
> dictated by Linux OS design limitations.

FATELF has nothing to do with whether software is 64-bit clean. If some doofus is assuming that sizeof(long) == 4, FATELF is not going to ride to the rescue. (Full disclosure: sometimes that doofus has been me in the past.)

> He would of not spent all this time and effort into implementing FatElf if
> it did not solve a severe issue for him.

I can't think of even a single issue that FATELF "solves," except maybe to allow people distributing closed-source binaries to have one download link rather than two. In another 3 or 4 years, 32-bit desktop systems will be a historical curiosity, like dot-matrix printers or commodore 64s, and we will be glad we didn't put some kind of confusing and complicated binary-level compatibility system into the kernel.

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 0:25 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> Windows even has a special "feature" called Windows Genuine Advantage that forces you to reinstall the OS when the hardware has changed. You *cannot* use your previous install.

Windows sucks in a lot of ways, but Windows sucking has nothing to do with Linux sucking also. You can improve Linux and make it more easy to use without giving a crap what anybody in Redmond is doing.

If I am your plumber and you pay me money to fix your plumbing and I do a really shitty job at fixing it.. and you complain to me about it to me... does it comfort you when I tell you that whenever your neighbor washes his dishes that the basement floods? Does it make your plumbing better knowing that somebody else has it worse then you?

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 12:07 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (4 responses)

>When you get a new computer, normally you reinstall the OS and copy over your /home directory. For all but a few highly technical users, this is the norm. Windows even has a special "feature" called Windows Genuine Advantage that forces you to reinstall the OS when the hardware has changed. You *cannot* use your previous install.

I know FUD is the order of the day here at LWN, but this has gone beyond that point and I feel the need to call it:

You are a liar.

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 25, 2010 8:26 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I'm confused. FUD is the order of the day?

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 27, 2010 12:12 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, to be charitable, WGA is an appalling intentionally-user-hostile mess that MS keep very much underdocumented, so it is reasonable to believe that this is what WGA does without being a liar. One could simply be mistaken.

(Certainly when WGA fires, it does make it *appear* that you have to reinstall the OS, because it demands that you pay MS a sum of money equivalent to a new OS install. But, no, they don't give you a new OS for that. You pay piles of cash and get a key back instead, which makes your OS work again -- until you have the temerity to change too much hardware at once; the scoring system used to determine which hardware is 'too much' is documented, but not by Microsoft.)

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 28, 2010 10:03 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

For the record, my experience of WGA is as follows:

I've never actually *seen* WGA complain about a hardware change; the only times I've ever seen it are when reinstalling on exactly the same hardware (eg 3 times in a row because of a problem with slipstreaming drivers).

In principal though, if you change more than a few items of hardware at once (obviously this would include transplanting the disk into another machine) or whenever you reinstall then Windows will ask to be reactivated. If you reactivate too many times over a short period, it will demand that you call the phone number to use automated phone activation. At some point it will escalate to non-automated phone activation where you actually speak to a person. This is the furthest I've ever seen it go, though I believe there's a further level where you speak to the person and you have to give them a plausible reason for why you've installed the same copy of Windows two dozen times in the last week. If you then can't persuade them, this would be the point where you have to pay for a new license.

This is obnoxious and hateful, to be sure, but it is entirely unlike the behaviour described. The half-truths and outright untruths directed at Windows from some parts of the open source community make it hard to maintain credibility when describing legitimate grievances or technical problems, and this undermines us all.

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 28, 2010 13:25 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well, that's quite different from my experience (it fired once and demanded I phone a number where a licensing goon tried to extract the cost of an entire Windows license from me despite my giving them a key: 'that key is no longer valid because WGA has fired', wtf?).

I suspect that WGA's behaviour (always ill-documented) has shifted over time, and that as soon as you hit humans on phone lines you become vulnerable to the varying behaviour of those humans. I suspect all the variability can be explained away that way.

Still, give me free software any day. No irritating license enforcer and hackability both.

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 12:28 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

Windows does make it hard to re-use an existing installation on new hardware, but it is certainly possible. Enterprises do this every day, and some backup tools make it possible to restore Windows partition images onto arbitrary hardware, including virtual machines.

Linux is much better at this generally, but this ability is not unique to Linux.

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 17:26 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (2 responses)

> When you get a new computer, normally you reinstall the OS and copy over
> your /home directory.

And if you use it for anything beyond office/Web surfing, you configure the system for a few days afterwards... (Except if you have a professional setup with some configuration management behind it, which the target group of this proposal most probably doesn't have.)

> Windows even has a special "feature" called Windows Genuine Advantage
> that forces you to reinstall the OS when the hardware has changed. You
> *cannot* use your previous install.

OK, that shows that you are not a professional. This is bullshit, plain and simple: For private and SOHO users, WGA may trigger reactivation, but no reinstall. (Enterprise-class users use deployment tools anyhow and do not come in such a situation.)

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 19:04 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

> OK, that shows that you are not a professional. This is bullshit, plain
> and simple: For private and SOHO users, WGA may trigger reactivation, but
> no reinstall. (Enterprise-class users use deployment tools anyhow and do
> not come in such a situation.)

Thank you for the correction. I do not use Windows at work. It's not even installed on my work machine. So I'm not familiar with enterprise deployment tools for Windows. I wasn't trying to spread FUD-- just genuinely did not know there was a way around WGA in this case.

However, the point I was trying to make is that most home users expect that new computer == new OS install. Some people in this thread have been claiming that Linux distributions need to support moving a hard disk between 32 and 64 bit machines in order to be a serious contender for desktop operation system. (And they're unhappy with the obvious solution of using 32-bit everywhere.)

I do not think that most home users, especially nontechnical ones, are aware that this is even possible with Windows. I certainly don't think they would view it as a reason not to switch.

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 19:50 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

It is much simpler than that: Very few people do move disks from one computer to the next. And those who do have the technical savvy to handle any resulting mess.