Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 7:15 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
In reply to: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems by torquay
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

"And hence it's no wonder many people have moved to Mac OS X, which provides a refreshingly stable environment"

Sorry, but...

*doubles over laughing for several minutes*

I don't think there's yet been a Mac OS X release in which libedit has not been broken in one of several exciting ways. They change bundled libraries constantly, and often in non-BC ways. It's routine for major commercial software (think: Adobe Creative Suite) to break partially or fully a couple of OS X releases after the release of the package, so you just have to buy the new version. Their Cocoa APIs clearly aren't much more stable than their POSIX ones.

Then there's the system level stuff. Launchd was introduced abruptly, and simply broke all prior code that expected to get started on boot. (Sound familiar?). NetInfo was abruptly replaced by OpenDirectory and most things that used to be done with NetInfo stopped working, or had to be done in different (and usually undocumented) ways.

I had the pleasure of being a sysadmin who had to manage macs over the OS X 10.3 to 10.6 period, and I tell you, Fedora has nothing on the breakage Apple threw at us every release.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 7:21 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, also, the sudden switch from LLVM to GCC. Switching to bash as the default shell. Changing their CIFS client. Breaking AFP support repeatedly in every release (did you know network search over AFP used to work?).

About the only highly backward compatible platforms out there are the moribund ones (Solaris, AIX, etc); FreeBSD, which makes a fair bit of effort but still breaks things occasionally; and Windows, which suffers greatly because it's so backward compatible.

Part of why OS X is so successful is *because* it breaks stuff, so it's free to change.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 11:24 UTC (Tue) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]

Stop it, you're not supposed to respond with facts when someone praises Mac OS X, that's not how it works.

The things that get broken probably needed to break and you should be grateful for it, you worthless non-believer.