Sigh, not seeing the forest…
Sigh, not seeing the forest…
Posted Aug 20, 2024 8:54 UTC (Tue) by gspr (subscriber, #91542)In reply to: Sigh, not seeing the forest… by Vorpal
Parent article: FreeBSD considers Rust in the base system
I work in research. I need my computer for that. I do *like* maintaining computer systems (that is, for example why I participate in the Debian project as a DD). However, the older I get, the less time I have for it. So then, in order to be able to do my work, I need my equipment to be *predictable* when I start the day. It's not really relevant whether the latest and greatest breaks or not (my younger self definitely didn't experience much breakage at all when living like that), it's more about whether things change from under me. Can I start exactly where I left off yesterday, or do I need to adapt to the world having changed?
The world upending completely every two years or so feels like just about the right pace for me. A one year cycle would be OK too. The main point is that I've come to love and appreciate the stability(*) of classical, slow-cadence, distro releases (and all the software they ship). I use the word stability in a very Debian-y sense here: not stable as in does-not-crash, but rather stable as in does-not-change(-for-good-or-for-bad).
So I guess that makes me a weirdo who loves hippest programming language in town *and* simultaneously the good old ways of classical distros. (I'm even a weirdo who'd love to see something like ABI stability and dynamic linking in Rust, but that of course faces many technical hurdles.)
Posted Aug 20, 2024 8:57 UTC (Tue)
by gspr (subscriber, #91542)
[Link]
Posted Aug 20, 2024 9:16 UTC (Tue)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (6 responses)
But are you sure it's because that's how older people feel or because that's the only alternative available? I know lots of older people who have got Chromebooks or Chromeboxes for them. And that thing updates itself every 6 weeks. Most of these users are pretty happy. The trick is, of course, that they don't ever need to know or care that it updates itself. Yes. That's what elders violently assert they want but what they actually need is, most likely, stable as in does-not-crash. Yearly Android and iOS releases invariably lead to more complaints than every 6 weeks Chrome and ChromeOS releases. People tolerate certain amount of breakage and certain amount of instability. They are not robots. The trick is to reduce that amount below certain threshold. And not to provide LTS releases. Of course it only works if you don't go and break things just because it's new release and you feel you have the right to do that, but change things slowly and gradually. But that actually happens pretty much automatically in the “use the latest version of every crate, or bust”: major breakage is confined to major, semver incompatible, releases, minor releases need, at most two or three lines of code changed (in places where you used something explicitly unsupported, usually).
Posted Aug 20, 2024 10:45 UTC (Tue)
by gspr (subscriber, #91542)
[Link] (1 responses)
> But are you sure it's because that's how older people feel or because that's the only alternative available?
Yes. I'm the "older person" in my own anecdote. I'm not very old, but older than I was a decade ago when I very much enjoyed having the latest version of everything. I can't say for sure whether my change in attitude comes from age. But I guess that's not really all that important – what's important is the very real change in attitude.
Posted Aug 20, 2024 11:14 UTC (Tue)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
So you have never tested the approach that you are criticising from what I can see. Rust approach is not to push disruptive changes on you, but to have few versions available: one that is only getting fixes and is backward-compatible and one that is getting new features. You are expected to always pick the bugfixes but only upgrade to next major version when you have time. In practice that's closer to Android model than to LTS or Debian testing.
Posted Aug 20, 2024 14:10 UTC (Tue)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (3 responses)
> Yes. That's what elders violently assert they want but what they actually need is, most likely, stable as in does-not-crash.
Why can't they BOTH be important? What matters is stability, as in "if it worked yesterday, it has to work THE SAME WAY today".
And yes I DO LIVE THIS EVERY DAY!
As someone providing support to a disabled wife, and her elderly parents, my BIGGEST problem is change. That's why we upgraded directly from XP to Windows 8.1. My wife pretty much didn't touch 7 or 8.0, because *I* couldn't face the pain of upgrading her, until her XP computer became pretty much unusable because of its age ...
Cheers,
Posted Aug 20, 2024 14:45 UTC (Tue)
by Vorpal (guest, #136011)
[Link] (2 responses)
As for getting both, that would be nice. Doesn't seem to happen in practice though.
Posted Aug 20, 2024 20:28 UTC (Tue)
by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
[Link]
I disk image systems before upgrades but most people can't do that.
I have little time and can't afford to spend 2 days tracking down why my updated GPU driver causes the main app I use to overlay fuzzy squares on everything. If it works I minimize change until I have some contingency time in hand. Since home desktop and laptop systems are effectively all unique (hw+sw+config combo) there's always a chance of mess.
Since my last Ubuntu update for example I'm having some frustrating issues with both Firefox and with Electron based apps experiencing periodic display glitches. No time to deep dive on it at the moment so I put up with it. Last update my laptop display server started freezing when unplugged form the external display. The one before that, it would periodically fail to suspend or resume... and this is pretty well supported hardware on a widely used distro. Admittedly the nVidia GPU is a significant part of the problem, one I'm usually able to avoid but wasn't with this model, but still.
The windows systems I have to maintain are even worse because they aggressively force significant updates. They're infrequently used so they're often pretty much disabled by immediately forced updates when I do boot them every few months...
Posted Aug 20, 2024 20:43 UTC (Tue)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Pretty painful. Not as bad as 7 or 8.0 would have been, however, I don't think. Precisely because 8.1 brought back a lot of the XP look-n-feel.
Mind you, it's now degenerated to "supporting anything is painful", as the in-laws can no longer cope with technology full stop, and my wife struggles all the time. That's why change is so painful now - if things don't change at least she stands a fighting chance of remembering what to do, if it changes - no chance!
Cheers,
Posted Aug 20, 2024 10:21 UTC (Tue)
by Vorpal (guest, #136011)
[Link]
And even on Arch most updates don't "upend the world". Yes, sometimes they do (KDE 6), but that is rare, because upstream doesn't release such major releases very often. I guess the question then is, do you want those 3-4 times per year (and only small and partial to specific subsystems) or do you want to accumulate a bunch and get them all in one go.
Really though, I can't think of any major update in the last year except for KDE 6. Yes, there been 2-3 updates where I hit minor bugs after updates too (quickly reported and quickly fixed, and none of the a showstopper), and one where I got a fairly annoying bug (Bluetooth defaulted to off in the login manager, easy to fix in the config file once I figured that out, and on a laptop it is an inconvenience not a show stopper).
Sigh, not seeing the forest…
> The world upending completely every two years or so feels like just about the right pace for me. A one year cycle would be OK too.
Sigh, not seeing the forest…
Sigh, not seeing the forest…
> I'm not very old, but older than I was a decade ago when I very much enjoyed having the latest version of everything.
Sigh, not seeing the forest…
Sigh, not seeing the forest…
Wol
Sigh, not seeing the forest…
Sigh, not seeing the forest…
Sigh, not seeing the forest…
Wol
Sigh, not seeing the forest…