> had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year.
This is indeed a problem now that google search is next to useless. And AI further
degrading the quality.
I work around it to some extent by keeping my local knowledge base up to
date, as much as that is possible; and using a ton of scripts that help me do
things. That works. I am also efficient. But some projects are simply underdocumented. A random example is, in the ruby ecosystem, rack. Have a look
here:
Yes, you can jump to the individual documentation of the classes, but does that really explain anything? It next to tells you nothing at all about anything about rack.
If you are new to ruby, would you waste any time with such a project? Yes, rack is useful; yes, many people don't use it directly but may use sinatra, rails and so forth, I get it. But this is not the point. The point is whether the documentation is good or bad. And that is not the only example. See ruby-webassembly. Ruby-opal. Numerous more projects (I won't even mention the abandoned gems, but this is of course a problem every language faces, some code will become outdated as maintainers disappear.)
So this is really nothing unique to Linux. I bet on BSD you will also find ... a lack of documentation. Probably even more as so few blog about BSD. OpenBSD claims it has great documentation. Well, if I look at what they have, and look at Arch or Gentoo wiki, then sorry but the BSDs don't understand the problem domain.
It really is a general problem. Documentation is simply too crap in general, with a few exceptions.
> if the team behind this OS puts this much care into its documentation, imagine how solid the system itself must be.
Meh. FreeBSD documentation can barely called the stand-out role model here either. Not sure what the BSD folks think about that.
> I realized almost immediately that GNU/Linux and FreeBSD were so similar they were completely different.
Not really.
There are some differences but I found they are very similar in their respective niche.
Unfortunately my finding convinced me that Linux is the better choice for my use cases. This ranges from e. g. LFS/BLFS to 500 out of top 500 supercomputers running Linux. Sure, I am not in that use case of having a supercomputer, but the point is about quality. Linux is like chaotic quality. Messy. But it works. New Jersey model versus [insert any high quality here]. https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
> Not only that: Linux would overheat and produce unpredictable results - errors, sudden shutdowns, fans screaming even after compilation finished.
Well, hardware plays a big factor, I get it. I have issues with some nvidia cards, but other cards worked fine on the same computer. But this apocalypse scenario he writes about ... that's rubbish nonsense. Linux works. For the most part - depending on the hardware. But mostly it really works.
> I could read my email in mutt while compiling, something that was practically impossible on Linux
Ok sorry, I stopped reading there. My current computer was fairly cheap; I deliberately put in 64GB RAM (before the insane AI-driven cost increases) and that
computer works super-fast. I compile almost everything from source. I have no real issue with anything being too slow; admittedly a few things take quite a bit of compile-power, e. g. LLVM, or qt - compiling that from source takes a while, yes, even on a fast computer. But nah, the attempt to claim how FreeBSD is so much faster than Linux is, that's simply not factual. It is rubbish nonsense. Note that OpenBSD and NetBSD folks never write such strangeness. What's wrong with the FreeBSD guys?
Just one small note: those experiences are from 2002 and I was writing about my first experience when running it on my Sony Vaio.
Running on a modern 64Gb Ram hardware is a totally different experience, 24 years later
> The Arch Wiki it's a joke as it gets obsolete with every major upgrade
I find this claim hilarious because well, arch doesnt have the concept of major upgrades. And rather their documentation is some of the fastest to cover relevant changes with regards to users' needs in software.
Can you find some obsolete bits here or there? Sure, but they're almost always visually flagged as OoD and disputed until consensus is certain rather than immediately yeeted.
Cohesiveness. Gnome was born out from GNU and today it's just RedHatware, and overtime you will only get a RedHat/Flatpak/Wayland OS with no alternatives but brainless Pacman repacks over and over as they will provide near nothing against some Fedora Silverblue install. And, yes, overtime all Fedoras will be Silverblue rebases with different desktops, toolbox + RPMs for concurrent development environments (if any, as Flatpak would supersede it) and most customizations will be over. Kinda like a crappiffied NT clone with MSI's/WIM images but from IBM. Even worse, because MS and Icaza has been making GNU/Linux almost like a MS testbed for different C#, networking, io scheduling, performance tests, usability on tactile input and so on. Yes, it looks like a propotype OS more than a final product to freely thinker with.
Meanwhile, the true spirit of GNU won't be at GNU+Linux as they are becoming aware of what's Linux all about today. GNU+Lisp lovers would support their own desktop and packing layer and Hurd maybe running Linux kernel drivers (the libre ones) on top free from IBM/Microsoft hands.
Unix? Most people will move on from BSD's and maybe they will be fed up as FreeBSD and NetBSD are just stacking Linux layers over and over.
OpenBSD users are die hard, staunch developers and thus they will last for longer, but I won't be surprised if they somehow adapted the plan9 namespaces into OpenBSD well instead of the GNU/Linux implementations. And, who knows, as POSIX won't matter a lot in a near future, maybe they would break it for the good and even simplify it, borrowing 9front ways into OpenBSD. I'm talking about 10-15 years from now, of course.
Most Unix diehard hackers will be at 9front today because of the ease of thinkering, simplicity, rc+rio vs all the POSIX+FDo cruft and so on. It's in the docs, /sys/doc/ and 'man intro' covers nearly everything.
Don't expect i3, X, Wayland, anime setups a la /r/unixporn or h4ck3r ones. It's more like a gray, dull whiteboard, it's up to you to build your own path. Learn rc, Plan9 C, even Go if you want, just don't ask for crappy ports with SDL2, try the native tools and emulators first.
Make games/snes faster. Write mappers for games/nes, add search support for page(1).
PD: don't use LLM's unless you want to be kicked out fast. We all know when an LLM it's writting both your code and speech and you will be known as a dumb useless idiot forever.
> GNU+Lisp lovers would support their own desktop and packing layer and Hurd maybe running Linux kernel drivers (the libre ones) on top free from IBM/Microsoft hands.
Then why DON'T they? Probably because in most cases they have more holier-than-thou attitude than actual technical chops. Otherwise it'd be done and dusted by now, and this imaginary 0.01% community would have taken the GNU/Linux world by storm! Instead of shitposting on HN about how inadequate the major Linux distros (which are being used in Enterprise all over the world _as well as_ everyone's personal pet projects) are.
They are basically helping Hurd and there already is an instalable Guix image.
GNU+Linux was just a temporarary patch and it shows.
>This is comedy gold
Ok, where's the Unix support from Ken, Ritchie and so? Are you aware that most of research on that area flew away to Plan9 and Inferno being fed up of X11, virtual terminals from the 70's (rio+rc it's far superior), ioctl's, a hard as hell network stack, POSIX, a shell where you have both aliases and functions?
The list of quirks it's huge. Plan9 tried to solve everything you read in Unix Haters Handbook. walk(1) + grep(1) solved the complexity of find(1).
No one it's bound to terminal emulators where the VT100 frames break cut and paste. You don't have to write 20 lines of code just to start a connection against X or a socket. Yet people praised that obsolete technology.
It's madness.
Everyone tought the same about DOS and Win9x vs Windows 2000 and XP. Where is DOS now? On legacy industry machines and hobbyist Freedos Machines. No one cares about Win9x anymore except for retrogaming. Most of the people working for the Win32 API migrated to C# for a good chunk of custom appliances for companies, leaving out complex low-level C++ code for game engines, drivers and the like.
Think whatever you want, but Unix compared to the clean Plan9/9front design it's like praising the Windows ME disaster when the NT based OSes are many more times more advanced.
Entreprise world? People are getting fed up of containers and tons of dependencies for NPM, JS_change_of_the_day, tons of unoptimized setups just spawning new machines in a cloud grid over and over and the like making most of the efforts today focused on deploying technologies instead of technologies themselves which are the ones doing the actual work there.
Icaza hasn't been involved in the GNU/Linux space for years iirc, even if he has it's been limited. Also, what the fuck are you going on about? for the record, I also don't like the current direction of the standard "Linux" desktop but also am not schizoposting about it
Also, let's pray that's the future for GNU because I think the hurd is pretty darn cool
More like schizoposting, I'm just watching what RHOS it's becoming into, some weird NT/Solaris hybrid with a non X11 layer.
And, yes, Hurd with Guix it's where the potential of reproducible distros lies on. True separate services, namespaces, non-root perms to mount both local and remote FS' (no FUSE needed) and so on.
This is closer to what RMS dreamt about. Hurd was about to recreate Unix but giving the users almost full rights without compromising the systems' security. And, yes, I know OG Emacs and ITS had no permissions at all and it was a 'free for all OS', but times changed.
With 9front and namespaces/separate servers you get a similar environment but even more modular.
This is indeed a problem now that google search is next to useless. And AI further degrading the quality.
I work around it to some extent by keeping my local knowledge base up to date, as much as that is possible; and using a ton of scripts that help me do things. That works. I am also efficient. But some projects are simply underdocumented. A random example is, in the ruby ecosystem, rack. Have a look here:
https://github.com/rack/rack
Now find the documentation ... try it.
You may find it:
https://rack.github.io/rack/
Linked from the github page.
Well, have a look at it.
Remain patient.
Now as you have looked at it ... tell me if someone is troll-roflcopter-joking you.
https://rack.github.io/rack/main/index.html
Yes, you can jump to the individual documentation of the classes, but does that really explain anything? It next to tells you nothing at all about anything about rack.
If you are new to ruby, would you waste any time with such a project? Yes, rack is useful; yes, many people don't use it directly but may use sinatra, rails and so forth, I get it. But this is not the point. The point is whether the documentation is good or bad. And that is not the only example. See ruby-webassembly. Ruby-opal. Numerous more projects (I won't even mention the abandoned gems, but this is of course a problem every language faces, some code will become outdated as maintainers disappear.)
So this is really nothing unique to Linux. I bet on BSD you will also find ... a lack of documentation. Probably even more as so few blog about BSD. OpenBSD claims it has great documentation. Well, if I look at what they have, and look at Arch or Gentoo wiki, then sorry but the BSDs don't understand the problem domain.
It really is a general problem. Documentation is simply too crap in general, with a few exceptions.
> if the team behind this OS puts this much care into its documentation, imagine how solid the system itself must be.
Meh. FreeBSD documentation can barely called the stand-out role model here either. Not sure what the BSD folks think about that.
> I realized almost immediately that GNU/Linux and FreeBSD were so similar they were completely different.
Not really.
There are some differences but I found they are very similar in their respective niche.
Unfortunately my finding convinced me that Linux is the better choice for my use cases. This ranges from e. g. LFS/BLFS to 500 out of top 500 supercomputers running Linux. Sure, I am not in that use case of having a supercomputer, but the point is about quality. Linux is like chaotic quality. Messy. But it works. New Jersey model versus [insert any high quality here]. https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
> Not only that: Linux would overheat and produce unpredictable results - errors, sudden shutdowns, fans screaming even after compilation finished.
Well, hardware plays a big factor, I get it. I have issues with some nvidia cards, but other cards worked fine on the same computer. But this apocalypse scenario he writes about ... that's rubbish nonsense. Linux works. For the most part - depending on the hardware. But mostly it really works.
> I could read my email in mutt while compiling, something that was practically impossible on Linux
Ok sorry, I stopped reading there. My current computer was fairly cheap; I deliberately put in 64GB RAM (before the insane AI-driven cost increases) and that computer works super-fast. I compile almost everything from source. I have no real issue with anything being too slow; admittedly a few things take quite a bit of compile-power, e. g. LLVM, or qt - compiling that from source takes a while, yes, even on a fast computer. But nah, the attempt to claim how FreeBSD is so much faster than Linux is, that's simply not factual. It is rubbish nonsense. Note that OpenBSD and NetBSD folks never write such strangeness. What's wrong with the FreeBSD guys?