Fedora is really good though. I’ve daily driven Windows, MacOS and Linux, Fedora is by far the best developer experience I’ve had so far. But then again, I tend to setup my devbox quite spartan, so that it just works.
Does Fedora support ZFS (without building from source) yet? Filesystem snapshots is not something I'd ever give up on, and Btrfs still doesn't seem production-ready.
Also - I'm done distro-hopping. The problem is KDE/Gnome- KDE is aping Windows (badly), Gnome is aping macOS (also badly). I'd list all of the problems but it would take an essay.
I don’t know, it’s my workstation so everything is in Dropbox/Onedrive/Github/Gitlab, making the machine itself ephemeral… Come to think of it I should
probably get a NAS and mirror Dropbox/Onedrive onto, just in case.
Does Dropbox or Onedrive keep hourly+daily+weekly+monthly deduplicated snapshots of everything that's happened on your machine, that work without any network connection?
It's no substitute for backups (I use Borg), and syncing is good (I use Syncthing, I guess iCloud also counts). But snapshots should be ubiquitous at this point, just like having a "trash bin" was mainstream in 1995.
Well, I may be an oddball, but I never really find myself having the need for snapshots, I have a tendency to not really delete files. Once upon a time i recall Dropbox having versions?
I'm also confused when I see threads like this. For dev work I've yet to try a distro that didn't "just work". The only real friction I've run into is the tradeoff between stability versus package freshness but that's going to be a tradeoff with any software environment.
Well, I once got a notice from Hetzner, that I needed to either stop running or harden some random open service I wasn't aware of running on my dedi box (I may have forgotten to install a firewall...). If i recall correctly, they were bound by German law, to monitor their network for suspecious activity, and if the customers didn't comply, they could close down your box. Now, it was a while back, my memory is a bit fuzzy and I don't have the time to look through old emails. Consider this anecdata.
"Monitoring their network for suspicious activity" does not mean to scan ports.
It means they have to monitor if one of their hosted "boxes" is actually generating nasty traffic. Once detected, they have to inform the owner of the "box" that they have been pown, well, careful if the owner of the "box" is actually the mob...
And I can tell you, I get attacks/scans mostly from those "clouds", like I start to wonder if they are not "closing their eyes" on purpose because with their huge network resources it is wrecking "small hosting", or more "business" for them.
Maybe it’s not the engineers that need to grow up, but the indecisive product people incapable of sticking to their principles for more than a week at a time.
That statement may be a bit much, but working in organizations unable to, well, organize around ideas leads to the state we’re in today, where most developers has to run around like headless chickens and put out fires. There’s exceptions, but from my point of view they are pretty rare.
It's actually neither. Its the software leadership. Ideally the product people should know what they want and provide that in writing, because that is what they are getting (whether or not it's what they really want). The developers/engineers are responsible for building according to the requirements and constraints provided.
Somebody has to own that. Ownership is important because that's where risk and failure live, and somebody ultimately must make the adult decisions that drives the product forward. Software leadership own the process definitions and risk acceptance while project managers own the budget and process operations.
In software this is often tiny, so its easy to gloss over and get sloppy. Consider freeway construction though which deals with a project budget that can exceed $5-20 billion, physical inventory, hundreds of people on site providing labor, and much more. There is still engineering, product delivery, a customer, and such but the liability is greater, so the planning and ownership are more disciplined. The incentives are also greater. As a result planning and modeling become more important. Injuries and defects cost money and result in halted work, so you have to account for risks and personnel in your planning. When there is no liability and limited incentives people have no real motivation to take ownership.
Other industries solve for this with some combination of licensing and broker/agent model. Licensing solves two problems. First, it sets the minimally acceptable baseline to practice and second it defines a set of ethics that become more important than employer directives.
I've worked with what I consider to be true software engineers. They cared about the craft, about the quality of what they produced, and about the process to get there. But that team was broken up because it worked too slowly relative to less caring developers, and stuck too closely to established tech instead of shiny new things. Some of the people remained, but they were now just software developers, writing code to deliver features and meet deadlines, now counting down the days to retirement.
I've also seen quality focus conflated with architecture astronauts since both take more upfront time. When product requirements are vague, there's a tendency to design a more generalized system than strictly necessary. But not all slower speeds are for the same reason. Taking some time to think out how to meet current and immediately foreseeable needs is not the same as wasting time designing for all possibilities, but a lot of people don't seem to understand the difference. Also, sometimes you do have to go through a bit of overengineering just to learn the shape and boundaries of what you're doing.
Yes, yes, it’s “the product people.” Or “the managers.” Anyone but ourselves. If they would just stop changing requirements, we’d stop writing awful, buggy software. Not sure I really buy it. I’ve worked in software my whole life and I have never met any software engineering team who would magically have more discipline and rigor if only the managers went away. A team that cuts corners and shortchanges testing when the clock is ticking is likely also going to do that when the deadlines are more achievable. Attention to detail, measurement, thoroughness, an obsession with correctness… these are not environment specific things that come and go. They are traits of
individual developers. You either have them or you don’t, and a screaming, impatient “product guy” can’t take these things out of you.
I'll admit that companies can set up processes that encourage (or discourage) rigor, and I firmly believe you can train the yolo out of software engineers. So it's not hopeless. It is very helpful to be in a company that values these things.
It's an example of the kind of backwards compatibility WordPress needs to deal with the myriad of crazy content generated by people (and plugins!) over the years. Often this gets very chatty and very inefficient.
Besides backwards compatibility, this codebase grew like a jungle, with people just piling code on, not always with much forethought. Part of it's due to the limitations of PHP in the old days, and of course it's inherent with projects of this size, but there are varying degrees of messiness. WordPress is an example of a project that started out too messy and only became more messy over time.
Just to pile on: the WPDB class is another example of continued messiness. The first thing I do whenever I write a plugin, is to add a little database wrapper that just uses PHP PDO instead. Anything better than to deal with the hopeless, inefficient, inflexible mess that is WPDB. (To whoever wrote it: sorry mate!)
Yep that's true. It's impressively fast on my brand new 32GB HP Spectre though.
Side-rant: It's nuts how hard it is to find a good laptop that has 64G RAM, let alone "more than 64G" as you cite. I finally thought I found one in a Thinkpad X1 2-in-1, but then it just had terrible build quality, broken speakers (low rumbling sound, unfixable even after a repair and a replacement), badly working components (eg fingerprint reader) etc. I ended up returning it. The HP is a full 1000 euros cheaper (!), and it's better in every way (incl processor speed) except the smaller RAM. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
Hibernate is not just for laptops though. I have a workstation with 128G of memory, and it’s annoying that the file allocates the full 128G even though i may only be using like 32G. I mean SSD’s have become cheaper but still..
There was a dark time in Apple's lineup (2015-2020) when they ran hot, the keyboard was widely considered terrible, battery time was unimpressive, and the lack of ports forced everyone to carry half a dozen dongles everywhere... These times are gone.
> The HP is a full 1000 euros cheaper
Oh true, Macbooks do seem expensive, until you consider actual value. If "an actual computer" is the primary tool of your trade, I'm 100% convinced it's good ROI to invest in your own comfort/productivity/peace of mind.
To date, I have always use 16 GB RAM on laptops, and "hard work" is done on a remote server via SSH.
This also alleviates the problem of sync'ing between multople laptops, as I use both a MacBook Air (lighter + better mobility: wake-up, WiFi, handling media) and a Lenovo X1 (Linux environment for software development and research).
I think you’re right, and even though it scares me a lot seeing my portfoilio down like this, I still try to see it as an opportunity to buy at a discount. It means I have to hold onto some more liquid funds, but i think it can turn out to be well worth it if you’re long term.
