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< Long Term Servicing Conundrum

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~kyle

Well... it might be just a matter of perception, of course. It boils down to the fact that, when I started, things were simpler and now they're awfully complex.

• Administrating a system used to be about editing text files, processes with their pid, and services to start and stop via init scripts. Administration required root privileges. Today you've got services that wake up autonomously just be cause you hit a socket, dbus that opens up administrative operations to the unprivileged user, you can see processes in your namespace, but there are containers with their own namespace of processes, their network stack, their filesystem... and the tools became more complex accordingly.

• The classic thing was to have a distribution with packages, libraries were dynamic by best practice, and you could had a drop-in replacement just by 'apt upgrade'. Today this is still true, but alongside you've got software written with languages that can only do static blobs (e.g. Golang), software that brings its own package manager (e.g. Python), software that is distributed via containers (e.g. Flatpack), everyone carrying around a private copy of the universe, possibly with security vulnerabilities.

• We used to have X for graphical application, completely optional (type 'startx' at the tty). Now we've got X started from login managers. A screen/tmux session gets somewhat entangled with that, so a GUI crash manages to bring down your terminal multiplexer. And then X is obsolete, but Wayland is incomplete. And you can't use your fonts, because Pango devs decided what's best for you. And I won't get started on Electron...

• Gnome and Kde used to be simple and usable, while now both seem to me horribly bloated. (Which justifies my preference for desktop environments such as Mate or Xfce. I'm not afraid of some command line administration task, so I don't need much graphical assistance). But this point is much more subjective than the others (plus, there's always Mate and Trinity).

But hey, I'm not saying that everything is horrible. Linux is probably the best trade-off between {simplicity, privacy, ownership, knowledge} VS {hardware/vendor support, gaming}. The former you can probably get better with *BSD, while the latter you can get better with Windows and Mac. Well, for gaming, I honestly still run Wintendo on a dedicated gaming computer.

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