Linus attacks code, not people.

If I say “your code is garbage” would you really say I’m not attacking you? I don’t think most people would accept that. The CoC mentions being welcoming, inclusive, respectful, empathetic, not insulting or attacking people or being unprofessional. Linus violates all of those! Of the 10 bullet points there he violates 6 of them!!

IMO this is a big issue with CoCs. They give cowardly justification for arbitrary dictatorial actions. It’s much better to admit that it’s a dictatorship.

I agree with the rest of your comment - it’s clearly worth putting up with his arseholery given how important to the project he is.

Lol surely Linux can’t have a CoC or Linus would be out in seconds? I wonder if he gets an explicit exemption.

CAD, CAM, EDA, audio/video production (NLVEs, DAWs, synthesisers etc.).

There are open source options sometimes, but they are all faaar behind the commercial options. No fiscally sane business or government department would use them (unless they only need a small job, or are quite masochistic).

Windows will actually stop you from deleting Program Files.

Nobody is asking for idiot-proof, just mistake-resistant. It’s ok, most people don’t understand this point.

they would have had to intentionally push past warnings to force the uninstall

Go and learn some basics about UX. Two different very smart people made this mistake.

IIRC there are no warnings. It will just list gnome in the list of packages to uninstall that you often get when uninstalling things, and can easily ignore.

Again to reinforce the point because many people do not understand it. Just because it was possible to avoid the issue if you were careful does not mean that it is not an issue. People make mistakes. Seatbelts exist.

Because my current company is too cheap to buy Macs, and the project I work on is full of Docker and bash scripts and obscure EDA tools. Would be a nightmare on Windows. WSL is a possibility I suppose.

Do you have 10k Linux laptops though? The places where I worked saw issues like this for a significant fraction of the dozens of Linux laptops (most people used Macs). There’s no way you could scale that issue rate to 10k machines.

That would be incredibly dumb. There are entire fields where the FOSS is just hilariously behind proprietary software (or sometimes the only option). Do you want to cripple public institutions by cutting them off entirely from proprietary software?

So why does it work for other people with the same laptop and OS?

you are telling me they can’t do better than hitting subscribe on Office365?

Yes I am absolutely telling you that.

I don’t think that’s the reason. It works for other people.

Yeah except that uninstalling Python 2 is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do.

Why? I’ve worked in two companies where IT allows Linux as an option and people are constantly having issues (including me). And these are highly technical people. Two people who are not stupid managed to break their laptops by uninstalling Python 2 which Gnome depended on.

Yes that’s technically a UX issue, but there are plenty of good old bugs too, e.g. if you remove a VPN connection that a WiFi network autoconnects to then that WiFi network will entirely stop working with no error messages to speak of. Took me a long time to figure that out. Or how about the fact that 4k only works at 30fps over HDMI, but it works fine over DisplayPort or Thunderbolt3. The hardware fully supports it and it works for other people with the same OS and laptop. I never figured that out.

That’s just a taster… I almost never have issues like that on Windows or Mac.

Windows may cost more than “free” but the additional support costs for Linux are very far from free too.

Maybe something like Chromebooks makes sense if everything is in the cloud.

Not really. It will predict more vulgar output but that is fixed by fine tuning. It’s not going to “poison” it in any meaningful sense.

Wow the level of drama and anger here is crazy. I assume it was cathartic to write at least!

But you’d still be crazy to use it for either of those purposes, given how safety critical they are. I expect it would be more likely used in robots like Spot, or manufacturing robots.

It’s not too bad if you strictly enforce Pyright, Pylint and Black.

But I have yet to work with Python code other than my own that does that. So in practice you are right.

Ok that was maybe a bit unfair!

I think you’re being way too harsh.

1. His recommendations to disable debug info and PIC are not “bad”. He isn’t suggesting that should be the default. He actually only suggested that split debug info should be made the default on Linux which is a sensible suggestion.
2. There are gazillions of other posts talking about codegen-units, cranelift and so on. I don’t think we need a repeat (though he could have linked to them).

The focus on linking was because this post is introducing his liker project.

OP ignore this naysayer.

would not be considered bugs but maybe change requests.

That’s just playing with semantics. They are clearly bugs. They are literally called “defect reports”.

Without a spec how would you argue that a system/product is safe?

1. Lots of testing, including randomised testing and ideally formal verification.
2. Comprehensive test coverage - both code coverage (lines, branches) and functional coverage (hand written properties).
3. Functional safety features (ECC, redundancy, error reporting & recovery, etc.)
4. Engineering practices known to reduce the chance of bugs (strong static types, version control, CI & nightly tests, rigorous engineering processes - requirement tracking and so on, and yes ideally well written specifications for all the tools you are using).

There are many aspects to safety and it’s definitely a good idea to have a spec for a language, but it doesn’t automatically mean safety is impossible without it.

Software in itself cannot be safe or unsafe because without hardware it cannot do anything.

The nice thing about abstraction is that you can talk about software without considering the hardware, more or less. If one says “this software is safe”, it means it’s safe assuming it’s running on working hardware.

It doesn’t always hold up - sometimes the abstraction leaks, e.g. for things like spectre and rowhammer. And there are sometimes performance concerns. But it’s pretty good.