Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

[GreyGeek]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

+1

What caused me to switch to Linux in the first place was when I bought a new Sony VAIO desktop that came with Win95 preinstalled. It was so buggy that Sony was forced to install a "Medi-Kit" between the BIOS and Win95 in a vain attempt to trap Win95 problems and crashes and do a phantom restart (the same technique Microsoft employed with Win2K). After I installed RH 5.0 in dual boot that Sony hardware was as stable as a rock. I was stunned because I thought the problem was entirely hardware.

When I bought this Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E notebook, VISTA pre-installed, VISTA frequently "lost" the display panel. Replacing it with Kubuntu, that problem disappeared. In fact, this notebook and Kubuntu is the best hardware+OS combination I have ever used, except that for that last few months my CDROM is failing to properly burn CDs, but DVD burns are still gold. I have been weighing buying a new CDROM or a new laptop.

That written, I have noticed that this hardware cannot boot a verified Maverick or Natty LiveCD without hanging before the splash screen shows. I am going to try Oneiric when it goes gold. However, my plan is to reinstall from scratch when the next LTS goes gold.

[saurav]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

@charles052, @GreyGeek: This is what I have been talking about all along - regressions and errors that should not happen. It would have been a different matter if nothing had ever worked but it is not so - earlier versions of this very same software used to work, whereas current versions don't. I am a software developer so I understand that errors definitely can and do occur but I also understand that such serious ones should not make into mainstream software. Of course, you need to buy Linux-friendly hardware and Dell and IBM/Lenovo systems are by far the most compatible ones I've encountered, but you cannot always ensure that, and you (or at least I) cannot afford to replace existing hardware just because the latest versions of major distributions cause problems on it.

[dibl]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

I do think someday, there will be distros as close to perfect as we humans can make them.

Correct -- if we stop all hardware design and development today, and don't ever design any more new hardware

Experience teaches me that the software is forever chasing the hardware, and never quite catching the newest hardware.

That's my thought.

[saurav]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

I do think someday, there will be distros as close to perfect as we humans can make them.

Correct -- if we stop all hardware design and development today, and don't ever design any more new hardware

Experience teaches me that the software is forever chasing the hardware, and never quite catching the newest hardware.

That's my thought.

Perhaps it will be worthwhile if we can concentrate on getting our software to run correctly on existing hardware before worrying about what to do with the newest hardware.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

@charles052, @GreyGeek: This is what I have been talking about all along - regressions and errors that should not happen. It would have been a different matter if nothing had ever worked but it is not so - earlier versions of this very same software used to work, whereas current versions don't. ....

That my notebook is now over one computer generation old, and the fact that a CD has only 704Mb, something has to give somewhere. The distro developers cannot continue keeping drivers for older hardware, nor can driver developers continue keeping code for older equipment in their drivers. Torvolds and the kernel developers have the same problem. IF they kept everything they've used before in their code the bloat, cruft and crude would be enormous. And for what? Just to help the few who keep ancient hardware running as long as possible for what ever reason?

BTW, the failure of my notebook to boot Maverick and Natty has, I suspect, more to do with the CDROM anomaly I mentioned than to any putative "regression", which is the restoration of a coding error that was once removed from the code. In a project environment those errors usually arise because someone commited a code change to the version control system before they synced their local code base with the trunk, thus overwriting the patched code with the previous, unpatched code.

As a coder you should know that people are human. Mistakes happen. That's why ALL code from all vendors (Linux or Microsoft) include disclaimers that their code should never be used where lives depend on it. That kind of code is available only at great cost, as I've mentioned before with my shuttle launch code example.

[saurav]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

The distro developers cannot continue keeping drivers for older hardware, nor can driver developers continue keeping code for older equipment in their drivers.

But the whole problem is that the drivers for the old hardware are still present in the new distros and they cause problems, whereas earlier they didn't.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

I don't believe that assertion is true. However, all you have to do to prove it is to go to the source code repository for the driver of the device you claim doesn't work any more and show that the driver for that device has changed from when the device was working and now, when it is not. That would be the smoking gun. Version control software makes such a comparison trivial. In fact, all you need is read access to the repository, from which you can download the most recent version of the driver and the version of it when your device was working, and then use KDiff to compare them in the areas of the code that apply to your device.

[dibl]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

@suarev, you are a software developer, so you understand what can happen if a modified version is not 100% regression tested. Think about it -- what are the odds that any updated piece of hardware-related Linux software can possibly be 100% regression tested (i.e. on all hardware that it ever previously worked on). I'd say the odds are about zero out of 1,000,000.

[bsniadajewski]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

In a word , saurav, "No". Ther can't be a perfect distibution OS. Even if you install a clean Windows 7 on a machine you could have driver issues. You may have to go hunting for a driver for a piece of hardware that you had lying around that lacks a driver disc for your OS (It may have a driver CD for XP, not Vista or 7, much less Linux).

[saurav]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

I posted a reply that disappeared because KFN sometimes stops responding. Anyway, I was replying to GreyGeek's last message, quoted below, and it applies to dibl and bsniadajewski too.

I don't believe that assertion is true. However, all you have to do to prove it is to go to the source code repository for the driver of the device you claim doesn't work any more and show that the driver for that device has changed from when the device was working and now, when it is not. That would be the smoking gun. Version control software makes such a comparison trivial. In fact, all you need is read access to the repository, from which you can download the most recent version of the driver and the version of it when your device was working, and then use KDiff to compare them in the areas of the code that apply to your device.

Of course it has changed, I'm not claiming otherwise, but it is still catering to that old hardware it used to cater to. That is why I say that it can be made to work. When it was already operating the hardware perfectly, what happened to make it stop doing so?

[GreyGeek]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

In 2005 A friend showed me his one year old Gateway m675prr laptop. I liked it so much I bought one. I can't recall the distro I was running at the time but one reason why I bought it was because that distro ran on it perfectly. It failed miserably on mine. So did a couple other favorites of mine. The difference? His had version "A" on his chips, mine were version "B". I was running Linux on my desktop and had purchased the machine because I needed to use Windows for the tool I was going to use to write the fly-by-wire for the ag tractor I've mentioned in the past, and I needed to use the laptop in the cab of the tractor, something that would be tough to do with a desktop.

Time passed. I tried PC LinuxOS, which hadn't worked before, but did this time. His, which had run PCLinuxOS before, couldn't this time. One problem was that his video chip became legacy and the more recent distro included drivers for the newer versions of the chip, which included mine, but not his older version. Once we got a hold of the older driver his video worked again.

I gave that laptop to my 7 (at the time) year old grandson. Using the OS radeon driver everything else still works out of the box. Not bad for a 7 year old machine. (4GB and a 3.6Ghz dual thread CPU makes it usable, yet) IF they modify the OS radeon driver (which is what I think your bone of contention is) to slide the window of usability closer to the present, that driver will no longer work on that machine. But, it is rapidly becoming unusable. A driver for a row of vertical pixals has failed, leaving a permanent line on the screen.

[charles052]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

I'm not a software developer. I don't know nearly as much about computers as I thought I did when I first come to this forum. As I was thinking about building a new computer I tried looking up motherboards, thinking it'd be an easy task, but I was suddenly overcome with different types, different connections, different.. well, I'm sure you guys can guess. Face it, I'm a noob.

I'm an artist. Here's some of my work: http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryDetail.asp?GCat=5467

My perfect distro would have complete support for any graphics program that I need. I use GIMP all the time on my Linux computer which runs it very well. Under Windows XP, Vista, and 7, it crashed constantly under a heavy load. Everything seems to work relatively well under Kubuntu, though I do wish I could enable desktop effects, but I just don't think it's possible with this rig.

In the meantime, I look at the bright sides. I don't have any anti-virus or anti-spyware program on my computer and I can keep it running as long as I want. With windows, I had to reboot dang near everyday because I worked on it all the time putting it through quite a bit. Seems like Windows needs to 'take a breather' or something every now and then.

Most times, 'perfection' is simply a matter of perception. To me, my wife's computer runs 'perfectly'. But to someone else with different needs, it may be far from 'perfect'. Perfection in a human world is impossible, but I think it's something we should strive to achieve nevertheless.

As an artist, I'm not perfect, my work actually depends on the imperfections to make it stick out and make it more dynamic and pleasing to the eyes of it's beholder. An artistic piece loses quite a bit the more and more you try to make it perfect. There's a point where I have to just stop and let whatever I've put down on paper just be. Adding more and more can turn a masterpiece into a complete piece of junk. I'm betting the same can be said of these distros?

[GreyGeek]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

I'm an noobian artist!
I only learned enough to be able to draw Great White Sharks with my 5 year old grandson. His "You draw better than Dad, Grandpa!" is music to my ears! 8) When he was in his SpiderMan phase I tried to draw Spidy, but .... my 5 year old critic wasn't impressed either!


Your work art work is at a professional level. What do you use to draw lines with, using GIMP? The mouse? A Watcom Tablet?

[charles052]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

I'm an noobian artist!
I only learned enough to be able to draw Great White Sharks with my 5 year old grandson. His "You draw better than Dad, Grandpa!" is music to my ears! 8) When he was in his SpiderMan phase I tried to draw Spidy, but .... my 5 year old critic wasn't impressed either!


Your work art work is at a professional level. What do you use to draw lines with, using GIMP? The mouse? A Watcom Tablet?

Thanks for the compliments!

I don't use Gimp to draw, but rather to make the scans of my work look better and to do some small edits now and then. I can also use it to take a large art piece which is takes 2 11x17 pages and is taped together in the back, scan the pages separately, and put them back together.

Other artists use it to color and letter comic pages. It's literally the swiss army knife of art programs.

Thanks again!

[ardvark71]

Re: Can we ever have a perfect distro? A call to the community

The distro developers cannot continue keeping drivers for older hardware, nor can driver developers continue keeping code for older equipment in their drivers.

Hi GreyGeek...

Just as an idea, would it be possible within the Debian community (or perhaps just the Ubuntu based distributions,) that drivers and related software could be kept in a permanent repository that could either be made available upon installation of the OS or by installing a separate PPA key? I'm not sure how this process would work with drivers that require a recompilation of the kernel, but I think it might be a useful feature for those systems not requiring this extensive of a modification and could be installed easily through a CLI, using APT or through a package manager.

I'm thinking, in part, of the old Nvidia and ATI drivers for cards like the Riva TNT2 card and the Radeon 7200 that I used a few years ago with older versions of Ubuntu (5.10 and 6.04.)

Regards...