this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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That's exactly my experience.
I've been doing Linux since the early days when Slackware fitted a "few" floppy disks and you had to configure the low level CRT display timings on a text file to get X-windows to work, and through my career have used Linux abundantly, at some point even designing distributed high performance software systems on top of it for Investment Banks.
Nowadays I just don't have the patience to solve stupid problems that are only there because some moron decided that THEY are the ones that after 2 bloody decades of it working fine trully have the perfect way (the kind of dunning-krugger level software design expertise which is "oh so common" at the mid-point of one's software development career and regularly produces amongst others "yet another programming language were all the old lessons about efficiency of the whole software development cycle and maintenability have been forgotten") for something that's been done well enough for years, and decided to reinvent it, so now instead of one well integrated, well documented solution there are these pieces of masturbatory-"brilliance" barelly fitting together with documentation that doesn't even match it properly.
Just recently I got a ton of headaches merely getting language and keyboard configuration working properly in Armbian because there was zero explanation associated with the choices and their implications, thousands of combinations (99.99% of which are not used or even exists) of keyboard configurations were ordered alphabetically on almost-arbitrary names across 2 tables, with no emphasis on "commonly used" (clearly every user is supposed to be an expert on the ins and outs of keyboard layouts) and there were multiple tools, most of which didn't work (some immediatelly due to missing directories, others failing after a couple of minutes, others only affecting X) and whatever documentation was there (online and offline) didn't actually match.
(It's funny how the "genious" never seems to extend to creating good documentation or even proper integration testing)
Don't get me wrong: I see Software Architecture-level rookie mistakes all the time in the design of software systems, frameworks and libraries in the for-profit sector ("Hi Google!!!"), but they seem to actually more frequent in Open Source because the barrier for entry for reinventing the wheel (again!) is often just convincing a handful of people with an equally low level of expertise.
(anyways, rant over)