tycho garen

"Shared libraries are what breaks the system. I've been laboring under the impression, and I'm totally ok being wrong on this, that where we needed shared libraries to save memory and disk space 10 to 20 years ago, it's not really an issue now, who cares if there are three different copies of libxml or libsvg on your system? The benefit you get from shared libraries is approximately 4 megs, and I have a 4 gig system... Certianly this is the approach that Mozilla takes, as they statically compile GECKO into thunderbird/firefox/sunfire/etc, so that you run four copies of the rendering engine even for no good reason, except that they want to avoid breaking things if code assumes a different version of gecko. Or some such. And then you have the whole version conflicts if two apps need different versions of the shared library. And when you have to managing four different versions of libawesome, because each libawesome app uses a different version of the library, the benefits to dynamic..." - tycho garen

"I've not read a review of a modern UNIX operating system (like a linux distro) that has made the "finding software" is difficult argument, but I can definitely imagine how such an article would come about. The one thing that I imagine that I'm more prone to hearing is that finding equivalents to proprietary software for Linux is difficult, which is only sort of true. At least in so far as there are some very specific applications that people are used to that just don't exist for Linux yet. Interestingly, these are the same kinds of applications that don't exist for OS X either. I imagine that whatever erosion Apple is able to do of the Windows market share will be good for Linux in the long run, because once you teach people that they really don't need that old VisualBasic.NET app from 2001 anymore once... that case becomes easier the next time. I'm not sure that the whole App store model is a bad thing, I mean frustrating, because we've been doing it for a long time with great..." - tycho garen