David Gewirtz: I Feel For Ya, buddy, But You Brought This On Yourself

I'm skimming David Gewirtz' post, the one where he talks of going back to windows because Linux is too hard.

I'm really surprised to hear someone say this, and I can only suggest he's let the stress get the better of him and sees the greener grass on the other side.

And, as I said, he did this to himself.

How to Hate Linux:

1. Believe that random source code you pick up on the street is safer, cleaner and will install the very same as that which has been tuned and tweaked for your OS and tested for 6 months by professionals.
2. Mix distros.  See #1
3. Mix real third-part (3p) repositories and official ones.  See #1
4. Feel like you're entitled to this week's release of something.  See #1.  The difference between Windows, Apple and Linux is that in Linux apps you see the upstream code releases and feel some arrogant entitlement to them, like you're a dev and not just a user of that app.
5. embrace products with finicky dependencies and no real tracking thereof.  Perl.  Ruby too, I'm sure.
6. Don't consider your actions, and look for a scapegoat.

I want to say that David's new at this.  He didn't have a good change plan, he had no backout plan, he didn't test his upgrade.  It looks like he did no planning, but just rushed off a cowboy change without understanding and taking on the responsibility for it.  In no OS is this a smart course of action.  He talks of snapshots and didn't even make one.  But his credentials look good, even if he professes frustration at some basic syntax problems.  Then it gets weird:

Here’s where it gets crazy, though. I asked if they used this distro (CentOS, version 5.6) anywhere else in their organization.
“Yes,” I was told. “On lots of machines. But we don’t ever run updates. Once it’s installed, we leave it alone.”

All I can say is that co-lo facility needs to understand security a bit, and a certain former kernel-dev needs to understand why updates are updates.  I hope he outs the co-lo facility so I can ensure no one I know is using it any more.

The part that baffles me the most is that he wants to move over to windows.  Tests in our, um, "Bigger-than Large Scale Multi-site Enterprise Shop" showed that Linux runs the same three times as fast on the same hardware.  It's more secure, more stable and I can have my stuff only a day behind the 0-days vs up to a month behind them on that side of the fence -- because yes, I test my updates, set snapshots and prepare my back-out plans.  It's a no-brainer, David, but if you have a life and want to spend it on an extra-special relationship with your pager, car and cube, then that's totally up to you.

I admit:  I use windows.  I'm using it now.  I use windows (XP here, soon 7) to launch my putty sessions, run winamp, chrome, seamonkey and skype, and maybe some warcraft at home.  

But that's all you want to be running on it.  Windows is just another tool to get the job done .. on Unix.