akrish

Check this out. After 11 weeks of work or so I think I’ve think reached the height of frustration with linux but at the same time I’ve learned a lot about dealing with those frustrations. I’ve always known that things are a little more complicated when dealing with linux, but I didn’t expect to get so annoyed with it. Anyway this xckd comic reminded me of some of the pains of messing with linux.

I spent most of today trying to install 1 (yes 1) perl module (DBD::Pg for those that care) and this was one of the most painful processes I’ve had to deal with. So I first had to configure CPAN which wasn’t that difficult but still required my attention for a bit. And when I tried install DBD::Pg the compilation failed with some C related error message. I spent some time trying to debug the module code, which I was pretty sure wasn’t the right thing to do (other people have installed it right?) Eventually after several hours, I found out that my machine had an old version of perl, an old version of a pre-requisite module, among other configuration issues so I fixed all of that and eventually got things to install.

And the other day, I got another monitor and was trying to set up TwinView on my machine and that opened another can of worms. I messed with my xorg.conf (the same as in the comic), and eventually I realized I had to install a new driver. This involved booting in a different run level and running through an installer which failed the first time for some strange reason. Eventually I got this to work, but this also took me a couple of hours.

And I guess what’s good is that I’ve come to accept that linux is more frustrating. At the same time, it’s good that I’m given a lot of flexibility to configure things and mess around with my system settings, so I guess it’s a tradeoff. A lot of stuff is oriented towards programmers; when I found compiler errors installed the perl module, I looked at the source code and made changes (although that’s probably not such a good idea in general).

Along similar lines, Vivek came over one day and he was all excited about partitioning his mac and installing linux on one partition. I warned him that linux isn’t all fun and games, especially if you’re not that computer savvy. When I stumbled on this comic, I promptly showed it to him as further proof that the warning is not to be taken lightly. But I’d still use linux over windows any day.