RANT ON !!!

Oh it isn't just software. That's bad enough. What's really ridiculous is hardware changes for no good reason. Examples you say? OK. In all fairness I do see the huge benefit from so much of hardware going Serial as opposed to Parallel. SATA is vastly superior to PATA, even if it was slower (which it decidedly is not) but just for the cabling and drive recognition. PcieX is superior to PCI and AGP BUT did manufacturers really need to stick us with DVI connections? and some boards with no other outputs so one had to buy adapters. Isn't it odd that most modern graphics cards have the typical old reliable PC D-Connector and also HDMI with a few including Display Port? What purpose did DVI ever amount to? Now for the biggie.... Power Adaptors aka "Wall Warts"!!! AAAaaarrrggghhh!!! I don't dare throw any of them away just in case and as a resulkt I have a closet full including massive beasts like the one that powers an old US Robotics external modem, but I can't find good matches for any gear not constantly in use.

Now back to software. OK I do realize that traditional BIOS was getting too old and too small to handle all that is needed and just doubling again wasn't going to be enough for long. I also realize there are benefits to a dedicated boot managing partition but I can't help but wonder if MS didn't bulldoze "features" through that were beneficial to "the Windows Way" and screw everybody else. Did they really have to incorporate full color, wifi, disk access, and mouse drivers that STILL an OpSys must override and install it's own drivers? Is that good use of precious real estate? ... and UEFI... Hey GPT is a nice improvement over MBR in many ways so why oh why is simple booting so much more a pita?

A friend of mine deep in the security business has a great demonstration regarding so-called "firmware".. The very name implies immutability. Hogwash! It's just software and it is more vulnerable now than it ever was and it's freakin' everywhere.

Now for the very worst offender. Software power switches. When I push the button for a CD/DVD door to open I want it to open right now, not maybe in 30 seconds or if it thinks it's OK. If it's not OK I will deal with the consequences. PCs, Laptops, Phones, TVs all of these things have software switches and the software as well as the chips can and do routinely fail. I want a simple electro-mechanical switch that Powers Up or Down when I SAY SO, not if and when software says OK or some programmer coded in planned obsolescence.

The upshot of all this is loss of freedom and control and generations of kids who just expect someone else to make it work.

Gawd I'm getting old.

RANT OFF.....

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(1) The really frightening part is how many of those kids see it as a feature and not a bug (and here I'm quoting my son).

(2) The reason grumpy old people are grumpy isn't that they're old, but that they've had to put up with so much bovine excrement along the way that the meter's off the scale... and then they get offered more.



Edit: Which is why a working Slackware keeps me sane.

Although it would work even better if I didn't keep playing "What does this button do?"

My observation of other users unfamiliar with the command line is when I open a terminal window and start typing commands, the users slowly move away from me and become utterly silent. They are afraid that I might ask them do the same thing. To really scare them sometimes I think I should just wear a hoodie and sunglasses when opening a terminal window.

Yup, one of my temper triggers too.

Old is good!

I couldn't say that any better!

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Speaking of updates. There's a new kernel in -current today.

The 44th so far during 2019...
On the other hand, only two of them have found their way into the Slackware Security advisories so I've skipped the other 42.

Yes, Pat only updates the kernel in Stable for the more serious security issues: which is completely understandable given the number of users who tend to cock-up applying a new kernel update, and the disruption it involves.

I get irritated by the frequency of kernel updates upstream¹ (and in current), but I'm too paranoid to take the more relaxed approach that Pat takes with the stable releases.

¹ And I bet Pat does too.

While I do agree with a lot of this, DVI was supposed to get us away from analog video to monitors and get us digital, but then HDMI came on the TV scene and was brought over to the computer side. Although, why DVI still sticks around this late is baffling.

And in regards to BIOS vs UEFI, many aspects of UEFI booting are much simpler for the Slackware user, the biggest being not requiring the user to run lilo after any changes to the kernel and/or initrd. But one big detractor is requiring the EFI loader to be added the motherboard's firmware for booting. You can boot manually via the EFI shell, but why couldn't they just search any UEFI partitions for an EFI loader and present those to the user.

As for software driven buttons, those drive me nuts too! On every Android phone I've owned for over 10 years, the sounds when you dial a phone number never initially match up with the presses. It's little things like that which annoy me with software driven buttons. Luckily, I hardly ever use discs anymore (none of my computers even have disc drives in them anymore), so I had pretty much forgotten about the delay when ejecting discs.

sweet music

upgrade treadmill???

all software has to be upgraded, otherwise you will be using obsoleted software that has been found to have vulnerabilities that can be exploited, its no big deal to use package updating tools, a couple of commands and BAM, its all done, and only occasionally will you have to reconfigure something...

everything wears out and has to be replaced, software, hardware, cars & trucks, houses and buildings, even people get old, it is an inescapable and inevitable fact
even the universe itself will eventually come to an end but that will be billions of years from now

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Like you, I update on each new kernel release. I run -current on all of my Slackware stations. As a -current user we beta test the software to help Pat identify and iron out issues prior to the next stable release.
I'm very grateful for the tireless work that Pat and the Slackware Team does on our behalf.

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This is relatively easy on a stable release since Pat tries to prevent any breakages and only releases updates when necessary, but it becomes quite a bit more difficult when running -current. The updates are a lot more frequent and many times have little to do with security updates and are mainly for testing newer versions of software, which itself can be buggy. Also, -current can occasionally break your 3rd-party packages when they're compiled against libraries that were updated. However, OP was actually talking about updates outside of Slackware, like running newer non-LTS kernels, plasma5, and video card drivers.

Not everything wears out. I still wear my casio F14, bought in the 80s. A fine luxurious watch.

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I think you must be missing the point since surely you don't actually think software wears out? A "1" or a "0" will be exactly the same a billion years from now as today, even if the language that interprets it has changed which of course it will. Even if what we think of as computing in 50 years is completely unrecognizable to humans alive now, a "1" will still be a "1" and the recipe will still work on any hardware that can deal with machine language, assuming any x86 and x86_64 cpus are still around and functional.

Software does go obsolete, but rarely because it doesn't work anymore. Quite often it just gets forgotten and tossed aside but sometimes it just bloats up with what was once important features nobody has any use for now.

That said, something like 50% of the PCs in the world are running Windows XP and there's still a LOT of small businesses at least partly running on DOS. Things aren't good because they are old and they're not conversely good because they are new. They are good because they do a job and most importantly one that suits the owner.

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It's just an analogy. Just like there's no literal treadmill for upgrades. But the point is that every aspect of tech changes daily. There's no moment when "ideal" functionality is reached because the demands have already changed. I expect to do more with my devices now than in 1998, don't you?

Of course there is no literal treadmill but there is the "In for a dime, in for a dollar" or the old PusherMan seduction of "The first hit is free" business plan. It's part of why Microsoft among others are switching from a one-time lease payment to subscription. However while I totally agree with your assessment that "ideal" is never reached because "the goalposts keep moving further away" I haven't seen a truly "Killer App" in ages, at least in the SOHO Desktop arena.

I do see that in Services and Supplies the use of softwares has increased fairly dramatically, but I personally don't do many things very differently from what I did in 1998. It's just faster but that is mostly due to hardware since writing a 64bit app back in 1998 would have been absurd without 64bit CPUs and systems to run it, not that 64bit is all that much faster than 32bit anyway except in a very few use cases. In fact I'm not exactly sure why the move to 32bit still transparently allowed for 16 and 8bit but we must jump through hoops to run 32 on 64 and most DOS won't run at all at base level and at best must be emulated. Gone are the days when in just a few seconds one could be at a prompt and do deep level work, AFAIK. Some functionality is just gone.

So... what do you do in 2019 with your PC that you didn't or couldn't do in 1998?