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posted by chromas on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-future-is-now,-old-man dept.

Nikita Prokopov has written a blog post detailing disenchantment with current software development. He has been writing software for 15 years and now regards the industry’s growing lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence as a problem to be solved. He addresses the following points one by one:

  • Everything is unbearably slow
  • Everything is too large
  • Bitrot
  • Half-baked products get shipped
  • The same old problems recur again and again
  • Most code has grown too complex to refactor
  • Business is uninterested in improvement

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by jelizondo on Wednesday October 03 2018, @10:12PM (6 children)

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 03 2018, @10:12PM (#743698) Journal

    Oh God!

    Been around software development for many years, since '87 or thereabouts. Seen a lot in that time, in no particular order: HP-UX, Xenix, AS/400, CPM, MS-DOS, OS/2, Windows.

    And the more I see, the crappier things seem. My particular beef is with software updates being mostly messing around with UI and now everything going to the "cloud". I just dumped the latest version of Adobe Acrobat in favor of Javelin 3 [drumlinsecurity.com] because I could not figure why the hell I needed to reboot my machine after the last update. Megabytes and megabytes for shit I don't need or want. Javelin might not be the best free option, but it is small and fast; I just need to open .PDF files, nothing more.

    As TFA states Android is such a big beast that I would gladly switch to something else entirely, except the other option is iOS and I hate Apple a lot more than I hate Google. Like choosing between Hillary and Trump, give me a fucking option!

    And don't get me started on Mozilla, the lost child of Free Software.

    Sorry for the rant. I want a simple OS that I control with simple applications that do their tasks fast and without trying to "help" me.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @10:23PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @10:23PM (#743702)

    I want a simple OS that I control with simple applications that do their tasks fast and without trying to "help" me.

    Tiny Core: http://www.tinycorelinux.net/ [tinycorelinux.net]

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by suburbanitemediocrity on Thursday October 04 2018, @12:26AM

      by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Thursday October 04 2018, @12:26AM (#743770)

      QNX offered that 20 years ago. It fit on a 1.2MB floppy drive and due to its real-time design was very fast on a 486.

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday October 04 2018, @03:25PM

      by Freeman (732) on Thursday October 04 2018, @03:25PM (#744130) Journal

      I've toyed with Tiny Core for a while now, but it's never taken hold of me. I love the tiny size, including resource usage, but getting Wi-Fi to work on that thing is stupid hard. Then, when I do get Wi-Fi working, it only wants to use PSK instead of a user/pass. I recently tried AntiX and that seems to be more along the line of what I want / need. While, I would love a tiny distro like Tiny Core, I need some things to just work. That way I can focus on the specifics for my project, and no the underlying OS.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @02:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @02:28AM (#743801)

    I'll have to try Javelin 3 (or 2, I have an older system), thanks for the tip.

    Meanwhile, you might enjoy Sumatra -- https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html [sumatrapdfreader.org]
    As well as pdf files, it also opens several ebook formats. Two versions for Windows, one runs standalone with no install required.

    i had the same problems with Acrobat that you did (several years ago) and rarely use it now.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by pkrasimirov on Thursday October 04 2018, @08:13AM

    by pkrasimirov (3358) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 04 2018, @08:13AM (#743926)

    > I just need to open .PDF files, nothing more.
    > I want a simple OS that I control with simple applications that do their tasks fast and without trying to "help" me.
    I'd add simple networking.

    But that's not what they want.

  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday October 04 2018, @03:35PM

    by Freeman (732) on Thursday October 04 2018, @03:35PM (#744142) Journal

    Personally, I've liked Puppy Linux for the OS control part. They have a nice remastering tool that you can use to make your own custom installs. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=71349 [murga-linux.com] It's also relatively easy to hack a Puppy Linux install with JWM into an Internet Kiosk that starts fresh after each reboot. I've done just that with a few different versions of Puppy Linux.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"