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by __d 973 days ago
Curious what you see as the "UNIX BS" in running a server?

Is it the need to CLI? Or just the number of knobs that you can frob? Too many choices?

Interested in how such a server system might look.

1 comments

Almost total absence of GUIs and proper documentation. A big part of why people pay for AWS and friends is not instant scalability or even the fancy features, but simply because clouds wrap a half-way decent GUI around high level server oriented tasks combined with an actual task focused user guide.

To compare, try comparing the docs and GUI help you get deploying a simple serverless app to Lambda+RDS vs configuring a Linux box with systemd, apache/nginx, SSL termination, postgres, borgbackup or whatever other stack you want to use. The difference is night and day. The systemd docs alone are classic Linux BS culture. UNIX sysadmin is complicated in very fundamental and deep ways for people who don't have a gray beard. I know how to do it but I don't enjoy it, and I had to recently teach a friend of mine how to do basic tasks. He's a pro software dev with years of experience incl at Google but sysadmin was never something he needed to do. Luckily now ChatGPT can help a lot with the missing usability.

Thanks for sharing that.

I think the documentation aspect is often overlooked. Even RedHat's subscriber-only documentation is ... quite dense, and yet, not very deep.

They're trying to document a system that wasn't designed with usability or GUIs in mind and they have a perverse incentive to keep Linux hard to use because that drives support subscriptions.