New Way To Grade Decay of Computer Installations

skojt writes: "I saw this link in Dr Dobb's Journal (the paper edition) about the behaviour of a slowly decaying computer installation. It refers to a Windows installation, but as the author writes, 'But there will shortly be ports to Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unices; we are confident these OSes are just as prone.'"

Windows? Try Linux...

[blackula]

I contend that Linux is more prone to installation decay... Just think about all the buildup of dependencies that happens, and those that remain even after the program that depends on them is removed.

Re:bsod, etc.

[laserjet]

I see BSOD's on Win2k all the time, Win2k Pro and Win2k Server/ Advanced Server. There are a couple of easy ways to do it if you search on Google, but when I see it, it is because of my own doing (i.e. not following directions).

I have seen Win2k BSOD when explorer froze, when I plugged in 75 hard disks at once (JBODs), and when working the IO really hard as well.

Still, it is better than NT, but still not perfect.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Many Unices are not prone to this

[Baki]

Especially FreeBSD, but also some other variants and certain Linux distributions such as Slackware.

I have run FreeBSD for 6 years without a single reinstall, been upgrading all the time (source via cvs, then make world and using mergemaster to merge new config into /etc). For such 'manual' systems like FreeBSD and Slackware, it is possible to know every single significant file on your computer and thus completely avoid 'installation decay'. Their simplistic package managers don't do many tricks, but are fully traceable and understandable.

Benchmarking

[Snuffub]

This is one complaint Ive always had about benchmarking with windows systems every test is usualy run after a clean install this is a good way to test the hardware alone and its alright if your comparing between two windows boxes but in my general experience if you dont reinstall windows every 6 months after typical "office" (ie app isntalls, upgrades, crashes, stupid user incidents)use you can lose a fifth of your performance.

Im not trying to insinuate that other OSes are not at all susceptible to this but at the same time i have to say that my os x machine's performance has _improved_ over the past year (thanks to apple point releases) through hundreds of apps being installed removed and generaly abused. at the same time my linux box where admitedly much less software is fussed with is about the same when i installed red hat 6.2 on it a year and a half ago.

With that in mind Id be really interested in all those people who are trying to prove a point about one platform or another run their tests under realistic conditions rather than under ideal lab conditions.

just a thought

Re:Windows decay

[jonathan_atkinson]

Sure it will have it's problems, but right now it does not. More users and more bad or poorly written apps will cause bloat and decay.

I agree; which is part of the reason I quit using Mandrake and rolled my own LFS [linuxfromscratch.org] system. Anything I'm not sure about I make install to /opt/whatever, then add the /opt/whatever/lib path to ld.so.conf. This way I can check out new apps, and if they don't make the grade, I just rm -rf the whole directory. My whole system has stayed pretty clean this way.

--Jon

Unix cruft

[Patrick]

Unix and Linux, even Debian, accumulate cruft.

ls -ld ~/.* | wc -l

Dot files. Loads of them. Four from RealPlayer, six from Gnome, five from Pine, three from Sawfish, and three NFS lock files, among a total of 140 entries.

Good thing Linux doesn't have a registry. It might get cluttered.

--Patrick

Real Player is a Great Example

[0xA]

I have this big time beef with Real One Player (free version). I make a point of cleaning my startup items out whenever some stupid thing like Real's Start Center gets in there. That is anoying enough but Real has taken it to a new level.

On my XP box Real One put "eventsvc.exe" in the run key of my registry, I removed it. Every time I run Real One it puts it back. This thing is even more anoying than the start center, it just sits in the background until another app steals one of it's file associations. It then pops up a little box saying "this app has stolen my media type". The box has two options, "OK" and "remind me later", there isn't even an X in the corner to close it, you have to use alt + F4. If you don't say OK and this stupid thing is running it will pester you again every 15 minutes or so. You have to kill the process and then remove it from the registry (or use msconfig).

This IMO is the worst kind of cruft. Maybe I want to use Winamp for MPEG 1 audio! Please fuck off!

This piece of junk just sits in the background sucking up a couple megs of ram and using some cpu time when it needs to check that nothing else is moving in on it's turff. The fact that I am playing WC3 when it decides to do this, isn't relevant, Real must protect thier position as the number one most anoying piece of shit in existence. God only know how many memory leaks and all round crappy code is contained in this thing.

Real guys, last time I checked it was still My Computer. Leave your bullshit at the door.

I've got a 9 year old linux machine

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed linux from kernel v.99d and I through hardware and software upgrades have never wiped the disk. I have files from 1993 on my machine and it still works. Take that windows 3.11!

They've got it backwards.

[jonadab]

IMO, they've got it completely backwards. Out of the box,
any system is totally unusable, as far as I'm concerned.
It takes DAYS to just install all the apps I use regularly
and get the various settings and options and preferences
just _roughly_ the way I want them. It takes _weeks_ to
fine-tune things until I can get comfortable with the
system. Then there are those obscure little apps and
utilities that you _occasionally_ need and go months
without realising you forgot to install them... it can
take _years_ to get a system truly _right_.

Linux is a little better OOTB than Windows, because the
distributions bundle more things, and this can save a
couple of days worth of download time initially, but
there are always still lost of little pieces missing.
Every so often I discover something that's missing,
something the distribution did not include, that I want.
This becomes, over the years, gradually less frequent.
Discovering that package x is badly obsolete doesn't
become less frequent; that's more or less constant. But
in a pinch you can get by with an old version; whereas,
if you never previously installed (say) a TADS runtime,
when you find that you need one, you can't proceed until
you go hunt it down.

As far as having things decently up to date, I find that
it mostly only matters for things you use with any frequency.
I have the latest browser, the latest Emacs, and so on, but
if Python is a bit out of date, I don't care until I go to
install or upgrade something that requires a newer version.
By the time I need to upgrade to a newer version of mkswap
my hardware will probably be on its last legs.

Cruftarama

[stor]

Hello all.

I don't tend to run windows but my friends do and I've noticed an alarming trend: proliferation of adware.

I know a lot of you will be saying "well duh" but I don't run Windows' desktops much. I run Linux as a desktop/workstation OS and I administer Linux and W2K servers. Windows, to me, is a shell for running Warcraft 3 and Operation FlashPoint 8)

An alarming amount of windows software (especially "shareware" or "freeware") installs all sorts of annoying adware. Popups, animations, banners: cpu-wasting, flashing, scrolling, dancing cruft. Think of a website with really annoying advertising methods and then think "What if my destop randomly did that" and you'll get an idea of what it's like.

During installation of these adware-containing programs you probably wouldn't realise that your computer is about to be seriously cruftified.

The adware is usually embedded in .dlls.

There's special programs you can download for windows that just try to remove/disable as much adware from the OS as they can.

I must say I don't miss windows one iota. I know with a bit of hacking I'd be able to disable any adware "suprises" but I think I'd pop a vein in my forehead before long.

Cheers
Andy

Re:Real Player is a Great Example

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I was INCREDIBLY and pleasantly surprised when I installed the new RealOne player on OS X.. It uses OS X's preferred install mechanism -- Drag and drop a single application icon wherever you want it. There's no installer -- nothing. From real, I FULLY expected an installer to be there. But there was nothing. So to the team who did the OS X port, thanks for not making it suck ;-). This installation mechanism (Application "Bundles") is one of my favorite things about OS X and why I think, since most applications are bundled similarly on OS X, that it has a much installed life than Windows. My BSD boxes have some cruft on them too, but they don't hose the system like they would a windows system. They just make the filesystem look kind of.. unclean.

Cheers,
-JD-
jd (at) bluenugget [dot] net

Re:Mac OS 9

[tbmaddux]

... how easy is it to clean up the mess and return to a smoothly running system, without reinstalling the entire operating system?

MacOS X in theory is easier still than MacOS 9, with its application "packages" containing all you need to throw away. Plus maybe some files in the Preferences folder, but they're harmless. With Carbon apps (esp. games) that support MacOS 9 it's a little more complicated.

The extensions management you mention is a little more difficult than you imply, but it's not nigh-impossible to do by hand like the Windows Registry is. A trick you didn't mention is to use the MacOS file labels (colors) on known-good extensions, which makes it easier to find newly inserted or modified items.

Techtool is an excellent utility for zapping the PRAM (a trick you missed) as well as for rebuilding the desktop. DiskWarrior cleans up cruft in your directory structure (HFS/HFS+).

When I was stuck using Windows machines at work, I made frequent use of RegClean, Norton Utilities, and scanreg /fix to keep things livable. Often the same registry errors would return over and over again. Like a mold.

To sum up, I preferred MacOS 9 when I was using it, but MacOS X is so much better still.

COM registry pollution is worst

[uradu]

The utter dependence on the registry for all things COM is what makes Windows more fragile than most other systems. After several months or years of installing, uninstalling and updating software, the registry is full of dangling CLSIDs, type libraries, ProgIDs etc. Worse, the versioning system can get completely screwed up with several generations of ActiveX DLLs co-existing and periodically getting re-registered by their respective parent apps. VB developers have a particularly nasty experience, since by default VB re-generates all the CLSIDs of COM objects each time a project is built, without usually bothering to clean up the previous ones. So over time the CLSID subtree is littered with orphaned COM class debris.

Right now my work system (W2K) most of the time takes forever to pop up the context menu on files in Windows Explorer. It didn't always do it, but I can't really identify a major change to the system that precipitated that. No doubt some of the shell extensions that are being activated each time are looking for "stuff" that they're either not finding, are being slowed down by other components that they're relying on, or experiencing some other type of timeout. The menu can take 30 seconds or more to pop up. Similarly, some types of file operations take equally long: deleting a file from within Windows Explorer can take over half a minute, half of that time waiting for the confirmation dialog, the other half waiting for the "deleting file" animation dialog to quit. These are all most likely COM related problems that could probably easily be fixed--if you know what you're looking for. Unfortunately, a trace on registry operations during a context menu popup generates so much output as to be virtually useless.

Things like these all add up to make the Windows user experience increasingly frustrating with advancing time, particularly because of the seeming intractability of the problems. The new .NET architecture promises to eliminate much of this mess, since class installation and activation is FS based like Java, and not registry-based like COM. Only time will tell if it turns out being any better, though.

Re:Don't use it!

[irony nazi]

Another 30 second workaround is: Support the software by purchasing it!! It's amazing how effective it is. Since I purchased quicktime pro, it hasn't nagged me once when I started. This super-secret method also enables some super-secret features. For example, now I can save Quicktime in Mpeg or DV formats! I can cut and crop movies and parts of movies or even combine movies.

Doing this with software such as Quicktime is also rebellious, as it sends the word to Apple that *hey your software is worthwhile to me*. It states that *I don't succumb to predatory bundle-it-with-the-OS techniques* and most importantly *I support capitalism and the free market*.

Do you get to do that by playing with the calendar?

Re:Windows? Try Linux...

[Metrol]

Three differnet Linux distros I tried to get to liking. Each and every time, "portinstall" on FreeBSD keeps me going back to it.

I really am glad to see Gentoo starting to implement a similar system. Having that ports tree enables me to keep my system up to date, without lingering dependencies, and without having to go racing out to buy the latest CD.

Personally, I think the distros like the fact that RPM is such a piece of crap as it ensures that buying a new CD is FAR easier than just upgrading what you have from the Net.