There’s a thing I’m going to call the ‘Linux model’. Not because it pertains ONLY to Linux, but because most of what’s wrong with this model often starts with Linux and stuff that runs (best) on Linux.

In a way, this is really a story about all the stuff that’s broken in JupyterHub, but it goes beyond that… it’s the general model that’s broken, and the model really owes it’s roots to Linux.

Basically, when you install something on a Linux box, and even the OS for the Linux box itself, it’s probably broken. That is, *something* won’t work after installing it, and there is no way short of digging into some code somewhere of ever fixing it.

Worse, the breaking of such stuff is often super complex and intricate – somewhere buried in a log somewhere is a message regarding “package X failed due to expecting library Y to be x.x.x but was z.z.z”. Or similar obscure “thing” that takes days to figure out, if ever.

You can post the error on google and what you get most of the time is a dozen hits – all questions on StackOverflow asking the same thing and getting precious little of value in response.

Worse, you are expected to manually update packages on an almost continuous basis, and (of course) such updates often break things that were working fine before the update. Yet if you don’t update, something ELSE will break.

The entire model is broken.

What triggered this particular rant today is that I spent ages figuring out how to (finally) install C++ into JupyterHub so I could run C++ notebooks. Yesterday, I found it broken. The log complains about a library *supplied by the supporter of this C++ package* being the wrong date compared to what’s expected. It doesn’t matter. C++ in JupyterHub is now broken, and good luck finding anyone to respond with anything useful. Even less likely is that the C++ supplier will fix it anytime soon.

That’s the other problem with the Linux model. Everything is well documented and often supplied with tutorials. BUT… THEY ARE ALL YEARS OUT OF DATE. Worse, the stuff they describe has changed so much in the years since that you cannot follow the tutorial without being worse off then if you’d just thrown mud at a wall.

The biggest problem with the Linux model is that noone really cares. “I did this really cool thing in 2012 but now I’m bored and … who cares”, seems the mantra of every developer. Nothing is maintained for long. It’s becoming obvious that nothing is really being used either. Otherwise the failures would be noted and (hopefully) fixed.

Overall, it’s a really depressing time to be trying to actually do anything on a Linux box.