[HN Gopher] Google's in-house desktop Linux
___________________________________________________________________
Google's in-house desktop Linux
Author : signa11
Score : 229 points
Date : 2022-07-31 05:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.computerworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.computerworld.com)
| cripblip wrote:
| A recent debconf talk on supporting the same
|
| https://debconf22.debconf.org/talks/11-scalable-support-for-...
| flakiness wrote:
| The canonical blog post:
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioner...
| sirjaz wrote:
| But I thought Google was all in om ChromeOS and chromebooks?
| WaffleIronMaker wrote:
| Those target a demographic consisting of schools and non-
| developers. Internal Software Engineers have different needs.
| racl101 wrote:
| gLinux
|
| are they finally calling it GNU/Linux?
| mabbo wrote:
| I would love to see a similar article diving into Amazon's use of
| RHEL5, and the eventual slow move to "Amazon Linux".
|
| At one point, I had a RHEL5 desktop in Seattle, which I could
| (and had to) develope remotely on from the Toronto office[0]. The
| software libraries we used depended on _something_ that RHEL5 had
| and newer versions of Red Hat didn 't, as I understood it.
| Eventually a new and fantastic manager joined the Toronto office
| and convinced senior management to at least ship the desktops to
| Toronto.
|
| [0] At the time, the 'office' was the warehouse in Mississauga.
| setheron wrote:
| I was always surprised how fast they got NoMachine to work on
| the VPN.
|
| In today's world with tools like Nix and more hermetic build
| systems that include libc, the need to build on RHEL5 wouldn't
| exist.
|
| Of course it's always good practice to test on the environment
| you're going to eventually deploy.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Why can't we get it? Is this not a violation of the GPL?
| userbinator wrote:
| The GPL has a clause that mentions internal use.
| tlhunter wrote:
| > Whenever Sieve spots a new version of a Debian package, it
| starts a new build. These packages are built in package groups
| since separate packages often must be upgraded together. Once the
| whole group has been built, Google runs a virtualized test suite
| to ensure no core components and developer workflows are broken.
|
| That must have required an impressive amount of effort!
|
| > Better still, thanks to the rolling release schedule, Google
| can patch security holes on the entire fleet quickly without
| compromising stability. Previously, security engineers had to
| carefully review each Debian Security Advisory (DSA) to make sure
| the fix was in.
|
| I can only imagine Google upstreams an incredible number of
| patches from this process.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > Besides, the "effort to upgrade our Goobuntu fleet usually took
| the better part of a year. With a two-year support window, there
| was only one year left until we had to go through the same
| process all over again for the next LTS. This entire process was
| a huge stress factor for our team, as we got hundreds of bugs
| with requests for help for corner cases."
|
| Ummm.. No? Ubuntu LTS has a 5-year support window. Not 2.
|
| Or maybe it didn't all the way back then? I don't recall.
|
| A rolling distro does make sense though. Especially in a large
| org where you have a relatively homogenous usepatterns. All the
| edgecases you can find centrally and pre-empt them before rolling
| out the updates.
| midasuni wrote:
| Desktop was 3 years from 6.06 onwards, only server had 5 years.
| Might have changed recently. This meant you had a year to
| upgrade the old LTS before it went end of life (from 2008
| releases moved back to April, 6.06 was the first LTS and I
| assume they took a little longer getting it out. I think the
| version before was 5.10)
| weberer wrote:
| They changed it in 2012. Desktop gets 5 years of support and
| server gets 10.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#Version.
| ..
| amelius wrote:
| Do they use M1 MacBooks?
| nexus7556 wrote:
| Yes. I'm a Googler who uses a 15" M1 MacBook Pro
| amelius wrote:
| Do you run gLinux on it?
| nexus7556 wrote:
| I do not, it's not an option. If it's a Mac it has to run
| macOS
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Google could also simply buy Canonical, and then decide what to
| do with Ubuntu. And doing some damage to the Microsoft monopoly,
| as a side bonus.
| lysergia wrote:
| Is there any Google branding in the OS? I'd love to see some
| screenshots of it in action.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| What a laugh.
|
| I left in 2017, and I was one of the last SWEs to use a Linux
| laptop. _Everyone_ had moved to a Mac, after the Christmas
| Windows security disaster (which I won 't detail here). It was
| pretty much forbidden for a SWE to use Windows, and for a while
| Linux had a lot of users but over time it became all Mac. Finally
| in 2016 I caved in and drank the Kool-Aid too.
|
| I'd go to the Tech Stop for something or other, and the staff
| would never _object_ , since, after all, it was the official
| Google Linux. But you could tell that they didn't see this very
| often.
|
| _Side note: the Tech Stop staff were some of the best, nicest,
| and most competent people I ever encountered in that role._
|
| Furthermore, whatever I needed seemed to almost always require
| them to keep it overnight and wipe the machine completely.
| bubblicious wrote:
| perhaps read the article before commenting, especially if you
| aim at criticizing what is written? the word "laptop" isn't
| even mentioned in the article, this talks about desktops only
| and how Google runs its own linux distri on those...
| malkia wrote:
| Does chromebook classify as linux? I had mac laptop, but
| granted I could not do anything in the shell, but just "remote"
| into an actual (or provided through ganeti ) machine, it was
| forbidden to check out locally on your laptop (makes sense).
|
| But clearly remember my team at LAX (part of Ads-Quality) had
| mix of mac, linux and I think two or three people windows
| laptops... But all were dumb terminals. Also taht was 2014-2017
| draw_down wrote:
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Seeing as MacOS build support for AOSP was dropped entirely
| over a year ago (
| https://source.android.com/setup/build/initializing ) I'm going
| to guess your corner of the world is very not representative.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "over a year ago" was 2021.
| eklitzke wrote:
| Obviously YMMV but my team is at least 75% Linux laptops, so my
| experience doesn't match yours at all.
| utopcell wrote:
| > I left in 2017, and I was one of the last SWEs to use a Linux
| laptop.
|
| Categorically not true, not then, not now.
| Cidan wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. This isn't even close to true, not sure where
| he got that from.
| gravypod wrote:
| (Opinions are my own)
|
| I am a gLinux user. Before google I just installed linux on
| my laptop at previous companies.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| I think it's a misunderstanding of the phrase "one of the
| last" which can have a connotation that there are no longer
| any remaining
| hahnchen wrote:
| do you know what the situation is right now?
| iron2disulfide wrote:
| There are still SWEs that use the Linux laptops. There are
| dozens of us!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I love it.
|
| Like I said: it was not _unheard of_ to use one -- just a
| bit unusual.
| yadaeno wrote:
| People still use glinux but as a remote host. Everything is
| done on the browser so laptop choice is less important.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > Everything is done on the browser
|
| Not quite. There is security hardware there, as I recall.
| cowmoo728 wrote:
| I strongly requested a Linux laptop (thinkpad x1 carbon) but
| got a Chromebook. It would have been easier to get a Mac, and
| all of my coworkers got new Macs when they joined. I'm going
| to strongly protest for a Linux laptop again when my hardware
| refresh date comes.
|
| I think I fell into some bureaucratic limbo because I joined
| near the beginning of covid lockdowns. I don't think my
| recruiter fully understood my request for a Linux laptop
| either, and there was a general shortage of them at the same
| time.
| zem wrote:
| yep, i held off on my laptop refresh until i was assured a
| thinkpad, but several of my colleagues made the switch to
| chromebook at the time.
| brnt wrote:
| But you got a Linux machine! What you wanted however is a
| GNU/Linux machine.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Google ran out of Linux laptops? Even at my humble place of
| employment we can just give any old computer to IT and they
| will install Linux on it without any fuss. I would imagine
| the IT wizards at Google also know how to do it.
| [deleted]
| aposm wrote:
| I find it very interesting that they're using Debian Testing as
| essentially a rolling-release distro. I did this in the past for
| a few years, and stopped (switched to Fedora), but I am pleased
| to see there is at least one other group of people who think
| that's a reasonable setup.
| pja wrote:
| I've been doing this for years. I generally suggest holding off
| on upgrades in the weeks immediately following a Debian stable
| release is a good idea: when everything that has been held back
| from testing suddenly arrives at once, bugs sometimes get
| missed. But otherwise, generally a really solid experience.
|
| Of course, it's not officially supported by anyone, so when the
| (very) occasional bug does hit, you have to sort out rolling
| back to something that works yourself. Sounds like Google
| automated this side of things?
| neilv wrote:
| Doing a rolling distro sounds like a great idea for Google, at
| their scale, and they also have the expertise and resources to
| handle any downsides of that.
|
| For early startups, I've been doing "Debian Stable" as the
| default, partly so that we don't have to spend any time on any
| surprise distro changes when we're focused on MVP, etc.
|
| And in 2 years, the startup will probably have a lot more
| resources, and we can look at whether that still makes sense,
| though we might just end up doing an in-place APT `dist-upgrade`,
| or coast on `oldstable` awhile if the timing is not right yet.
|
| I also try to use the same distro on workstations and in
| production, to permit lightweight efficiencies, like
| experimenting and debugging outside of containers on
| workstations, without special tooling, while still having a close
| match to production. So, Debian Stable everywhere.
|
| A recent Ubuntu LTS would also work for this (and sometimes be
| easier for things like Nvidia SDK), though Debian has been
| arguably a bit better for security and stability lately.
|
| For things not in the Debian Stable we're using, such as if we
| need a bleeding-edge version of some key thing, and we have big
| security/reliability requirements... I manage non-Debian-packaged
| third-party dependencies in our own Git repo, and track and vet
| updates. This also means trying to minimize these dependencies,
| more than we would if we were pulling in 100 packages casually
| from a language-specific package manager, since each package is
| additional work.
| krzyk wrote:
| Debian Stable (same as Ubuntu LTS) doesn't have newer package
| versions, it might sound OK for Windows people, that are
| accustomed having release once every few years, but in case of
| mode hardcore Linux users it wouldn't be the best user
| experience.
|
| Even just the git has many releases during Debian Stable/Ubuntu
| LTS, which enhance user experience, that holding back users is
| not the best idea. And in most cases security fixes land first
| in the newest versions and are backported, so it is most likely
| to have a fix in HEAD than in some random older release.
| jpace121 wrote:
| I work for a smaller company running most of our stuff on
| older Ubuntu LTS versions. While there are things we want to
| update faster than the distribution does, most of them are
| leaf packages near the stuff we're directly working on and
| are easy enough to either package ourselves or find a more
| recent package for from a trust worthy source.
|
| It's really nice to have the rest of the distribution more or
| less set it and forget it.
| Melatonic wrote:
| For a general desktop OS though that does not sound like a
| huge problem at all - long term stable always is behind.
| Thats part of the selling point in a way.
| raegis wrote:
| > Even just the git has many releases during Debian Stable...
|
| It just so happens the software you mentioned, git, is in
| stable backports, so it is updated frequently. Regardless,
| I've been on Debian stable since 2007, and running "bleeding
| edge" stuff is trivial, depending on your desired workflow.
| (For example, I just install Debian testing packages in a
| schroot.) I used to bounce from distribution to distribution
| in the old days (Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, etc.)
| but once I found Debian _Stable_ I could concentrate on
| getting work done.
| brnt wrote:
| I thought distros were stable until I tried Debian
| stable... It's stable! I use it everywhere, even my dev
| machine. Might switch to testing though on the dev machine,
| 2-3 years of no user software updates is a long time. I
| know it's unreasonable to ask, but a yearly new stable
| would be the best of all worlds.
| jrockway wrote:
| I use Debian stable for my workstation, but get everything I
| care about from somewhere else. Go, Node, Emacs, Postgres...
| all installed from some other package repo. (I actually like
| Homebrew a lot on Linux.)
|
| So I might be two years out of date on ls, but it probably
| hasn't changed in the last 2 years anyway.
| istillwritecode wrote:
| I'm a linux user for over 25 years. I want my development
| environment to match production and that almost never
| involves new software.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Debian has a backports repository, providing newer versions
| of software for the existing stable release. This "Debian
| Stable has old software" canard is way out of date.
| rahen wrote:
| Not only that, but there are so many ways to get newer
| versions of software on Debian Stable when required:
| backports, Nix, pkgsrc, Docker containers, Appimages,
| flatpak, snaps...
|
| Debian Stable tends to hand pick the latest LTS version of
| packages everywhere applicable, so it's actually a good
| base to standardize on. Packages might be a bit older but
| they are reliable, predictable, and kept secure by a
| constant roll of security updates.
|
| In other words, if it doesn't work on the latest Stable,
| you're probably moving too fast for a good part of the
| industry. Lots of customer and production stacks are not in
| the "move fast, release early, release often, and link the
| crap to the very latest bleeding edge dependency"
| bandwagon.
| dataflow wrote:
| > in case of mode hardcore Linux users it wouldn't be the
| best user experience.
|
| The "best" user experience you're referring to is getting
| surprises like your OpenSSH 9 suddenly stopping to work with
| your key agent [1] out of the blue because they decided to
| change the protocol (no big deal right?) without any hint of
| this whatsoever during normal usage, and you just casually
| upgraded your packages because, well, when did Linux package
| upgrades ever hurt anybody?
|
| (Just the latest _incredibly_ frustrating surprise your
| fellow "Windows person" literally had to spend hours on
| tracking down. And that I actually remember. Most
| _definitely_ not the only one.)
|
| [1] https://www.openssh.com/agent-restrict.html
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| ... or when an ill-advised and insufficiently tested change
| to the internals of glibc suddenly causes threaded
| applications to misbehave ... great that it was fixed
| quickly, but for the "regular users" who suddenly found a
| variety of applications malfunctioning (but they each
| typically only used one, and hence blamed the application
| they used), a strong argument against rolling releases.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| Having never worked at a place the size of Google, I'm surprised
| that their IT team directly manages 100,000 machines. In my
| (apparently naive) mind, if you're smart enough to work at
| Google, you're smart enough to manage your own OS.
|
| Is it a security thing? Are Googlers not allowed to directly
| control their own computers?
| danpalmer wrote:
| Googler opinion, it feels like the right balance between
| letting me be in control while automating away the boring stuff
| that I don't want to deal with.
| dvirsky wrote:
| (recent Xoogler here) There is quite a lot of freedom, though
| if you do custom stuff it's just not supported. I usually
| replaced the desktop, installed a custom terminal app, etc.
| There is also a lot of freedom in IDE choice - you can use
| literally whatever you want, it's just that the support is
| crappy if you don't use a supported one. And Vim support was
| IIRC completely volunteer based - there was no vim team, just
| people working on plugins and building releases as 20% etc. I
| contributed one plugin which sadly not a lot of people used,
| but Googlers out there - try BlazeDebugCurrentTest (it's part
| of the Blaze plugin) or something like that!
|
| Actually one of my favorite Google experiences starting out was
| that I wanted to work with an Apple Magic Keyboard, and to get
| proper support for it I needed to compile some kernel driver I
| found on github. I asked IT support if I can do that, and the
| answer was "you're a SWE, review the code, make sure it looks
| legit and doesn't contain any security holes, and then it's
| your responsibility if you mess anything up". Which I did, and
| it worked just fine. It was in 2018 so it's not like I'm
| referring to some early days thing.
| adtac wrote:
| vim support had only gotten better since 2018. With CiderLSP
| (LSP support for all of google3), it was a breeze navigating
| the massive codebase.
| dvirsky wrote:
| Before WFH I used CLion for cpp. When we were locked down I
| found Cider to be annoying (I think mostly because you
| couldn't tab switch to a a chrome window on MacOS) so I
| took a couple of days to really master vim and configure
| all the plugins (and wrote the one plugin I was missing),
| and it worked just fine for a while, I would just ssh to my
| workstation and use that. Later on they fixed the tab
| switching thing so I found myself drifting more towards
| Cider, then Cider-V came along, and I was back at the
| office, so I was mostly using that, though by that time I
| wasn't writing cpp anymore.
| ptero wrote:
| I never worked at Google, but based on my experience elsewhere
| it is partly security and partly standardization of guaranteed
| minimum functionality.
|
| For example, security aside, as an engineer working on X that
| depends on internal tools Y, Z and W, I do not particularly
| care what variant of Linux is under the hood as long as I can
| run my favorite WM, editor and user apps. But I do want support
| on Y, Z and W if they misbehave. If I run a non-standard OS or
| distro I will likely get a lukewarm support because those teams
| will put debugging problems in "non-standard configurations" as
| a low priority.
|
| Personally, I learned to live with most Linux distros. When I
| did roll out a non-standard setup I had a standby system in a
| standard configuration that I can show failures on before
| asking for help. My 2c.
| wayne wrote:
| I've worked at large tech companies where very capable software
| engineers struggled to install or upgrade their OS, let alone
| be familiar with the intricacies of Linux. I was surprised at
| first too, but I do think there's a large class of engineers
| who think about code who don't think at all about the other
| stuff, and engineering is broad enough that that's totally
| fine.
|
| Not to mention all the non-engineers, even in tech roles like
| PM, design, etc.
| cactacea wrote:
| This. There's a lot of I shaped people out there that don't
| have the first clue about anything beyond their day-to-day.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I think it depends on what the priorites are. I care a lot
| about my own systems but when I'm working I really don't want
| to have to care about anything but the activity I'm getting
| paid for.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| The way I see it, the engineers aren't being paid to install
| and repair hardware and operating system stuff. Even if they
| are perfectly capable, it makes sense to have IT handle that
| and let the engineers get on with their engineering.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's also a matter of efficiency. I can spend more time on
| projects that matter instead of on system administration. The
| people doing the system administration are more efficient since
| they don't need to spend extra time figuring out what to do.
| It's not a matter of being smart enough to do it, but instead
| it's a matter of time efficiency.
| yathaid wrote:
| "In my (apparently naive) mind, if you're smart enough to work
| at Google, you're smart enough to manage your own OS."
|
| This is a bit like saying if you can operate on human brains,
| you should absolutely be able to take apart your car and put it
| back together.
| tryauuum wrote:
| I wish people never used analogies. It adds nothing to
| conversation and you are always inclined to pick the most
| ridiculous one. Neurosurgeon disassembling and reassembling a
| whole car, sounds indeed crazy.
| jnwatson wrote:
| We have root on our own (personal) boxes, so we can essentially
| do what we want (within reason).
|
| There's a tremendous value in having a somewhat homogenous
| environment. We have our own package repo and .deb packages to
| access internal resources. Even little stuff like editor
| plugins customized to our internal stuff we have packages for.
|
| Plus, we hire a great deal of folks that aren't Linux experts.
| Have a sane set of defaults gets people going faster.
|
| It makes a lot of sense to have our own distro when we're
| talking this kind of scale.
| thrashh wrote:
| Try doing support when everyone has a different setup
|
| Or your software has all these customization options
|
| Or your product has a bunch of different configurations
|
| What was already hard just became a thousand times more painful
| anonquixey wrote:
| I am a google engineer, and a fairly successful one.
|
| I would absolutely despise it if I had to manage my own OS,
| just like I despise thinking about my keyboard layout or text
| editor.
|
| Hacker News overrepresents the hacker type which loves the
| feeling of full control but I'd estimate that at least 33% of
| engineers, including many very talented ones, don't want that,
| and only want to focus on the concrete problems they are trying
| to solve.
| number6 wrote:
| Did the even more successful engineers liked the experience
| more or less than you?
| mattnewton wrote:
| It's for security and for homogeneity, a lot of google is setup
| around the principle that "works on my machine" is terrible,
| and also removing needless cleverness. You have root and can
| run anything you want*, but you have to go out of your way to
| configure anything differently than others, and the result is
| (hopefully) it just works the same everywhere. The monorepo
| also runs only natively on these Linux machines through a
| magical fuse interface so most development is either using the
| web ide or ssh-ing into the Linux box if you aren't sitting in
| front of it. There were big economies of scale running this way
| and at least this setup, definitely felt pretty great and
| efficient I gotta say.
|
| * By default, a tool called "Santa" keeps a naughty and nice
| list of runnable programs but all it took to get a program
| added to the nice list is any other googler vouching for it in
| an automated web tool.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Santa is open-source: https://github.com/google/santa
| bityard wrote:
| > Are Googlers not allowed to directly control their own
| computers?
|
| First, if the computer is provided by the company, for company
| work, they're not "their own computers." They're the company's
| computers. And I don't know about Google, but yes it is VERY
| common in most mid- to large-size organizations that employees
| are not allowed to change things on the machines they use for
| work.
|
| The IT department is usually required by either contracts or
| regulation to follow certain security standards and many of
| those prohibit end-user modification of machines. And further,
| these are often enforced through annual, semi-annual, or
| quarterly audits. Failure to follow these standards can result
| in the loss of a sales contract, a critical certification, or
| fines.
|
| So, just like a manufacturing worker is not allowed to modify a
| machine on the factory floor (even to fix it, or improve it,
| regardless of their skill to do so), employees are not allowed
| to modify the organization's computing equipment.
|
| And, it's important to note, the IT department generally has NO
| say in these rules since they are a business or legal
| requirement.
|
| Edited to add: I've also worked in companies where the
| developers who write the in-house software might be masters of
| the business problem domain and their programming language, but
| have exactly ZERO knowledge of hardware or the most basic
| system administration principles. It doesn't cross their mind
| that RAM and disk space are actually finite things, for
| example, and that it makes for a Bad Day when one of their
| programs starts to consume ALL of it. These are the people who
| should not really be managing their own operating systems at
| work.
| [deleted]
| closeparen wrote:
| Which business and legal requirements, do you think, bind
| most small and medium enterprises to lock down workstations
| while engineers across Silicon Valley have root on their
| MacBooks from huge important companies?
| number6 wrote:
| Money for lawyers
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I gave a demo in Mountain View of some excellent viz, on
| their big screen in some room. I wanted to make some tiny
| change to (plug something in) _edit_ no not a new device,
| being polite, I suggested to move a device of theirs already
| on that network, closer to the overhead projector .. the
| alarm, consternation and definite NO that rippled through the
| three quickly-relaying employees there, was literally like an
| electric current. I was amazed that they couldn 't change
| even the smallest thing, ever.
|
| of course I was trying to get my brilliant colleague without
| a degree, noticed with that code; zero response, like
| stonewall. Later I read, that year Google got over 1million
| job applications.
|
| weird place
| lupire wrote:
| dsl wrote:
| > I suggested to move a device of theirs already on that
| network, closer to the overhead projector
|
| What you didn't know is that it wouldn't work.
|
| There is also an expectation that you don't just randomly
| start changing things in shared conference rooms. If there
| is an issue, you open a GUTS ticket and someone comes and
| solves the problem. Chances are if you discovered a real
| issue, there are 90 other rooms with the same issue that
| also would be updated.
| dekhn wrote:
| What were you trying to connect? Connecting to an ethernet
| port wouldn't work as they use ethernet authentication.
| Connecting to the projector's input ports instead of using
| Meet to present? Certainly something I wouldn't have
| protested if somebody external was giving a demo, back when
| I worked there.
| ska wrote:
| > if you're smart enough to work at Google, you're smart enough
| to manage your own OS
|
| Regardless of the scale, that is a recipe for having your
| highly capable, highly paid engineers losing hours, days, even
| worse - to annoying configuration issues etc. Sometimes it's
| the right thing to do (e.g. very early stage, no IT infra) but
| if you can have an IT person who is actually good/experienced
| at this sort of thing sort out the core problems, it's way more
| efficient.
|
| It's astonishing how much collective time can be wasted on
| "well, it works on my machine" issues. This makes it worth
| coming up with some sort of systematic way to avoid (mostly)
| it.
| miggol wrote:
| There probably a lot of brilliant minds at Google who have
| their very first taste of Linux there. Designers, management
| types, even developers, who suddenly need a Linux install to
| run a specific tool or dev build. Having a consistent Distro
| for them to just turn on and go is very useful.
|
| If something doesn't work, they can communicate back to the
| (well-bearded) developer who sent them that weird build. The
| developer surely has some crazy esoteric distro on their bring-
| your-own device, but they also have desktops running the
| consistent distro available to them all around the office to
| reproduce the issue on. It's a bridge between worlds.
|
| I work in academia and we manage our own Ubuntu spin for this
| reason, despite everyone we ship it to being very
| conventionally smart.
|
| > if you're smart enough to work at Google, you're smart enough
| to manage your own OS.
|
| I also like to think of myself as "smart" for self-managing
| most OS and cloud things. But the role of smarts is probably
| minor compared to the decade+ of experience I have doing it.
| When it's something I'm good at, I think it's because of
| intelligence. When it's something I can't do, I assume the
| people who can have lots of practice.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the word is not "smart", the word is "autonomy" and there is
| none in that network environment. (see post above for real
| example)
| happyopossum wrote:
| > The developer surely has some crazy esoteric distro on
| their bring-your-own device
|
| Nope. If you want access to more than just the basic corp
| resources, you're doing it from a fully managed and approved
| OS on a company owned machine or VM.
| dman wrote:
| Google was the only employer I had where I had root on my
| machine, so I would say that developers have control over their
| machine.
| baobob wrote:
| Was this pre or post 2009?
| sulam wrote:
| I have root right now on my Linux and MacOS systems.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| I have root on my Google machine right this second.
| geekbird wrote:
| I had root on my Linux desktop box at my university job, but
| I was in IT, administering a Linux service. Most of my
| coworkers were using Macs only.
| raggi wrote:
| > Having never worked at a place the size of Google, I'm
| surprised that their IT team directly manages 100,000 machines.
| In my (apparently naive) mind, if you're smart enough to work
| at Google, you're smart enough to manage your own OS.
|
| Smart isn't really a key point here. You can be smart and make
| choices that solve your immediate needs but may not be good for
| the company in the long run. The distro provides for some
| standardization and baseline in among other variance.
|
| > Is it a security thing?
|
| Yes, one of the forms of standardization are audit solutions
| that keep track of all kinds of data about the machines. In the
| time I worked there, I once received outreach because a service
| I had started on the machine had retained an outgoing port to a
| third party service provider for an extended period of time. I
| explained what it was, and I did not get in trouble, but I also
| shut it down. There are many other forms of audit systems.
|
| > Are Googlers not allowed to directly control their own
| computers?
|
| It depends on your role, but many roles have root on their
| machines. You can of course do just about anything from there,
| however some things may get undone by periodic scripts if
| they're defensive (e.g. removal of certain software), or in
| other cases trigger some kind of outreach as described above.
| For certain other policies, you may need to file a bug with a
| business justification to request specific policies - you can
| also do this for entire teams if it applies to their work.
| summerlight wrote:
| Not everyone is interested in playing with their own customized
| OS configurations. Perhaps 90% of the employees would be okay
| if everything "just works". This is especially true due to lots
| of internal tooling and figuring out the right configurations
| for most of them would be a very painful time-consuming process
| for newcomers.
| isatty wrote:
| I work at google, and I'm also someone who has used and messed
| around with Gentoo for like 12 years. When it comes to my day
| job I rather not spend time messing around with my own OS (my
| workflow aside) and leave it to other people. Multiply that by
| 100k or so engineers and the productivity boost is insane.
|
| We're root on both desktops and laptops though, I just rather
| use my time for work and I'm sure my employer would rather I do
| that too.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > I rather not spend time messing around with my own OS (my
| workflow aside) and leave it to other people.
|
| I don't really understand what "messing around mean" in your
| context. Exotic things like slackware or alpine aside, all
| major popular distros now offer unattended updates, easy
| upgrade path between major releases.
|
| Your vscode, neovim, jetbrains whatever or emacs do not work
| differently from one distro to another and since nowadays
| many external stuff is either distributed as static binaries,
| containers or flatpacks or appimages everything is quite
| straightforward and not distro specific.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Why would I want to manage my own Linux distro? I use it to
| code for work, that's it.
|
| > Is it a security thing? Are Googlers not allowed to directly
| control their own computers?
|
| This and simplicity I think. There's definitely some controls
| over what kind of things you install on the MacBooks as well,
| though it's actually not that restrictive.
| poopypoopington wrote:
| Software Engineers are worth more to the company when they're
| writing code, not when they're debugging issues with the OS.
| It's much more worthwhile to standardize the machines people
| have and let people focus on doing their actual work more
| effortlessly.
| [deleted]
| dangus wrote:
| > if you're smart enough to work at Google, you're smart enough
| to manage your own OS.
|
| No disrespect to you but this is a really naive take on how IT
| management works.
|
| For one thing, not everyone at Google is an OS expert. There
| are people working for Google in marketing, sales, support,
| data science, graphic design, hardware design, and other fields
| where you can't depend on every person to "do the right thing"
| when it comes to "managing their own OS."
|
| And even if they can, is that where you want them spending
| their time? Manually managing their OS? Don't you want them to
| do the job they were hired to do instead? Their computer is a
| work tool, not tinkertown.
|
| Basically, the opposite of what you're saying is true: because
| 100,000 people work at Google, each person represents another
| way to potentially mess something up and cause problems for the
| whole company.
|
| Assign each employee with probabilities:
|
| - Probability of falling for a phishing scam
|
| - Probability of installing malware
|
| - Probability of an employee missing an announcement regarding
| OS/security policy
|
| - Probability of an employee opening a support ticket with IT
|
| These probabilities are very low for people who are computer-
| savvy, educated, very highly qualified people. The thing is,
| all you have to do is multiply those probabilities by 100,000
| and now you've got a big problem.
|
| It's much easier to run with zero IT automation if you've only
| got 10 people in your company and they all know each other.
| jms703 wrote:
| Most of the people you listed don't run Linux desktops at
| Google. Of those that do, most are able to manage their own
| OS.
|
| For your probabilities, you describe many issues that aren't
| big issues at Google. Phishing credentials is mitigated by
| mandatory FIDO tokens, binary whitelisting heavily reduces
| installs of malware, security policy isn't needed on these
| desktops (really just needed for mobile devices incl
| laptops).
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Software distribution becomes distinctly more complicated
| if you're running multiple distros. As is, I can install a
| lot of software from an internal apt. Saying "hey now we
| need to maintain an internal yum and pacman and also deploy
| internal packages to those" or alternatively come up with
| some bespoke cross platform binary distribution method
| seems effortful.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Most _could_ , sure. I could do so. But why would I want
| to? It would take research and investment into something I
| don't give a shit about. I don't particularly care what
| Linux variant is being used, as long as it works. The less
| I have to think about it, the more I can spend time on
| other, more important stuff.
| duped wrote:
| I've worked with Xoogler SWEs who didn't know how to use the
| command line. They're not hiring for computer literacy.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Weird. Why not just use Arch Linux?
|
| They could have simply done what Manjaro did: start as Arch, add
| some packages and over time fork completely and manage your own
| testing and stable (by getting inputs from mainstream Arch)
| pessimizer wrote:
| Because Debian-testing is wonderful?
| bluedino wrote:
| Don't a lot of _Googlers_ [1] use Macs? And is it still not
| encouraged to run Windows there, or was that just something
| created by the media?
|
| [1]: Are they still called _Googlers_?
| coryrc wrote:
| Yes, yes Windows discouraged, yes.
| readams wrote:
| Lots of people have Mac laptops but you can't use them for
| anything but remote into a gLinux desktop or virtual machine to
| do development. Or you can use a web-based development
| environment. Basically, at Google, a laptop is just a web
| browser.
| rob74 wrote:
| So a MacBook Air is just a really expensive web browser with
| a weird keyboard layout (it's probably Ok for US keyboards,
| but I hate the way they hide keyboard mappings essential for
| development like square and curly brackets, pipe, backslash,
| tilde etc. on German keyboards with no other plausible
| explanation than that some designer didn't want the keyboard
| to look cluttered)?
| lesuorac wrote:
| I think it's mostly MacBook Pros (not Airs).
|
| Most of Google's services have a corresponding iOS app
| which requires a Mac to build / run a simulator. So if
| you're not actually picky about computer then it's more
| practical to have a Mac as it can handle debugging for
| Web/Android/iOS.
|
| If you're at a desk you can have a dock with a different
| keyboard.
| wil421 wrote:
| Can you post a pic of what you are talking about? My
| mappings for everything you said are one keyboard click or
| a shift click away.
| Arainach wrote:
| [Bias disclaimer: I have previously worked on Windows and
| ChromeOS]
|
| When your choices are:
|
| 1) A 16" MBP with an awful keyboard layout (death to the
| Command key, and put Ctrl in the corner) but a great screen
| and battery life
|
| 2) A Chromebook that's straightforward, reliable, but for
| some reason not available in a size >13" with a resolution
| >1080p (so a dealbreaker for development for many people)
|
| 3) A Linux laptop with all of the fun bluetooth, driver,
| and battery quirks that implies
|
| Many people will choose #1. OS X is by far my least-
| favorite desktop OS for a wide variety of UX reasons, but
| when my workflow for the most part requires browser
| windows, terminals, and enough pixels to use many of them
| at once the 16" MBP is a pretty good choice (when I'm not
| paying, at least).
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > MBP with an awful keyboard layout
|
| OSX lets me remap caps lock to control without digging in
| the registry or playing "find where they moved
| Xorg.conf." It's just an option in the preferences.
|
| Emacs movement shortcuts like C-a and C-e (move-
| beginning-of-line and move-end-of-line) work everywhere
| out of the box. ^C can be kill and ^p can be previous-
| line because they don't collide with copy and print, so
| terminals Just Work instead of each having their own
| convention to memorize. Also, for some reason the OSX
| terminal is the only one that reliably gets SIGWINCH and
| unicode reliably correct, and has for a decade. It's
| weird that linux terminals are so bad at this, but
| whatever.
|
| This is what good design looks like.
| xdennis wrote:
| > OSX lets me remap caps lock to control without digging
| in the registry or playing "find where they moved
| Xorg.conf." It's just an option in the preferences.
|
| In Linux you just have to add 'include
| "capslock(escape)"' in xkb symbols file and it works on
| any Linux distro. I just set it up in my dotfile
| installer in 2013 and never had to fiddle with the
| interface since.
|
| I never have to wonder "where did they moved the option
| in the interface this time?". It's just a script I have
| to run when I set up a new distro install.
| Arainach wrote:
| >OSX lets me remap caps lock to control without digging
| in the registry or playing "find where they moved
| Xorg.conf." It's just an option in the preferences.
|
| For native apps. Sort of.
|
| * Though you can assign Ctrl to the Fn key, you cannot
| assign the Fn action to any key so you can't swap them
| without giving up the ability to use the Fn key at all.
|
| * This doesn't work for web apps. Google Docs etc. will
| still use Command key shortcuts and will thus be
| different locally versus remoted into a machine.
|
| * Some key mappings break in text boxes. I've remapped
| Find to Control+F, which works most of the time, but not
| if my cursor is in a text box, because then it moves the
| cursor forward. Control+B for bold and Control-A for
| select all are likewise. To make it worse, this only
| happens for certain text boxes, and heck if I can figure
| out the pattern.
|
| In all, it's an incredibly frustrating experience.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > is it still not encouraged to run Windows there
|
| My experience was that the only encouragement one way or
| another was toward trying ChromeOS a first, and switching away
| if you wanted to later.
| jawilson wrote:
| As of a few years ago, most engineers in my group had Apple
| laptops but linux desktops and mostly the laptops were being
| used as "terminals" via remote desktop and Chrome (as you were
| not supposed to store source code on a laptop anyways in case
| it was stolen but with some exceptions). I often used a linux
| laptop (or chromebook) and mostly just ssh'd into a "screen"
| session running lots of emacs which worked OK on the google
| bus.
|
| The only folks with Apple desktops were people doing iOS work
| and I think they may have had linux desktops as well.
|
| It was fairly easy to get another linux "desktop" which was
| really just a virtualized linux machine in the cloud.
|
| [1] Yes, still called googlers.
| dsl wrote:
| > is it still not encouraged to run Windows there
|
| You can get a Windows machine, but they are not trusted devices
| and you can't access a lot of stuff. (At least that was the
| case a few years ago when I left)
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Google can keep their in-house distro. Just release their damn
| Linux Google Drive client, and I'll be happy.
| krono wrote:
| Perhaps https://rclone.org/ would be of use to you. It handles
| other cloud storage providers as well, comes with convenient
| encryption functionality, and its synchronisation is far more
| reliable and controllable (at least this is my experience using
| it with OneDrive and S3).
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I've been very happy with insync for years, it works very well.
| gumby wrote:
| A working google drive client for the mac would be nice too. It
| sucks less than it did a few months ago, but is still so bad it
| makes Dropbox look good!
| dsl wrote:
| For the longest time Drive never actually enforced users
| quotas. This was recently "fixed" and they are getting things
| under control.
|
| Quota enforcement was a blocker for official Drive linux
| support because it would have made the abuse issues even worse.
| (Not saying its going to happen now, but one blocker has been
| cleared)
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Could you explain what you mean by this? Why would an
| official Linux client lead to more abuse compared to the
| current situation of several unofficial clients in common
| use.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Google released BSD-licensed Drive integration a decade ago.
| The only reason there isn't a "Linux Drive client" in the sense
| that you implied is the complete lack of initiative among open
| source developers.
|
| If you want a mature, maintained Drive integration on Linux you
| can have it right now with ChromeOS.
|
| https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
| Macha wrote:
| If open source developers were going to do all the work, why
| would they do it for Google's walled garden, rather than
| Syncthing?
|
| And that's why we now have N open source third party
| syncthing interfaces and no clone of the GDrive client.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Exactly. Which is fine.
|
| * Google doesn't see enough gain in supporting a Drive
| client for Linux
|
| * Linux users don't see gain in feeding the beast
|
| ... so nobody dedicating their finite lives to solving this
| problem is win-win.
| solar-ice wrote:
| It is not reasonable to demand that open-source developers
| build a product for one of the world's largest companies
| because it is "too hard" for that company to ship a
| functioning product.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| If the competitor offers https://www.dropbox.com/install-
| linux, developed in the open with a GPL license, is it
| reasonable to tell other people to take on the cost of
| building and maintaining a client for your paid service?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Which aspect of chromiumos drive integration and sync
| engine is not "developed in the open"? The dropbox source
| is distributed as a tarball and if you want to contribute
| to it "contact us". That doesn't meet my definition of "in
| the open".
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| I didn't claim that ChromiumOS's code wasn't developed in
| the open. The fact remains that Google neither supports
| nor provides a Google Drive client for Debian and its
| derivatives or Redhat and its derivatives, while its
| competitor does. It is reasonable for people to complain
| about this.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _is it reasonable to tell other people to take on the cost
| of building and maintaining a client for your paid
| service?_
|
| Google barely squeaked by with $76 billion in revenue last
| year. It only has 156,500 employees.
|
| You can't possibly expect something like that from a
| company this resource-constrained.
| Willish42 wrote:
| They're actually not even as "resource constrained" as
| this comment implies, as the numbers here are off.
|
| Per https://abc.xyz/investor/, Alphabet made $75 billion
| in Revenue _in Q4_. They made $76 billion _in net income_
| for all of 2021.
| wrycoder wrote:
| $480,000 per employee is quite decent, but hardly radical
| these days.
| smm11 wrote:
| Not related to Google at all, but I've been in Windows places
| with Sun, OS/2 and NeXT providing the data. Not a single install
| was newer than the 90s.
|
| Consider this happened after 2011.
|
| Having a few different Linux distros at Google, okay then.
| kodah wrote:
| I'd really love if more companies embraced desktop linux, much
| less maintaining their own distro configuration.
| gitowiec wrote:
| Where I could download gLinux? I thought article said it's
| available for all...
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| It says you can't get it in the second paragraph.
| shortlived wrote:
| Can you create a Debian derivative and not release the source
| code?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Of course; even GPL only requires that you share source
| code _with people that you distribute binaries to_.
|
| EDIT: The only FOSS license I know about that _doesn 't_ do
| this is AGPL, which Google is known to be extremely averse
| to.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| There's a few other supra-GPL copylefts that impinge on
| the freedom to privately fork:
|
| * The OpenWatcom license requires source code publication
| on _use_. This was approved by the OSI but not FSF, which
| means its one of the few times a license can be described
| as Open Source but not Free Software.
|
| * SSPL extends AGPL's copyleft clause to include support
| utilities, which didn't pass muster at either OSI or FSF
| (which is inconsistent with the OSI's prior opinion on
| OpenWatcom but )
|
| IMHO, Google's not wrong to reject AGPL. The license
| makes it very difficult to use modern fork-and-pull-
| request workflows unless you write all your code to be a
| quine. And the lack of people using it makes it mostly
| useful as an exception sales vector rather than a
| legitimate renegotiation of the copyright bargain like
| GPL is. But Google's objection to it is rather weird,
| based on some hypothetical scenario of "GPL virality"
| making them publish internal tools. This is a misreading
| of underlying copyright law; I have yet to see a court
| demand specific performance of any source code
| publication requirement[0]. They will give you money
| damages and _possibly_ an injunction prohibiting use of
| the specific application in question - not your entire
| internal stack.
|
| [0] Practical example: that one time Atari hired a
| subcontractor to republish old Humongous Entertainment
| games on Wii and wound up infringing the GPL on SCUMMVM.
| Atari actually considered GPL compliance, but then
| realized that this would violate their obligation from
| Nintendo not to disclose game source at all.
|
| http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06/gpl-scummvm-and-
| violat...
| lupire wrote:
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| It's not distributed outside Google so yes, you can.
|
| Read the GPL...
| kps wrote:
| What is "the source code" of Debian?
| Xylakant wrote:
| Definitely. The GPL triggers on distributions, so as long
| as you don't distribute you're in the clear. Company-
| internal use doesn't usually count as distribution.
| Karliss wrote:
| The thing with GPL is that you must provide source to users
| of software not to to everyone publicly. So if compiled
| binaries are only available internally the same can be done
| with source code.
| bityard wrote:
| The article says it's just Debian testing with some (presumably
| proprietary) Google provisioning and dev tools bolted on.
| readams wrote:
| Regular users really wouldn't want glinux. It's really just
| debian with a lot of things added for Google's corporate fleet
| management.
| igetspam wrote:
| Correction: The first official distro internally was "grhat." It
| was born out of need. We used LDAP+kerberos for auth and our
| homedirs mounted on first login. This had all kinds of fun
| problems (looking at you, nscd!) but worked well enough most of
| the time. Goobuntu came a couple years later. In the in between,
| lots of people ran their own installed version and we worked
| together to get things working (even Slackware).
| V-eHGsd_ wrote:
| > This had all kinds of fun problems (looking at you, nscd!)
|
| "can someone telnet to 10200 on my box to reset nscd!?"
| temp0826 wrote:
| >> LDAP+kerberos for auth and our homedirs mounted on first
| login
|
| My first "real" job as a sysadmin had this kind of setup,
| albeit with Sun servers and workstations running Solaris 8. I
| was impressed by how well it actually worked most of the time
| given all the quirkiness of kerberos/nfs/nsc/etc..
| dekhn wrote:
| I've used kerberos + some auth (actually AD in addition to
| LDAP) and automounted home (and data dirs) a number of times
| (various clusters, departmental servers, corps). I'd say it
| was fairly mature (the OS stack supported it, it didn't crash
| all the time, etc) but still had (and has) sharp edges when
| it comes to high throughput computing.
| buildbot wrote:
| Same, though much newer! UW CSE did the same when I worked
| there as a help desk tech, student directories mounted on
| login to the machines. IIRC, it was just a samba share linked
| into kerberos auth somehow.
| bryan_w wrote:
| My first job at University was dealing with this type of
| setup (Solaris workstations) except we weren't dealing with
| LDAP, Kerberos, and NFS, but rather AD and Microsoft DFS.
|
| It did NOT go that well, but was a good learning experience.
| politelemon wrote:
| For all the talk I've heard over the years about their in house
| Linux distro. Their desktop application support, and sometimes
| web application support, for Linux is non existent.
|
| Most of their server estate will be Linux based, including what's
| powering their desktop applications. But almost none of their
| efforts give back and enrich the desktop ecosystem. That said
| they do contribute a lot towards frameworks, libraries and the
| kernel. Certainly they are among the top alongside Microsoft in
| recent years and Facebook. So I do recognize my entitled call for
| more... with good cause
| rvz wrote:
| Well their contributions and 'desktop support' only go
| towards... ChromeOS.
|
| The fact that this effort is going towards this OS tells us
| they don't care about open-source and especially the Linux
| Desktop either. It is only to the Kernel which is fine, but it
| clear that the wider Linux Desktop ecosystem has had the same
| 20 year old issues still present today.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| As a Fedora user writing this from my brand new Google Pixel
| phone, who uses Gmail and YouTube, and pretty much nothing else
| from Google in 2022, what is missing?
| [deleted]
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| A lot of the stuff that annoys me and gets in my way while
| using Linux is still the same basic quality-of-life stuff
| that has been broken forever. Bluetooth pairing fails
| occasionally. Plugging in a new display doesn't immediately
| work. A USB microphone fails to register as an input sound
| device.
|
| I cannot imagine that Google engineers would live with such
| deeply broken systems as daily drivers. So whatever _that_
| secret is, whether it consists of drivers, known hardware
| configurations, or even just config files they use to ensure
| optimal operation - that 's what I'd like them to Open
| Source. I'm happy to buy whatever laptop spec Google uses for
| gLinux for myself to go along with their OS.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > I cannot imagine that Google engineers would live with
| such deeply broken systems as daily drivers. So whatever
| that secret is, whether it consists of drivers, known
| hardware configurations, or even just config files they use
| to ensure optimal operation - that's what I'd like them to
| Open Source. I'm happy to buy whatever laptop spec Google
| uses for gLinux for myself to go along with their OS.
|
| Then your imagination could be improved in a few ways:
|
| 1. Google has complete say over the software you're allowed
| to run at work. They can mandate using whatever tools they
| want as terms of your employment.
|
| 2. Google has complete say over the hardware they purchase
| you. Random drive incompatibility isn't a thing. They pick
| hardware that's been validated to work so they don't have
| random IT complaints.
|
| 3. This is a IT / compliance / security thing. The grand
| total of UX people dedicated to this probably amounts to
| designing the splash screens. The grand total for bug
| fixing is for issues impacting an obscene number of users.
| If you f'ed up your OS install you'll basically have to fix
| it yourself (IT will offer to reimage your machine and
| you'll be responsible for making sure you correctly managed
| your backups by hand - you get limited storage space at
| least when I worked there, so you had to make sure to
| exclude certain folders from backups).
|
| 4. They do have a slightly better story for Android
| development but most of that relies on Google3 / Blaze. I
| think they're doing some work to migrate to Bazel finally
| but I imagine they'll always have a bit better internal dev
| story.
|
| About the only value-add they could be giving here is the
| hardware configurations but they're not really different
| from stock Linux laptops you'd buy as a consumer.
| coryrc wrote:
| > I cannot imagine that Google engineers would live with
| such deeply broken systems as daily drivers.
|
| Heh, most use Macs. Linux laptop users have the same
| problems, don't worry. My laptop hard locks up on suspend
| once every couple weeks, plus all the things you mentioned.
| Oh, I also have a weird audio latency bug.
| ajross wrote:
| > Bluetooth pairing
|
| BT is just a disaster everywhere. My experience is that for
| "normal" use cases (input devices & headphone audio,
| basically) Linux is no worse than anywhere else, but still
| bad. Apple users think it's great because Apple made
| AirPods work, but that's a testament to Apple's integration
| engineering and not the underlying technology.
|
| > Plugging in a new display doesn't immediately work
|
| I haven't seen this with Intel drivers on a major distro in
| a long time. But yes, the driver story for other hardware
| remains somewhat weak. And obviously the farther you get
| from "Gnome on Ubuntu/Fedora" into the weeds of desktop
| choices, the weirder the feature set is going to get.
|
| > A USB microphone fails to register as an input sound
| device
|
| No idea here. I haven't seen a USB audio failure in a
| _LONG_ time (closest I can think of is a Razer headset that
| has two chat /game output streams and Linux sees only one
| by default). Mostly likely you had a broken piece of
| hardware that worked in windows only by installing its own
| driver. And that sucks, but poor standards compliance is
| just something we all live with.
| dm319 wrote:
| I get terrible USB mic issues but only with native MS
| Teams (linux is terrible, Windows is not much better).
| These issues are weirdly resolved using the web client
| through Chrome on both platforms.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| > but that's a testament to Apple's integration
| engineering and not the underlying technology.
|
| So no one outside of apple is smart enough to get it
| working.
|
| What bothers me about non apple stuff is. I can pair my
| AirPods to my phone, tv, and laptop. Even if they connect
| to the laptop if I press connect on the Apple TV or phone
| they switch.
|
| With any non apple headphones. (Bose, Audio-Technica,
| Sony, Asus) I have to press Bluetooth pairing button and
| connect on the decide again. So switching between two
| laptops is a pain.
|
| Why can't other brands do what apple can? It's not the
| tech problem when someone solves it...
| ajross wrote:
| > So no one outside of apple is smart enough to get it
| working.
|
| Pretty much, yeah. And the reason is that Bluetooth is a
| disaster of complexity. One implementer thinks function X
| in state Y means "frob", but another interprets that as a
| "glim" command. Apple makes it work by controlling
| variables: their controller, their driver stack, their
| library framework, their app integration. If one team
| doesn't understand why another team's layer is doing
| something, they walk across campus and ask them.
| ska wrote:
| > So no one outside of apple is smart enough to get it
| working.
|
| You have to have the capability _and_ be given /assigned
| the time to do it properly.
|
| Things that are genuinely a mess (e.g. bluetooth?) often
| only work smoothly when there was a mountain of effort
| put into it - that consumers can't see.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| > So no one outside of apple is smart enough to get it
| working.
|
| Eeehhh... Specs are big, complex documents with fuzzy
| terms like SHALL, MAY, MUST and weird corner cases that
| no one thought of, being read by engineers with varying
| linguistic prowess, implementing them in disparate
| hardware and software vendors with radically different
| manufacturing/release pressures, different skillsets,
| different interpretations of the same damned specs...
| It's a wonder any of this shit works at all.
|
| Apple's the only vendor out there with something
| approaching a consistent experience because they're the
| vendor with the greatest degree of control/integration
| over the entire stack. BT, ACPI, all the same.
| ghaff wrote:
| My impression from being in the industry far too long is
| that Bluetooth was one of a variety of what I think were
| being touted as personal area (wireless) networks once
| upon a time with Bluetooth seemingly being pushed for
| relatively simple use cases like keyboards. But none of
| those other protocols panned out so Bluetooth ended up
| being the general non-WiFi wireless standard for things
| that the original spec never contemplated. The standard
| has been updated over time of course but I imagine a lot
| of early-on decisions still have an impact on things.
| hadlock wrote:
| I have a bluetooth audio receiver in the home office, bt
| in my car and bt headphones and none of it has given me
| any trouble. Just works. The only issue I have is which
| phone the car decides to pair with when we get in to go
| somewhere together. Oh, I guess we also have one of those
| bluetooth battery powered speakers for taking to the
| park. It works fine too. I connect to the bluetooth audio
| receiver with my linux, mac and windows laptops on an
| almost daily basis, no problem.
|
| What problems are you running into?
| ori_b wrote:
| > _So whatever that secret is_
|
| A large IT team.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I would imagine that not only large, but also likely
| quite capable. If the IT staff to be hired at google goes
| through a similarly tough gauntlet as the software devs
| and SREs (and other similar product-producing) roles,
| then i can imagine those IT staffers really know what
| they're doing...at least they'd have to be good enough to
| get into the doors of google; which i guess is not easy.
| jszymborski wrote:
| > Bluetooth pairing fails occasionally
|
| Anecdata, my airpods have been pairing seemlessly with
| Xubuntu out-of-the-box for over a year. I've similarly not
| have had any problems pairing with my Bose portable speaker
| or soundbar.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| The secret is using hardware that's known to work with
| Linux. Inside Google, I'm sure IT does this (or
| writes/fixes drivers when it must). Outside google, you
| have to do this yourself. Find someone with a working setup
| and duplicate exactly.
|
| > Bluetooth
|
| Bluetooth is a dumpster fire and Linux bluetooth is a
| radioactive biohazardous dumpster fire. Stay away. My
| workaround: Linux -> SPIDF -> 1Mii B03Pro bluetooth
| transmitter. The chipset drivers that output 3.5mm and
| SPIDF are ancient, stable, and dumb as rocks, so they
| actually work. SPIDF beats 3.5mm because 3.5mm can detect
| connectedness and punish you by scrambling your sound
| settings every time you bump a cable. SPIDF can't do this
| so software can't screw it up.
|
| Also, even if you get linux bluetooth working it will tend
| to scramble if you reboot into a different OS. Just say no.
| Use an external bluetooth transmitter.
| Morgawr wrote:
| > I cannot imagine that Google engineers would live with
| such deeply broken systems as daily drivers. So whatever
| that secret is, whether it consists of drivers, known
| hardware configurations, or even just config files they use
| to ensure optimal operation - that's what I'd like them to
| Open Source.
|
| Hey there, Google engineer here (opinions are my own, etc
| etc). I work in the ChromeOS platform team. We have
| hundreds if not thousands of very talented (not me)
| engineers who work on low-level firmware, drivers, kernel,
| performance optimization, etc on Linux. ChromeOS is still
| Linux and almost entirely open source[0], we also upstream
| most of it[1]. A lot of the improvements that ChromeOS has
| had for multi-monitor support, plug-and-play devices,
| wayland, keyboard/touchpad firmware, etc have all entered
| mainline Linux kernel and should be perfectly usable by the
| whole Linux ecosystem and other distributions.
|
| I don't work with the gLinux team anymore (used to in the
| past) so I don't know how what exactly they do with their
| stuff, but regardless of the "it's not a real linux
| distro!" hate ChromeOS might get, we still run on a fully
| open Linux environment ourselves.
|
| [0] https://source.chromium.org/chromiumos/chromiumos/codes
| earch
|
| [1] The stuff we don't upstream it's usually because either
| we can't (ChromeOS-specific hacks that the Linux kernel
| mainline wouldn't accept) or we haven't been able to yet
| due to needing to clean up patches before they are
| accepted. Regardless we'll still open source it in our
| kernel tree
| Melatonic wrote:
| From an enterprise management perspective nobody (as far
| as I know) has made some kind of tooling to manage linux
| desktops in a similar way admins can do with ChromeOS or
| Windows. I think that is the real dealbreaker for linux
| in the enterprise for general use.
| praptak wrote:
| Plugging in a new display doesn't immediately work on
| gLinux. It may be me, because I'm on i3wm which is not the
| official wm.
|
| I have a manually crafted autorandr config but it's kind of
| hit and miss.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > Plugging in a new display doesn't immediately work. A USB
| microphone fails to register as an input sound device.
|
| I have these problems with the Dell laptop running Windows
| 10 which I use for work, but not with my own desktop or
| laptop running Fedora. So, my experience is more or less
| the opposite apparently. This makes it harder for me to buy
| the theory that there's something uniquely inferior about
| these Linux desktops.
| dkarl wrote:
| When I switched from Linux to Macs for my daily drivers
| ten years ago, I was really shocked by how much stuff
| just works. But there's plenty of stuff that doesn't
| work, even on Mac. When I am struggling to get something
| working with one of my Macs, I often joke to myself that
| stuff like this is why Linux on the desktop will never be
| popular.
|
| For example, my work laptop, a Macbook Pro, is always on
| my desk in my office. When I'm working, I have an
| external monitor plugged into it. If the laptop goes to
| sleep, then a bit later the monitor goes to sleep. But
| when the monitor goes to sleep, the laptop wakes up. Then
| a few minutes later the laptop goes to sleep and starts
| the cycle again. So every evening when I'm done working I
| have to unplug the laptop and manually put it to sleep.
| Then every once in a while (rarely, but multiple times
| this year) something else keeps waking the laptop up, or
| maybe I accidentally wake it up and don't manually put it
| to sleep again, who knows. When that happens, I have a
| dead Macbook Pro on my desk in the morning, and I say,
| "[Stuff] like this is why Linux on the desktop will never
| be popular.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I'm honestly a little disappointed at how smoothly
| everything works on my Linux machines. It ruins the
| impression that I'm doing eldritch magic, issuing gnomic
| commands inherited from the primal hackers, immersing my
| very self in the unknowable gnostic wisdom of Unix.
|
| Maybe I need to run OpenBSD.
| lsc36 wrote:
| Googler here, opinions on my own. Here are a few sentences
| from our internal "supported configurations" page:
|
| - Bluetooth accessories are not guaranteed to work.
|
| - GNOME is the only supported desktop environment. (Used to
| be Cinnamon but we're switching away)
|
| - X11 is the only supported display server protocol. (They
| tried pushing wayland but broke tons of stuff)
|
| People struggle with screen configurations all the time.
| Nvidia driver updates are still a nightmare. I'm pretty
| sure there's no secret sauce.
| kristjansson wrote:
| That's really nice to hear, actually.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I'm curious about the change from Cinnamon to GNOME. Are
| you aware of any particular reason why? I feel like
| attitudes towards GNOME haven't particularly changed over
| the year, but that just might be my bubble.
| raggi wrote:
| > I cannot imagine that Google engineers would live with
| such deeply broken systems as daily drivers.
|
| Oh yes, yes they do.
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