The horror that is Ubuntu

You might have heard that I recommend Ubuntu to people as a sort of equivalent to the patch for Windows smokers. It's sort-of linux-y, yet sort-of Windows-y enough to not trigger PWSD in random, non-techie people.

I had merely a vague impression of exactly how Windows-y it actually is, until last night. But the horror doesn't begin last night, the horror begins sometime earlier in the week, when :

Her : You know, this Ubuntu thing is just as progressively sluggish as Windows. But I mean... exactly.
Me : How did that happen ?
Her : I have no fucking idea.
Me : So look in top, what's hanging it ?
Her : What ?
Me : Click in system whatever, where the monitor is, look where it lists processes.
Her : The Task Manager thingee ? Hm... Oh! It says settings-something uninterruptible.
Me : So kill it.
Her : Hahaha is this the Ubuntu svchost ?
* Me quietly facepalms, head-desks and prepares to BBQ an OMFG with a side of WTF

Then last night :

Me : So did that fix it ?
Her : Yes. Killing Ubuntu svchost fixes the problem, and also makes the windows in Ubuntu look exactly like the windows in Windows once you've killed Windows svchost.ⁱ Of course it comes back when you turn it back on, so you have to kill it every time.
Me : You have to show me this thing.

So she did, and yes gnome-settings-daemon was utterly murdering the reasonably recent machine. Why ?

No, seriously, take your time.

Take your time and try to guess,

before you scroll all the way down

to where the explanation is.

Ready ?

Here we go :

I had to look into the open files. It has $Home/.thumbnails/normal opened, which made me curious. Wtf is in here ?

$Home/.thumbnails/ contains three directories : large, normal and small. They, together, contained over 300`000 files.

Imagine this.

Someone designed a system that does its own caching. You know, for kids. It can't use the OS caching, it's too good for that. It does its own. And then fails to garbage collect the cache. And then fails to notice when the cache that's never garbage collected runs out of any sort of bounds.

What happens if I copy a file ten billion times in that directory, does gnome-settings-daemon crash ? Does it check THAT bound, or do I now get to run random code atop its smoldering remains ?

This is how Windows people code. This is what System-D is all about : A Festivus For The Rest Of Us, in computing. For the rest of them. Of them. For the retards, for the vegetables that "are people too"ⁱⁱ, for the Power Rangers and the Secret Agents cracking the case in Excel.

This is why I want signed patches. This is why you want signed patches. Because we're not them. It sucks to be them. We want to kill them, not be them.

1. I checked. It fucking does, yes. [↩]
2. No they aren't. [↩]