Thanks for the info, I'll take a look. "far less modern looking" is a selling point for me haha. Give me those win95-looking gtk2 interfaces!
"everything is a file" is such a godsend. It makes absolutely everything so much easier and intuitive. I remember trying to get an old dot matrix printer to work using a parallel-to-usb adaptor cable. Without reading any documentation or having any prior experience I tried echo testing12345 > /dev/lp0
and it just worked lol. Meanwhile my friend spent like half an hour digging in windows gui settings trying to figure out how to print to a parallel printer.
I also posted about this before, but a while back I had to configure my system so that a non-root user could start and stop a root daemon without sudo. On a runit system all you have to do is change the permissions of some control files and it works. On systemd? When I looked it up, the simplest solution involved writing a polkit policy in javascript 🤮
systemd-regedit
That's just dconf lol. It sounds great in theory -- after all, isn't bringing standardization to a chaotic battlefield of different formats a good thing? But in practice it's absolute garbage. I would much rather just edit a config file. Heck, even if you program uses some obscure config format like xml or something language-specific like .lua
or .py
, I would much rather take a few minutes to learn the specifics of your format than fuck around with dconf. Fuck dconf.
idk man I use /dev/sdX when running commands interactively and PARTLABELs in my /etc/fstab
. All those letters and numbers in UUIDs are too much for my monkey brain to handle lol
Ooh, I've never heard of bcachefs, sounds exciting! I see it supports encryption natively, which btrfs doesn't. Pretty cool!
Personally I've never had any issues with btrfs, but I did start using it only a couple years ago, when it was already stable. Makes sense that you'd stick with zfs tho, if that's what you're used to.
I find myself inventing new curses for those who screwed things up with these overblown, over complex, minimally functional abominations
Gosh, tell me about it. I once tried writing a custom wifi signal strength indicator app that got its information from network-manager. Apparently the only way to programmatically communicate with network-manager is through dbus, which is just terrible. Scarce to no documentation, poor support for any language other than C/C++, and once you do get it working, it's the most disgusting and overly verbose code you've ever seen, just to query the status of the wifi card. Could've exposed the API through raw unix sockets or something, but nope, they had to reinvent the wheel on that one as well.
Just give me vi and the basic configuration files and let me get on with it!
I'll take this opportunity to shill for Void Linux, it sounds like exactly what you're describing. I've been a happy user for like 5 years now. I particularly like how nothing ever breaks, because there's not much to break on such a minimal system.
...well, actually, a few things did break over the years, but most of those were due to user error haha.
Thanks! Memes as education material / propaganda FTW
I can think of a single instance where a Redhat-ism is better
I don't know if it would be accurate to call it a redhat-ism, but btrfs is pretty amazing. Transparent compression? Copy-on-write? Yes please! I've been using it for so long now that it's spoiled me lol. Whenever I'm on an ext4 system I have to keep reminding myself that copying a huge file or directory will... you know... actually copy it instead of just making reflinks
I'd do away with network-manager on a stationary system too, but I'm on a laptop, and unless there's some trick I don't know about, configuring wifi by hand for every new network I come across sounds like a bit of a pain. Especially for corporate/institution network that use fancy things like PEAP
Thanks! I love this format so much. I can't find it now, but one of my favourite memes in this genre was something like this:
STOP DOING
- Tasks were never meant to be completed
- Years of working, but there's STILL MORE SHIT TO DO
- Wanted to get some work done anyway, for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called SIMULATION GAMES
- "Please let me sacrifice a third of my life to justify my existence. Please let me spend eight hours a day working just to be able to do it again the next day" - statements dreamt up by the utterly deranged
Look at what people have been demanding our respect for all this time, with all the schedules and todo lists we have built for them:
These are REAL things done by REAL people
<Pictures of gmail, microsoft outlook, and some TODO list app>
They have played us for absolute fools
I use nixos on my homeserver, but I'm looking to switch it to Void as well. For me personally I just realized that it's easier to set everything up with shell scripts and docker-compose. But that's just my personal experience, by all means go ahead and try out nixos if you have the time. It has lots of unique features that you can't replicate with "just a bunch of shell scripts". This video does a great job of selling nixos. Maybe my favourite part of nixos is how they make "shortcuts" for a lot of common tasks. For example, setting up a letsencrypt ssl certificate for your webserver with autorenewal can be done in just two lines of config.