Software

someone figured out how to talk to rocks. now we all have to do it. rocks speak in riddles and that makes it real hard sometimes.

“considered harmful”

some people pride themselves in their disagreeability. i’m not into that kind of thing, but i have no problem getting preachy.

these are my personal recommendations. YMMV

instead of	consider
arch linux	alpine, gentoo, void linux
bluesky, threads, twitter	the fediverse, rss/atom, going outside
bootstrap, PureCSS	min, werc
LaTeX	groff, or Plan 9's troff
discord	signal, mumble, telegram, xmpp, matrix, ANYTHING. hell, even irc
fedora, ubuntu, pop os	linux mint, devuan
gemini, chatgpt	duckduckgo, 4get, searx
cursor, visual studio code	vim, emacs, micro, zed
hyprland	niri, mangowc
omarchy	just buy a mac
python	sh/sed/awk, or Go
snap	flatpak, appimages
substack, medium	going outside

goto

i am fond of goto in the C programming language. i think most developers fear it irrationally

“I think goto’s are fine” - Linus Torvalds

See also: The case for goto by Srcerer on YouTube

suckless

02:44 < aiju> this suckless approach of obsessing over "bloat" and ESPECIALLY trying to quantify it is just turbonerdery

suckless has produced some real helpful stuff over the years, but some of their code is quite difficult to read despite their obsession with small, easy code.

i like st.

suckless is right about systemd.

some several years ago they were involved in some weird right-wing crap. one member threw around the term “cultural marxism” when questioned about it. mark of the beast. don’t trust anyone who talks like that.

i have no idea if these reprehensible political leanings still define them in any way today.

sudo

sudo is awful big for what most people use it for. apparently it has some advanced features that some administrators are real thankful for, but the typical user will never know.

did you know that the sudo project’s mascot is a sandwich?

sudo mascot

/etc/sudoers is way harder to read than anything should ever be, especially given its importance to big vital infrastructure. this is such a problem that they scream at you not to edit sudo’s configuration directly, but instead through visudo so nothing will save if there are errors.

most people would do just fine without sudo and with something simpler and easier to use like doas from OpenBSD.

a sudoers file can be hundreds of lines long on a fresh install of Ubuntu. this, however, is my entire OpenDoas /etc/doas.conf file:

permit nopass :wheel

…not only is this easier to read than

%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

…but the entirety of the OpenDoas config is one line on my machine, whereas this would be one among tens or hundreds of lines in sudo.

systemd

GNU Linux are just a small part of the overall systemd operating system

On Mon, 20.09.10 16:42, Michael Biebl (mbiebl at gmail.com) wrote: > > > - systemd-random-seed-save.service: why do we need this as a > > > separated service? Anyway, shouldn't it be in > > > /lib/systemd/system/shutdown.target.wants by default? > > > > Same. > > This clashes with our existing sysv init scripts on Debian. > > Could those services only be enabled by default if you make a > native/non-sysv build? Well, it is definitely our intention to gently push the distributions in the same direction so that they stop supporting deviating solutions for these things where there's really no point at all in doing so. Due to that our plan is to enable all this by default in "make install". Packagers may then choose to disable it by doing an "rm" after the "make install", but we want to put the burden on the packagers, so that eventually we end up with the same base system on all distributions, and we put an end to senseless configuration differences between the distros for the really basic stuff. If a distro decides that for example the random seed save/restore is not good enough for it, then it's their own job to disable ours and plug in their own instead. Sooner or later they'll hopefully notice that it's not worth it and cross-distro unification is worth more. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.

this is a tiny example and doesn’t matter all so much, but it reflects a certain harmful attitude common among developers.

an egocentric deveoper makes tools for himself and figures they must be for everybody. after all, he is everbody and everybody is just like him. there is no “different,” only wrong, he thinks.

maybe Poettering is not the most egocentric developer out there, but you’d have to be close to it to pull off so much feature creep and see no issue.

systemd has some real rich and robust features for power users and system administrators. like what? i dunno. i don’t use them. sudo has a similar problem.