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While I think it’s amazing that not only are 95% of Linux users 56 years of age, but they even share the same birth date!

I work at a Linux-dominant shop. Macs are somewhat common. People with Windows are kind of seen as weirdos.

We don’t use office packages all that much either; more geared towards markdown and git and programming languages. The office package I use the most is Google’s.

I haven’t had a machine with windows on it since Windows ME. I do have some training in windows server from over a decade ago (nearing two maybe?), but I’ve never used the knowledge.

Let’s just say that ME deserved its “Mistake Edition” moniker

Yeah, Ubuntu actually isn’t the first distro without GNU coreutils. Beyond Android and Busybox, there’s also stuff like Talos, which is something like … Kubernetes/Linux.

IME something like Kubernetes/Linux running “distroless” containers have a huge potential to displace traditional GNU/Linux in the server market, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone manages to build a desktop out of it, either.

One more puzzle piece here is that du won’t report on files that have been marked for deletion but are still held on to by some process. There’s an lsof incantation to list those, but I can’t recall it off the top of my head.

It used to be part of sysadmin work to detect the processes that held on to large files if df reports that you’re running out of space, and restart them to make them let go of the file. But I haven’t done that in ages. And if you restarted the host OS that should have taken care of that.

I assume you also know how to prune container resources.

It’s even a tape archiving tool. Just pretty much nobody uses it in the original way any more.

Very much one of those “if it ain’t broke, don’t replace it” tools.

Yeah, there should be a clear separation between scripts, which should have a shebang, and interactive use.

If a script starts acting oddly after someone does a chsh, then that script is broken. Hopefully people don’t actually distribute broken script files that have some implicit dependency on an unspecified interpreter in this day and age.

That’s interesting I hadn’t thought about the JSON angle! Do you mean that you can actually use jq on regular command outputs like ls -l?

No, you need to be using a tool which has json output as an option. These are becoming more common, but I think still rare among the GNU coreutils. ls output especially is unparseable, as in, there are tons of resources telling people not to do it because it’s pretty much guaranteed to break.

I’ve been using fish (with starship for prompt) for like a year I think, after having had a self-built zsh setup for … I don’t know how long.

I’m capable of using awk but in a very simple way; I generally prefer being able to use jq. IMO both awk and perl are sort of remnants of the age before JSON became the standard text-based structured data format. We used to have to write a lot of dinky little regex-based parsers in Perl to extract data. These days we likely get JSON and can operate on actual data structures.

I tried nu very briefly but I’m just too used to POSIX-ish shells to bother switching to another model. For scripting I’ll use #!/bin/bash with set -eou pipefail but very quickly switch to Python if it looks like it’s going to have any sort of serious logic.

My impression is that there’s likely more of us that’d like a less wibbly-wobbly, better shell language for scripting purposes, but that efforts into designing such a language very quickly goes in the direction of nu and oil and whatnot.

No, but the weirdos who insist on spelling it “SystemD” always seem to hate systemd.

systemd is pretty great. I tend to start long-running processes as user services, and I’ve even taken to starting some apps that give an old laptop trouble with systemd-run and a slice with some memory restrictions. Easy peasy, works great, all declarative, no wibbly-wobbly shell scripts involved.

Yeah, JSON is essentially a side effect of having JavaScript already. It makes sense that it shows up a lot of places, especially web. But just like with JS, it’s not really good, just ubiquitous.

I’ve very barely dipped my toes in dbus before, and the option to have something else is on its face attractive (not a fan of XML and the late 90s/early aughties style of oop), but JSON for a system interface?

I mean, Kubernetes shows that yaml can work, but in this day and age I’d expect several options for serialisation, and for the default to be binary, not strings.

String serialisations are primarily for humans IMO, either as readers or writers. As writers we want something with comments (and preferably no “find the missing }” game), so for that most of us would prefer something like TOML if the data is simple enough, and actually Yaml for complexity at the level of Kubernetes—JSON manages to be even more of a PITA at that level.

But machine-to-machine? Protobuf, cap’n’proto, postcard, even CBOR should all be alternatives to examine

Yeah, I think my sway config is around five years old now. The Wayland experience hasn’t been entirely without warts, but as someone who kind of just uses the desktop to drive a browser and a bunch of terminals, there’s not a whole lot of problems to run into either.

If ssh has a security issue and you permit root logins then hostiles likely have an easier time getting access to root on the machine than if they only get access to your user account—then they need multiple exploits.

Generally you also want to be root as little as possible. Hence sudo, run0, etc.

I used Ratpoison for well over a decade, and only replaced it with sway once I had a new machine and figured it was time to try Wayland. Apparently that’s some 4-5 years ago already.

Leaking isn’t really the issue, though I suppose Rust helps with that as well. Its memory sales pitch is more about memory safety, which is not reading or writing the wrong parts of memory. Doing that can have all sorts of effects, where the best you can hope for is a crash, but it often results in arbitrary execution vulnerabilities. Memory _un_safety is pretty rare and most prominent in languages like C, C++ and Zig.

Rust also has more information contained in it, which means resulting programs can actually be faster than C, as the optimizer in the compiler is better informed.

Rust is already in the kernel and Torvalds wants more, faster. He’s being obstructed by C purists, who at this point are the people who should fork the kernel if they see anything but C as heresy.

Thing is, there is already Rust in Linux, and Torvalds wants more, faster. He’s being sabotaged by C purists, who at this point should stop acting unprofessionally, or at the very least make their own “only C” fork if they disagree with his leadership so much.

Reads more like if you made a mess as a kid and cleaned up before your parents came home. The state between when they leave and when they arrive is up for experimentation.

How do you know a post was written by a systemd hater? Easy, they’ll spell it with a big D for some reason. It reminds me of how Norwegian rabid anti-cyclists are unable to spell “cyclist” for some reason.

Claiming you don’t want to restart an old debate and then trying to restart it anyway is pretty funny.

You might also want to keep in mind that you can’t really force an init system on Linux distros. Systemd became the norm through being preferred, as in, the people using and maintaining it think it’s good. At this point you might as well be ranting about how “LinuX is evil somehow” and we should all be using GNU HURD or Minix or something.

Also: Haven’t thought about suckless in well over a decade, maybe closer to two? I guess way back in the day I was kinda intrigued by their ideas and used some of their products; these days I’d rather see them as something between an art shop and people who are playing a somewhat unusual game with themselves, but not particularly relevant to mainstream software engineering.