The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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Slav Power said:
Yet no one who ever glorifies their shell as the be-all-end-all of computing would live without any form of window compositor. Even though they could since they can do everything in their shell, even browse web with Lynx. Funny that.
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In 2014, I spent half a year on Linux without any windowing system installed. That was also the last year I had any notion of "stability". Should western civilization pull out of this downward spiral and provide me with a bit more, I'd probably RETVRN but web browsers provide me with too much copium ATM.
 
AnOminous said:
Even sh does almost anything anyone would actually want to do. bash is a little more elegant and what I usually use.
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Related to this, I recently learned that Debian symlinks a different shell called dash to /usr/bin/sh. Apparently it makes execution much quicker, the Arch Wiki notes a roughly 4x times faster speed. But I have also heard it can cause problems due to bashisms, there is a project to mitigate that though called checkbashisms.
 
Kiwifarmsname said:
I didn't use the company app I used the pre installed Mint app?
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I tried to get you to actually clarify what you used.


If it was from mint's app then, it could literally be anything that causing it to fail. For all i know the drive you have could be failing. Which could explain why windows is failing to install. but idk. I doubt you're going to be able to fix it. Unless it is a hardware failure it's definitely fixable. but unless you know how to chroot into a disk, and work on things. Or give more than vague one sentence descriptions you're basically screwed.

If it's not a hardware failure. install windows 11. is my advice.
 
AnOminous said:
Even sh does almost anything anyone would actually want to do. bash is a little more elegant and what I usually use.
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Akerman said:
Related to this, I recently learned that Debian symlinks a different shell called dash to /usr/bin/sh. Apparently it makes execution much quicker, the Arch Wiki notes a roughly 4x times faster speed. But I have also heard it can cause problems due to bashisms, there is a project to mitigate that though called checkbashisms.
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dash is a Debian-specific implementation of the Almquist shell: a re-implementation of the original Bourne shell.

Bashisms, if I'm not mistaken, are a well attested problem for anyone who runs a bash script without enabling the POSIX modifier... so basically, 90% of bash scripts will have at least one bashism in it. After all, who wants to remember the damn --posix/set -o posix modifier when writing shell scripts that'll be used by people running bash anyway? Now, I ain't a jack-off with any acumen in shell scripting, I'm just parroting shit I've read over the years, take what I say with a grain of salt. That outta the way, let's talk about the problems with sh and why bashisms rear their inconvenient heads from time to time:

a) sh's syntax resembles ALGOL; some defunct programming language from the 60s.
b) The Bourne shell was designed for mainframes with the computing power of a potato, relative to our eleventy bazillion transistor 0.000001nm process nodes, etc
c) bash lets you do all sorts of fancy stuff with double brackets for conditional expressions, specific forms of string manipulation, arrays, and process substitution.
d) bash has tons of other features that make scripting more flexible, easier to read, write, troubleshoot, etc
e) it used to be that Linux developers used to pay lipservice to the idea of interoperability with other Unix-like environments, but that pretense disappeared a decade plus ago.
f) All the BSDs default to sh with tcsh being the only other official alternative; bash, fish xonsh, zsh, and others are always available as ports, but their scripts err on proper POSIX-compliance, unlike Linux developers who quarter-ass it (if they even pay any attention to POSIX at all nowadays)
 
Not to detract from the current topic, but I've had some real fun prowling through Guix configs these last few days. Its a really pleasantly surprising how kino a lot of people's setups are. You'll rarely see two people rig their system in the exact same way, guess that's the whole point of having such a flexible base. And I'm not just talking about rice, but custom packages, file systems, channels and so on. Two of my favorites thus far are Testament and Engstrand. Gentoo et al probably have a similar level of personalization, but there's something about Lisp/Guile that makes reading through these git pages super comfy.
 
Dread First said:
Bashisms, if I'm not mistaken, are a well attested problem for anyone who runs a bash script without enabling the POSIX modifier... so basically, 90% of bash scripts will have at least one bashism in it. After all, who wants to remember the damn --posix/set -o posix modifier when writing shell scripts that'll be used by people running bash anyway? Now, I ain't a jack-off with any acumen in shell scripting, I'm just parroting shit I've read over the years, take what I say with a grain of salt. That outta the way, let's talk about the problems with sh and why bashisms rear their inconvenient heads from time to time:
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I've made my sh symlink on all my linux insalls point to dash for a while now (which by the way in case anyone here doesn't happen to know, generally on modern linux installs, /bin/sh is just a symlink to another shell, usually bash running in posix compliant mode, but anything debian uses dash out of the box, and void also happens to use dash out of the box).

I've never had an issue with any of the scripts that get installed from packages, or ones built into the system breaking after making dash my /bin/sh. It's generally not a problem, because most people that make scripts that are getting shipped out to other people set #!/usr/bin/bash or #!/usr/bin/env bash in the shebang if they use bashism in the script. So changing /bin/sh has no effect. And any script that somehow doesn't that does use bashisms is getting packaged, people should open an issue on it, because it's a dumb mistake on the writers part, that's easily fixable.

As far as writing scripts. I do tend to use /bin/sh for my scripts. Since I'm using dash, I would rather take advantage of the speed, than the slight convenience using bash can give most of the time. Like I don't mind using [ instead of [[. There are still a few scripts where I do use bash in the shebang, mostly for things where I am doing signal handling, because bash makes it simpler. Otherwise. I don't really feel like I loose much.

The main thing I wish I had in dash, that isn't there, is being able to do $(<filename.something) to read the contents of the file. Although you can do the same thing with read, and you can definitely do it with cat, but I tend to avoid calling external programs if at all possible, without needing to do anything ridiculous. Obviously there are some situations where it will be more efficient to fork an exec an external command, like doing some kind of processing that the shell would be way less efficient in. Or that just doesn't make sense to do with the shell.
 
cigint said:
It's actually the shell command line that is obsolete as a user interface, and the shell program only has value as a command interpreter. Commands should be written in and executed straight from the text editor, since writing commands and handling their output is a text processing task.
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> Wants to turn a text editor into an Operating System.
> EMACS user detected.
 
analrapist said:
In 2014, I spent half a year on Linux without any windowing system installed. That was also the last year I had any notion of "stability". Should western civilization pull out of this downward spiral and provide me with a bit more, I'd probably RETVRN but web browsers provide me with too much copium ATM.
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The Unix Philosophy indicates one tool doing one job well. Meaning, you need a laptop for casual web browsing, separate from your personal computing hardware.
 
Croco said:
The Unix Philosophy indicates one tool doing one job well. Meaning, you need a laptop for casual web browsing, separate from your personal computing hardware.
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Even though the main inspiration behind Unix, Multics, was designed with the idea that multiple users should be able to utilize the same mainframe computer to do different tasks at once. Something Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie kept in Unix.

Then again, Linux users are notorious for completely misunderstanding ideals of "the founding fathers". It's extremely telling when Stallman's views are nowhere near as radical as those of a good chunk of the Linux community.
 
Dread First said:
As a general rule: all the i686 applications that antiX, a Debian rebuild, has would be in the repositories. If antiX has a software manager or a software store of some type, you can just start searching and away you go.
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Ah yeah they do have a software center I haven't used one of those in ages lol
 
Slav Power said:
Even though the main inspiration behind Unix, Multics, was designed with the idea that multiple users should be able to utilize the same mainframe computer to do different tasks at once. Something Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie kept in Unix.

Then again, Linux users are notorious for completely misunderstanding ideals of "the founding fathers". It's extremely telling when Stallman's views are nowhere near as radical as those of a good chunk of the Linux community.
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The one mainframe as The Cathedral vs the multiple laptops scattered around as The Bizarre. One distraction free prog environment = better is better. 35 chrome tabs open on the same laptop = worse is better.
 
Looking at that. the part I dislike the most is removing tpm 1.2 support. It's not as bad as windows forcing you to get a new computer if you don't have tpm 2.0. But still you would think they would keep that around.
 
prollyanotherlurker said:
Looking at that. the part I dislike the most is removing tpm 1.2 support. It's not as bad as windows forcing you to get a new computer if you don't have tpm 2.0. But still you would think they would keep that around.
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You do realize who Poettring works for, right?

Very cool that they just completely broke people's systems after they did normal upgrades for absolutely no reason. New PCs were shipping with TPM 1.2 modules as late as 2018, if not even more recently.

The scum claim they did this "due to better security". But what "better security"? Anyone with TPM 2.0, was already using TPM 2.0. The only argument for removing TPM 1.2 support would be to:
  • cut unneccessary code
  • reduce the attack surface
in SYSTEMD? When they could just stop parasitizing more and more previously working parts of Linux? JFC
 
⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛ said:
You do realize who Poettring works for, right?
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Okay but, what if, all the retardation in Windows stems not from deliberate malice but from mass retardation of it's employees, and the reason systemd is so shit is not because Poettering does it out of deliberate malice, but because he's simply retarded? Have you ever thought about that? Hmm? No? Thought so.
 
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