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I’ve been using Linux for ten years and I agree. These are not very enticing reasons. Terminals and shells are overrated. Most popular shell languages are te

I’ve been using Linux for ten years and I agree. These are not very enticing reasons. Terminals and shells are overrated. Most popular shell languages are terrible as programming languages, and if you go for a less popular interactive shell then you will “ruin your muscle memory” or whatever for when you have to SSH into a Linux “box” (as they call it). (A lot of new tech on Linux is immediately suspicious because “[I’m a sysadmin and] this won’t work on this 30 year old Unix variant”.) The terminals themselves are just 70s technology and you might have to use another layer on top of the terminal (multiplexer) in order to do simple things like copy (to the clipboard) the output of the previous command—it’s not an integrated experience at all. And Mac has terminals and shells as well. Although I guess a different (probably better) default shell compared to many Linux distros. Tiling window managers are great and a great concept. But they often come bundled with yet-another-multi-weekend configuration campaign as you have to set up basic, simple things like date-and-time and the battery level (and often in a bad/unaliased font as well… because some users might be running their window managers on potatoes). Maybe Linux is too much of a configuration-sink for people like me. But I ended up on it for whatever reason.

VTimofeenko 5y ago
> Most popular shell languages are terrible as programming languages, Could not agree more, and my hobby is writing those shell scripts in a DSL that is very close to bash. To me the main benefit of terminals and shells is the composability of utilities that are built to run in text-only environments. Daisy-chaining tools together on the fly is immensely powerful and just not possible with GUI based programs.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  Chaining together applications like that is a great concept. But we should take it further in this case day and age with more structured input/output, like what Elvish and PowerShell does.
  - VTimofeenko 5y ago
    Yeah, the ideas behind PS and Elvish are very interesting, however, I find that if I need to process more complex data, I typically reach for Python.
fartcannon 5y ago
There's no time sink if you don't do any of that and just use, for example, Ubuntu. What you're describing is the benefit of an open system. You _can_ customise it. You don't have to.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  Sure, it can work as a web browser OS for grandpa and grandma. But the author mentioned tiling window managers. And if you want those kinds of not-on-other-OSes experiences then you have to configure all kinds of irrelevancies (generally speaking).

VTimofeenko 5y ago

> Most popular shell languages are terrible as programming languages, Could not agree more, and my hobby is writing those shell scripts in a DSL that is very close to bash. To me the main benefit of terminals and shells is the composability of utilities that are built to run in text-only environments. Daisy-chaining tools together on the fly is immensely powerful and just not possible with GUI based programs.

avgcorrection 5y ago
Chaining together applications like that is a great concept. But we should take it further in this case day and age with more structured input/output, like what Elvish and PowerShell does.
- VTimofeenko 5y ago
  Yeah, the ideas behind PS and Elvish are very interesting, however, I find that if I need to process more complex data, I typically reach for Python.

fartcannon 5y ago

There's no time sink if you don't do any of that and just use, for example, Ubuntu. What you're describing is the benefit of an open system. You _can_ customise it. You don't have to.

avgcorrection 5y ago
Sure, it can work as a web browser OS for grandpa and grandma. But the author mentioned tiling window managers. And if you want those kinds of not-on-other-OSes experiences then you have to configure all kinds of irrelevancies (generally speaking).