5 ms·

Trainwreck Design

148 points by j3s 2y ago

robertclaus 2y ago
I think this is also interesting with respect to running a company or a more close-knit team.
hinkley 2y ago
I have been wondering about this more recently. I’ve filed bug fixes on a handful of projects and tracked open issues on quite a few, and the stream of inbound PRs is often so random. Not just bug fixes but new features. Where’s the plan? Whats the scope? Which of these PRs is likely to land? Can anyone but the maintainer guess?
terryf 2y ago
Good article content, but wow the article looks great! Really incredible! If by any chance someone knows the tools that were used to make the big-font subtitles (or the whole page?), enlightenment would be highly appreciated!
- nyx 2y ago
  FIGlet http://www.figlet.org/ http://www.figlet.org/ is a nice command-line tool for doing stuff like this. Can preview its fonts online here: https://patorjk.com/software/taag/ https://patorjk.com/software/taag/
  - terryf 2y ago
    Thank you!
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Also - the images look strongly reminiscent of `cowsay`.
- aflukasz 2y ago
  Looks is in the eye of the beholder, but notice, that in HTML, this is just one big paragraph - if any tool did the whole page, it wasn't particularly interested in semantic HTML.
hagbard_c 2y ago
Hm, yes, well. Trainwreck design seems to be another term for 'design by natural evolution', more or less the way the literate apes which are responsible for these systems came about themselves. Just like we are full of odd design choices [1] so are our creations. We learn to deal with them as long as they do not cause egregious problems, otherwise we build something else which more fits the bill at that moment. The moment passes, things change and before long the fancy new replacement for that old piece of junk is getting crusty itself but a drop of oil here and a well-aimed slap there keep it functional so why bother, there's more important stuff to do. Disparate components of the Rube Goldberg contraption age at different times, some are patched and some are replaced entirely but the machine keeps running while that other team with their visionary leader finds out that the well thought-out design does not lend itself for crossing that chasm which the recent earthquake produced. While they are waiting for the right design to percolate up through the masses we added the bridge tool to the toolbox and kept it there just in case - it is a big box. Lo and behold, it came in handy quite often, who knew that a bridge could be used to walk from tree to tree through the jungle? And so it grows and grows, every now and then shedding some parts while gaining new ones. That is how it came about, just like how we came about. That is fine by me as one who is part of the motley crew of tinkerers who make it happen. Every now and then someone comes along with a vision of taming this mess, to give it a new facade, to bring order to the chaos, seemingly oblivious of the many corroding and overgrown remnants of previous attempts at taming the beast we passed along the way. I say let them try to tame it, maybe someone succeeds in breeding some nice and docile pet out of it some day which obeys your every command - only to find out it has lost the ability to fend for itself in times of trouble. Poor thing, another one bites the dust while the beast just keeps going and going, warts and all. In the end it is said only the cockroaches and tardigrades survive but rest assured, they'll have the beast right on their many heels. [1] We have inside-out retinas, why did we not get them the right way around just like squid have? Why can we not synthesize vitamin C? OK, we evolved somewhere where it was available on every tree but would those few extra genes have bothered us? The dog under the table has them, why not we?
aumerle 2y ago
Now, the OP has to remember, df -h -x tmpfs instead of df -h. The proper solution for this is to not have commands that are both meant for interactive and script usage. Then the defaults for their output can be changed over time to suit the evolving landscape. Or if you do want a single command for both have a --script flag that makes its output suitable for usage in scripts.
aktuel 2y ago
The bouncing ball bounces way too soon.
notachatbot1234 2y ago
A webpage that uses numeric identifiers for external references that are found only when scrolling to the very bottom of the page and show their URLs as plain text. Now that is a train wreck. Hyperlinks are the cornerstone of the web. Don't be afraid of using them!
- bayindirh 2y ago
  [flagged]
- atoav 2y ago
  You mean footnotes? As they have been used for centuries in print? The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context, that is out of the scope of the original text. Ideally on a website meant for computer screens you wouldn't have them on the end, but in the margins, next to the information, but for short stuff it is okay to put them at the end of the chapter – bonus points if the reference numbers can be clicked and take you to the foot note, extra bonus points if there is an arrow taking you up again. But this is scientific literature style writing, not everything needs footnotes.
  - Someone 2y ago
    > The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context, <a href=“Foo” title=“go to Foo” /> will give you additional context on hover (on systems that support that)
    - hk__2 2y ago
      > will give you additional context on hover (on systems that support that) "hover" has no meaning on touch-based interfaces.
      - majewsky 2y ago
        You should see the title text if you long-press on the link, no?
troupo 2y ago
This is the bazaar version of enshittification. In that the software becomes worse for the user, but for different reasons than in the commercial world. In the end users lose anyway
- cybrox 2y ago
  Yes but at least it's too many cooks spoil the broth and not the cook spat in your soup so now pay double and order a beverage subscription.
  - badsectoracula 2y ago
    And if you know how to cook you can at least try and improve the food or make your own ingredients :-P (ok the analogy starts breaking down at some point but you get the idea :-P)
langsoul-com 2y ago
This is why I quite like Phpstorm over vscode. Yes, vscode and plugins can do everything. But Phpstorm integrates everything into one coherent package. Too many random directions is more annoying. In terms of software dev, it's quite hard to get a good app wide experience. There's just so many people working on the project. Without someone to make sure things are aligned, things fall apart into random wild patterns everywhere.
- frankzander 2y ago
  not everything ... just plain remote work over sftp or ftp seems to be impossible. You always work some sort local and than it's pushed. There is no real "remote client" out there. Atom did have plugin which worked quite well accomplishing this task.
therein 2y ago
Output of mount and df are terrible indeed. The other day I took the output of df -h and gave fed it to an LLM, asking, anything stands out here? It helped. That being said, Claude turned no fun. [0] I remember back when ChatGPT first came out, I'd say `ssh root@mainframe.nsa.gov` and it came up with some interesting outputs. [0] https://i.imgur.com/a/ZzBxRcq.png https://i.imgur.com/a/ZzBxRcq.png
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  mount | column -t … Wish I could remember the rest but am away from computer. df has a switch to exclude types like tmpfs, mount can use grep -v, etc. Make aliases.
aetherspawn 2y ago
Haha, try and expand a partition on Linux using command line. It's nearly impossible if you're not a sysadmin [1]. You'll google it and find 10 different ways for 10 different distros, and most of them will require doing byte math (but you're not sure if KB is really kB and 1000 or 1024). If you get it wrong your computer blows up (probably). And if you think resizing was hard, try to defrag and shrink one! [1] For example if you install RHEL using wizard it will create a bunch of virtual logical areas that each have partitions allocated that each have disks allocated and if you want to resize them later you have to resize the onion all in the correct order.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  ...or you'll just install gparted and do it with a couple of clicks. It'll require root, yes. But in Windows you're already "root", so it doesn't count. No, "permission elevation prompts" doesn't count. You're still defacto Administrator on that system. BTW, none of the CLI tools allow you to overlap partitions or shrink below used percent. So you can't blow your data up unless you try really hard (like fdisk delete/recreate tricks).
  - aetherspawn 2y ago
    I think command-line is the key word here. It is not so hard on Ubuntu in the GUI. But for example if you installed Red Hat CLI-only version, it's probably so hard you'll give up and just ask Red Hat support to look at your logs and send you the commands to run.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      The thing is, if you're a desktop user, you generally use gparted. If you're not using a GUI, you're already a sysadmin in most cases. Systems like Raspberry Pi make these things easier, too. They both have docs, or you can do on your system with gparted already. Also, as I aforementioned, none of the CLI tools eat your data unless you force them to. Lastly, all the tools accept KB, MB, etc. as prefixes/suffixes. So, I rarely make back of the napkin math for these things, if ever. > But for example if you installed Red Hat CLI-only version, it's probably so hard you'll give up and just ask Red Hat support to look at your logs and send you the commands to run. Actually it's not hard. You only need to know that you have your filesystems in a LVM (Logical Volume Manager) container. Unless you're not changing the size of the LVM volume, it's the same thing, only the device name changes. If you're adding disks, you need to first increase the LVM size to span the other disk, and add or resize your partiton there. It's not intentionally hard, you meet with a layer you generally don't see everyday. Even if you boot a LVM containing system from a live distro, say GRML, you only need to "activate" the LVM container with a single LVM command, and it's the same thing after that point. It's a matter of thinking in layers.
moffkalast 2y ago
I mean... keeping the output of a small "load bearing" program that's been that way since the 80s and is being parsed by countless other scripts that rely on it being exactly the way it is is probably a good idea. Despite what the average library maintainer seems to think, it's far better to have a few people complain about it being meh then breaking half the internet because the output could be nicer. That said, anyone know of any good alternatives that parse it into something actually -human readable?
noufalibrahim 2y ago
UNIX : Everything is a file Linux : Everything is a filesystem
- frankzander 2y ago
  everything is systemd ... your system overlord
- SSLy 2y ago
  So, taking on the apparently good qualities of Plan9's design? Look at their HID API.
ploxiln 2y ago
Just using the example of "df -h" and "mount" ... all the extra stuff that wasn't there 15 years ago, is from systemd. The idea is to auto-enable anything anyone might possibly want, to whatever extent possible, and I don't like it. I also noticed the /var/credentials/ mounts showing up recently; that's for a systemd feature that neither I nor you actually use, to set encrypted secrets for these services in a way that is exposed only to those services via a centralized framework. If you didn't explicitly use it, it's all empty. But it started years ago with the mounts for efivars, pstore, binfmt-misc, kernel/debug, kernel/security, etc. Sure they're useful sometimes, but they shouldn't be enabled until you have a need and then explicitly enable it. Well, that's my preference, so I always start with minimal debian or arch linux, but even on such minimal systems that have switched to systemd, you get all this stuff enabled and mounted by default. If you're actually using a tmpfs mount, like perhaps just one on /tmp, then you do want df to tell you how full it is. The problem is that you have 20 fs mounts that are truly useless to you, and IMHO should not be there. And ironically I think systemd developers do have a strong opinionated design vision, and if you don't like it you can pound sand (or use void or alpine for a desktop system I guess), because they have successfully taken over the vast majority of the desktop and server linux ecosystem. Anyway I still like linux for the flexibility I have elsewhere in the stack to make it work the way I want, reasonably conveniently for me. (Many would think I'm an idiot for not appreciating the brilliance and necessity of what systemd has done, but for a completely different angle about systemd I recommend: https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/ https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/ (seems tls cert expired a few days ago, but it's fine to ignore))
teddyh 2y ago
From my .bashrc: alias dfx='df -x nfs -x none -x smbfs -x tmpfs -x cifs -x tmpfs -x fuse.sshfs -x devtmpfs -x squashfs'
- anttihaapala 2y ago
  and it almost works, does not get rid of efivars... needed to add `-x efivarfs` for that.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    I also see that ”nfs4” is missing. Update: alias dfx='df -x nfs -x none -x smbfs -x tmpfs -x cifs -x tmpfs -x fuse.sshfs -x devtmpfs -x squashfs -x overlay -x efivars -x nfs4'
- jfreax 2y ago
  Very cool. Thanks for sharing! I added `-x overlay` too, to get rid of all the docker overlay mounts.
- Propelloni 2y ago
  I'll just throw out findmnt here. It does what mount and df do, only with more options and filters. It is part of mount -- IIRC today's mount just runs findmnt --mtab under the hood -- and therefore available on all modern Linux systems. I guess the article's author would have been happy with findmnt -s -D -e findmnt --fstab --df --evaluate
larodi 2y ago
(most) Kids will likely never learn these command and attributes and output like we passionately did in 1994. LLMs be spittin' them command lines quick and correct, transpiled/translated from English/French/...Macedonian if you like. they already do, and it already helps a lot. Perhaps one may learn to remember <df> and <ls -a>, but will definitely not care to produce by heart oneliner bash abominations sprinkled with sygils and pipes and three-char cmd names. This whole article very true, but somewhat irrelevant to 2024. Claude/Mistral/CHatGPT been parsing outputs perfectly, and there are plenty of experiments into getting the LLM to assist code writing and parsing results directly from the cmdline. And you know what, this also works in 100% console mode, you don't need GUI to talk to the new GUI called LLM. the smaller models get, the sooner they get embedded in shells. then you'll get the real Ghost in the Shell, yeah...
- cybrox 2y ago
  Nothing I'm looking forward to than a generation of sysadmins who use 99% correct commands and get the output parsed for them 99% correct.
  - larodi 2y ago
    somehow my gut feeling is they are not going to ask for old gen sysadmin's opinion, but the contrary - would love to make them outraged, as my generation script-kiddies-soon-to-become whitehat hackers did. we can expect sysadmins to grow into typical BOFHs and BDFLs... besides this comment of yours is exactly what was expected as a first response, and is very boring.
  - thomashop 2y ago
    Isn't the chance for a human sysadmin to get wrong just as high? I think I've worked with some very good and very bad human system administrators. The good ones will produce more reliable code than current LLMs. But on average, I don't think so.
- atoav 2y ago
  As a youngling I have to say, I always liked the idea of the shell as something where you can pipe stuff inbetween programs. It is a genius concept. The problem is that in the real world implementation of the idea you have something like bash, that sucks for text processing with all its footguns of unescaped strings, spaces, wildcard operators and such. Maybe it has to do with strings not really having been a first class citizen in C? Processing strings in C is a (dangerous) pain even in the year 2024. I often find myself just writing python scripts calling subprocesses (if needed, so much is already included), ideally with a --json option so I get proper machine-readable output. This has shown to be far more stable and reliable than bash.
atoav 2y ago
From a design standpoint I like to highlight one rule: A good design is one where the most common action your users will take is priorized. If you get there alone, by basar, by comittee or whatever, doesn't change that. The problem with the latter variants is that decisions are not made on principles, they just happen. For example if the overwhelming majority of users use df to get an overview of how much disk space they are using and how much they have left, the default option should be giving you a easily digestable output of precisely that. I get that in terminal-land this can be a problem, as the default df command is now probably parsed by a thousand shell scripts and chaninging it breaks things. But that is also bad design: If there are hard reasons like that that could conceivable lock you into doing it a certain way, you should warn against it and offer a stable alternative (stderr: "The output of df -h is not meant to be machine readable, use df --machine instead"). Again frequency is the guide here. People will more often type df -h to manually check things than they have to write df --machine in a script. Same goes for the default output of ip a (which in my opinion should be more like ip -br -c a).
kreyenborgi 2y ago
df -h .
- hggh 2y ago
  df -h / .
topspin 2y ago
This complaint about df/mount/etc. recurs with noticeable frequency. Another ugly spot is iproute2's ip link/addr. Between containers and VMs and their virtual interfaces, link bonding, virtual bridges, macvlan/tap, etc., the list of "interfaces" proliferates. Trying to find an actual physical interface is difficult, and interpreting what is there is a challenge. Improving this stuff isn't happening because no one is funding the work. A hobbyist or gainfully employed contributor stealing time from "real" work can't manage this anymore: complexity is too high now and the gatekeepers aren't -- for good reason -- going to tolerate naïve contributions. There is very little money in the Linux world for anything a Linux distributor or hardware manufacturer doesn't care about. The former care only about the high value features people pay license/subscription/support fees for, and the latter just get drivers working, and maybe rework a kernel subsystem when absolutely necessary, and leave the rest. The money exists. The Linux Foundation collects a quarter billion a year, for example. But they've found a long list of better priorities to spend it all on. I don't know about the "trainwreck design" concept. There is nothing here that can't be solved given some hard headed refinement. It's just that no one is doing that.
- gsich 2y ago
  A single \n would improve ip link/addr. There is no easy way to visual grep the right interface. ifconfig is much better in this regard, but has obvious downsides.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    But... you have to use systemd tools to parse the output these days. Why are you even looking at this with the naked eye?
    - gsich 2y ago
      I would gladly switch to a systemd command. What should I use?
      - SSLy 2y ago
jml7c5 2y ago
The hive does not seem materially different than "the bazaar, but everyone agrees". What are examples that differentiate them?
bheadmaster 2y ago
If your disk is mounted at root ("/"), which is the case of most default distro installs, you can run "df -h /" to get only your disk info: user@hostname:~$ df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdc 1007G 49G 908G 6% /
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  This only shows a single disk. I find it weird that despite having a bunch of options to control output and even filter things, df does not have an option to specify "show me only physical block devices and only once (my /dev/sda4 shows up for various mountpoints but still all show the same size/used/avail values)".
  - bheadmaster 2y ago
    In that case, you can use "-t ext4" (or whatever filesystem type you use) to show only disks formatted with this filesystem type. On my machine, none of the snap/tmpfs/efivars stuff shows up: user@hostname:~$ df -ht ext4 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdc 1007G 49G 908G 6% /
benrutter 2y ago
I love the idea of hive design. Any examples of large projects where it continues to be a principle? I can think of a load of small ones like Hare, Suckless tools, etc. But no big ones (not necessarily an argument against it working though- could just be me not knowing any)
BenoitP 2y ago
What about governance in The Hive? For Cathedral and Bazaar, it's simply the two opposite corners: control everything, or control nothing. Just like we use binary because it's the min and max of voltage: it's simple. We don't use intermediary voltages. It costs energy to maintain that. To align with the colorful analogies in the article, governance in The Hive is 'draw the rest of the fucking owl' here. Ahem, what is distributed consensus? I have quite a few ideas about that, but they remain to be tested (Define a voting pool, let everyone vote for everyone, run a PageRank, publish the top 20 Queen Bees, let singleton decisions be taken in Queen Bee committees, decay votes for renewal). Let's call it "Human Staking"? Surely some research has already been done about that.
dexen 2y ago
Author states "i feel disrespected in my own ~home.". And funnily enough "~" is exactly what he's looking for: df -h ~
nox101 2y ago
this reminds me of a locale issue. When I ssh from Mac to Ubuntu 22.04 I get some error about LC_??? not being set. Looking for a solution lead me here https://askubuntu.com/questions/162391/how-do-i-fix-my-locale-issue https://askubuntu.com/questions/162391/how-do-i-fix-my-local... what sticks out to me is there is no definitive answer. every answer is different. I'd have to already know the correct answer to know the correct answer Further, I've never done anything out of the ordinary on either Ubuntu nor MacOS. Both are standard setups. How can it be 2024 and I'm running into issues like this?
- badgersnake 2y ago
  Every time I ssh to FreeBSD by terminal is screwed because FreeBSD doesn’t know what alacritty is. Which would be simple to fix but FreeBSD uses a different terminfo format which has to be set up manually on each box and I can never remember how to do it.
st_goliath 2y ago
The year is 2024 and I want to know how much free disk space I have. I open the Thunar file browser on my Xfce desktop and it tells me "Free space: XXX GiB" right at the bottom. The year is 2024 and I need to give a presentation. I walk up, plug the HDMI cable into my laptop. On my Xfce desktop, a window pops open with 4 buttons: Laptop only, external display only, mirror, expand. I choose "mirror", the desktop is resized to the smallest common size and it "just works". Unlike the next person who has to futz around their Windows settings for a few minutes and afterwards asks me excitedly what that tool was that I used. Of course then there is also that one guy who fidgets around on stage for 10 solid minutes, before we are treated to a tiling window manager with eleventynine terminal windows and a hundred nervously fat-fingered xrandr command lines. Everyone in the audience chuckles and shakes their head "Linux people, typical...", and the guy on stage, already sweating blood begins the presentation. But I guess you just gotta have your command line and complain about it too.
- Atlas26 2y ago
  > Of course then there is also that one guy who fidgets around on stage for 10 solid minutes, before we are treated to a tiling window manager with eleventynine terminal windows and a hundred nervously fat-fingered xrandr command lines. Everyone in the audience chuckles and shakes their head "Linux people, typical...", and the guy on stage, already sweating blood begins the presentation. Lol exactly. These people cause everyone else to think that's what Linux is like in 2024...just because you can doesn't mean you should, especially with the OP. Why use some arcane commands instead of the easily, single glance solution? We're not talking about advanced power user cases, just a simple day to day check...
michaelteter 2y ago
This is about like trying to ride the rails on just a pair of wheels and an axle, and the complaining that train rides are horrible in 2024. _obviously_ he's looking too low level. That's why there are layers, apps, tools, that ride above that low level and summarize it for different perspectives. We need the full information, mostly raw, at the low level. Then we can choose what to do with that information when presenting it to users.
kantapproves 2y ago
Surprise, surprise. Let me be the contrarian: I dislike this attitude of dumbing everything down just because some people can't be bothered to learn how and why their tools work the way they do. They'll invoke "2024" like it means something. Not a great look IMO. The output of df and mount shows the truth as it is: raw and shitty. Don't dumb it down. Your version of usability might be my idea of a nightmare. I like the raw truth, ugly as it is. If I or anybody needs a `tiktok-disk-usage --fancy` we'll conjure one up. Are we tech or what? It is exceedingly easy to filter the output of said tools. Nothing to do with money or incentives. It is a completely solved "problem" for the people that need it and are capable of "solving" it. Maybe you should opt for a "desktop environment" that "manages" your stuff so you can have a nice set of disk percentage indicators? I hear good things about "Windows".
- Mali- 2y ago
  Why should the default of the tool be totally unintelligble useless (for 90% of single usages) rubbish? You can have your raw truth - strange way of putting it, its a tool, this is not a detective drama - it would be a more useful tool for the average use-case if this was a flag though (or some other option). We can't handle the truth!
  - kantapproves 2y ago
    It is not unintelligible, it is exceedingly simple. If you are not knowledgeable about your system at this level, then sure, it is quite chaotic. But that’s a different problem and why are you at this level anyway? Also, a substantial amount of this problem is just systemd. Don’t shit on df, which looks fine on, say, BSD. This is not for the “average user” IMO.
    - Mali- 2y ago
      You like a design which spits out a wall of text, 90% of which is useless. And wrap it up with the idea that you're a high IQ superuser for reading through that crap. I'm just someone who wants to use a tool, so I'm not amazed and impressed with myself for being very clever when the tool drools all over my monitor.
_xnmw 2y ago
Yup and this is the reason I just use Apple devices. Google and Microsoft products are design-by-committee garbage, and most open source projects eventually devolve into a mess, unless it is tightly controlled by a single author (such as SQLite or Redis or even Laravel). People forget that Nature's default is to devolve to the chaos of the jungle (beautiful, but does not work toward any human purpose). The absolute best human designs are those controlled by benevolent dictatorships with a ruthless focus on simplicity. Nature's default is for every garden to overgrow with weeds, unless a gardener keeps at it relentlessly. Eventually the weeds become a beautiful jungle, but the absolute worst gardens are those designed my multiple competing gardeners. Either have 1 gardener, or 0. See also the incompetent clusterfuck that is the European Union.
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ofrzeta 2y ago
While I agree in principle here are some commands that help: - df -h / - ip -brief a s - mount -t ext4 (or whatever you usually are using)

148 points by j3s 2y ago

I think this is also interesting with respect to running a company or a more close-knit team.

I have been wondering about this more recently. I’ve filed bug fixes on a handful of projects and tracked open issues on quite a few, and the stream of inbound PRs is often so random. Not just bug fixes but new features. Where’s the plan? Whats the scope? Which of these PRs is likely to land? Can anyone but the maintainer guess?

terryf 2y ago

Good article content, but wow the article looks great! Really incredible! If by any chance someone knows the tools that were used to make the big-font subtitles (or the whole page?), enlightenment would be highly appreciated!

nyx 2y ago
FIGlet http://www.figlet.org/ http://www.figlet.org/ is a nice command-line tool for doing stuff like this. Can preview its fonts online here: https://patorjk.com/software/taag/ https://patorjk.com/software/taag/
- terryf 2y ago
  Thank you!
- roenxi 2y ago
  Also - the images look strongly reminiscent of `cowsay`.
aflukasz 2y ago
Looks is in the eye of the beholder, but notice, that in HTML, this is just one big paragraph - if any tool did the whole page, it wasn't particularly interested in semantic HTML.

hagbard_c 2y ago

Hm, yes, well. Trainwreck design seems to be another term for 'design by natural evolution', more or less the way the literate apes which are responsible for these systems came about themselves. Just like we are full of odd design choices [1] so are our creations. We learn to deal with them as long as they do not cause egregious problems, otherwise we build something else which more fits the bill at that moment. The moment passes, things change and before long the fancy new replacement for that old piece of junk is getting crusty itself but a drop of oil here and a well-aimed slap there keep it functional so why bother, there's more important stuff to do. Disparate components of the Rube Goldberg contraption age at different times, some are patched and some are replaced entirely but the machine keeps running while that other team with their visionary leader finds out that the well thought-out design does not lend itself for crossing that chasm which the recent earthquake produced. While they are waiting for the right design to percolate up through the masses we added the bridge tool to the toolbox and kept it there just in case - it is a big box. Lo and behold, it came in handy quite often, who knew that a bridge could be used to walk from tree to tree through the jungle? And so it grows and grows, every now and then shedding some parts while gaining new ones. That is how it came about, just like how we came about. That is fine by me as one who is part of the motley crew of tinkerers who make it happen. Every now and then someone comes along with a vision of taming this mess, to give it a new facade, to bring order to the chaos, seemingly oblivious of the many corroding and overgrown remnants of previous attempts at taming the beast we passed along the way. I say let them try to tame it, maybe someone succeeds in breeding some nice and docile pet out of it some day which obeys your every command - only to find out it has lost the ability to fend for itself in times of trouble. Poor thing, another one bites the dust while the beast just keeps going and going, warts and all. In the end it is said only the cockroaches and tardigrades survive but rest assured, they'll have the beast right on their many heels. [1] We have inside-out retinas, why did we not get them the right way around just like squid have? Why can we not synthesize vitamin C? OK, we evolved somewhere where it was available on every tree but would those few extra genes have bothered us? The dog under the table has them, why not we?

aumerle 2y ago

Now, the OP has to remember, df -h -x tmpfs instead of df -h. The proper solution for this is to not have commands that are both meant for interactive and script usage. Then the defaults for their output can be changed over time to suit the evolving landscape. Or if you do want a single command for both have a --script flag that makes its output suitable for usage in scripts.

aktuel 2y ago

The bouncing ball bounces way too soon.

notachatbot1234 2y ago

A webpage that uses numeric identifiers for external references that are found only when scrolling to the very bottom of the page and show their URLs as plain text. Now that is a train wreck. Hyperlinks are the cornerstone of the web. Don't be afraid of using them!

bayindirh 2y ago
[flagged]
atoav 2y ago
You mean footnotes? As they have been used for centuries in print? The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context, that is out of the scope of the original text. Ideally on a website meant for computer screens you wouldn't have them on the end, but in the margins, next to the information, but for short stuff it is okay to put them at the end of the chapter – bonus points if the reference numbers can be clicked and take you to the foot note, extra bonus points if there is an arrow taking you up again. But this is scientific literature style writing, not everything needs footnotes.
- Someone 2y ago
  > The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context, <a href=“Foo” title=“go to Foo” /> will give you additional context on hover (on systems that support that)
  - hk__2 2y ago
    > will give you additional context on hover (on systems that support that) "hover" has no meaning on touch-based interfaces.
    - majewsky 2y ago
      You should see the title text if you long-press on the link, no?

troupo 2y ago

This is the bazaar version of enshittification. In that the software becomes worse for the user, but for different reasons than in the commercial world. In the end users lose anyway

cybrox 2y ago
Yes but at least it's too many cooks spoil the broth and not the cook spat in your soup so now pay double and order a beverage subscription.
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  And if you know how to cook you can at least try and improve the food or make your own ingredients :-P (ok the analogy starts breaking down at some point but you get the idea :-P)

langsoul-com 2y ago

This is why I quite like Phpstorm over vscode. Yes, vscode and plugins can do everything. But Phpstorm integrates everything into one coherent package. Too many random directions is more annoying. In terms of software dev, it's quite hard to get a good app wide experience. There's just so many people working on the project. Without someone to make sure things are aligned, things fall apart into random wild patterns everywhere.

frankzander 2y ago
not everything ... just plain remote work over sftp or ftp seems to be impossible. You always work some sort local and than it's pushed. There is no real "remote client" out there. Atom did have plugin which worked quite well accomplishing this task.

therein 2y ago

Output of mount and df are terrible indeed. The other day I took the output of df -h and gave fed it to an LLM, asking, anything stands out here? It helped. That being said, Claude turned no fun. [0] I remember back when ChatGPT first came out, I'd say `ssh root@mainframe.nsa.gov` and it came up with some interesting outputs. [0] https://i.imgur.com/a/ZzBxRcq.png https://i.imgur.com/a/ZzBxRcq.png

mixmastamyk 2y ago
mount | column -t … Wish I could remember the rest but am away from computer. df has a switch to exclude types like tmpfs, mount can use grep -v, etc. Make aliases.

aetherspawn 2y ago

Haha, try and expand a partition on Linux using command line. It's nearly impossible if you're not a sysadmin [1]. You'll google it and find 10 different ways for 10 different distros, and most of them will require doing byte math (but you're not sure if KB is really kB and 1000 or 1024). If you get it wrong your computer blows up (probably). And if you think resizing was hard, try to defrag and shrink one! [1] For example if you install RHEL using wizard it will create a bunch of virtual logical areas that each have partitions allocated that each have disks allocated and if you want to resize them later you have to resize the onion all in the correct order.

bayindirh 2y ago
...or you'll just install gparted and do it with a couple of clicks. It'll require root, yes. But in Windows you're already "root", so it doesn't count. No, "permission elevation prompts" doesn't count. You're still defacto Administrator on that system. BTW, none of the CLI tools allow you to overlap partitions or shrink below used percent. So you can't blow your data up unless you try really hard (like fdisk delete/recreate tricks).
- aetherspawn 2y ago
  I think command-line is the key word here. It is not so hard on Ubuntu in the GUI. But for example if you installed Red Hat CLI-only version, it's probably so hard you'll give up and just ask Red Hat support to look at your logs and send you the commands to run.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    The thing is, if you're a desktop user, you generally use gparted. If you're not using a GUI, you're already a sysadmin in most cases. Systems like Raspberry Pi make these things easier, too. They both have docs, or you can do on your system with gparted already. Also, as I aforementioned, none of the CLI tools eat your data unless you force them to. Lastly, all the tools accept KB, MB, etc. as prefixes/suffixes. So, I rarely make back of the napkin math for these things, if ever. > But for example if you installed Red Hat CLI-only version, it's probably so hard you'll give up and just ask Red Hat support to look at your logs and send you the commands to run. Actually it's not hard. You only need to know that you have your filesystems in a LVM (Logical Volume Manager) container. Unless you're not changing the size of the LVM volume, it's the same thing, only the device name changes. If you're adding disks, you need to first increase the LVM size to span the other disk, and add or resize your partiton there. It's not intentionally hard, you meet with a layer you generally don't see everyday. Even if you boot a LVM containing system from a live distro, say GRML, you only need to "activate" the LVM container with a single LVM command, and it's the same thing after that point. It's a matter of thinking in layers.

moffkalast 2y ago

I mean... keeping the output of a small "load bearing" program that's been that way since the 80s and is being parsed by countless other scripts that rely on it being exactly the way it is is probably a good idea. Despite what the average library maintainer seems to think, it's far better to have a few people complain about it being meh then breaking half the internet because the output could be nicer. That said, anyone know of any good alternatives that parse it into something actually -human readable?

noufalibrahim 2y ago

UNIX : Everything is a file Linux : Everything is a filesystem

frankzander 2y ago
everything is systemd ... your system overlord
SSLy 2y ago
So, taking on the apparently good qualities of Plan9's design? Look at their HID API.

ploxiln 2y ago

Just using the example of "df -h" and "mount" ... all the extra stuff that wasn't there 15 years ago, is from systemd. The idea is to auto-enable anything anyone might possibly want, to whatever extent possible, and I don't like it. I also noticed the /var/credentials/ mounts showing up recently; that's for a systemd feature that neither I nor you actually use, to set encrypted secrets for these services in a way that is exposed only to those services via a centralized framework. If you didn't explicitly use it, it's all empty. But it started years ago with the mounts for efivars, pstore, binfmt-misc, kernel/debug, kernel/security, etc. Sure they're useful sometimes, but they shouldn't be enabled until you have a need and then explicitly enable it. Well, that's my preference, so I always start with minimal debian or arch linux, but even on such minimal systems that have switched to systemd, you get all this stuff enabled and mounted by default. If you're actually using a tmpfs mount, like perhaps just one on /tmp, then you do want df to tell you how full it is. The problem is that you have 20 fs mounts that are truly useless to you, and IMHO should not be there. And ironically I think systemd developers do have a strong opinionated design vision, and if you don't like it you can pound sand (or use void or alpine for a desktop system I guess), because they have successfully taken over the vast majority of the desktop and server linux ecosystem. Anyway I still like linux for the flexibility I have elsewhere in the stack to make it work the way I want, reasonably conveniently for me. (Many would think I'm an idiot for not appreciating the brilliance and necessity of what systemd has done, but for a completely different angle about systemd I recommend: https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/ https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/ (seems tls cert expired a few days ago, but it's fine to ignore))

teddyh 2y ago

From my .bashrc: alias dfx='df -x nfs -x none -x smbfs -x tmpfs -x cifs -x tmpfs -x fuse.sshfs -x devtmpfs -x squashfs'

anttihaapala 2y ago
and it almost works, does not get rid of efivars... needed to add `-x efivarfs` for that.
- teddyh 2y ago
  I also see that ”nfs4” is missing. Update: alias dfx='df -x nfs -x none -x smbfs -x tmpfs -x cifs -x tmpfs -x fuse.sshfs -x devtmpfs -x squashfs -x overlay -x efivars -x nfs4'
jfreax 2y ago
Very cool. Thanks for sharing! I added `-x overlay` too, to get rid of all the docker overlay mounts.
Propelloni 2y ago
I'll just throw out findmnt here. It does what mount and df do, only with more options and filters. It is part of mount -- IIRC today's mount just runs findmnt --mtab under the hood -- and therefore available on all modern Linux systems. I guess the article's author would have been happy with findmnt -s -D -e findmnt --fstab --df --evaluate

larodi 2y ago

(most) Kids will likely never learn these command and attributes and output like we passionately did in 1994. LLMs be spittin' them command lines quick and correct, transpiled/translated from English/French/...Macedonian if you like. they already do, and it already helps a lot. Perhaps one may learn to remember <df> and <ls -a>, but will definitely not care to produce by heart oneliner bash abominations sprinkled with sygils and pipes and three-char cmd names. This whole article very true, but somewhat irrelevant to 2024. Claude/Mistral/CHatGPT been parsing outputs perfectly, and there are plenty of experiments into getting the LLM to assist code writing and parsing results directly from the cmdline. And you know what, this also works in 100% console mode, you don't need GUI to talk to the new GUI called LLM. the smaller models get, the sooner they get embedded in shells. then you'll get the real Ghost in the Shell, yeah...

cybrox 2y ago
Nothing I'm looking forward to than a generation of sysadmins who use 99% correct commands and get the output parsed for them 99% correct.
- larodi 2y ago
  somehow my gut feeling is they are not going to ask for old gen sysadmin's opinion, but the contrary - would love to make them outraged, as my generation script-kiddies-soon-to-become whitehat hackers did. we can expect sysadmins to grow into typical BOFHs and BDFLs... besides this comment of yours is exactly what was expected as a first response, and is very boring.
- thomashop 2y ago
  Isn't the chance for a human sysadmin to get wrong just as high? I think I've worked with some very good and very bad human system administrators. The good ones will produce more reliable code than current LLMs. But on average, I don't think so.
atoav 2y ago
As a youngling I have to say, I always liked the idea of the shell as something where you can pipe stuff inbetween programs. It is a genius concept. The problem is that in the real world implementation of the idea you have something like bash, that sucks for text processing with all its footguns of unescaped strings, spaces, wildcard operators and such. Maybe it has to do with strings not really having been a first class citizen in C? Processing strings in C is a (dangerous) pain even in the year 2024. I often find myself just writing python scripts calling subprocesses (if needed, so much is already included), ideally with a --json option so I get proper machine-readable output. This has shown to be far more stable and reliable than bash.

atoav 2y ago

From a design standpoint I like to highlight one rule: A good design is one where the most common action your users will take is priorized. If you get there alone, by basar, by comittee or whatever, doesn't change that. The problem with the latter variants is that decisions are not made on principles, they just happen. For example if the overwhelming majority of users use df to get an overview of how much disk space they are using and how much they have left, the default option should be giving you a easily digestable output of precisely that. I get that in terminal-land this can be a problem, as the default df command is now probably parsed by a thousand shell scripts and chaninging it breaks things. But that is also bad design: If there are hard reasons like that that could conceivable lock you into doing it a certain way, you should warn against it and offer a stable alternative (stderr: "The output of df -h is not meant to be machine readable, use df --machine instead"). Again frequency is the guide here. People will more often type df -h to manually check things than they have to write df --machine in a script. Same goes for the default output of ip a (which in my opinion should be more like ip -br -c a).

kreyenborgi 2y ago

df -h .

hggh 2y ago
df -h / .

topspin 2y ago

This complaint about df/mount/etc. recurs with noticeable frequency. Another ugly spot is iproute2's ip link/addr. Between containers and VMs and their virtual interfaces, link bonding, virtual bridges, macvlan/tap, etc., the list of "interfaces" proliferates. Trying to find an actual physical interface is difficult, and interpreting what is there is a challenge. Improving this stuff isn't happening because no one is funding the work. A hobbyist or gainfully employed contributor stealing time from "real" work can't manage this anymore: complexity is too high now and the gatekeepers aren't -- for good reason -- going to tolerate naïve contributions. There is very little money in the Linux world for anything a Linux distributor or hardware manufacturer doesn't care about. The former care only about the high value features people pay license/subscription/support fees for, and the latter just get drivers working, and maybe rework a kernel subsystem when absolutely necessary, and leave the rest. The money exists. The Linux Foundation collects a quarter billion a year, for example. But they've found a long list of better priorities to spend it all on. I don't know about the "trainwreck design" concept. There is nothing here that can't be solved given some hard headed refinement. It's just that no one is doing that.

gsich 2y ago
A single \n would improve ip link/addr. There is no easy way to visual grep the right interface. ifconfig is much better in this regard, but has obvious downsides.
- nottorp 2y ago
  But... you have to use systemd tools to parse the output these days. Why are you even looking at this with the naked eye?
  - gsich 2y ago
    I would gladly switch to a systemd command. What should I use?
    - SSLy 2y ago

jml7c5 2y ago

The hive does not seem materially different than "the bazaar, but everyone agrees". What are examples that differentiate them?

bheadmaster 2y ago

If your disk is mounted at root ("/"), which is the case of most default distro installs, you can run "df -h /" to get only your disk info: user@hostname:~$ df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdc 1007G 49G 908G 6% /

badsectoracula 2y ago
This only shows a single disk. I find it weird that despite having a bunch of options to control output and even filter things, df does not have an option to specify "show me only physical block devices and only once (my /dev/sda4 shows up for various mountpoints but still all show the same size/used/avail values)".
- bheadmaster 2y ago
  In that case, you can use "-t ext4" (or whatever filesystem type you use) to show only disks formatted with this filesystem type. On my machine, none of the snap/tmpfs/efivars stuff shows up: user@hostname:~$ df -ht ext4 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdc 1007G 49G 908G 6% /

benrutter 2y ago

I love the idea of hive design. Any examples of large projects where it continues to be a principle? I can think of a load of small ones like Hare, Suckless tools, etc. But no big ones (not necessarily an argument against it working though- could just be me not knowing any)

BenoitP 2y ago

What about governance in The Hive? For Cathedral and Bazaar, it's simply the two opposite corners: control everything, or control nothing. Just like we use binary because it's the min and max of voltage: it's simple. We don't use intermediary voltages. It costs energy to maintain that. To align with the colorful analogies in the article, governance in The Hive is 'draw the rest of the fucking owl' here. Ahem, what is distributed consensus? I have quite a few ideas about that, but they remain to be tested (Define a voting pool, let everyone vote for everyone, run a PageRank, publish the top 20 Queen Bees, let singleton decisions be taken in Queen Bee committees, decay votes for renewal). Let's call it "Human Staking"? Surely some research has already been done about that.

dexen 2y ago

Author states "i feel disrespected in my own ~home.". And funnily enough "~" is exactly what he's looking for: df -h ~

nox101 2y ago

this reminds me of a locale issue. When I ssh from Mac to Ubuntu 22.04 I get some error about LC_??? not being set. Looking for a solution lead me here https://askubuntu.com/questions/162391/how-do-i-fix-my-locale-issue https://askubuntu.com/questions/162391/how-do-i-fix-my-local... what sticks out to me is there is no definitive answer. every answer is different. I'd have to already know the correct answer to know the correct answer Further, I've never done anything out of the ordinary on either Ubuntu nor MacOS. Both are standard setups. How can it be 2024 and I'm running into issues like this?

badgersnake 2y ago
Every time I ssh to FreeBSD by terminal is screwed because FreeBSD doesn’t know what alacritty is. Which would be simple to fix but FreeBSD uses a different terminfo format which has to be set up manually on each box and I can never remember how to do it.

st_goliath 2y ago

The year is 2024 and I want to know how much free disk space I have. I open the Thunar file browser on my Xfce desktop and it tells me "Free space: XXX GiB" right at the bottom. The year is 2024 and I need to give a presentation. I walk up, plug the HDMI cable into my laptop. On my Xfce desktop, a window pops open with 4 buttons: Laptop only, external display only, mirror, expand. I choose "mirror", the desktop is resized to the smallest common size and it "just works". Unlike the next person who has to futz around their Windows settings for a few minutes and afterwards asks me excitedly what that tool was that I used. Of course then there is also that one guy who fidgets around on stage for 10 solid minutes, before we are treated to a tiling window manager with eleventynine terminal windows and a hundred nervously fat-fingered xrandr command lines. Everyone in the audience chuckles and shakes their head "Linux people, typical...", and the guy on stage, already sweating blood begins the presentation. But I guess you just gotta have your command line and complain about it too.

Atlas26 2y ago
> Of course then there is also that one guy who fidgets around on stage for 10 solid minutes, before we are treated to a tiling window manager with eleventynine terminal windows and a hundred nervously fat-fingered xrandr command lines. Everyone in the audience chuckles and shakes their head "Linux people, typical...", and the guy on stage, already sweating blood begins the presentation. Lol exactly. These people cause everyone else to think that's what Linux is like in 2024...just because you can doesn't mean you should, especially with the OP. Why use some arcane commands instead of the easily, single glance solution? We're not talking about advanced power user cases, just a simple day to day check...

michaelteter 2y ago

This is about like trying to ride the rails on just a pair of wheels and an axle, and the complaining that train rides are horrible in 2024. _obviously_ he's looking too low level. That's why there are layers, apps, tools, that ride above that low level and summarize it for different perspectives. We need the full information, mostly raw, at the low level. Then we can choose what to do with that information when presenting it to users.

kantapproves 2y ago

Surprise, surprise. Let me be the contrarian: I dislike this attitude of dumbing everything down just because some people can't be bothered to learn how and why their tools work the way they do. They'll invoke "2024" like it means something. Not a great look IMO. The output of df and mount shows the truth as it is: raw and shitty. Don't dumb it down. Your version of usability might be my idea of a nightmare. I like the raw truth, ugly as it is. If I or anybody needs a `tiktok-disk-usage --fancy` we'll conjure one up. Are we tech or what? It is exceedingly easy to filter the output of said tools. Nothing to do with money or incentives. It is a completely solved "problem" for the people that need it and are capable of "solving" it. Maybe you should opt for a "desktop environment" that "manages" your stuff so you can have a nice set of disk percentage indicators? I hear good things about "Windows".

Mali- 2y ago
Why should the default of the tool be totally unintelligble useless (for 90% of single usages) rubbish? You can have your raw truth - strange way of putting it, its a tool, this is not a detective drama - it would be a more useful tool for the average use-case if this was a flag though (or some other option). We can't handle the truth!
- kantapproves 2y ago
  It is not unintelligible, it is exceedingly simple. If you are not knowledgeable about your system at this level, then sure, it is quite chaotic. But that’s a different problem and why are you at this level anyway? Also, a substantial amount of this problem is just systemd. Don’t shit on df, which looks fine on, say, BSD. This is not for the “average user” IMO.
  - Mali- 2y ago
    You like a design which spits out a wall of text, 90% of which is useless. And wrap it up with the idea that you're a high IQ superuser for reading through that crap. I'm just someone who wants to use a tool, so I'm not amazed and impressed with myself for being very clever when the tool drools all over my monitor.

_xnmw 2y ago

Yup and this is the reason I just use Apple devices. Google and Microsoft products are design-by-committee garbage, and most open source projects eventually devolve into a mess, unless it is tightly controlled by a single author (such as SQLite or Redis or even Laravel). People forget that Nature's default is to devolve to the chaos of the jungle (beautiful, but does not work toward any human purpose). The absolute best human designs are those controlled by benevolent dictatorships with a ruthless focus on simplicity. Nature's default is for every garden to overgrow with weeds, unless a gardener keeps at it relentlessly. Eventually the weeds become a beautiful jungle, but the absolute worst gardens are those designed my multiple competing gardeners. Either have 1 gardener, or 0. See also the incompetent clusterfuck that is the European Union.

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ofrzeta 2y ago

While I agree in principle here are some commands that help: - df -h / - ip -brief a s - mount -t ext4 (or whatever you usually are using)