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Gnu and its associated tech is basically shit. Its arcane, awkward, and sometimes self-defeating aspects is only matched by its ugly naming. Stallman’s obsessio

Gnu and its associated tech is basically shit. Its arcane, awkward, and sometimes self-defeating aspects is only matched by its ugly naming. Stallman’s obsession with purity over pragmatism has kept GNU projects stagnant. I don't think it's the terminal interface that is a problem. The entire smell is unapproachable and just plain weird for real-world users and devs. Look at thus coreutils guide: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/#mailinglists https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/#mailinglists This is for general help. Mailing lists. Can you think of a less productive way to manage this type of information? Sending an email to the void and siloing it in a specific reader? No HTML allowed? Yes, "man" pages are annoying to use and not helpful but that's been true for decades. Have you tried apropos? Does git really need to be so difficult? I understand creating a barrier to entry but does that even work? Has it been effective in increasing the quality of Linux tooling? Is Linux even a good ecosystem? When you see modern projects like systemd, what do you think?

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shadowgovt 2y ago
I think you're conflating a few pieces of the ecosystem. Linux (and GNU/Linux, and POSIX, and the tools that run on and through them) have the same great strength and great weakness: they aren't owned by anyone. To a first approximation, the only thing that gives them consistency is some loci of discourse and consensus built up around some charismatic leaders (Torvalds, Stallman). But the end result is that nobody's actually in charge of making all this stuff work together "all of the time or we don't ship," which means... It all kind of works, most of the time, with some weird corner cases that make a person dig deep into some historical interactions to fix it (TIL that manpages aren't even all in the same language, or that `man` does more that pop a file open and dump it raw to the terminal). ... but on the flip side, there's no artificial barrier to entry. If you want to get started, you can download a distro onto a machine willing to accept some media that will overwrite its boot rules and get started. And that's extremely powerful. The Linux ecosystem is awful and weird and gross and arbitrary and broken... And beautiful. And it's not going away anytime soon because it's free (beer and usually speech). The alternatives can't replace it because they generally lack the incentives to be as open and fast as the incumbent ecosystem; they either aren't free (beer or speech), so already constrain their domain to people willing to pay... Or they are too different (even if different in a better way), and therefore don't interoperate with the software that's already there and have a labor shortage (having an ecosystem that mostly works most of the time creates a positive feedback loop on improving it that is missing in the attempts to burn it down and replace it). (Side-note on git: while I concur that git out of the box doesn't make it obvious the right way to use it... In fact, there is no one right way, that's the thing about git... I've used four version control systems in my day, and git's the only one I've ever used where there was a way to do what I wanted, every time. The flexibility of its abstraction makes it tricky to delve into but powerful).
- BlursedTarot 2y ago
  I personally am grateful for the free base bundles. Thank you, GNU.
sgarland 2y ago
> Look at thus coreutils guide: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/#mailinglists https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/#mailinglists This is for general help. Mailing lists. Can you think of a less productive way to manage this type of information? Sending an email to the void and siloing it in a specific reader? Wait until you find out how Linux PRs are developed and accepted.

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shadowgovt 2y ago

I think you're conflating a few pieces of the ecosystem. Linux (and GNU/Linux, and POSIX, and the tools that run on and through them) have the same great strength and great weakness: they aren't owned by anyone. To a first approximation, the only thing that gives them consistency is some loci of discourse and consensus built up around some charismatic leaders (Torvalds, Stallman). But the end result is that nobody's actually in charge of making all this stuff work together "all of the time or we don't ship," which means... It all kind of works, most of the time, with some weird corner cases that make a person dig deep into some historical interactions to fix it (TIL that manpages aren't even all in the same language, or that `man` does more that pop a file open and dump it raw to the terminal). ... but on the flip side, there's no artificial barrier to entry. If you want to get started, you can download a distro onto a machine willing to accept some media that will overwrite its boot rules and get started. And that's extremely powerful. The Linux ecosystem is awful and weird and gross and arbitrary and broken... And beautiful. And it's not going away anytime soon because it's free (beer and usually speech). The alternatives can't replace it because they generally lack the incentives to be as open and fast as the incumbent ecosystem; they either aren't free (beer or speech), so already constrain their domain to people willing to pay... Or they are too different (even if different in a better way), and therefore don't interoperate with the software that's already there and have a labor shortage (having an ecosystem that mostly works most of the time creates a positive feedback loop on improving it that is missing in the attempts to burn it down and replace it). (Side-note on git: while I concur that git out of the box doesn't make it obvious the right way to use it... In fact, there is no one right way, that's the thing about git... I've used four version control systems in my day, and git's the only one I've ever used where there was a way to do what I wanted, every time. The flexibility of its abstraction makes it tricky to delve into but powerful).

BlursedTarot 2y ago
I personally am grateful for the free base bundles. Thank you, GNU.

sgarland 2y ago

> Look at thus coreutils guide: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/#mailinglists https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/#mailinglists This is for general help. Mailing lists. Can you think of a less productive way to manage this type of information? Sending an email to the void and siloing it in a specific reader? Wait until you find out how Linux PRs are developed and accepted.