🐧 Lunix
-
Right; Windows is FAR more stable, and also FAR more sensibly-designed.
Again, you people are handing out metrics here that basically are convincing any reasonable person that Linux sucks ass.
Based on what? Your opinion? I like both sides of the fence, and use the proper tool for the job.
Being a creature of habit is still a problem.
I never said it wasn't. In fact, I said that it was. Please note what I said:
It is a "people are creatures of habit" problem.
I bolded the relevant bit so that hopefully you did not miss it this time.
This is a "we're too fucking stupid to ever examine our own beliefs
No.
we like our system to be harsh and difficult so we can point and laugh at new users" problem.
The treatment of new users on 8nix discussion boards most certainly is a problem. I encountered it a long freaking time ago, and nothing has really changed. And yes, if you come from Windows, *nix is really hard to grasp. I am no guru on *nix systems, and even I have a hard time on occasion when I get outside of my scope of familiarity.
I got into computers because computers were fun, you could play with them, mistakes were temporary and easily-corrected.
Yeah, well, *nix was never really meant to be that. At least not the mainline distros. If that is what you want, grab a Raspberry Pi and load up Raspbian. If you make an unrecoverable error, you can be back and running in just a few minutes and there are tons of things you can play around with for very little money.
Slackware or Gentoo were never meant to fill that void. You need to use the right tool for the job.
Turns out only Classic Mac really ever was that way. The rest of the industry has been doing nothing but making things more difficult, less fun. Even Apple themselves, now.
Well, I think a lot of that has to do with complexity. You and I are approximately the same age, IIRC. When we were getting in to computers, you could grasp the basic concept of everything that was happening on your computer. Now, it is just too much for any one person to fully grasp.
I mean, I have a high-level overview of most everything, but back in the day I feel like I had a better grasp of all of the minutiae...because there was a hell of a lot less minutiae. Now, as you and I are having this converation, we are a hell of a lot farther from the metal. There are probably 10X more layers of abstraction in place. That has happened everywhere, not just for Apple or Windows or *nix themselves.
Shit man, look at watches. When I was ~15, I carried an old school pocket watch. I always liked the engineering, and I could understand how they worked. There were springs, and gears and some method of turning the potential energy of the spring in to oscillations that could run through the gears to move the hands to display the time.
Quartz watches worked by counting the oscillations of a quartz crystal, divide by X and that would give you the number of seconds and from there it changed the count on a digital display.
Now, I wear a Samsung Gear Fit that communicates with a pocket-sized computer (that has many multiples of the amount of computing power that we used to send men to the moon in the entire Apollo program) to get NTP information, tell me when I receive email, keeps track of my heart rate and amount of physical activity, how long I sleep and how motionless I am when I am asleep, etc.
It is just the way things are. Things get more complex. We either learn to accept it and hone our skills as well as we can or we sound like a blacksmith lamenting the rise of the automobile. I am just happy that there are still things like the Raspberry Pi that at least attempt to keep computing simple enough to grasp and fun enough to do that it has a hope of capturing the hearts and minds of the next generations.
-
Right; but what I'm also slowly getting at is the whole concept of "a bunch of tiny tools piped together" is only useful if your data format is text. (Text including a list of filenames.)
I think it is most useful for text and "record"-like things (likelsoutput) that is text for historic reasons but would better if you have a slightly-more-structured view (e.g. JSON). It can still be useful in other cases, e.g. manipulating images with ImageMagick, but at least I don't find myself doing that too much.In particular, I think the "record" structures would work really well with the right set of tools; I get the sense that PowerShell would shine there too, I just have only played around with it myself. Just the standard set of tools aren't "right", and so they tend to work annoyingly and barely but do work and are useful.
-
Well, it depends. In one system, you get an OpenGL context. In the other system, you go through 7 steps to get an OpenGL context.
Also, most of that is handled by your windowing toolkit (GTK, Qt, KDE...)
-
/dev/audio
/dev/audio is not an application which is what they are talking about. The same for
cat /dev/urandom | aplay
-
Based on what?
Stable based on being able to run binaries compiled decades ago.
Sensibly-designed based on basically everything in this thread.
I like both sides of the fence, and use the proper tool for the job.
Right; but what advantage does Linux have over Windows? Other than monetary price, is there a single one?
And yes, if you come from Windows, *nix is really hard to grasp.
I come from Mac Classic, and believe me, Linux is completely impenetrable. It's not just Windows, it's everybody.
If that is what you want, grab a Raspberry Pi and load up Raspbian.
Haha, what?
You're saying "Linux isn't fun to use, the solution is to run a crappy Linux on really shitty hardware". Brilliant.
Slackware or Gentoo were never meant to fill that void. You need to use the right tool for the job.
Right; but the Linuxes I've tried have been Corel Linux, RedHat and Ubuntu, all of which in theory at least claim(ed) to be the most friendly and usable. And none of which were even up to Windows 3.11 usability standards. EDIT: Oh I think I tried SUSE once, also.
None of them lasted long, because in every case I had hardware that never worked right, and eventually I just said fuck it with even trying Linux. As I posted about EVE Online, you only get one chance to make a first impression and Linux distros all blew it.
Well, I think a lot of that has to do with complexity. You and I are approximately the same age, IIRC. When we were getting in to computers, you could grasp the basic concept of everything that was happening on your computer. Now, it is just too much for any one person to fully grasp.
There's two types of complexity. There's the computer code being simple, and the UI being simple. ONLY THE SECOND ONE MATTERS.
I mean, I have a high-level overview of most everything, but back in the day I feel like I had a better grasp of all of the minutiae...because there was a hell of a lot less minutiae. Now, as you and I are having this converation, we are a hell of a lot farther from the metal. There are probably 10X more layers of abstraction in place. That has happened everywhere, not just for Apple or Windows or *nix themselves.
First of all, that's bullshit. You're a lot closer to the metal using any modern Windows or MacOS than you ever were in Classic Mac.
Secondly, I have a good grasp of the minutiae because I've read up on it as a hobby, not because I needed it to get stuff done. Again, I think you're conflating two types of simplicity here into a single concept.
I was far more productive on Mac Classic before I'd learned any of that minutiae, because Mac Classic's designers wisely abstracted their UI almost entirely from that minutiae. (Except for places it couldn't be avoided, like ejecting disks.)
It is just the way things are. Things get more complex.
Obviously the computer code gets more complex. Duh. That has NOTHING TO DO with my complaint.
My complaint is that the UI is getting more complex. (Or, in the Linux case, it started out ridiculously complex and broken and hasn't ever been simplified or fixed.)
I am just happy that there are still things like the Raspberry Pi that at least attempt to keep computing simple enough to grasp and fun enough to do that it has a hope of capturing the hearts and minds of the next generations.
Again, you're talking about the WRONG simplicity here.
If you want kids to have fun with computers, you need to give them powerful computers with simple UIs. (Which is not to say the simple UI should limit the power of the computer-- look at something like HyperCard, for a great example.) This is something we had in the 80s and early 90s and no longer have.
-
If you're seriously telling me you can pipe a sound clip around to different CLI tools (without passing around the file it's in), I'll need to see an example of it.
Here's the standard
headtool in a pipeline that plays the first nine seconds of Jollity Farm:avconv -i '03 - Jollity Farm.flac' -f s16le - |
head -c $((922*44100)) |
aplay -t raw -c 2 -f S16_LE -r 44100The data going through both pipes is raw stereo 16-bit little-endian audio at 44100 Hz. The use of - to specify the output filename for
avconvis idiomatic and means what it usually does: write to standard output instead of a named file.Note the use of the shell's $((expr)) arithmetic expansion facility:
headnever sees the expression, as the shell calculates it and passes the result as the next arg after the -c option, specifying the number of bytes thatheadshould copy from its standard input to its standard output before terminating.The
aplaycommand expects an audio stream on standard input if no input filename is specified, as in this case.
-
we already know it can't handle filenames that begin in dash correctly.
Shell handles those just fine. If you want to pass them as arguments to other commands that use - as an option leadin, there are a couple of conventions to deal with that: either prefix the dashed filename with ./ to make it into a pathname based off the current directory, or use the -- option (conventionally "end of options") before it on the command line.
-
And the point is, if you're promoting a system where you solve problems by piping together programs, those programs need a common format of the data so that can understand what the fuck they're supposed to be doing.
It's my understanding that audio and video formats have that in the form of codecs or something (I don't work with that shit aside from hitting play). Which people talked about passing around, and then you said that wasn't acceptable.
You should be ashamed of that.
I can't even begin to tell you how ashamed I am about not living up the expectations of your shoulder aliens.
-
Shell handles those just fine.
Oh good. It handles it.
If you want to pass them as arguments to other commands that use - as an option leadin, there are a couple of conventions to deal with that: either prefix the dashed filename with ./ to make it into a pathname based off the current directory, or use the -- option (conventionally "end of options") before it on the command line.
... oh so it doesn't handle it.
I might feel better about Linux if its proponents weren't all liars.
-
I am no guru on *nix systems, and even I have a hard time on occasion when I get outside of my scope of familiarity.
I have this problem with both Windows and Linux.
-
-
Well, in that case, he's totally screwed. But then he'd be equally screwed, no matter the OS, CLI, GUI, BRI, or magic incantation environment you're using.
The magical incantation environment he's using is called the clipboard. Which does, in fact, receive a full sound clip with RIFF header, aka WAV file, along with a format hint that says it's a WAV file, not arbitrary bytes.@blakeyrat said:I tried Linux I couldn't even paste spreadsheet cells into a word processor without them getting converted into gibberish crap.
It's still not together. But they at least got rid of the "there are three clipboards and which one the default keyboard shortcuts use depends on Mysterious Things" nonsense.@blakeyrat said:Maybe it's better now. Maybe. But I was using it in like 2010 and they STILL didn't have their clipboard shit together.
Will either of them actually work correctly?
No. But at least the gigantic multitude of hacks in use to tunnel non-"just bitmaps and clicks" information through a 1970's protocol will move over to something whose standardization at least contemplates that.@Polygeekery said:If that is what you want, grab a Raspberry Pi and load up Raspbian.
Shut up. The correct response to "I want an automatic transmission" is not "Toys-Я-Us has Fisher Price cars for that".
-
Technically @blakeyrat is right - the shell doesn't handle
-foo, just like Adobe Photoshop doesn't handle Microsoft Word documents.
-
@RaceProUK said:
Well, in that case, he's totally screwed. But then he'd be equally screwed, no matter the OS, CLI, GUI, BRI, or magic incantation environment you're using.
The magical incantation environment he's using is called the clipboard. Which does, in fact, receive a full sound clip with RIFF header, aka WAV file, along with a format hint that says it's a WAV file, not arbitrary bytes.
I know about the clipboard
But that also means that the OS is doing its job correctly, and it's the programs that are getting it wrong.Just like in Linux
-
Technically @blakeyrat is right - the shell doesn't handle -foo, just like Adobe Photoshop doesn't handle Microsoft Word documents.
Except what he's saying is really more like saying that the WM doesn't handle left clicks.
-
Right; but the Linuxes I've tried have been... and Ubuntu...
Do you happen to remember which version of Ubuntu, and what was wrong with it?
-
Shell handles those just fine.
It handles them, but I disagree that it handles them just fine. The (very very) common use of globbing with an unadorned*is error prone.As a rule, the easy-to-do case should be the one that's safer and almost always correct, and for
*it is not.
-
What color is the sky in your world?
BLACK!
-
Why would the shell handle argument handling for other programs? Windows does even less - programs don't even get shell globbing or
<(foo)stuff.
-
Stable based on being able to run binaries compiled decades ago.
Horseshit. A hell of a lot of binaries even for XP will not run on 7/8/8.1. Decades is also a nebulous term. How far are you willing to go back with that assertion?
Right; but what advantage does Linux have over Windows? Other than monetary price, is there a single one?
System stability. Lots of Linux firewalls, NAS units, routers, switches, etc, can run for years without a reboot. Even today on 8.1 I can only go maybe two months if I am lucky. And that is only if I don't do Windows updates. Where uptime matters, Linux is a much better choice and only gets better every day. That is only the first thing to come to mind. There is also the fact that I don't need a team of lawyers to tell me what I can and cannot do with my software due to licensing. That is a huge sell for me. A Linux server is ready to go do whatever I need after I install all the software. A Windows server is really only licensed to boot up when you pay for a $700 software license. If you want to actually use it, you better keep that checkbook out. CAL's, per-socket licensing, Terminal Services licensing, limitations on RAM, the list goes on and on.
I come from Mac Classic, and believe me, Linux is completely impenetrable. It's not just Windows, it's everybody.
Fuck Mac Classic. Goddamned, every time you bring that and HyperCard up I just think of the blacksmith bitching about automobiles.
You're saying "Linux isn't fun to use, the solution is to run a crappy Linux on really shitty hardware".
No, what I am saying is, "Buy cheap hardware, that has GPIO pins that you can do cool shit with, and play around with it. If you fuck up, re-image the SD card and learn from your mistakes."
Notice the difference in intention versus your interpretation? It is not a subtle point that I am making here...
Corel Linux, RedHat and Ubuntu, all of which in theory at least claim(ed) to be the most friendly and usable. And none of which were even up to Windows 3.11 usability standards.
Riiiiiiiight. You are higher than a giraffe's ass, or you have forgotten just how shitty and dated 3.11 looks today. Get networking going on both of them and tell me that 3.11 is better than anything produced today, by anyone. Your nostalgia is getting in the way of objectivity.
you only get one chance to make a first impression and Linux distros all blew it.
Then why are you a fucking asshole to every single newcomer to these forums? Practice what you preach, or look like a hypocritical asshole.
My first experience with Linux was not real grand either. But I did not just throw up my hands and concede defeat. I decided to learn and not just expect everyone to cater to my wants and needs. I adapted. I didn't sit around and wax poetic about some shitty beige box and an IDE based on a Rolodex.
You're a lot closer to the metal using any modern Windows or MacOS than you ever were in Classic Mac.
You're fucking high.
Secondly, I have a good grasp of the minutiae because I've read up on it as a hobby, not because I needed it to get stuff done.
We are about to quarrel over semantics. To me, good grasp ~= high-level overview. Yes, I have a good grasp of the minutiae.
My complaint is that the UI is getting more complex.
So, you expect them to add more shit, but still keep the UI at the same level of complexity? How do you propose that? Do you expect someone to design the TARDIS of user interfaces?
-
Why would the shell handle argument handling for other programs?
Indeed. That's part of the problem with the blakeyrants in this thread.
-
-
That's the best kind of right.
Also because his rightness is an argument against his main argument.
-
Why would the shell handle argument handling for other programs? Windows does even less - programs don't even get shell globbing or <(foo) stuff.
<(foo)is really nice (diff <(foo) <(bar)is my common use case). But the program doing globbing has advantages too, because the program actually sees the glob. For example,do-something --to-these-files *could be made to work right on Windows, but not Linux. (I had other use cases that the DOS/Windows way enables, but that's what I can think of off the top of my head.)
-
I have this problem with both Windows and Linux.
As do I. I just have it a lot less in Windows, because -gasp- that is what I am most familiar with.
Some of us don't understand that, and continue to bitch about how computers no longer look like this:
I, for one, have very little nostalgia about those days and have no intention on going back.
-
Some of us don't understand that, and continue to bitch about how computers no longer look like this
Those guys are just Luddites who hate change.
-
Those guys are just Luddites who hate change.
...like the guys who don't want to change Bash?!?
...say it ain't so @boomzilla. Say it ain't so...
-
I might feel better about Linux if its proponents weren't all liars.
https://ecowomen.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/cast_iron_frying_pan.jpg
That's better.
-
https://ecowomen.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/cast_iron_frying_pan.jpg
That's better.Stop lying!
-
Fuck Mac Classic. Goddamned, every time you bring that and HyperCard up I just think of the blacksmith bitching about automobiles.
There's a story in Jared Diamond's Collapse about a small group of people who lived on an island close to (but not within sight of) Easter Island. The island was harsh, barely livable: there was no soil, hardly any fresh water, it was just a pile of sharp rocks. For centuries, this group of people had an active trade and were visited regularly and often by canoes from Easter Island bringing food, supplies, trade goods, etc. As Easter Islanders deforested their islands, it became impossible to build new canoes capable of crossing the distance between the two islands. Visits became infrequent, irregular, and then at some point, when the last of the canoes became unusable, stopped entirely.
The people on that small island didn't die-out right away, though. They survived, barely, for several generations. You can imagine each generation explaining to the next that the canoes will be returning any day now and their rough existence will be over. Over generations, the very concept of a "canoe" would be completely alien to the few survivors, a vague, misty concept.
-
What is this gibberish?
-
What...
...the fuck...
...does that have to do with...anything?
-
-
Lunix is a canoe.
-
Lunix is a canoe.
I think HyperCard is the canoe. Or perhaps Mac Classic is.
I don't know. My shoulder aliens are on break, and I cannot ascertain what a person is implying without it being precisely delineated for me due to my lack of psychic powers.
-
Maybe it is figurative speech, like some kind of metaphor. I have heard that the hu-mans use these modes of communication from time to time.
-
If you're seriously telling me you can pipe a sound clip around to different CLI tools (without passing around the file it's in), I'll need to see an example of it. Because I don't believe you can do that "easily", and I highly doubt it can be done at all.
Yep -- sox has no problems being used that way.
parec | sox -b 16 -c 2 -e signed-integer -r 44100 -B -- -t wav -- | sox -- -- gain -n -6 riaa | sox noisered record_player_noise.prof 0.4 | sox -- -t flac old_vinyl_track_93.flac gain -bwould be useful for cleaning up a turntable output being piped into your PC via the default sound input device and then tossing it on disk, for instance.
-
Have you tried getting a VM to run mac classic? Or maybe even using it on a physical device, if you have one? The communion with perfection may calm you down.
</sacrasm>
-
Yep -- sox has no problems being used that way.
parec | sox -b 16 -c 2 -e signed-integer -r 44100 -B -- -t wav -- | sox -- -- gain -n -6 riaa | sox noisered record_player_noise.prof 0.4 | sox -- -t flac old_vinyl_track_93.flac gain -b would be useful for cleaning up a turntable output being piped into your PC via the default sound input device and then tossing it on disk, for instance.
Sure, alright, but what would happen if you used a rabid racoon in your filename? What then, smart guy?
-
Have you tried getting a VM to run mac classic?
A 512x342 display might look a touch small on a modern display. ;)
-
Where did you get the 'clip from middle of file' garbage from? Those commands are sending the entire file through the pipe, including the file header.
And
soxhas no trouble both extracting the clip and tacking a new header on it in one fell swoop...sox some_silly_file.mp3 trim 20 24 -t wav -- | ...Right; but what I'm also slowly getting at is the whole concept of "a bunch of tiny tools piped together" is only useful if your data format is text. (Text including a list of filenames.)
No, it isn't -- one could easily see something like ImageMagick that's a bunch of binaries, each of which performs one little image-processing task (ImageMagick itself isn't quite designed that way, but I digress...)Right; but what advantage does Linux have over Windows? Other than monetary price, is there a single one?
Windows hasn't exactly been ported to run on a zSeries...For example,
do-something --to-these-files *could be made to work right on Windows, but not Linux.
All the Linux program has to do is interpret a list of filename arguments coming in, which works just fine
Sure, alright, but what would happen if you used a rabid racoon in your filename? What then, smart guy?
The ./ trick basically always works -- I just was assuming that this was something you constructed where you controlled your own file naming :)
-
I just was assuming that this was something you constructed where you controlled your own file naming
You and your assumptions.
I bet you also assumed that you had the capability to rename things? That is an amateur mistake...
-
Sure, alright, but what would happen if you used a rabid racoon in your filename?
Rabid Racoon? Is that the latest Ubuntu release?
-
-
And yet, nobody in the Linux world has any intention to develop a replacement for the shell.
What are you talking about? There are lots of replacements, usually REPLs over languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, SmallTalk, etc. (The Bash shell is a repl over the Bash scripting language...)
-
I thought we were up to Vicious Velociraptor by now.
Just in time for Jurassic World!
-
What are you talking about? There are lots of replacements, usually REPLs over languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, SmallTalk, etc. (The Bash shell is a repl over the Bash scripting language...)
And another perennial favourite for reinvention: how many times has someone said "you know what, fuck every existing build system in existence. I'm going to write one in XML/JavaScript/PowerShell/Ruby/Yaml/Haskell/etc/..."
-
I thought we were up to Vicious Velociraptor by now.
I'm waiting for them to run out of letters and have to reset back to
A.We'll finally be able to name it properly soon after. I really look forward to Bloated Baboon.
-
I thought we were up to Vicious Velociraptor by now.
Vapid Vervet, whose only change was infection with SystemD, with all subsequent effort spent on "how do we fix this?" The previous version was Utopic Unicorn, which had no changes of note at all. The one before that was Trusty Tahr, which is actually decent.
-
If I wrote a programming language,
variable_name,variableNameandvariable namewould all refer to the same variable.
