Fair.

I think in asking myself why I’ve never really held Linus conduct against him; he’s this weird 1:1 situation.

He’s unfortunately tasked with stewarding a project that runs the planets tech and it’s his name on the tin. Which whether he likes it or not at this point, makes his identity wrapped up in the quality of the project. I absolutely don’t condone the behavior, but I can understand how people handing you shit sandwiches becomes a personal attack of it’s own over time.

It’s probably a lesson we’ll refuse to learn about not doing this single leader thing again. Time and insularity tend to make bigger assholes of us all.

Hey holy shit! Someone else who knows this is in there! Two of us!

I got around this just using a local IPC on whichever box and a wlroots compositor (I think river right now? They’re all tiny). Wezterm is just locked in a remote multi plexed session I can fire scripts from the one with a keyboard. Startup isn’t really noticeable in wasted time, but it isn’t nothing. Consider this a promise to circle back if I do find something, it would have been a pain in the ass at another job.

Broadly I think it’s funny a lot of the same people who taught me the Unix philosophy don’t seem to understand the irony of refusing to move from the monolith. (Not that that’s you specifically, but Wayland actually gets it right for the most part).

The defense you hear from people like me is less fingers in ears that there are problems, and more the response to people who have tried nothing and are out of ideas on how to arrive at the same place differently. Im currently doing several things I was AGGRESSIVELY informed were impossible and wouldn’t ever be, but there’s so few people using some of the functionality in xorg I wonder if its back to hacking things together with pipes and scripts for the niches, remote display pretty much has been superseded by the common web server.

I started IT hearing stories of migrations back and forth from xorg/plan 9, and I did some of the troubleshooting in the early xorg era. you can trust me or not when I say I will choose the situation with xorg/Wayland now infinity times over that.

Even as a toy language if I can’t tell what it’s doing beyond interface with an llm prompt… What good is it?

Consistency and validity of output is essentially impossible to prove, because this has all the accuracy of both humans famously bad at explaining their problems to machines who understand 80% of it.

This is always a spectrum from how long it was since the last Debian stable release. So about 2 years max.

Modern release cadences make it crazy anywhere but Debian, but security patches are very timely. If you’re dealing with newer features, driver support or java/npm packages you’re probably also outside the typical defaults, but there’s generally some people working to keep the common ones up to date.

Still not my preferred way to handle updates and in some cases… kind of abusive to the maintainers who constantly haVE to deal with bug reports from “out of date” Debian users. The xscreensaver maintainer has some choice words. But it works, has for years with no sign of slowing.

That’s probably closer today than it was then. The added complication being that client is probably not thin enough for them to return to mainframe model which would be vastly easier to monetize.

Besides we got WSL out of the bargain, so at least inter op isn’t a reverse engineering job. Its poetically the reason linux ended up killing the last few win sever shops I knew. Why bother running win sever x just to run apache under linux. Why bother with hyper v when you can pull a whole docker image.

If the fortune 500 execs are sold on microsoft ita mostly as a complicated contactual absolution of cyber security blame.

I know about 3 people on earth that ever ran it in anything approaching production. Two of them still found a way to use the acme editor til LSPs took over, one is still at it.

It remains a pretty cool project you can still find people maintaining the bones of it. I think the core utils are ported and in the arch repo.

I mean it predates a lot of the pervy anime, but Usenet looked the same at the start with lots of Unix/computer boards and an alt.

Computer enthusiasts gonna enthusiastically talk about computers. People who pick up and move to a new platform are likely to be united around being technically competent enough to get there first, and everything else second.

It has been years since I was paid to play on prod, bigger companies are smart enough to have change management.

I remember lots of messing with kerberos, and I don’t remember a lot of minutes passing without cursing.

It’s largely a tough nut to crack just because Microsoft is obnoxious about integration. Thunderbird can do it (or used to) in pieces with local AD forest access. I don’t know about remote IMAP access, but you can definitely sneaker net export. It’s the weird formatting on the import side I’m fighting.

I saw someone piping something to local programs through the office 365 electron app, but the least work probably ends run a VM and sync off of or just use that. I didn’t try wine, so others would have to verify emulation works.

Thanks for the data points!

I’m working on trying to pry local office software copies of outlook from the clutched hands of people stuck in the win 7 era.

Well done sync is a hell of a drug.

Evolution is another GUI client I don’t have a ton of experience with other than proofing it was stable. It exists.

Unironically the most powerful email clients i know on any platform are retro, mutt or emacs (last time I used notmuch, but there’s options). I never bothered to set it up since all the reading and half the writing I do are off my phone these days.

But I don’t know the juice is worth the squeeze starting out, that’s a bit of a hurdle. I’m really curious on use case, what are you missing?

For the most part what kind of company you are is what kind of product you’re selling or making money off of.

So you could contend that Tesla is a battery company or a car company feasibly. Nobody ahead of the AI bubble would have mentioned Tesla and artificial intelligence in the same category.

Besides, if it’s what he makes money selling Tesla is a tax credit company.

I think it’s grossly undersold personally. What valve has managed is getting the single target platform open source could never agree on.

It’s a small miracle, and it bleeds over into stuff like device driver support in a way I don’t think most people who didn’t deal with Linux in the 2.x era immediately appreciate.

If Linux on the desktop has a surge, they did a lot of the legwork.

I haven’t even begun to dig in to everything it can do, but chezmoi is in the arch repo.

https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi

Fits the bill.

Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.

I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.

Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.

Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.

The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.

Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.

You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.