Attempting solidarity pragmatically.

Also @cakeistheanswer@lemmy.world @cakeisthenanswer@lemmy.fmhy.ml

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Generally Fedora’s purpose is to make sure nothing gets into redhat (RHEL) Linux. So if there are breaking changes to things, you’ll be getting them.

    Historically if people had wanted to learn I’d push them towards Ubuntu because its Debian based, meaning familiar enough to most of what runs the modern internet that I could eventually (I’m not a Linux admin) fix.

    These days if you just want to use it I’d pick Linux mint, just since they seem to be orienting towards that way. Arch or SUSE based something if you want to learn more about how the packages you install work together. But the choice in distro honestly feels more like an installer and package manager choice than anything. a distro is just a choice of which thousand things to hide in a trenchcoat.

    I just ideologically don’t like IBM and would rather hand in my bug reports to the volunteer ecosystem.



  • 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.





  • Tldr and tealdeer in the arch repo are both helpful, but Ill do you one better since someone already beat me to it. I found fish shell’s tab completion with either tool to be immensely helpful if you’re not trying to stay stock standard. But if you’re working on a lot of remote machines you don’t own stick with bash/zsh.

    There’s some easy to find fuzzy search and linting for for history plugins that mean if you found it once you can do it again in whichever shell.

    Its mostly familiarity, but i don’t think I could function without fzf.


  • I’ve kind of come and gone full circle on this one. It fits in the same space as the terminal, way more useful when you know what you want.

    Some config files are a lot easier to get the behavior I want, but editing a poorly formatted (or in some some cases pointlessly complicated) config is a quick nope out.

    Too many options to learn a new language.


  • If you’re the type of person with an opinion on on how software should work, there are options to make it happen.

    It’s been my first trip back in a decade, just looking through my options in the core repo these days has made me giddy. I worked for years as a Windows environment sys admin, half my tools went out the window for directly better options almost immediately.

    Most of the open source software you’ll find had someone who thought there was a big enough issue to roll up their sleeves, so lots of the projects are answers to questions you haven’t thought of yet too. The entire orientation puts fixing things ahead of profiting off them.




  • I laughed a little because I’m not sure I ever grew out of the expectation of everything being a little broken. You are going to learn so much you could have done without.

    On a more sober note I’m not sure adding a business model fixes the problem anymore.

    If we paid for our anonymity like toll roads or subscriptions we box out people who can’t afford it. Commodity level information isn’t likely to be decreasing in value any time immediately.

    If equitable access is also on the list, I don’t see anything but regulation and taxes getting you there. Just look at the steam store prices outside the first world and you have an idea for how poorly it could go.


  • Thank you, added to the list. Gonna tear up some disks spinning up all these VMs.

    I’m less worried on an intro to Arch than I am being able to just standardize on the same repos I’m already staring at when I inevitably have to answer questions over the phone. I know a few people like my dad (lapsed unix) who could afford to remember what it’s like outside of the walled garden, but too much friction is going to drive them off, ui or otherwise.






  • We still haven’t really sussed out whether the dominant model is going to be general or specific focus instances, or even brought whether niche boards want to just be in charge of the content and not the users, since your credentials are good everywhere you’re federated.

    Right now your ‘all’ feed is a combination of all the various places users on your instance have trawled, but they’re not totally the same everywhere.

    We could see curated instance feeds with some instance muting from admins that make it function like a public RSS, per user even if it gets that granular. Skies kind of the limit once you understand it’s limited to insecure communication, the most anonymity you have here is in a crowd.