Linux or BSD? both, happiest with arch and openbsd

Vim or Emacs? vim, tho i keep looking at vile, and use ed on servers

Systemd or init? init, maybe in 5 or 10 years systemd will be mature enough -- are logs in /var/log or journalctl, which target is the recovery/omg-its-all-borked target, '\S+ is taking a long time'...

Languages? C, perl, python, ocaml, golang -- nowadays mostly just python and golang for work, with ocaml for project euler.

Why unix? ease of automation (free tools!) and stability of interface (when was the last big backwards incompatibility in vi or emacs or TeX?). its bias against unnecessary change is a huge advantage in a world that already has more necessary change than we can process.

(04-01-2019, 02:33 AM)gaak Wrote: Why unix? ease of automation (free tools!) and stability of interface (when was the last big backwards incompatibility in vi or emacs or TeX?). its bias against unnecessary change is a huge advantage in a world that already has more necessary change than we can process.

Nice introduction, straight to the point.
Welcome to the forums.

(04-01-2019, 02:33 AM)gaak Wrote: its bias against unnecessary change is a huge advantage in a world that already has more necessary change than we can process.

I thought you said you were happy with Arch.
Welcome to nixers.

(04-01-2019, 04:10 AM)jkl Wrote: I thought you said you were happy with Arch.

One or two problems at a time is a lot easier to manage than 1000 problems + downtime. that said, it can make sense to turn machines into puppet/chef scripts and spend a little to just forklift upgrade the boxes. yay for technical debt....

(04-01-2019, 02:33 AM)gaak Wrote: Vim or Emacs? vim, tho i keep looking at vile, and use ed on servers

Why on earth would you want to use ed? It's a notoriously bad interactive editor, a product of a long-gone age, not matter what esoterics say. If you already use OpenBSD (I presume on servers?) why not use the two entirely sufficient alternatives: (classical) vi and mg?

(04-01-2019, 02:33 AM)gaak Wrote: its bias against unnecessary change is a huge advantage in a world that already has more necessary change than we can process.

Which doesn't mean that certain things shoudln't have been changed, and *nix makes it hard to change them.

(04-01-2019, 09:05 AM)zge Wrote: Why on earth would you want to use ed? It's a notoriously bad interactive editor, a product of a long-gone age, not matter what esoterics say.

vi - which you have suggested as an alternative - was written for a teletype system in the 70s, a "product of a long-gone age, no matter what esoterics say". It is basically a full-screen ed. Now how is that "modern" or even "good"? Its developer has made clear in 1999 that "vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore - unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud". Now do you?

So why on earth would you want to use vi? :-)

edit, disclosure: I use ed on one half of my servers and teco on the other half. For one very good reason: Less overhead = less potential security fuckups.

(04-01-2019, 09:05 AM)zge Wrote: Why on earth would you want to use ed? It's a notoriously bad interactive editor, a product of a long-gone age, not matter what esoterics say. If you already use OpenBSD (I presume on servers?) why not use the two entirely sufficient alternatives: (classical) vi and mg?

vim + tmux to make a vim-slime that can capture all my remote edits. e.g.

having one huge file of all the work that's been done on servers is great.

Welcome here!

Admittedly, I just have a bog standard desktop but I have totally no problems with systemd on my arch system.

(04-01-2019, 11:46 AM)Dworin Wrote: Admittedly, I just have a bog standard desktop but I have totally no problems with systemd on my arch system.

The less that's in-flight on a box, the easier it is to debug. Compare `ps aux` on your machine to an old init box:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!origin...fv_Xv36J0J