The question of whether you should be an extremist follower of a certain philosophy or play with parts of it, dealing with ambiguities is one that is getting more and more popular these years. Not only with free software or the Unix philosophy but around everything else. It seems like people can handle less and less discrepancies.

I'd say: keep the right balance and think about what's your intention and why is it your intention.

(10-01-2019, 03:17 PM)d9a Wrote: If shit hits the fan, I want the option to maintain my own fork of the software. Additionally, I care about privacy and think free software is the only way to go with that so you can verify what programs are doing in the background.

(10-01-2019, 03:17 PM)d9a Wrote: This also extends to if I care about using Linux-libre or another deblobbed kernel or if I'm satisfied with what ships with whatever distribution I pick like Void Linux or Arch even with using a completely free system like my future X200.

(10-01-2019, 03:17 PM)d9a Wrote: however, I don't trust the modified BIOSes that people have written and Coreboot still has some thermal issues which kinda scare me, but maybe they're not as big of a deal.

From that I guess your main issue is one of trust. My personal take on that is to think about it like I think about food and restaurants. Recipes are usually free, some of them are trade secrets that keep businesses running, some tell you the ingredients but not in what quantities. It's nice to have someone hand you some free recipe, it's cool to go to a restaurant and buy food, it's totally weird when people hand out free samples of food because you know it's because it's a marketing scheme.

When software is cheap, not open, and almost free, then you should worry about privacy and trust. I've used Parabola for 3 years, it was fine but I just can't cope with it now because it's not practical for me anymore.

(10-01-2019, 03:47 PM)jkl Wrote: And I honestly don't care about ethics. My computers are tools and I expect them to be good at their designated tasks. I don't really care how.

(10-01-2019, 05:14 PM)d9a Wrote: I care about the ethics because I don't want my software compromising me because I decided to trust it.

jkl is right, computers are tools. Unless you want to make a political statement out of it or go full paranoia. But in that case maybe even open source software is not enough.

As for the Unix philosophy, in my opinion it should be taken as a development methodology only. Many take it a bit too far and it goes against it's own purpose. Similar to taking TDD to the extremes or wanting strict functional programming, those can be quite limiting and not fit all cases.

(10-01-2019, 03:17 PM)d9a Wrote: Other philosophy I really care about is the Unix philosophy of a program doing one thing and doing it really well. I think it makes it so that programs are easier to understand and extend. It's great how I can combine programs to accomplish things instead of waiting for a feature to be added, etc. I'm also a minimalist, so this follows that I think. If I don't need a feature, I just don't have the package installed.

(10-01-2019, 03:17 PM)d9a Wrote: However, all of that would mean stepping away from the Unix philosophy a bit due to systemd. With Void Linux, the main distro I've been looking at recently, I'd have to either be ok with proprietary blobs in the kernel if I'm not using them or compile Linux-libre myself.

(10-01-2019, 03:17 PM)d9a Wrote: RE: Unix philosophy, I'm trying to figure out if I care enough to not use systemd. I haven't had a point where systemd has really hindered me. With my future X200, it'd probably be beneficial to just use Parabola since it guarantees I won't use proprietary software.

I don't think that if there's one software in a distro that isn't perfectly fitting the concept of Unix philosophy that it should be ditched entirely, that's quite radical. Putting the development technique aside there's a few questions you need to answer: Are you the kind of person that deals a lot with services, which service managers have you used before, have you dealt in depth with systemd and not liked it?

(10-01-2019, 03:47 PM)jkl Wrote: I avoid systemd because of its atrocious security and reliability implications.

(10-01-2019, 05:14 PM)d9a Wrote: Well it appears a few vulnerabilities in systemd were discovered today....
I don't know how this will affect my decision because it'd be no different if it affected the Linux kernel or other piece of software I use on every distribution. It does make me question it more though.

Edit: This vulnerability has pushed me to Void. I'll deal with the learning. These vulnerabilities exist because of sloppy programming.

See here jkl has a real concrete example of why he avoid systemd, the still immaturity of the code base, the security and reliability issues. Others might enjoy it because it's the only service manager that is able to solve their problems.

My personal opinion is that I quite enjoy some of the innovations that systemd is trying however that comes at a cost. I also find the utilities confusing because you have to buy into the whole concept to get it.

(10-01-2019, 03:17 PM)d9a Wrote: It's also smaller than Arch, so there's the potential of it dying or not having a resource I need to fix my system if something happens.

That's the least of your concerns. Set your system such that you have backups and are able to reinstall it on another machine in a matter of hours.

(10-01-2019, 03:17 PM)d9a Wrote: So let's get to the point of this post: I'm trying to determine how much I care about the above philosophies in the end to get stuff done.

What are you trying to get done?