I just got on Windows 10 two years ago after running Windows 7 since 2012. I don't feel like moving to Windows 11, especially with the enshittification I keep hearing about. Maybe I should learn...
I just got on Windows 10 two years ago after running Windows 7 since 2012. I don't feel like moving to Windows 11, especially with the enshittification I keep hearing about.
I'm kinda torn on windows 11. A lot of tech complaints strike me as some mixture of "old man yells at cloud/the kids must be wrong". There are other ways of doing UI that aren't just vomiting...
I'm kinda torn on windows 11. A lot of tech complaints strike me as some mixture of "old man yells at cloud/the kids must be wrong". There are other ways of doing UI that aren't just vomiting menus all over the screen ala 1995, and yet I feel like some of the loudest complaints are from that crowd.
Further it didn't help that when windows 11 launched, there were 100% missing and essential features for even basic power users let alone the people stuck managing this in a work environment. Still I see complaints that are no longer relevant to modern windows.
Overall, I mostly prefer the UI of windows 11, and the direction things like powertoys have taken in making life a little easier for power users (and powertoys run finally doesn't suck so i might be going away from flow on my personal machines).
Alll that being said, widgets SHOULD be a really cool thing and I'd even like their news feed thing if it FUCKING LET ME PICK WHAT I ACTUALLY WANT. Oh sure you can toggle the settings, but since you can only choose (being a MASSIVE hypocrite here), last I looked, from their preset list of feeds and topics, it's useless to me. I actually wanted so few of it's preset options it wouldn't let me select that few and just toggled them all on, and of course the UI sucks for mass editing.
And all of that is in the background of just waiting for the "you know what, it's all a subscription" to drop. I really don't love how linux has also dragged its tech debt through the ages in some areas (no, grep is not a reasonable command. Select-String, while not as needed in PS, is a much better naming convention and it bothers me that linux fans seem willing to die on that archaic hill), but at least I know it's not monitoring every fucking button click with the underlying goal of charging me for it.
Edit-
Checking in on my hypocrisy in regards to their feed/widget bar, it's different but still awful. This should be something i'm hooking right up to my rss feed and getting everything I want in one click, but instead it's a mess and has nothing i'd like, and it looks like it's a pain in the ass to add your own widgets (although still have to dive in more on that)
It's too late to change. And with the lack of the centralized control that Microsoft has we won't see any coherent efforts to simplify standard bash scripting components. Calling it grep is indeed...
no, grep is not a reasonable command. Select-String, while not as needed in PS
It's too late to change. And with the lack of the centralized control that Microsoft has we won't see any coherent efforts to simplify standard bash scripting components.
Calling it grep is indeed stupid (for what it's worth, the name does mean something sane - "global regular expression print"). I don't care about the name and would be happy to see it called filter or whatever. But it's not really a deal-breaker to any technical user. Think of the millions of technical users around the world that are memorizing random English words because all programming languages use English for keywords. They can handle it just fine.
Here we go: echo 'alias filter=grep -i' >> ~/.bashrc The best part of *nix ethos is having the tools to fix your problems. :) I kinda prefer the less-readable commands anyway, as I can make all of...
Here we go:
echo 'alias filter=grep -i' >> ~/.bashrc
The best part of *nix ethos is having the tools to fix your problems. :)
I kinda prefer the less-readable commands anyway, as I can make all of my aliases and functions plain english without needing to overide the alias all the time.
People handled coding in assembly just fine. People handled working DOS just fine. Everyone seems pretty happy with python and never touching a command line if they don't, and yeah the language...
People handled coding in assembly just fine. People handled working DOS just fine. Everyone seems pretty happy with python and never touching a command line if they don't, and yeah the language barrier to coding sucks and should probably be worked on to.
Personally, if microsoft could overhaul windows enough to get DOS MOSTLY out of the system, linux should be taking a long hard look at what is necessary and what is dogma.
Edit- To be clear I have been using nushell for awhile now and know that there are other options that are trying to tackle the command line and how it's used across devices.
But there isn’t anything wrong with the way Linux works for its intended users. 99% of my Linux use does not involve a GUI at all. If you want a version that treats users like Windows users you’ll...
But there isn’t anything wrong with the way Linux works for its intended users. 99% of my Linux use does not involve a GUI at all. If you want a version that treats users like Windows users you’ll need someone to make a new distro like how Valve made SteamOS for handheld gaming.
Right. And its current users are less than 5% of the market. If you want to see any alternative to a windows subscription future that’s going to mean designing for people who don’t just need...
Right. And its current users are less than 5% of the market. If you want to see any alternative to a windows subscription future that’s going to mean designing for people who don’t just need headless terminals
An alternative would have to be something that can be dropped, legally, onto any hardware. Doesn't MacOS still requires an overpriced Apple computer in a very proprietary environment? I don't...
An alternative would have to be something that can be dropped, legally, onto any hardware. Doesn't MacOS still requires an overpriced Apple computer in a very proprietary environment? I don't think it counts.
In my opinion, this is a false premise. I find MacOS perfectly usable and have so far just had employers purchase the expensive hardware (although some offerings like the M2 Air are an exceptional...
An alternative would have to be something that can be dropped, legally, onto any hardware.
In my opinion, this is a false premise. I find MacOS perfectly usable and have so far just had employers purchase the expensive hardware (although some offerings like the M2 Air are an exceptional value depending on your needs).
Windows can be used on any hardware, a replacement needs to be able to do that too. Nothing false about that, MACOS just isn't flexible enough when it requires you to buy prebuilts. Besides, once...
this is a false premise.
Windows can be used on any hardware, a replacement needs to be able to do that too. Nothing false about that, MACOS just isn't flexible enough when it requires you to buy prebuilts. Besides, once Windows does it you know Apple is going to as well. They'll probably have some minimum tier of Apple One or something.
M2 Air are an exceptional value
Maybe for a prebuilt, since the hardware is good and will last a long time, but if you replace or upgrade often then Macs completely lose their value. They also further lose value the more you get entangled in their proprietary environment where everything is expensive.
just had employers purchase the expensive hardware
I'm surprised by that, I help a lot of businesses with their books and none of them are buying MAC's. A few of the owners have bought them for their own use, but for their employees they all go with Windows. I admit my area does have some rather less techsavvy people and they're small businesses, so it could just be that, but I just can't see any of them choosing more expensive options.
Tech companies are more likely to go for Macbooks (at least for engineering roles) because Windows has a lot of quirks that make it a worse development environment for most devs. Some of these...
Tech companies are more likely to go for Macbooks (at least for engineering roles) because Windows has a lot of quirks that make it a worse development environment for most devs. Some of these quirks have been mitigated over time by improvements on Microsoft's end but it's still usually a worse experience. In most cases, devs will work better with Mac or Linux, and Mac has a lot more options on the IT "work laptop management" side.
Oh, developers/IT makes sense. You can't put MacOS on a Windows computer for testing, but you can put Windows on a Mac. Add in more stability from an OS made for the hardware and efficiency from...
Oh, developers/IT makes sense. You can't put MacOS on a Windows computer for testing, but you can put Windows on a Mac. Add in more stability from an OS made for the hardware and efficiency from Unix baked in with employees who are use to Linux, it'd be easy to justify the added expense.
The companies I help can barely use a computer, they just want something cheap. If it weren't for programs like QuickBooks Desktop, a lot of them would prefer Linux, assuming someone else set it up.
I’ve worked at a few tech companies ranging from <50 to several thousand employees. Macbooks have always been an option, and often were the dominant choice at least in the engineering departments....
I’ve worked at a few tech companies ranging from <50 to several thousand employees. Macbooks have always been an option, and often were the dominant choice at least in the engineering departments.
One of my hardware refresh periods came up shortly after the M1 was released; they basically told me just max out a new MBP configuration and send the request to the procurement department.
That's what shell aliases are for. What people call tech debt, I call decades of muscle memory. One of the key strengths of Linux was carrying over a lot of Unix conventions. From Solaris 9 days,...
That's what shell aliases are for.
What people call tech debt, I call decades of muscle memory. One of the key strengths of Linux was carrying over a lot of Unix conventions.
From Solaris 9 days, I essentially learned tools like grep and vi "once" and occasionally just need to keep updated on new syntax that might be helpful, otherwise I can still keep being stubborn and do things the old way. And I'm confident my scripts, personal and professional will still work unchanged for the next decade and do the things they need to do.
Last major tool change I had to relearn was the deprecation of ifconfig to ip (net-tools).
In that time, Microsoft has wholesale changed the Azure cmdlets like what, 2 times now with major provider updates (AzureRM to Az). And there's still constant breaking syntax changes between major revisions of the current cmdlet. Frankly, I have better things to do than fix up scripts because CleanupPolicy became CleanupPolicyRetentionDescription
There's also decades of documentation that still remain relevant because of this "archaic" system. I can reference Unix man pages or mailing lists from the 90s to navigate around a modern Linux system at a reasonable level.
Great for a personal environment, terrible for production ones because now you've got to make sure every machine you hit has those aliases. I know it's not terribly hard to run a script that'll...
That's what shell aliases are for.
Great for a personal environment, terrible for production ones because now you've got to make sure every machine you hit has those aliases. I know it's not terribly hard to run a script that'll set all that up, but my criticism is at a much lower level. If you're going to alias everything, you might as well have verbose and human readable commands.
Yes breaking changes suck and god knows MS has shit the bed on that more than once, but again things like Nushell are at least attempting to modernize some of these flows.
Completely stopping all progression just because some people are comfortable has never actually been the way of programming despite it seeming to attract a ton of people who wish it was.
Agreed! As long as nushell or whichever other “modernized” attempt of making a legible system interface isn’t standardized, available on literally all operating systems (of the same *nix descent...
Great for a personal environment, terrible for production ones because now you've got to make sure every machine you hit has those aliases.
Agreed!
Yes breaking changes suck and god knows MS has shit the bed on that more than once, but again things like Nushell are at least attempting to modernize some of these flows.
As long as nushell or whichever other “modernized” attempt of making a legible system interface isn’t standardized, available on literally all operating systems (of the same *nix descent including less widely used, obscure, and resource-limited ones), interoperable with any given set of other tools or languages, and, crucially, a default on nearly all existing machines everywhere, it can’t outclass what’s already out there, and thus won’t be replaced.
In my opinion it’s, in essence, a network effect, no different from me trying to switch any number of friends and family contacts away from WhatsApp and onto Signal: someone’s gotta start and be willing to sacrifice some things (and maybe encounter a bit less stability).*
Completely stopping all progression just because some people are comfortable has never actually been the way of programming despite it seeming to attract a ton of people who wish it was.
I don’t think it’s about comfort – it’s about consistency. You can just know and rely on the fact a #!/bin/sh file will run on probably north of 75% of all computers currently operating, and on top of that it will probably do what you expected it to do.
*Hell, thinking about it, this applies to me as well: Nushell sounds like a tremendously interesting thing to learn, utilizing all the design improvements they have made in my use cases, but if I can only ever use it on personal machine(s) for the foreseeable future, and need to retain *sh skills, it’ll be nice to have, but still too annoying to allow for a full switch.
Yeah i get it's an odd middle ground, and this has almost always been the issue with open source. Linus himself hasn't been thrilled with how often breaking changes are pushed, and it took steam...
Yeah i get it's an odd middle ground, and this has almost always been the issue with open source. Linus himself hasn't been thrilled with how often breaking changes are pushed, and it took steam getting heavily involved with the space to really get some major movement on gaming (and even still it's sometimes a fight).
It's hard to get a first mover when you're punished so heavily for not knowing the legacy, but some of the linux stuff reminds me of COBOL where it's technically still in use, but man are we just ever bottlenecking ourselves in some cases. I'd love to get a modernized vim (literally just more in line with what the average user expects of the bindings) out there as the new standard, but I get why that's never going to happen
I don't see this as a problem because provisioning consistent systems at scale should be done by automation anyway, or setup in a platform independent way like containers. And wholesale renaming...
Great for a personal environment, terrible for production ones because now you've got to make sure every machine you hit has those aliases.
I don't see this as a problem because provisioning consistent systems at scale should be done by automation anyway, or setup in a platform independent way like containers.
And wholesale renaming grep to filter I'd argue is much worse, because the change has to outweigh rendering years of existing printed documentation invalid and makes a relatively uncommon word much harder to find with of the current state of enshittified mainstream search engines. I encountered this myself when searching for discussions around Control (the game). It just becomes a "formerly known as Twitter" mess for something you can setup an alias or symlink for.
Completely stopping all progression
It's open source, no one's stopping anything. There's plenty of new tools like ugrep and ripgrep that build off existing grep conventions, convenience tools like zgrep, and the current iteration of egrep and fgrep are completely different from their original Unix incarnations when their functionality was provided in separate binaries. It certainly hasn't stopped anyone writing new shells or alternative tools even if bash and coreutils are de facto standard.
FOSS lives on scratching its own itch, so if there was a very hard need for a completely verbose implementation of coreutils (or busybox at least) it essentially would've existed by now. Even then adoption will still have to match up against existing tools like say, Powershell Core which can be set as a default shell.
When did that happen? I feel like i just learned about ifconfig->ip last week and don’t think any of my devices have renamed it yet. Can’t say I’m too surprised I haven’t noticed though since my...
When did that happen? I feel like i just learned about ifconfig->ip last week and don’t think any of my devices have renamed it yet.
Can’t say I’m too surprised I haven’t noticed though since my work vm is running an older LTS release.
That's just how Windows goes. It's shit on launch but actually pretty good in about 5 years. Not just due to Microsoft fixing stuff, but also because in the meantime third party apps will mature...
That's just how Windows goes. It's shit on launch but actually pretty good in about 5 years. Not just due to Microsoft fixing stuff, but also because in the meantime third party apps will mature enough to make it tolerable. I'll switch when it hits that mark. Windows 11 doesn't even support my processor anyway. I would have to bypass the CPU check.
I've been considering bypassing the cpu checks for windows 11. Are there any potential problems in doing this? It's just frustrating that Microsoft doesn't officially support cpu that were...
I've been considering bypassing the cpu checks for windows 11. Are there any potential problems in doing this? It's just frustrating that Microsoft doesn't officially support cpu that were released the same year as their OS.
The potential problem is that someday an update might actually depend on that CPU difference, or they add the check in a different way, and your system breaks. Of course, updates on supported...
The potential problem is that someday an update might actually depend on that CPU difference, or they add the check in a different way, and your system breaks. Of course, updates on supported systems can break things, too, but you generally have more options and more hope of a fix than when you took off the safety rails yourself.
They're both arbitrary names that you must memorise, though: sitting in front of a terminal neither will come to you naturally, even for native English speakers. Personally, I prefer it be called...
grep vs Select-String
They're both arbitrary names that you must memorise, though: sitting in front of a terminal neither will come to you naturally, even for native English speakers.
Personally, I prefer it be called 'grep' over something generic like search because it's not a built-in language feature, it's a separate tool. My feeling is if it was called search people would see it as the one way & be less replace it with better tools (for instance, I use 'rg' instead of 'grep').
P.S. in a vacuum, I think both are bad names: Select-String implies you're selecting a (single) string, rather than finding matching substrings/lines. Will Microsoft fix that bad naming, or will they stick with it until powershell is replaced with something else?
Windows 11 personally pushed me to Linux, Pop!_OS and Ubuntu specifically and it's been great. Proton on Steam has made gaming a breeze for the most part. However, I'd previously messed around...
Windows 11 personally pushed me to Linux, Pop!_OS and Ubuntu specifically and it's been great. Proton on Steam has made gaming a breeze for the most part. However, I'd previously messed around with Linux so the differences in how things work weren't annoying. There are distros that exist to look and feel like Windows such as Linux Mint and Zorin OS that you could try out with a VM or by dual booting instead of fully sending it and erasing your Windows install. Linux certainly isn't for everyone and there will still be times where you might have to dig into the terminal.
I have also heard of scripts and stuff to debloat your Windows install. Never tried them myself and not sure how well they'd work given that Microsoft could revert all the changes the scripts make when you update the PC.
big +1 for Zorin OS, especially if you're coming from Windows. i auditioned a bunch of distros over the weekend and landed there because you can make it operate like Win 10 immediately, down to...
big +1 for Zorin OS, especially if you're coming from Windows. i auditioned a bunch of distros over the weekend and landed there because you can make it operate like Win 10 immediately, down to getting some real familiar taskbar right click items like the task manager and file explorer counterparts. i'm considering this a transitional period, but once i feel more comfortable with Linux in general, i want to switch my desktop environment to sway.
Big caveat to Zorin, if you're a developer: it's downstream from Ubuntu, of all things. So as far out of date as Ubuntu is, double-check if you can afford to have your development tools even more...
Big caveat to Zorin, if you're a developer: it's downstream from Ubuntu, of all things. So as far out of date as Ubuntu is, double-check if you can afford to have your development tools even more out of date.
glad you called that out, as it definitely tripped me up. a lot of apt-get install scripts ask you to set a variable for current linux version and pull from the right repo. without knowing that...
glad you called that out, as it definitely tripped me up. a lot of apt-get install scripts ask you to set a variable for current linux version and pull from the right repo. without knowing that Zorin OS is specifically using Ubuntu 22.04/jammy or any of that, half the bash scripts i ran to install packages from non-native repos didn't work because Zorin reported version 17.
I pulled out an old laptop to guide myself through the process after a break from tinkering. In no time it was working flawlessly with Steam installed and running "windows only" games through...
I pulled out an old laptop to guide myself through the process after a break from tinkering.
In no time it was working flawlessly with Steam installed and running "windows only" games through Proton.
It's not nearly as complicated as it used to be. I switched over 2 years ago and I barely have to do anything more complex than I did on windows. I haven't even had to use the terminal in months...
Maybe I should learn to use Linux.
It's not nearly as complicated as it used to be. I switched over 2 years ago and I barely have to do anything more complex than I did on windows. I haven't even had to use the terminal in months it's all clicking around a GUI. Same system I have for windows: find a problem then look in options menus if that doesn't work google 'how to do X on linux' and then follow the best looking result.
Honestly most people get scared off I think by the having to relearn how to navigate and where settings are but not so different from getting a new phone you just pick it up as you use it then before you are aware it's just how things are and going back to windows is a little jarring.
I recommend ZorinOS or Linux Mint for stability and familiarity with windows for new users, or if you're up for something more customisable, faster to update, or like gaming then Manjaro has been wonderful for me and I'm not even remotely a power user.
The main thing I worry about is compatibility for work products and services that my wife uses when she's working from home. Does citrix work on Linux?
The main thing I worry about is compatibility for work products and services that my wife uses when she's working from home. Does citrix work on Linux?
Citrix Workspace is officially supported on Linux and I've had jobs where we only had access to Citrix desktops that I've accessed over Fedora. The one fix I had to do is getting libunwind with...
Citrix Workspace is officially supported on Linux and I've had jobs where we only had access to Citrix desktops that I've accessed over Fedora.
The one fix I had to do is getting libunwind with newer versions of Workspace, because Microsoft Teams (surprise) has special treatment with Citrix.
Lots of stuff has Linux support... some stuff is still a pain in the ass. MS Teams has a Linux app that I use from time to time but MS Office doesn't. Libre Office works and opens Word files but...
Lots of stuff has Linux support... some stuff is still a pain in the ass.
MS Teams has a Linux app that I use from time to time but MS Office doesn't. Libre Office works and opens Word files but sometimes formatting gets thrown off... Excel files open and works just fine for the simple spreadsheets I need but if you're doing macros then its going to give you problems.
I just accept that some stuff doesn't work on Linux. I use Linux on my desktop computer and have a Macbook for when I need MS Office or a laptop.
Not exactly your case, but I find funny people complaining that Linux is hard and you have to type this or that and then they look for a lot of cryptic shenanigans to bend Windows to be more to...
Not exactly your case, but I find funny people complaining that Linux is hard and you have to type this or that and then they look for a lot of cryptic shenanigans to bend Windows to be more to their liking by disabling a lot of the baked in bullshit.
In one way or another you will have to learn things.
Seems like clickbait? Actual article says: OS Support Windows 11 - 64-Bit Edition , RHEL x86 64-Bit , Ubuntu x86 64-Bit OS Support Windows 11 - 64-Bit Edition , Windows 10 - 64-Bit Edition , RHEL...
Seems like clickbait? Actual article says:
The official specifications of the two Ryzen AI 300 SKUs, the HX 370 and 365, do not have Windows 10 listed in the supported OS list:
OS Support
Windows 11 - 64-Bit Edition , RHEL x86 64-Bit , Ubuntu x86 64-Bit
Meanwhile, this is not the case with the Ryzen 9000 series desktop parts as the spec sheet of that says:
OS Support
Windows 11 - 64-Bit Edition , Windows 10 - 64-Bit Edition , RHEL x86 64-Bit , Ubuntu x86 64-Bit
This essentially means that AMD's Windows 10 chipset drivers will not work on these new Ryzen AI 300 series mobile APUs, though Ryzen 9000 should have no issues on either.
Both AMD and Intel did this with Windows 7 and I got bit by it, so it isn't terribly surprising. They are not saying that it won't necessarily work at all, but it won't be officially supported and...
Both AMD and Intel did this with Windows 7 and I got bit by it, so it isn't terribly surprising. They are not saying that it won't necessarily work at all, but it won't be officially supported and some (probably AI-centric) features won't work.
Well, it doesn't look like it matters too much if you're not building a new desktop with the 300 series AI APU's which is fine? Since they look like laptop CPU's anyways. The new desktop parts are...
Well, it doesn't look like it matters too much if you're not building a new desktop with the 300 series AI APU's which is fine? Since they look like laptop CPU's anyways. The new desktop parts are still compatible with Windows 10.
Just a soft reminder that at least skimming the article before commenting is good Internet etiquette :) also the comment that you replied to also outlined it.
Just a soft reminder that at least skimming the article before commenting is good Internet etiquette :) also the comment that you replied to also outlined it.
When I saw Windows Recall and how it keeps pushing AI further into Windows, I have Zorin OS setup which is fantastic and I can run all my games and do my work.
When I saw Windows Recall and how it keeps pushing AI further into Windows, I have Zorin OS setup which is fantastic and I can run all my games and do my work.
Ha, my immediate thought after reading the name is that it sounds evil. My memory sucks so I had to google it to figure out why and it seems I watched too much James Bond when I was a kid (Max...
Zorin OS
Ha, my immediate thought after reading the name is that it sounds evil. My memory sucks so I had to google it to figure out why and it seems I watched too much James Bond when I was a kid (Max Zorin). 😅
Out of curiosity, how well does the interface work? An issue I've had with many Linux GUI's is the interface feels like a cheap afterthought tacked on. One of the things Windows and MACOS have is that when you click on something it opens quickly and smoothly, no noticeable latency.
Wow, good thing I had already decided that I wasn't planning on continuing with dual booting into Windows anymore as I was looking at building a new desktop with a Ryzen 9000.
Wow, good thing I had already decided that I wasn't planning on continuing with dual booting into Windows anymore as I was looking at building a new desktop with a Ryzen 9000.
I just got on Windows 10 two years ago after running Windows 7 since 2012. I don't feel like moving to Windows 11, especially with the enshittification I keep hearing about.
Maybe I should learn to use Linux.
I'm kinda torn on windows 11. A lot of tech complaints strike me as some mixture of "old man yells at cloud/the kids must be wrong". There are other ways of doing UI that aren't just vomiting menus all over the screen ala 1995, and yet I feel like some of the loudest complaints are from that crowd.
Further it didn't help that when windows 11 launched, there were 100% missing and essential features for even basic power users let alone the people stuck managing this in a work environment. Still I see complaints that are no longer relevant to modern windows.
Overall, I mostly prefer the UI of windows 11, and the direction things like powertoys have taken in making life a little easier for power users (and powertoys run finally doesn't suck so i might be going away from flow on my personal machines).
Alll that being said, widgets SHOULD be a really cool thing and I'd even like their news feed thing if it FUCKING LET ME PICK WHAT I ACTUALLY WANT. Oh sure you can toggle the settings, but since you can only choose (being a MASSIVE hypocrite here), last I looked, from their preset list of feeds and topics, it's useless to me. I actually wanted so few of it's preset options it wouldn't let me select that few and just toggled them all on, and of course the UI sucks for mass editing.
And all of that is in the background of just waiting for the "you know what, it's all a subscription" to drop. I really don't love how linux has also dragged its tech debt through the ages in some areas (no, grep is not a reasonable command. Select-String, while not as needed in PS, is a much better naming convention and it bothers me that linux fans seem willing to die on that archaic hill), but at least I know it's not monitoring every fucking button click with the underlying goal of charging me for it.
Edit-
Checking in on my hypocrisy in regards to their feed/widget bar, it's different but still awful. This should be something i'm hooking right up to my rss feed and getting everything I want in one click, but instead it's a mess and has nothing i'd like, and it looks like it's a pain in the ass to add your own widgets (although still have to dive in more on that)
It's too late to change. And with the lack of the centralized control that Microsoft has we won't see any coherent efforts to simplify standard bash scripting components.
Calling it
grepis indeed stupid (for what it's worth, the name does mean something sane - "global regular expression print"). I don't care about the name and would be happy to see it calledfilteror whatever. But it's not really a deal-breaker to any technical user. Think of the millions of technical users around the world that are memorizing random English words because all programming languages use English for keywords. They can handle it just fine.Here we go:
echo 'alias filter=grep -i' >> ~/.bashrcThe best part of *nix ethos is having the tools to fix your problems. :)
I kinda prefer the less-readable commands anyway, as I can make all of my aliases and functions plain english without needing to overide the alias all the time.
People handled coding in assembly just fine. People handled working DOS just fine. Everyone seems pretty happy with python and never touching a command line if they don't, and yeah the language barrier to coding sucks and should probably be worked on to.
Personally, if microsoft could overhaul windows enough to get DOS MOSTLY out of the system, linux should be taking a long hard look at what is necessary and what is dogma.
Edit- To be clear I have been using nushell for awhile now and know that there are other options that are trying to tackle the command line and how it's used across devices.
But there isn’t anything wrong with the way Linux works for its intended users. 99% of my Linux use does not involve a GUI at all. If you want a version that treats users like Windows users you’ll need someone to make a new distro like how Valve made SteamOS for handheld gaming.
Right. And its current users are less than 5% of the market. If you want to see any alternative to a windows subscription future that’s going to mean designing for people who don’t just need headless terminals
I don’t know if I have any strong selfish motivations there as I’m happy using Linux/MacOS for everything once M$ jumps the shark.
An alternative would have to be something that can be dropped, legally, onto any hardware. Doesn't MacOS still requires an overpriced Apple computer in a very proprietary environment? I don't think it counts.
In my opinion, this is a false premise. I find MacOS perfectly usable and have so far just had employers purchase the expensive hardware (although some offerings like the M2 Air are an exceptional value depending on your needs).
Windows can be used on any hardware, a replacement needs to be able to do that too. Nothing false about that, MACOS just isn't flexible enough when it requires you to buy prebuilts. Besides, once Windows does it you know Apple is going to as well. They'll probably have some minimum tier of Apple One or something.
Maybe for a prebuilt, since the hardware is good and will last a long time, but if you replace or upgrade often then Macs completely lose their value. They also further lose value the more you get entangled in their proprietary environment where everything is expensive.
I'm surprised by that, I help a lot of businesses with their books and none of them are buying MAC's. A few of the owners have bought them for their own use, but for their employees they all go with Windows. I admit my area does have some rather less techsavvy people and they're small businesses, so it could just be that, but I just can't see any of them choosing more expensive options.
Tech companies are more likely to go for Macbooks (at least for engineering roles) because Windows has a lot of quirks that make it a worse development environment for most devs. Some of these quirks have been mitigated over time by improvements on Microsoft's end but it's still usually a worse experience. In most cases, devs will work better with Mac or Linux, and Mac has a lot more options on the IT "work laptop management" side.
Oh, developers/IT makes sense. You can't put MacOS on a Windows computer for testing, but you can put Windows on a Mac. Add in more stability from an OS made for the hardware and efficiency from Unix baked in with employees who are use to Linux, it'd be easy to justify the added expense.
The companies I help can barely use a computer, they just want something cheap. If it weren't for programs like QuickBooks Desktop, a lot of them would prefer Linux, assuming someone else set it up.
I’ve worked at a few tech companies ranging from <50 to several thousand employees. Macbooks have always been an option, and often were the dominant choice at least in the engineering departments.
One of my hardware refresh periods came up shortly after the M1 was released; they basically told me just max out a new MBP configuration and send the request to the procurement department.
That's what shell aliases are for.
What people call tech debt, I call decades of muscle memory. One of the key strengths of Linux was carrying over a lot of Unix conventions.
From Solaris 9 days, I essentially learned tools like
grepandvi"once" and occasionally just need to keep updated on new syntax that might be helpful, otherwise I can still keep being stubborn and do things the old way. And I'm confident my scripts, personal and professional will still work unchanged for the next decade and do the things they need to do.Last major tool change I had to relearn was the deprecation of
ifconfigtoip(net-tools).In that time, Microsoft has wholesale changed the Azure cmdlets like what, 2 times now with major provider updates (AzureRM to Az). And there's still constant breaking syntax changes between major revisions of the current cmdlet. Frankly, I have better things to do than fix up scripts because
CleanupPolicybecameCleanupPolicyRetentionDescriptionThere's also decades of documentation that still remain relevant because of this "archaic" system. I can reference Unix man pages or mailing lists from the 90s to navigate around a modern Linux system at a reasonable level.
Great for a personal environment, terrible for production ones because now you've got to make sure every machine you hit has those aliases. I know it's not terribly hard to run a script that'll set all that up, but my criticism is at a much lower level. If you're going to alias everything, you might as well have verbose and human readable commands.
Yes breaking changes suck and god knows MS has shit the bed on that more than once, but again things like Nushell are at least attempting to modernize some of these flows.
Completely stopping all progression just because some people are comfortable has never actually been the way of programming despite it seeming to attract a ton of people who wish it was.
Agreed!
As long as nushell or whichever other “modernized” attempt of making a legible system interface isn’t standardized, available on literally all operating systems (of the same *nix descent including less widely used, obscure, and resource-limited ones), interoperable with any given set of other tools or languages, and, crucially, a default on nearly all existing machines everywhere, it can’t outclass what’s already out there, and thus won’t be replaced.
In my opinion it’s, in essence, a network effect, no different from me trying to switch any number of friends and family contacts away from WhatsApp and onto Signal: someone’s gotta start and be willing to sacrifice some things (and maybe encounter a bit less stability).*
I don’t think it’s about comfort – it’s about consistency. You can just know and rely on the fact a
#!/bin/shfile will run on probably north of 75% of all computers currently operating, and on top of that it will probably do what you expected it to do.*Hell, thinking about it, this applies to me as well: Nushell sounds like a tremendously interesting thing to learn, utilizing all the design improvements they have made in my use cases, but if I can only ever use it on personal machine(s) for the foreseeable future, and need to retain *sh skills, it’ll be nice to have, but still too annoying to allow for a full switch.
Yeah i get it's an odd middle ground, and this has almost always been the issue with open source. Linus himself hasn't been thrilled with how often breaking changes are pushed, and it took steam getting heavily involved with the space to really get some major movement on gaming (and even still it's sometimes a fight).
It's hard to get a first mover when you're punished so heavily for not knowing the legacy, but some of the linux stuff reminds me of COBOL where it's technically still in use, but man are we just ever bottlenecking ourselves in some cases. I'd love to get a modernized vim (literally just more in line with what the average user expects of the bindings) out there as the new standard, but I get why that's never going to happen
As an avid user and enjoyer of Helix, I wholeheartedly agree :-)
I don't see this as a problem because provisioning consistent systems at scale should be done by automation anyway, or setup in a platform independent way like containers.
And wholesale renaming
greptofilterI'd argue is much worse, because the change has to outweigh rendering years of existing printed documentation invalid and makes a relatively uncommon word much harder to find with of the current state of enshittified mainstream search engines. I encountered this myself when searching for discussions around Control (the game). It just becomes a "formerly known as Twitter" mess for something you can setup an alias or symlink for.It's open source, no one's stopping anything. There's plenty of new tools like
ugrepandripgrepthat build off existing grep conventions, convenience tools likezgrep, and the current iteration ofegrepandfgrepare completely different from their original Unix incarnations when their functionality was provided in separate binaries. It certainly hasn't stopped anyone writing new shells or alternative tools even ifbashand coreutils are de facto standard.FOSS lives on scratching its own itch, so if there was a very hard need for a completely verbose implementation of coreutils (or busybox at least) it essentially would've existed by now. Even then adoption will still have to match up against existing tools like say, Powershell Core which can be set as a default shell.
I still catch myself using ifconfig and spend 30 seconds puzzled at why my network stack tools seemingly don't exist.
When did that happen? I feel like i just learned about
ifconfig->iplast week and don’t think any of my devices have renamed it yet.Can’t say I’m too surprised I haven’t noticed though since my work vm is running an older LTS release.
That's just how Windows goes. It's shit on launch but actually pretty good in about 5 years. Not just due to Microsoft fixing stuff, but also because in the meantime third party apps will mature enough to make it tolerable. I'll switch when it hits that mark. Windows 11 doesn't even support my processor anyway. I would have to bypass the CPU check.
I've been considering bypassing the cpu checks for windows 11. Are there any potential problems in doing this? It's just frustrating that Microsoft doesn't officially support cpu that were released the same year as their OS.
The potential problem is that someday an update might actually depend on that CPU difference, or they add the check in a different way, and your system breaks. Of course, updates on supported systems can break things, too, but you generally have more options and more hope of a fix than when you took off the safety rails yourself.
They're both arbitrary names that you must memorise, though: sitting in front of a terminal neither will come to you naturally, even for native English speakers.
Personally, I prefer it be called 'grep' over something generic like search because it's not a built-in language feature, it's a separate tool. My feeling is if it was called search people would see it as the one way & be less replace it with better tools (for instance, I use 'rg' instead of 'grep').
P.S. in a vacuum, I think both are bad names: Select-String implies you're selecting a (single) string, rather than finding matching substrings/lines. Will Microsoft fix that bad naming, or will they stick with it until powershell is replaced with something else?
Linux is great. You should definitely give it a shot.
Windows 11 personally pushed me to Linux, Pop!_OS and Ubuntu specifically and it's been great. Proton on Steam has made gaming a breeze for the most part. However, I'd previously messed around with Linux so the differences in how things work weren't annoying. There are distros that exist to look and feel like Windows such as Linux Mint and Zorin OS that you could try out with a VM or by dual booting instead of fully sending it and erasing your Windows install. Linux certainly isn't for everyone and there will still be times where you might have to dig into the terminal.
I have also heard of scripts and stuff to debloat your Windows install. Never tried them myself and not sure how well they'd work given that Microsoft could revert all the changes the scripts make when you update the PC.
big +1 for Zorin OS, especially if you're coming from Windows. i auditioned a bunch of distros over the weekend and landed there because you can make it operate like Win 10 immediately, down to getting some real familiar taskbar right click items like the task manager and file explorer counterparts. i'm considering this a transitional period, but once i feel more comfortable with Linux in general, i want to switch my desktop environment to sway.
Big caveat to Zorin, if you're a developer: it's downstream from Ubuntu, of all things. So as far out of date as Ubuntu is, double-check if you can afford to have your development tools even more out of date.
Personally I recommend Fedora these days.
glad you called that out, as it definitely tripped me up. a lot of apt-get install scripts ask you to set a variable for current linux version and pull from the right repo. without knowing that Zorin OS is specifically using Ubuntu 22.04/jammy or any of that, half the bash scripts i ran to install packages from non-native repos didn't work because Zorin reported version 17.
I pulled out an old laptop to guide myself through the process after a break from tinkering.
In no time it was working flawlessly with Steam installed and running "windows only" games through Proton.
YMMV. Dual booting IS an option.
It's not nearly as complicated as it used to be. I switched over 2 years ago and I barely have to do anything more complex than I did on windows. I haven't even had to use the terminal in months it's all clicking around a GUI. Same system I have for windows: find a problem then look in options menus if that doesn't work google 'how to do X on linux' and then follow the best looking result.
Honestly most people get scared off I think by the having to relearn how to navigate and where settings are but not so different from getting a new phone you just pick it up as you use it then before you are aware it's just how things are and going back to windows is a little jarring.
I recommend ZorinOS or Linux Mint for stability and familiarity with windows for new users, or if you're up for something more customisable, faster to update, or like gaming then Manjaro has been wonderful for me and I'm not even remotely a power user.
The main thing I worry about is compatibility for work products and services that my wife uses when she's working from home. Does citrix work on Linux?
Citrix Workspace is officially supported on Linux and I've had jobs where we only had access to Citrix desktops that I've accessed over Fedora.
The one fix I had to do is getting libunwind with newer versions of Workspace, because Microsoft Teams (surprise) has special treatment with Citrix.
Lots of stuff has Linux support... some stuff is still a pain in the ass.
MS Teams has a Linux app that I use from time to time but MS Office doesn't. Libre Office works and opens Word files but sometimes formatting gets thrown off... Excel files open and works just fine for the simple spreadsheets I need but if you're doing macros then its going to give you problems.
I just accept that some stuff doesn't work on Linux. I use Linux on my desktop computer and have a Macbook for when I need MS Office or a laptop.
Not exactly your case, but I find funny people complaining that Linux is hard and you have to type this or that and then they look for a lot of cryptic shenanigans to bend Windows to be more to their liking by disabling a lot of the baked in bullshit.
In one way or another you will have to learn things.
I started to use Debian on my ThinkPad, it's good to learn it. There is a lot of tinkering, and if you have the patience, it's great! :)
Seems like clickbait? Actual article says:
Both AMD and Intel did this with Windows 7 and I got bit by it, so it isn't terribly surprising. They are not saying that it won't necessarily work at all, but it won't be officially supported and some (probably AI-centric) features won't work.
Well, it doesn't look like it matters too much if you're not building a new desktop with the 300 series AI APU's which is fine? Since they look like laptop CPU's anyways. The new desktop parts are still compatible with Windows 10.
Thanks for the clarification. Sadly, I did read the article, but I didn't realize there was more content if I scrolled down a bit.
Just a soft reminder that at least skimming the article before commenting is good Internet etiquette :) also the comment that you replied to also outlined it.
Chipset drivers are almost always just 'will work better' rather than "won't work at all."
That does put APUs in a tricky spot, however.
It's funny how Linux is slowly replacing the Windows kernel. :-)
As they say, Windows is the best Linux salesman around. :)
When I saw Windows Recall and how it keeps pushing AI further into Windows, I have Zorin OS setup which is fantastic and I can run all my games and do my work.
Ha, my immediate thought after reading the name is that it sounds evil. My memory sucks so I had to google it to figure out why and it seems I watched too much James Bond when I was a kid (Max Zorin). 😅
Out of curiosity, how well does the interface work? An issue I've had with many Linux GUI's is the interface feels like a cheap afterthought tacked on. One of the things Windows and MACOS have is that when you click on something it opens quickly and smoothly, no noticeable latency.
Wow, good thing I had already decided that I wasn't planning on continuing with dual booting into Windows anymore as I was looking at building a new desktop with a Ryzen 9000.
Ryzen 9000 will still work, this is about the new 300 series mobile chips.