The more you know about computers the more you realize its just magic rocks, and that magic, rocks.
It’s magic
libmagic is just one tiny part of the linux ecosystem
What I tell people: “When you get used to using an operating system that respects your rights, you don’t wanna go back.”
I’ve been on Arch full time for 6 years, I still get frustrated, sometimes I get stumped, but I NEVER want to go back to windows
It’s like asking “How does toilet paper work?” Meaning to say you don’t have to know all the details about how it comes to be but can just use it and appreciate it does work. And you also know it would be really messy and with poor hygiene without.
Maybe not the best metaphor but I approve your message
It was a shitty, yes. I probably would have said “it’s like asking how food works” if I had been eating when I wrote it
Lemme just fully quote the Arpaci-Dusseaus OSTEP real quick
I tried slackware when win 3.1 was hot. I would have went a lot further a lot sooner if I could have gotten my modem working
I guess it’s been about 16 years for me! Seeing as I first rolled up my sleeves to Linux as a Mac native around 2010. Though it’s been my personal PC daily driver for only about 3. It was all work and projects stuff until then. I learned Linux nuts and bolts on the job in-person from a very good mentor.
Everything’s a file.
Lots of things are files. See Plan9.
Linux: You’re a file.
Windows: No! You’re a file!
*Linux smiles maliciously*
… And there are a lot more of those random guys around now.
Statistically yes, but also you’re noticing a lot more because Lemmy creates those guys. Source: random guy. (Although I’m actually the low end “who the fuck knows” on the IQ chart version of this meme.)
I think M$ has had a lot to do with it recently, although lemmy certainly offers a helping hand
Microsoft makes you want to leave, Lemmy tells you it’s not so bad and pushes you to do it.
because Lemmy creates those guys
I confess, I’m perhaps complicit in that.
All I know is I survived the Debian installer. But at what cost?
Has it been a while since you used it? I know the nonfree firmware thing used to trip people up if they weren’t already aware of it, but that’s a nonissue now. Debian isn’t any harder to install than any other graphical distro.
Nah, the installer is much more tame than it used to be. I just like to poke fun at ye olden times.
I did make a huge recent mistake by using an NVIDIA GPU on Debian. Every time it updated was playing Russian roulette with “is this gonna break my system and send me into six hours of troubleshooting?” Til I finally said fuck it and swapped it with my brother for his AMD card. And I haven’t had a single issue since.
I like Debian, but NVIDIA drivers just refused to play nice for any extended period of time.
24 years exclusively running it.
Short answer: magic.
Long answer: a stressful full week trying to get everything right, followed by a long, blissful period forgetting how hard it was to get it up and running like magic.
Those weeks were a lot more stressful, and longer than a week, when I used Slackware and started installing stuff that wasn’t packaged for Slackware. I would dread new software. It was the Unifi controller that finally put me over the edge: I wasn’t even willing to give it a shot. I ran the controller on my Kubuntu desktop for a few weeks until I switched the server to Debian.
It felt like a house of cards. Nudge one of those cards by, say, updating a library, and you could easily break something else.
“If you want to know how Linux works, ask a Slackware user,” is the old saying. It’s true…we had to know, because we didn’t have a choice not to know.
After a dozen of those stressful weeks I decided to write down everything new I learn if I can.
🙋♂️: “How does Linux work?”
👨💻: “…does it?”
There is a book called how Linux works.
But the short answer is. Linux provides the kernel that includes a lot of functionality out of the box. Drivers so all hardware can be abstracted away, scheduling of tasks, a filesystem with privileges, processmanagement etc. This lives in the kernel.
In userland, there is more or less the GUI stuff (not entirely true). You can interact with higher privileges if you have the rights / sudo.
Linux makes you hardware run and abstracts it away in Operating System.
Long answer. Read the book. It is very good.
I don’t really understand how software translates to hardware.
Like, I do… I understand that a driver takes a software value of {0,1} and converts it into a concrete voltage for that device… I just don’t understand how a voltage rail can just be fiddled with like that without someone mechanically restricting the flow.
Like, I do… I understand how a transistor can regulate the flow of electricity to another circuit, by using a base to restrict the emitter to collector flow… I just don’t understand how that “switch” mechanism isn’t pre-determined from some beginning sequence. A timing sequence instead of an event-driven one.
Like, I do… I understand how a simple ratchet / flip flop works in terms of constructing chaotic or aperiodic cyclic flows… I just don’t see how they were initialised in the first place to force them into specific branches of computation.
Like, I do… I understand how a CPU is made up millions/billions of such devices, reacting off external device voltages to drive software paths, all initialised in such a way to allow for any number of configurations… I just don’t understand how we can do it in such a formalized relatively error-free way that appears to defy entropy
Great comment, took me back to computer architecture. Not sure I can answer. Just a postulate, is it because the electric forces are a billion times stronger than gravity so they both neutralize quicker, but also can more reliably and precisely cause electricity to flow because when you do disturb that balance, it’s much stronger than the interactions with massive systems we’re used to visualizing?
That, as well as how computers will run the same computation multiple times and select output bits by majority rules to correct errors from say cosmic rays causing some bits to flip part way through one (but not all) of the fault tolerant circuits?
My last one was more of a joke, but my other statements hold. I think what I’m essentially asking is:
I understand how a pendulum works, I understand how a Newton’s swing works, I understand how Newton’s swing can start off another swing elsewhere… I’m just not clear on the nature of the finger that started off the first swing
It translates what you tell it to the hardware.
We’ve cracked the code! Lol
We don’t ask that question here
