It’s like owning a car for 20 years. Even if you don’t want to, you’ll eventually understand more and more.
The more you know about computers the more you realize its just magic rocks, and that magic, rocks.
Me who started working on my own OS from scatch 2 months ago.
Now know more about what I don’t know. For sure I have no clue how Linux works.
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 magic
libmagic is just one tiny part of the linux ecosystem
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?”
