Good article. I learned long ago that, at least the case of your development environment, it’s best to install the latest upstream release instead of just relying on the system provided version. Go makes doing this extremely easy relative to some other languages out there.

I recently started uses dotbot for managing dot files across my systems. It sounds very similar, in terms of the simplicity of the implementation, to yadm. You define a config file in yaml or json and run the “install” script which calls the dotbot utility, passing in your config file. With a simple change to the install script, I’ve been able to create multiple config files, one per environment (work, home, linux, mac, etc.) and I’ve been thinking about how I could automatically sync changes to git whenever I edit a config file. Leaning towards setting up an autocmd in neovim to automatically commit and push changes on save when I have one of the config files open. Just not yet sure how to do this in a way that would only run the sync for the configs and not every json or yaml file on my system. I’ve only ever set up autocmds for specific file extensions but the syntax leads me to believe it’s flexible enough that any arbitrarily specific file name or path could work the same.

This sounds really similar to how I do things but I use Ansible. What are the advantages to something like yadm, that is specifically designed for dot file management, and a generic config management utility like Ansible?

There’s a difference between complaining and providing constructive feedback. This post falls in the former category. If you are a user of a free product and you don’t like how it works, you are entitled to a full, no questions asked, refund. You’re welcome to make suggestions but devs who work hard to provide something at no cost and on their own time owe nobody anything. I’ve seen this play out year after year in the open source community and it’s led to a lot of very good projects shutting down when the developer gets fed up with the demands and behavior of the community of users.

I’m glad to see that. I didn’t follow her on Twitch, but watching that was nice to see.

Damn! I know she was going through some rough stuff in her personal life recently. I fear it’s all connected, though I sincerely hope I’m wrong.

I met Kris a couple of years ago at GopherCon. At the time I was very new to Go and she mentored me early on and was very friendly. She and I worked together during the GopherCon hackathon and produced the early version of a tool that ultimately became Kubicorn.

EDIT: seems like this was a climbing accident. Truly sad to hear. But going out doing what you enjoy… could be worse I suppose.

I run Ubuntu on a 2011 MacBook Air. I have to believe a 2012 Pro would also run it without issue

I think reality lies somewhere in the middle. Yes you have to read and yes you have to configure things but the docs are all on the wiki. There’s a point where this is easier than figuring out how to undo the defaults on, say, Ubuntu and do your own thing without official documentation on it.

Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.

Are we just going to pretend Debian doesn’t exist?

So turn my argument around and replace performance with disk capacity. Cost per gigabyte is so low now that you’ll end up spending more money in electricity compiling the dependency out than you would by having the disk space to not worry about it in the first place.

It’s not necessarily idiocy. Dystopian, yes. And when you consider that the case for it not being idiocy is a government that has created such wealth inequality that people will do this for an extra $50.

The irony of the “compiling software on modern hardware isn’t bad at all” argument for Gentoo is that the same hardware hardly benefits from custom compiled software. There was a time when hardware was slow and performance improvements could be made, but that was also back when it took ages to compile software, so there was a trade off of time taken up front for performance during real time usage.

If you want to learn Linux internals, build a system using Linux From Scratch. If you want a system that’s maintainable and highly customizable, run Arch Linux. IMO, Gentoo no longer really has a niche.

Part of me wants to believe that this won’t be abused and it’ll actually make the web better. The other part of me knows better.

They could, theoretically, implement this on a way that just changes the pay structure for ad impressions but I think that all that will do is incentivize website owners using Google ads to block or nag “non-compliant” users… but here’s hoping they don’t abuse it I guess because there’s basically nothing we can do to change it once it’s out there. Genies out and all that

No, thats because of capitalism

Exactly! It will all come full circle

Exactly this. SO is now just a repository of answers that ChatGPT and it’s ilk can train against. A high percentage is questions that SO users need answers to are already asked and answered. New and novel problems arise so infrequently thanks to the way modern tech companies are structured that an AI that can read and train on the existing answers and update itself periodically is all most people need anymore… (I realize that was rambling, I hope it made sense)

Twitter who?

His utter lack of understanding about how SAaS companies work is astounding. Having worked on the backend of several, they’re all hot garbage and brittle. That’s why there were so many “useless” engineers. You know, the ones he shit canned when he acquired the company? Surprise, they were probably the only reason the dumpster fire wasn’t burning down the whole city block. The thing Elon fails to understand is that someone didn’t just write Twitter on one go and gift it on to the world. It has evolved over many many years. Technology stacks change, frameworks change, standards change and these companies are trying to continually add features to applications and don’t have the luxury of just rewriting the whole stack every time something new comes out. The end result is something that is often more akin to a living organism than a website or application. He probably thinks Twitter is some program running on every server that can just be rewritten and replaced. I can’t wait for the day they try to replace it and it ends up setting Twitter back a decade.

I’m curious what you mean by getting hands dirty with system maintenance on Arch. Granted, I have been using Linux and Unix systems at this point longer than many people on here have been alive… but after a year of running Arch on my new laptop, it’s been pretty un-messy. The messy part is really the setup since you have to pick each and every piece, but if you search just about any issue and include “arch Linux” on DDG, the answer is almost always one of the top 5 results and the Archwiki is hands down some of the best Linux documentation currently available.