That used to be how translucent terminals did it “back in the day” because it’s a lot cheaper to calculate…

It would be the terminal that does this, not a generic solution. I didn’t know if any specifically so this though.

It being a bad practice and “not uncommon” is my complaint.

I hate when people say that they’ll only move when it has 100% support

Why do you give a shit what os others use?

I feel like it should be self evident - but I’ll outline a few of the specifics.

“Hey kids - just run this rando internet script directly without inspecting it first”

Firstly - you shouldn’t copy/paste directly into the terminal at all. What you copy and paste may not be what you see: example. So even “simple” things could turn bad. Paste to an editor first, then your terminal - especially if you’ve used “sudo” recently. It’s simply bad security hygiene to just run random code in a shell and to get people used to doing so.

Secondly - you’re just running some rando un-structured shell script. They can, and do, do whatever they want and put things wherever the developer felt they should go. It can re-configure your system in ways you may not want. In fact in this specific case it will add repositories to your system without asking. Did you want EPEL setup on your system? Did you want to add an external NVidia repo to your system? Too bad, it’s done. Hope you saw the “Installing NVIDIA repository…” message as it flew past because that’s all the notice you’ll get - and you only get that because the developers told you about it.

Thirdly - since these are completely unstructured there is no uninstall without sifting through the script (which you didn’t keep because it’s a “curl | sh”). Again lets use this one as an example:

How many things do you think that shell script installs?

• It puts a binary in one of /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin or /bin
• It then downloads a bunch of stuff to one of /usr/local/lib/ollama, /usr/lib/ollama or /lib/ollama.
• It sets up external repositories to fetch nvidia dependencies
• It proceeds to install dependencies from those external repos
• It creates a service file for ollama and starts it.
• It configures /etc/modules.d to load nvidia drivers

And that’s all I see on a cursory walk through the 300+ lines of script. All of that may be reasonable to get things working - but that’s a lot for you to find and undo if you wish to remove this later.

There are better ways to distribute software and handle dependencies.

This one happily modifies system repositories for you too which is “great”. This whole practice needs to stop.

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

Yeah… No. What’s with the kids these days and shitty install scripts for Linux?

That looks amazing.

… For 2008.

That’s an interesting little program. Not sure if it’s for me - I’ll either remember/lookup commands or create bash scripts for more complicated things - but it’s good to know about.

And stop copy/pasting them. Type them out so you get used to them. It gets quicker the more you do it.

having to type the filename instead of double clicking.

Google “tab completion”

Just use it and fix things when they break. There’s no magic bullet - just experience.

Hah! It’s funny I just fired it up again for the first time and I do see a bit of flicker in xterm when paging full-screened in vim… So maybe there is something to performance optimizing terminals. :-)

“decent” hardware back then ran at 1024x768. I never ran less. And definitely multiple colors. But sure - no anti-aliasing and other features. But also on hardware several orders of magnitude slower.

Though granted I don’t have a 4k monitor so maybe there are issues with that…

Some people spend a lot of time in the terminal, so I can’t fault them for taking the time to make a nice working environment and sharing that work with others.

I mean - it’s the first thing I open… Which is why I’m surprised others seem to have “performance issues” since I’ve never seen any.

Bash and zsh aren’t terminals. They’re shells.

It’s ridiculous how much time people are spending performance optimizing terminals.

xterm on a 120MHz Pentium on X11 in the 90s performed “fine”.

Whichever one doesn’t crash while I’m trying to do something.

So usually neither…

Are they free range and GMO free? 🙄

Linux has been very successful without catering to those who don’t want to learn new things.

Why would I want gui for those things? CLI is often a better interface. Being able to grep lsusb rather than scanning a gui for an entry is much better. It’s easier to pipe to an email as well. Screenshots don’t allow copy/paste…

That’s what libraries do. glibc converts application calls to Linux syscalls. libgl converts application calls to driver calls.

It depends on where you draw the line at “native”. Unless you’re writing assembly you’re using some sort of ‘compatibility layer’.