l3mming

I'm a linux developer of 25+ years and I'm permanently banned from /r/linux because I dared criticize systemd.

My answer is therefore: Power-tripping mods. Where mods are required, ensure the community has the ability to oust them.

I'm a web developer of 25+ years. These days python, php, react, vue stack. Formerly, C, C++, perl and assorted other oddities.

Forget what you once heard about PHP. Modern php is nothing like its early days. Modern php has some great constructs that give language expressiveness and fluidity, and that really lends itself to concise and beautiful code.
PHP also has some brilliant web frameworks (eg: Symfony) that make build web apps (be it REST APIs or frontend backends) just a pleasant experience all around. It's dead simple yet extremely powerful. This makes makes development and maintenance using PHP cheap. PHP's testing suite is also ridiculously powerful.

By comparison, I find python web frameworks (Django, flask etc), fiddly and finnicky to use. I also find Python a much less expressive language. By that I mean it will often take me several lines of code to do something that is otherwise a 1 liner in php. It just feels clunky and awkward.

Don't get me wrong. I once hated and laughed at PHP with the rest of them. But PHP has really evolved over the past 10 years, much more so than python has. I look forward to the day Python has a good hard look at itself.

In the meantime, if I need a backend for a website and I'm given the choice between PHP or Python, I'll choose PHP (symfony) every time.

Besides, PHP devs are cheaper.

Lenovo is renowned for their excellent linux compatibility. I'm sure you'll get a bunch of proponents here saying the same.

BUT, oh boy. Don't get me started...

Too late. Having used various models of thinkpads in recent years, their inconsistent keyboard layouts will drive you absolutely insane. I swear, at this point they're just fucking with us.

I've got one in pieces somewhere, that has/had the ~ key next to the FN key on the bottom row! How the fuck are you supposed to use Linux if you're ~ key is down there? It's fucking stupid.

Not to mention their keys have a tendency to break off with just the mildest of fist slams.

AND the latest work-issued recent model is fucking with us again! It has the FN key ON THE LEFT SIDE of the Ctrl key on the left. Who does that? The Ctrl is always the left-most bottom key. Now, every time I fucking go to press Ctrl+something, I end up hitting FN instead.

Fucking morons! At this rate this laptop will also end up in pieces.

So, tldr; Stay the fuck away from Lenovo if you want to use Linux and not end up in prison for vehicular homicide.

Hi Spez, my advice is to hold off for a while on that IPO.

Would this locked-down distro be used by customers or by employees? If it is being used by employees, there is no faster way to be hated than putting unnecessary restrictions on their logins. You don't want that kind of workplace.

I simply do this:

1. Make sure they don't get sudo/root privileges.

2. Remote mount their home directories (nfs).

3. Don't add any restrictions beyond that. It is a waste of time and money.

4. Control the rest through company policy, usually clauses under the 'Misuse of company network' section.

5. Who cares if employees are browsing tik-tok or whatever if they've done all their work? That's a work-allocation issue. If they haven't done all their work then that's already a solved problem. Either motivate them or performance manage them slowly towards the door.

6. Who cares if they want to install xyz software [in their home directory]? Chances are it'll be a free boost for performance and/or morale.

You should have a look at Sebastian Lague's programming videos on Youtube. He models various things (eg: predator/prey/ant colonies, slime growth) using a few very simple rules. They're just beautiful. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A

Vim. Hands down the best text editor / ide ever created. Come at me, Emacs.

I was fortunate enough to meet Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP founder) long before I became a PHP programmer. At the height of the PHP hate back in the early 00's Rasumus was bravely giving a talk to a group of us stuck up Perl programmers.

To be fair, we had good reason. PHP had borrowed lots of functions from C for familiarity (all those str* functions) and done stupid things that made life unnecessarily difficult, like naming some of them with underscores and others without, and making parameter order inconsistent across similar functions. So it did all these C like things but, it did them way, way slower.

Not only that, PHP also wanted to be like Perl because perl was also a bit like C but, unlike PHP, did things quickly and could parse just about anything you could throw at it. So, PHP also shoe-horned in a bunch of regex functions to give perl-like capabilities to their pile of poo. So now it also had perl capabilities, but was performing way, way slower than perl.

PHP was like that try-hard kid at school that wanted to please everyone, but everyone pretended not to know.

But, most impressively, Rasmus was very apologetic for what PHP had become. He said to us that PHP was never designed to be a programming language. It was designed to be a "Personal Home Page" templating tool. But soon people wanted to conditionally include bits of templates. Then they wanted to iteratively include bits of template.

And then he learned about lex and yacc, rewrote the whole thing. And finally, one stormy day, there it was. Hideously ugly and Turing complete.

And, when he said this, suddenly it all made sense and we had a whole lot of sympathy for where it and he was at.

He went on to say that they were putting a lot of working into looking at the worst bits of PHP and making things better. And, credit where credit's due, that's exactly what he's done. PHP today really is a nice language to work with.

What does that mean?

Are you talking about about the lack of games on Linux? Because that makes no sense. Check out protondb.com

And if your GPU is still only lukewarm, Stable Diffusion runs better in Linux than Windows.

Yeah, I'm conflicted too. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, fuck IBM.

Yeah, I was having a whinge about it here the other day. Just a sec while I dig up the corpse...

Systemd* removes choice*, and it was designed to do so. That is why there is so much anger. It is bad software design, by design. It flies in the face of the core linux principles, all in the name of homogenising the linux ecosystem, and you know exactly which big corporations benefit from that.

The simple fact is: today, if I want to run a mainstream distro without Systemd, I cannot. Its cancerous tentacles run so deep that decoupling it from a mainstream distro, and keeping it decoupled, is a full time job.

Instead I have no choice but to run a smaller, less featured, less secure and less funded alternative. Good luck getting Gnome to work without systemd.

Full credit to Devuan, MxLinux, Artix, and the other united underdogs.

Fuck you Redhat/IBM and your proxy evil-doer Lennart.

But if you want to read more about how why others hate systemd, there's no shortage of material:

https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd

https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Main_Page.html

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/21616608

http://www.galexander.org/systemd_sucks.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18873851

Buying a laptop that can run SD will cost you more than twice as much as an equivalent desktop. A desktop will also remain upgradeable for the next 10 years or so.

Holy shit dude. At 8 hours a day, that's over 3 years of full time play! How do you support yourself?

It is that easy in php:

$jsonConfig = file_get_contents('config.json');
$config = json_decode($jsonConfig);

If you're technically inclined, a simple bash script with a for loop could dump the time and discharge rate to a text file every minute. Then you could copy/paste that into LibreOffice calc and do yourself some pretty graphs, or whatever.

edit: just found a tool called powerstat which looks like it does sampling over longer intervals.

sudo apt install powerstat

But how will they have time to learn SELinux and run a business?

Ah right, I see. Sounds like you're making the right choices in the context of your unfortunate situation. Yeah, playing games pretty much rules out a remote desktop setup. Sorry I don't have any more answers to your questions, but you're clearly asking the right ones.

Have a look at the pygame library for python. It's a great first step for this kind of thing. It has everything he needs to grasp the concepts and start to build some cool stuff. Then move to Godot.

If Snowden can exfiltrate data from the NSA, there is simply no way for your average employer to prevent this through computer restrictions. Effort in that direction is a total waste of money.

This is a company policy issue, enforced through non-disclosure agreements and, ultimately, the legal system.

Similar 20+ years programmer here. Even before Lemmy Rust was top of my list for languages to learn. Now I've got a boost in motivation too.

I don't think it's a 'culture'; it's not something people choose to do. There's just a lot people out there who aren't as familiar with English as you.

I'm a programmer of 25+ years. Everything written above is spot on. I too started with C and I still love that thing like my first born. It is so immensely satisfying writing something in C that a) works b) doesn't leak memory and c) passes all your unit tests. Nothing else compares.

I too looked at React and hated it with a passion. Then I saw VueJS and kind of liked it. Then I saw Nuxt and now I've gone all in on NuxtJS. It is so simple and well-thought out compared to the shambles that is React. It's very satisfying to use. Rust is next for me.

I've learnt well over 10 languages over the years. Some well, some well enough. Learning a language is bit like reading a book. If you're a third of the way in and it's doing nothing for you, don't waste your time. Grab another one off the shelf and try that. Don't put pressure on yourself - it should be enjoyable, not stressful. Just chip away at it bit by bit and enjoy the little discoveries.

Don't worry so much about your coding style. From the examples you gave, yours is much easier to follow than the second one. And, you know what? Most 'senior programmers' I've worked with have been bad coders. The bar is not as high as it may appear.

Sounds like you're currently a systems guy with a bit of programming skills. That's an awesome combination to have, and mirrors my own all those years ago. The best bit is your have the freedom to learn programming as a hobby, without the pressure. Enjoy the process. Watch some videos by Sebastian Lague on Youtube, they're magical.

Best of luck with your programming journey. It is an immensely enjoyable hobby, and ridiculously useful skill to have.

Yes, you should. Try something debian based like Mint. Hell, try Arch, which I use btw.

Agreed. I manage both of these transparently beyond the employee's view. All the employee knows is that they have xyz free space to use on their profile.

It is the one universal truth. Viewers do not want ads.

Why then should I care about a content creator who doesn't care about their viewers?

If you have built your business model on giving people what they don't want, AND have the audacity to insist that people make it easier for you to give them what they don't want, then you can fuck right off.

No. I do not care about creators who rely on ads. You'll take my Ublock Origin from my cold, dead hands.

This. And people commenting "This."

Nice try, American person.

Thank you! It's a bloody miracle!

7 Days to Die. It's an incredibly underrated game. I'd describe it as Minecraft, but for adults.

My ex was a hoe hoe person.

I like this. Super clean and simple.

That said, I suspect Reddit's 'controversial' sorting might work a little differently, as I often used it to see what the crazy people were saying.

I haven't played with the numbers, but I'm not sure that your proposal would push the crazies to the top - just the moderate crazies.

Right, that's it. I'm going back to Reddit

/s

I have to resolve them way more than I should. We have internal devs and external devs and there is a lot of treading on toes. For any conflict that isn't super obvious (90% are) I just ask the two devs involved to resolve it together, in a sensible way that keeps the unit tests working.

Awesome, cheers. Really appreciate it.

What a joy to see Sigur Rós' album '()' listed. :)

Curse you artists, and your whimsical disregard for parseability.

Well, this is true. It's all about the right tool for the job. The PHP hammer is good at some things and bad at others. It is good for web development, it is bad for parsing [thanks to its truly awful regex functions], and it is way too bloated to be any kind of scripting language. Python is much better for parsing and transforming data, but its regex implementations are still pretty awful when compared to something like Perl. In fact, I still reach for Perl when I have to parse complex and unstructured text. Haven't yet reached for Perl 6 though.

I concur.

So why is China so irked then?

Your principal architect sounds like an idiot.

Right, you've already convinced me. How and where do I start? Can you recommend some links/resources please?