> Elite mathematicians insist that they should give zero shits about trying to explain things and their convoluted impenetrable explanations are elegant
I'm here trying to explain...
I'm very much not trying to be like the Arch userforum and say that this problem was solved 3 years 7 months, 22 days, 9 hrs, and 13 minutes ago but will also not provide you a link or any more reference to this because I'm closing the topic. There 100% are elitists. But not everyone who agrees with their point is an elitist. That experience is always frustrating because a noob doesn't know what questions to ask or what terms to search. It's true that in any domain that a task is literally easier for the domain expert than the noob because the noob doesn't even know where to start looking.
As for users, I do agree that there's a lot of common stumbling blocks. But I also notice (the same problem exists in math) that a holistic view is not taught with or before specifics. These things have to be taught together, but if you try to just learn linux a command at a time (math an equation at a time or programming a function/algorithm at a time) you're going to be stunted for a very long time. The abstractions matter.
But why are aliases and functions disallowed? I've thought the TUI boom has been a great thing for users, although I wish TUI developers would spend just a bit more time doing design and understand that "has vim movements" means more than h,j,k,l arrow keys... There's lots of great alternatives to the most common coreutils. But I am still a firm believer that people should be making their own rc files. Especially today where it is trivial to carry them around with you. Hell, I even throw notes in my dotfiles. The whole thing is 84M and 81M of that is vim plugins, so not even part of the git repo.
> Some people think iOS is successful
Well I still don't know how to get my iPhone to stop correcting two words back. You'd think turning off General > Keyboard > Auto-Correction would do it. Nope. Maybe Predictive Text? Also no. But then again, you'd think that Auto-Capitalization would capitalize the letter I when it is used as a single character but again, no, and you can always recognize an iPhone user because their "i"'s are never capitalized.
I'll tell you this. Linux is a pain. All of software is a pain. 90% of software is a pain and has no fucking reason to be. I can give you a hundred examples where trivial things make a huge difference. From fucking Meta's download for Llama not telling you how much disk space it uses and hard coding the destination (2 problems), how calendard won't merge holidays and instead you have 5 instances of MLK Jr's day, or how I can't disable Apple Music or remap my media keys so I can stop the god damn Music player app from opening or get it to stop playing some random youtube video in a lost tab rather than play the song on spotify that I literally just paused. But the reason I choose linux is because I can fucking fix those things. I hate it. So much of it. You're so right that so many things don't have to be this way. But at least with linux and it's design choices, I can fucking fix things. It isn't just the open source aspect that makes that possible and it isn't just documentation, it is the mentality that things should be small and simple. To really take to heart the concept of monads.
systemctl reboot -f should be the default for "reboot".
People generally already make sure there's nothing they care about running and then issue a reboot often because something is broken.
It's already mostly a manual override. The default makes it not a manual override but instead yet another operation of a system that is, under most reboot conditions, assumed to be tainted in some way.
If you want reboot to potentially require IPMI or some kind of manual intervention, it should be an option like
or something that makes it very very clear what you're asking it to do.
Because how it currently is, reboot does not reboot, instead it inquires a potentially malfunctioning system what its opinion is on rebooting.
It effectively assumes every system is always in pristine condition and that users reboot out of boredom. If someone’s issuing a reboot, it's because something is wrong, and the system should treat that as the primary assumption.
> systemctl reboot -f should be the default for "reboot".
I very much disagree. This is not what I want and certainly you can recognize that this is an unsafe operation, right? Less safe operations should ALWAYS require more work. Not everyone checks and it is also easy to forget or miss something.
I like the --ask-everything option but I'm not sure how the other 2 can work. A crash, especially during shutdown, can have no guarantees of being caught. Or do you mean crashing user programs? Well then that's --force, right? The --wait-indefinitely-ok seems a bit weird too. Shouldn't that be configured in your boot options (or bootctl)? I do think there's reasons you might want this in one situation but not another so flag sounds good.
> If someone’s issuing a reboot, it's because something is wrong
On personal machines: >9/10 times I'm rebooting because I installed a new kernel. Granted I'm usually running an arch distro, but even on other machines it's pretty similar.
On servers, yes, you're right, I reboot far less and am usually rebooting because a specific GPU server has a defective GPU that is often a pain to solve with rmmod and resetting manually, being just far easier to reboot the entire machine.
But I still think it's clear that what you think is "average" or "usual" is not. Literally the fact that you and I disagree on what our typical use cases is proof of this (note: I'm not saying _my average_ use case extrapolates, nor your average use case, nor anyone else I know or even don't know. I'm saying _average_ is not a meaningful thing. I mean this in the same way as taking the average of 2 samples from a normal distribution; doing so gives you a number that is not representative of the distribution).
I'm very much not trying to be like the Arch userforum and say that this problem was solved 3 years 7 months, 22 days, 9 hrs, and 13 minutes ago but will also not provide you a link or any more reference to this because I'm closing the topic. There 100% are elitists. But not everyone who agrees with their point is an elitist. That experience is always frustrating because a noob doesn't know what questions to ask or what terms to search. It's true that in any domain that a task is literally easier for the domain expert than the noob because the noob doesn't even know where to start looking.
As for users, I do agree that there's a lot of common stumbling blocks. But I also notice (the same problem exists in math) that a holistic view is not taught with or before specifics. These things have to be taught together, but if you try to just learn linux a command at a time (math an equation at a time or programming a function/algorithm at a time) you're going to be stunted for a very long time. The abstractions matter.
But why are aliases and functions disallowed? I've thought the TUI boom has been a great thing for users, although I wish TUI developers would spend just a bit more time doing design and understand that "has vim movements" means more than h,j,k,l arrow keys... There's lots of great alternatives to the most common coreutils. But I am still a firm believer that people should be making their own rc files. Especially today where it is trivial to carry them around with you. Hell, I even throw notes in my dotfiles. The whole thing is 84M and 81M of that is vim plugins, so not even part of the git repo.
Well I still don't know how to get my iPhone to stop correcting two words back. You'd think turning off General > Keyboard > Auto-Correction would do it. Nope. Maybe Predictive Text? Also no. But then again, you'd think that Auto-Capitalization would capitalize the letter I when it is used as a single character but again, no, and you can always recognize an iPhone user because their "i"'s are never capitalized.I'll tell you this. Linux is a pain. All of software is a pain. 90% of software is a pain and has no fucking reason to be. I can give you a hundred examples where trivial things make a huge difference. From fucking Meta's download for Llama not telling you how much disk space it uses and hard coding the destination (2 problems), how calendard won't merge holidays and instead you have 5 instances of MLK Jr's day, or how I can't disable Apple Music or remap my media keys so I can stop the god damn Music player app from opening or get it to stop playing some random youtube video in a lost tab rather than play the song on spotify that I literally just paused. But the reason I choose linux is because I can fucking fix those things. I hate it. So much of it. You're so right that so many things don't have to be this way. But at least with linux and it's design choices, I can fucking fix things. It isn't just the open source aspect that makes that possible and it isn't just documentation, it is the mentality that things should be small and simple. To really take to heart the concept of monads.