I know tar zxf and xjf off by heart. I probably do 100x as many extracts as creates. Tar is a stupidly antiquated command though.

Concerning logs:

1. You can still log to text if you want by configuration (e.g. forward stuff to syslog) and you can use any tools you like to read those files you want. So if you like text logs you can get them. You can even invoke journalctl to output logs on an ad hoc / scheduled basis in a variety of text formats and delimited fields.
2. Binary allows structured logging (i.e. each log message is comprised of fields in a record), indexing and searching options that makes searches & queries faster. Just like in a database. e.g. if you want to search by date range, or a particular user then it’s easy and fast.
3. Binary also allows the log to be signed & immutable to prevent tampering, allow auditing, intrusion detection etc… e.g. if someone broke into a system they could not delete records without it being obvious.
4. You can also use splunk with systemd.

So people object to systemd writing binary logs and yet they can get text, or throw it into splunk or do whatever they like. The purpose of the binary is make security, auditing and forensics better than it is for text.

As for scripts, the point I’m making is systemd didn’t supplant sysvinit, it supplanted upstart. Upstart recognized that writing massive scripts to start/stop/restart a process was stupid and chose an event driven model for running stuff in a more declarative way. Basically upstart used a job system that was triggered by an event, e.g. the runlevel changes, so execute a job that might be to kick off a process. Systemd chose a dependency based model for starting stuff. It seems like dists preferred the latter and moved over to it. Solaris has smf which serves a similar purpose as systemd.

So systemd is declarative - you describe a unit in a .service file - the process to start, the user id to run it with, what other units it depends on etc. and allow the system to figure out how to launch it and take care of other issues. It means stuff happens in the right order and in parallel if it can be. It’s fairly simple to write a unit file as opposed to a script. But if you needed to invoke a script you could do that too - write a unit file that invokes the script. You could even take a pre-existing init script and write a .service file that kicks it off.

Kind of sad there are still people raging over systemd. When it flares up in discussions there is the usual debunked nonsense:

• it only logs information to binary and this is somehow bad. Except it it can be configured to log to text as well and it uses binary so it can forward secure sign records to prevent tampering as well as offering database style query operations.
• it’s insecure because the repo has millions of lines of code. Except that they compile into hundreds of small binaries running with least privilege, and often replacing the task of far more dangerous processes (e.g. there is an NTP client in systemd which sets the time and nothing else).
• various rants about the primary author

What is more bizarre is the nostalgia and hearkening back to sysvinit scripts when systemd didn’t replace sysvinit! Systemd replaced upstart which replaced sysvinit. Because writing 100s of lines of script to stop/start/restart a process sucked - insecure, slow, didn’t scale, didn’t capture dependencies and everyone knew it. Upstart was the first attempt to solve the issue and was used in Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora / Red Hat, openSUSE and others until systemd came along.

I don’t think any solution is ideal but imo it’s better than dual booting.

It works great too. Day to day I’ll be building Linux code, running IntelliJ under X, installing docker containers and doing other stuff all from a Windows desktop.

You can use Linux and Windows at the same time with WSL. Works extremely well for people who develop Linux but also need Windows stuff.

It’s a rotten analogy. Comparing Linus having a go at some volunteers is not analogous, or comparable to a father abusing kids.

Because of it, quite obviously.

I define effective by the fact it was self evidently effective. No need to split hairs or dissemble here. Linux is objectively, indisputably the most important piece of code in the world. Everything else, such as a the context free boo hoo about some times when he has had a go at people is just noise.

The logic is simple. This is s his style and it demonstrably worked. I’m sure you could point to someone else’s style that also works in another context but that’s irrelevant.

There is a difference between a rant and a tantrum. If you read the post, you could see very clearly he makes a point very forcefully.

This is a nonsensical comparison

Exactly. It might not be good to be on the receiving end, but the chain of discussion that went before these rants should have given people the clue they needed to stop while they were ahead.

Yes you could but he didn’t and clearly his style was self evidently effective. And I’d add that if you’ve ever read the LKML archives, that these rants were rare and usually preceded by long chains of discussion before it reached that point.

In almost instances of Linus going off on one in public it is because maintainers weren’t doing their jobs (to act as quality gatekeepers), or particular developers thinking they could steam roll road changes through if they kept submitting them, or not listening to what Linus was saying. I remember Linus used to ream out Hans Reiser a lot (the guy who was subsequently imprisoned for murdering his wife) because he constantly tried to get ReiserFS into the kernel despite serious issues Linus had with it.

So generally when you see a rant, there is a history behind it and the rant itself is directed with a point. I also think it’s self evident that the kernel has benefited from this “benevolent dictator” model. I’m sure some people have gotten all precious over their feelings being hurt. The rest raised their game and the result has been a code quality standard you’ll probably never see anywhere else.

His style of being direct, having a high quality threshold and calling out bullshit immediately and bluntly is why the Linux kernel went from a university project to powering everything from lightbulbs to super computers. I think it kind of ridiculous that this demonstrably effective style got framed as “toxic” just because he hurt a few people’s fee-fees.

It didn’t come out in 1984. And that’s without pointing out that X11 is a protocol, not a window manager. I.e. it rendered stuff in a box but didn’t say what to do other than that. It took the likes of xt and window managers et al to place some semblance of widgets on apps and they were still a disconnected mess. The first time X became a “desktop” were things like Solaris, XDE, CDE etc. It was still disjointed dogshit compared to Windows, MacOS, AmigaOS, GEM, RISC OS, OS2 etc. The first time that something approached being a modern desktop was with GNOME and KDE but even those spent a long time getting anywhere close to usable. E.g. GNOME sucked untl GNOME red carpet / later ximian was the first pretty good Linux desktop.

X11 came out in 1987. Windows 1.0 came out in 1985. Not sure why that is relevant or represents some kind of point since a lot of windowing UIs were emerging around the same time.

The only ads I see are the clickbait garbage MSN shit that the browser defaults to but I’ve disabled it. I don’t really see ads other than that. Then again I live in Europe and I upgraded from a purchased copy of Windows 10 so maybe there are lesser or greater degrees of advertising Microsoft puts on users depending on their location, version of Windows 11 etc.

In fairness KDE has been copying Windows for years. That’s why it has a taskbar, start menu, tray etc.