71–80 of 88 posts
I wish they didn’t just take the well established name of a principle and re use it in their distro-name. As much as I appreciate this initiative I think they should consider the importance of naming and branding. An original product should have an original name.
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Slackware is a complete OS complete with curated set of user land and desktop applications. Although I have a soft spot for Slackware, I’d say arch fills this niche more than Slack: You get the most minimal system as a starting point and build what complexity you need on top - and no more.
I didn’t look into Kisslinux but the rather obvious problem with Arch is that the installation process scares people away (regardless whether it is hard or not). The terminal/command line is a scary place for people who didn’t use it before. Otherwise I tend to agree that Arch can be absolutely minimal if you want to. Didn’t use Slackware so I can’t comment on that.
It may scare people away, but you have to ask yourself: what kind of people? I have been teaching Linux to a couple of people, and some hate reading documentation in general. Make of that what you will. :)
That said, I installed Linux on a Windows user's laptop and she was fine with it because all she needed was a browser and something else I cannot remember. I think this covers many people.
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In cases where people simply have to follow instructions, I find the fear of the command line to be disappointing. It is far easier to provide support and that support is far less failure prone simply because you can state exactly what has to be done, rather than describe how to navigate a user interface while hoping that the other person interprets visual cues in the same way. That being said, there is a deeper prob…
I don't know, I've installed installed arch many times and I still occasionally will forget some step or make a typo or something. Then I have to boot the installation image again, remount everything, fix the issue... it's annoying. GUI installers don't really have this problem.
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> So a bus factor of zero would mean that the project is in jeopardy even if all the maintainers are alive. So, PHP, then.
I suppose the downvotes may be justified due to your comment being pretty out-of-place, but, just to add some perspective: I'd like to remind everyone that PHP originally used strlen() as a hashing function: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691 It is (or at least originally was) certainly not the pinnacle of good design.
The packageformat is entirely static. A series of plain-text files with fields separated by lines and spaces. Easily parseable via any programming language or with basic UNIX utilities. And you have to write parsers for it which is PITA even if it's very simple. Please just stick to well-known formats (even if you don't like them) and make your fellow developers life easier! For example, everyone hates YAML for one r…
FYI: package format isn't simple/static anymore: 1. https://github.com/kisslinux/kiss/commit/d296b90b75d02ee81ec... 2. https://github.com/kisslinux/repo/pull/286
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I didn’t look into Kisslinux but the rather obvious problem with Arch is that the installation process scares people away (regardless whether it is hard or not). The terminal/command line is a scary place for people who didn’t use it before. Otherwise I tend to agree that Arch can be absolutely minimal if you want to. Didn’t use Slackware so I can’t comment on that.
In cases where people simply have to follow instructions, I find the fear of the command line to be disappointing. It is far easier to provide support and that support is far less failure prone simply because you can state exactly what has to be done, rather than describe how to navigate a user interface while hoping that the other person interprets visual cues in the same way. That being said, there is a deeper prob…
Rather than a sane default, the installation guide says "Install a bootloader. Click here for a list of 8 bootloaders" "Click here to see 12 different partition managers" etc..
I feel I have to be an expert in every part of the system (Even things I'll never, ever touch again). It would be much better if the install guide chose the default and said "here's a link for other options if you prefer". Once the system is set up, I mostly just run pacup every day, with very few issues. But the install process seems deliberately complicated, and serves as gatekeeping.
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sounds like you'd be happy with Alpine Linux too https://alpinelinux.org/
Alpine is amazing. One of the best distros I've ever used by far. So good for desktop, so good for servers, so easy to use and install, amazing package manager.
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I suppose the downvotes may be justified due to your comment being pretty out-of-place, but, just to add some perspective: I'd like to remind everyone that PHP originally used strlen() as a hashing function: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691 It is (or at least originally was) certainly not the pinnacle of good design.
The other thing that's "funny" to me with PHP is that they are adding features a few years after everyone. Right now they're really big on OO when lots of people are slowly moving towards more FP features.
There is somewhat a positive trend about immutability, but you don't need a FP language of FP features for that.
My guess which languages that is most popular here at HN, based on rough estimate of number of positive mentions, would be C, golang, rust & python, where neither is a FP language.
Edit: Maybe Erlang should be included in that list of popular HN languages, if that is the case then it is one out of five.
The packageformat is entirely static. A series of plain-text files with fields separated by lines and spaces. Easily parseable via any programming language or with basic UNIX utilities. And you have to write parsers for it which is PITA even if it's very simple. Please just stick to well-known formats (even if you don't like them) and make your fellow developers life easier! For example, everyone hates YAML for one r…
space-delimited entries of plain text, one entry per line
In addition, up until [1], not only was the syntax simple, but so were the semantics.
[1]: https://github.com/kisslinux/kiss/commit/d296b90b75d02ee81ec...
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The other thing that's "funny" to me with PHP is that they are adding features a few years after everyone. Right now they're really big on OO when lots of people are slowly moving towards more FP features.
Is the trend of FP still going on? I'm not so sure, feels like it has somewhat slowed down compared to the hype about eight years ago. There is somewhat a positive trend about immutability, but you don't need a FP language of FP features for that. My guess which languages that is most popular here at HN, based on rough estimate of number of positive mentions, would be C, golang, rust & python, where neither is a FP l…
Replacing everything with FP languages is not going to happen, but I think more and more people are coding in a "FP way" if that makes sense.