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Endless Operating System

endlessos.com

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Re: Endless Operating System

#41

Post by boogies »

jolux wrote: post #29
stragies wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just type "help" into anything that looks like a prompt. From there things are usually discoverable enough, and if not, now I have strings, that I can C/P straight into a search engine. ;)

zsh: command not found: help

OpenBSD has a help command that’s basically just an alias for man, except without arguments it opens the manpage for help(1)¹. GNU help is a bash builtin for help with bash builtins, but does redirect to more general help.

  GNU bash, version 5.0.17(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
  These shell commands are defined internally.  Type `help' to see this list.
  Type `help name' to find out more about the function `name'.
  Use `info bash' to find out more about the shell in general.
  Use `man -k' or `info' to find out more about commands not in this list.
¹https://man.openbsd.org/help

Re: Endless Operating System

#42

Post by lproven »

Endless is a rather interesting distro. It's aimed to be suitable for non-technical users on fairly low-end hardware, with an internet connection that might be intermittent at best.

Some salient but unusual features:

• A desktop that is GNOME adapted into a non-desktop metaphor, more like a smartphone: a full-screen app browser, and an app switcher that's loosely like the Windows taskbar.

• A read-only root filesystem, with no package manager.

• All apps are Flatpaks.

• OS upgrades are atomic, whole-system-at-once, like Android or iOS upgrades on a smartphone.

Re: Endless Operating System

#43

Post by incrudible »

This is curious branding. In my language perception, the word "endless" is pretty much universally associated negatively. Even the girl in the stock photo seems to evoke "how long is this going to take?".

Re: Endless Operating System

#44

Post by bckr »

incrudible wrote: post #43

This is curious branding. In my language perception, the word "endless" is pretty much universally associated negatively. Even the girl in the stock photo seems to evoke "how long is this going to take?".

There is a nice video game that I played on the Wii called "Endless Ocean". The expression on the girl's face on this web page to me looks like "this is cool". So for me "Endless"="Wondrous"

Re: Endless Operating System

#45

Post by l0b0 »

stragies wrote: post #27
eightysixfour wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of reasons people are afraid of CLIs, here's a few: 1. Graphical UIs are inherently more discoverable. There's no way around this and "googling it" isn't a good enough answer. 2. Graphical UIs, for better and worse, hide or limit you from doing things that will break. Those guardrails reduce the fear associated with exploration. There are guardrails on CLIs as well (sudo), but we take for granted what t…

I just type "help" into anything that looks like a prompt. From there things are usually discoverable enough, and if not, now I have strings, that I can C/P straight into a search engine. ;)

I wrote ~3000 words on how to find help for commands (and discovering which commands exist) for a book. It's not a trivial task at all.

Re: Endless Operating System

#46

Post by dfcowell »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #32
gh-throw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normal computer users don't understand: - What a filesystem is. - How directories, files, and filesystems relate to one another. - What a server is/does. - How any kind of raw text whatsoever relates to what the computer "actually is" (the GUI) - When or how or under what circumstances a program might read a file (say, re-reading a config file) - What all that prompt noise means. - Why some things they type on the co…

To boot: In general, many popular unix utilities are cryptically named and they are not holistically designed. Consequently different programs take different flags for the same semantic, or some flags must be prefixed with a single dash and others with two dashes, or some flags are required to be passed in a particular order, or to view the docs for some commands it's `man command` and for others it's a `--help` flag…

I still occasionally stumble on the sequencing of arguments for chmod/chown and I can’t tell you off the top of my head which demands -r or -R. I’ve been doing this for years.

Re: Endless Operating System

#47

Post by throwaway894345 »

dfcowell wrote: post #46
throwaway894345 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To boot: In general, many popular unix utilities are cryptically named and they are not holistically designed. Consequently different programs take different flags for the same semantic, or some flags must be prefixed with a single dash and others with two dashes, or some flags are required to be passed in a particular order, or to view the docs for some commands it's `man command` and for others it's a `--help` flag…

I still occasionally stumble on the sequencing of arguments for chmod/chown and I can’t tell you off the top of my head which demands -r or -R. I’ve been doing this for years.

Oof, yeah, I hear you. Also I can never remember useradd vs adduser. That's hardly a scratch on the surface of the issues I have with unix utilities. Which isn't to say that I've seen any operating system with better utilities, but it's not hard to imagine (with the benefit of hindsight) how these might've been better designed.

Re: Endless Operating System

#48

Post by stragies »

jolux wrote: post #29
stragies wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just type "help" into anything that looks like a prompt. From there things are usually discoverable enough, and if not, now I have strings, that I can C/P straight into a search engine. ;)

zsh: command not found: help

yes, but now you know, into which shell you were dumped, and can gogle next steps! Don't you fully read the posts you reply to?

Re: Endless Operating System

#49

Post by stragies »

Skhalar wrote: post #35
offtop5 wrote: post #6

Actually I think students need to learn to use apt. I swear, the entire reason I got comfortable with the command line is because when I was 16 I couldn't afford a Windows license, and I ordered a free Ubuntu CD. I'm still very good with the terminal and it serves me well in my six-figure career

Apt and dnf/yum. 90% of Linux usage is rhel based (personal machine is fedora). And the other 10% is aws Ubuntu. Id saying get good at 1 and know thr basics with tht other.

That may be regional. Over here I see ~5 Deb/Ubuntu installations for every RedHat-derivative.
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