Live data from Hacker News

Suicide Linux (2009)

qntm.org

1–10 of 73 posts

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#2
> I suppose I should finally clear this up: The autocorrect functionality I originally described here was a feature of the first Linux systems I ever used, so I assumed it was how every Linux system worked by default. Since then I've come to understand that it's a completely optional extra doodad.

What systems did this? I've never encountered one that I can recall.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#3
I remember another distro from the 90s similar to this, it was created because the maintainer thought too many Windows people where influencing Linux.

I forgot what it did, but I think it wiped your system out too.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#4
Related. Others?

Suicide Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41748336 - Oct 2024 (1 comment)

Suicide Linux (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24652733 - Oct 2020 (170 comments)

Suicide Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15561987 - Oct 2017 (131 comments)

Suicide Linux (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9401065 - April 2015 (55 comments)

Suicide Linux: Where typos do rm -rf / - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389931 - Aug 2012 (1 comment)

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#5
post #2

> I suppose I should finally clear this up: The autocorrect functionality I originally described here was a feature of the first Linux systems I ever used, so I assumed it was how every Linux system worked by default. Since then I've come to understand that it's a completely optional extra doodad. What systems did this? I've never encountered one that I can recall.

Zsh can suggest the corrections to commands and filename. I'm not sure if that's what they're talking about, but zsh has been around for awhile.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#6
post #2

> I suppose I should finally clear this up: The autocorrect functionality I originally described here was a feature of the first Linux systems I ever used, so I assumed it was how every Linux system worked by default. Since then I've come to understand that it's a completely optional extra doodad. What systems did this? I've never encountered one that I can recall.

Anything that ships with a default zsh shell, which is a surprising number of distros actually.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#7
post #2

> I suppose I should finally clear this up: The autocorrect functionality I originally described here was a feature of the first Linux systems I ever used, so I assumed it was how every Linux system worked by default. Since then I've come to understand that it's a completely optional extra doodad. What systems did this? I've never encountered one that I can recall.

I'm on my phone so I'm too lazy to dig for this, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about the bit of shell script that gets run if you type a command that isn't found in PATH.

Fedora and Debian will both dive straight into searching apt/dnf for a matching package and ask "do you want to install this?"

I imagine you could create a hook that gets run for any command failure, but again I'm on my phone so not sure.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#9
post #2

> I suppose I should finally clear this up: The autocorrect functionality I originally described here was a feature of the first Linux systems I ever used, so I assumed it was how every Linux system worked by default. Since then I've come to understand that it's a completely optional extra doodad. What systems did this? I've never encountered one that I can recall.

There are some bash options like cdspell or dirspell that are likely what the blog author is referring to.

Either that or they were using zsh with autocorrect preinstalled or had somehow rigged up the thefuck to execute and run on any error somehow? Either way seems like a terrible default.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#10
post #7
post #2

> I suppose I should finally clear this up: The autocorrect functionality I originally described here was a feature of the first Linux systems I ever used, so I assumed it was how every Linux system worked by default. Since then I've come to understand that it's a completely optional extra doodad. What systems did this? I've never encountered one that I can recall.

I'm on my phone so I'm too lazy to dig for this, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about the bit of shell script that gets run if you type a command that isn't found in PATH. Fedora and Debian will both dive straight into searching apt/dnf for a matching package and ask "do you want to install this?" I imagine you could create a hook that gets run for any command failure, but again I'm on my phone so not sure.

I thought Ubuntu did that, but not Debian. Still, that's very different than what the author mentioned
Post reply on HN