Thanks for the further clarifications, TK.
We disagree on a few details (eg, how terrible of a monster systemd is, and how hard it will eventually become to migrate from whatever Linux will become to start forcing people out, cgroups vs VMs, and a few other stuff), but I think we are about 90%+ in accordance (eg opensource rocks, Poettering sucks, and long live Debian – without which Devuan would have nothing to fork itself from 
).
Same here. Many games run on Linux using WINE or one of its derivatives (PlayOnLinux, etc), but for these that don’t, I have a separate partition with Windows to install them.
I know the Linux gaming experience has been improving. There’s Wine, Proton, and the Steam Deck around. I should probably start dual-booting so I can dip my toes in again. Windows 11 has been a real pain for me with lots of useful features being removed. (I put on W11 when i got my Intel 12700kf due to reports that W11 drivers were updated to handle core allocation with the new architecture while W10 drivers were not)
Hummrmrmr… now that’s an idea, try and see whether my browser windows+tabs pass the Turing Test 
Well, you know what they say about emacs: “A mediocre OS, but with a great hidden editor called vi mode”
Going by your categories:
OS: Windows 10 (probably my last Windows box, I refuse to use win11 
), xubuntu, debian, arch, also have a lot of my projects and personal services running on Kubernetes, and various smaller and more temporary stuff in Docker. Formerly had various CentOS boxes, now all decommissioned because anything Oracle touches is ruined forever.
Terminal: Various, not strongly attached to any one, usually whichever has a reasonable set of window and tab handling features and otherwise keeps out of my way.
Shell: heavily customised and modified bash environment (my bashrc is the size of some whole projects I’ve done 
). Use zsh occasionally, but half of my zshrc is just undoing all the weird unwanted stuff it does like vomiting random symbols into file paths. Imo zsh is the MacOS/Win11 of shells - it does way too much, most of it unwanted, and it’s surprisingly hard to make it stop doing some of it - overall, I somewhat dislike zsh, it’s WAY too DWIM-esque for my tastes, mostly just used it in order to learn it in case I end up needing it.
Editor: vim/gvim
Browser: Firefox
Mail: Thunderbird / mutt. Also selfhost my email with Postfix, with rspamd and dovecot.
Input: Keychron Q6 with custom QMK configs, Razer Lancehead Tournament Edition
My opinion is basically this. I am still keeping a close eye on Devuan though, because everything about systemd is just horrendously janky. The design goal seems to have been “what if Linux could be more like Windows and MacOS?”…
I currently have in Firefox… 43 windows and 653 tabs, apparently. Yay ADHD, I guess.
Uh? What does Oracle have to do with CentOS? Perhaps you meant Redhat/IBM?
Regardless, I agree with you. After almost 30 years of using RHLinux and derivatives exclusively, and CentOS for the last 10 or so of those years, I left it without looking back after v6 – and considering the recent crapshow regarding kernel source code vs licensing, I’m very happy I did.
You’re right, I meant IBM. IBM is a bit more the traditional software Borg, Oracle the newer one, but I wouldn’t trust either, especially not at keeping a free product free.
Agreed. IBM ended up being the victim when Microsoft betrayed it in the OS/2-Windows brouhaha, but IMHO it was just the case of a bad actor being effed by an even worse bad actor. And let’s not forget the shenanigans IBM played on the market to ensure dominance in the mainframe arena.
Basically the only thing IBM ever did that was beneficial overall, was establishing the PC architecture as de facto open hardware (it has a technical manual with complete, detailed schematics) and also publishing its entire original BIOS source code (I still had it until a few years ago), this started the “PC standard” that benefits everyone to this day.
…plus the thinkpads used to be pretty nice…
I’ve found it mostly works like bash unless configured otherwise, so I’m curious about the details, if you have some time to elaborate.
At some point, I’ve been meaning to put a sanitized version of my zsh config onto github. It’d take a while to clean it up and document things though.
Also curious about the details of this.
This is a thing we definitely have different preferences for. If a terminal has window and tab handling features, I view that terminal as doing way too much. I have a tabbed window manager which does that stuff, so I don’t want an assortment of poor imitations on a per-app basis.
However, for something more modern and feature-rich, kitty is really nice. The kovidgoyal one, not the PuTTY fork called KiTTY. Or cool-retro-term is fun sometimes.
PC guy here. And I’m with love with Thinkpads.
My girlfriend has iMac, so there is one home, but I never really wanted to even give it a try.
I think possibly a lot of it was from first using it on ubuntu, who tend to IMO have… weird defaults for stuff (their default vim config is IMO possibly a calculated attempt to discourage people from using it in favour of nano 
One thing I particularly remember was it showing symbols on the end of paths for different filetypes although now I can’t find that option documented anywhere, I do remember it took me well over an hour to figure out how to disable (and now I just open it in a clean alpine container, and I notice it’s not an actual default… *shakes fist at ubuntu*.
Possibly a lot of it was misconfiguration on my end, but I find the documentation very difficult to understand, zsh-newuser-setup is next to useless because I really have no idea what half the stuff it’s asking me means around completion and autocorrect, and I find myself ending upwishing there was a single “disable all autocorrect, suggest, and typo 'fix’ing features in one, just do what I type out and show me a normal list when I use tab completion” feature.
The main missing feature was ctrl-xe to edit the current line in $EDITOR, which I did get working on zsh but it took me ages and it seemed that very few people had tried at the time.
I have a prompt_command that keeps track of keys in ssh-agent, shows $PIPESTATUS in the shell prompt, generally lots of aliases and scripts to do different things, and (currently semi-broken and needs fixing) and a few fun options to apply things like cowsay or lolcat automatically.
Been meaning to sanitise it and put it on github for like 4 or 5 years now
Agreed.
Honestly, my sympathies lie more with Microsoft in that particular war with IBM (not that I measurably trust either :P), since IBM wanted it to be a closed platform and to charge huge amounts of money for proprietary software (as well as having the attitude that computers were largely just for businesses and random normal people didn’t need/shouldn’t have them), Microsoft still selling proprietary software but a lot cheaper and more accessibly.
I’m sorry, but I thought the PC “openness” was something that came out of IBM itself, not Microsoft: I remember reading that IBM had a ‘champion’ team of employees fighting for it internally, and it was them that managed to convince IBM’s management to do it that way (there were indeed others inside IBM that wanted to make it a closed platform). This is the first time I hear that Microsoft had any place in this.
EDIT: some googling brought up this: Why the IBM PC Had an Open Architecture | PCMag; not the original material I’ve read many years ago, but seems to point to the same, ie it was championing by an internal team ("Entry Level Systems Lab ", as represented by its director Bill Lowe) that managed to convince IBM management to go the open way. Microsoft isn’t even mentioned…
+1 to you both; since the mid-90s all my laptops have been ThinkPads, the last one (a W520) was already from Lenovo and it was kinda disappointing, and I have heard that ThinkPad’s quality had gone even worse since then, so my next (and still current) laptop is an HP Zbook; very nice machine, but I still miss the ThinkPads.
The main point of that being that IBM were scared of losing that first to market advantage and ending up with an entrenched and cheaper competitor, when you consider how ultimately IBM and Microsoft both started out interoperable software-wise before IBM styarted taking it their own way, and MS-DOS still being commercial software, but much more developer-friendly than IBM.
To be fair, I may have some things wrong as around the time parts of this was happening, I did exist, but was young enough I barely understood what a computer did
+1 to this. I’m a bash user (and tcsh, and csh, and sh before that, if we go all the way to the original Unix v7 where I started), and I always saw the fancy shells like zsh (and ksh before it) as more of a hindrance than a benefit.
Never heard of this, will have to look into it (seems like a great thing to use when entering/debugging some of the 10-line ‘one-liners’ I frequently end up concocting 
)
Again, first time I hear of it. Looks mighty useful for debugging some of these same gigantic ‘one-liners’ when an intermediate command fails deep inside a pipe…
Now that sounds more like what my first boss would have called “improper use of computing resources”… 
Yeah, it’s one of my biggest “more people should know about and use this”
e.g. in my shell environment I can do:
[0] wolf@localhost:~ $ true | false | sh -c 'exit 13' | timeout 10s sleep 30 | cat
[0 1 13 124 0] wolf@localhost:~ $ ssh-add -t 300
Enter passphrase for ~/.ssh/id_rsa:
Identity added: ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Lifetime set to 300 seconds
Identity added: ~/.ssh/id_ecdsa
Lifetime set to 300 seconds
Identity added: ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
Lifetime set to 300 seconds
[0] wolf@localhost:~ [3:5] $
For John and others that have mentioned the Raspberry Pi, its new model (Pi 5) just came out, rather unexpectedly as Raspberry’s own CEO had recently warned us not to expect it until 2024:
For me, it was rather a disappointment, as commented here: Review - Raspberry Pi 5 Review: A New Standard for Makers | Tom's Hardware Forum
What are your takes on it?
I agree - doesn’t have a lot of compelling reason for me to upgrade my RPi4s.
I do like the addition of an RTC, but most of the cases where I want an RTC on a rpi are cheaper ones, as my 4s are generally fairly static (and have network connectivity for NTP) and always running while a 3 is something cheaper I might use for something that is powered on/off more often. The CPU upgrade is fairly small, and I find that 8GB of RAM is a bigger performance limitation overall on my 4s (I have 2x8GB and 1x4GB model 4). The 4’s HDMI output is already overkill for my use case, I guess the best thing about it might be the camera bus upgrade.
Probably not buying any any time soon; hoping it’ll drop the price of the 4 enough I can upgrade my two old 3B+ to 4. But maybe when it gets cheaper I’ll pick up a few. Maybe when the 6 drops the 5’s price