Evidently I’m similarly old, but a lot of the TUI apps replacing old standards look better.

Whatever wezterm uses to render ligatures has made editing quite pleasant, it doesn’t eat random control characters either which I found insufferable in a few that ship with DEs. Its still miles better than the cart, YMMV depending on what you use it for.

Depends on what you’re beginning.

The risk of forgetting some critical part of the install is mostly mitigated by arch-install. Arch is one of the easiest to “learn the ecosystem” since all packages are delivered to you as the author wrote them, so your first time through is a chore, but afterwards you can pretty easily replicate what you land on.

There’s a lot more decisions made for you in other distros, ultimately I found it frustrating to work backwards trying to understand what those were the more polished they came.

It is however; the absolute last place I’d point someone who didn’t want to or did not have the time, no matter how good the arch wiki is: it doesn’t read itself.

I did this for awhile…

https://github.com/systemd-cron/systemd-cron-next

If I remember whatever chef script I was blowing out mucked up something enough I ended up ditching it and manually rebuilding the timers as sysd units.

Even as someone who likes systemd since trying to teach init is pretty uniquely awful, I still have a load of one a year cron jobs I just use a BSD box for.

Tldr and tealdeer in the arch repo are both helpful, but Ill do you one better since someone already beat me to it. I found fish shell’s tab completion with either tool to be immensely helpful if you’re not trying to stay stock standard. But if you’re working on a lot of remote machines you don’t own stick with bash/zsh.

There’s some easy to find fuzzy search and linting for for history plugins that mean if you found it once you can do it again in whichever shell.

Its mostly familiarity, but i don’t think I could function without fzf.

I’ve kind of come and gone full circle on this one. It fits in the same space as the terminal, way more useful when you know what you want.

Some config files are a lot easier to get the behavior I want, but editing a poorly formatted (or in some some cases pointlessly complicated) config is a quick nope out.

Too many options to learn a new language.

If you’re the type of person with an opinion on on how software should work, there are options to make it happen.

It’s been my first trip back in a decade, just looking through my options in the core repo these days has made me giddy. I worked for years as a Windows environment sys admin, half my tools went out the window for directly better options almost immediately.

Most of the open source software you’ll find had someone who thought there was a big enough issue to roll up their sleeves, so lots of the projects are answers to questions you haven’t thought of yet too. The entire orientation puts fixing things ahead of profiting off them.

I’m a bigger defender than most of Consider Phlebas than most, but it’s a product of age.

If you grew up with Star Trek and Neuromancer, the first book kind of splits those wickets on utopia/dystopia neatly in a way I don’t think holds up as well afterwards.

Player of games is a much neater intro, but the ambiguity of the first book felt intentional, and it’s always interesting to me to see peoples reactions to that called shot.

I must have read that description of ‘damage’ a dozen times.

Hopefully healthcare.