Is Linux easy to use?

Exactly. Can’t tell how many pages the handbook to the first computer in our household had, but it surely weight almost 2kg :slight_smile: It tought everything one needed to use the box software wise - one only had to be willing to do some reading/learning.

The BBC was another one with a huge manual, it even delved into some assembly.

Ended up writing a network sniffer in assembly at school so I could grab the admin’s password after persuading him to log into a machine further down the network.

What I liked about Endeavour is that I could install to a point I could google without stress to then do the other stuff I’d forgotten / had changed since I installed gentoo.

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The history of Linux began in 1991, with UNIX and MINIX as its predecessors.

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Oh really Multics, it was the first UNIX-like time-sharing multi-user operating system, it was a heroic age, it was mainly used in universities.

While I agree that the inconsistencies of naming is not aesthetically pleasing, I don’t think it is much of a hindrance to learning the shell commands. I do agree that rd and md would have been better names for rmdir and mkdir. In fact, the rm command could have been expanded be able to remove an empty directory without the -r argument, so rmdir is actually not needed, in my opinion.

The lack of a rename command may be confusing at first, but when you think about it, this command would do the same thing as mv, only in a more limited scope, so it would be redundant. You cannot really modify the mv command so that it cannot rename files, without crippling its functionality significantly.

I also always create these aliases:

alias cls="clear"
alias cd..="cd .."

just because I’m used to MS-DOS. :slight_smile: Why is clear not abbreviated? On the other hand, on MS-DOS, why copy instead of cp and move instead of mv? Shorter is better, in this case.

What irks me much more than mkdir, rmdir, and the lack of a dedicated rename command, is the inconsistencies in how arguments are passed to commands.

Take for example the find utility. Why does it take a single dash in front of a multi-character argument name, e.g.

find . -iname "*frog*"

instead of the expected:

find . --iname "*frog*"

?

I have a lot of issues with the find utility. I love it, because it is excellent, but I also hate it because it is so inconsistent and contrary to the UNIX philosophy of a program doing only one thing, but doing it well. The manpage for the find command has over ten thousand words! If that is not bloat, nothing is.

So no, the shell commands and utilities are not perfect and, in retrospective, could have been made better and more consistent. However, I don’t think this is much of a hurdle for a newbie. Maybe a minor source of annoyance, at worst, and certainly nothing that an advanced shell user (or a dedicated newbie) couldn’t fix by customising it and creating aliases.

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YES!!! Holy crap, thx i’m not alone…
It bugs me so hard in it’s non-intuitiveness - unless you just remember commands…

Then you can find all the frogs recursively :yum: :frog:

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Well - some of the conceptual leaps are tougher than they need to be. They certainly put up a hurdle for me! (and I came from playing on Multics, and ‘C’ programming on Unix etc). Back to mv for a moment - is it easier to get your head around that rename can also move a file (rename /home/joe/conky/filename /home/joe/.conky/filename) or that mv somehow changes a name without moving a file?

I’m sure it would have bothered me less if I hadn’t used a more straightforward system first…

Also, of course, shells like bash have incredible powers, but the usage of ( { [ and the like are a bit arcane :grin:
Luckily the advent of the internet has made tutorials accessible, and the learning process more likely. You no longer have to find a guru, and learn his viewpoint on everything like a mere apprentice!

As for aliases - I have quite a few - and even a few bash functions too. I still haven’t managed the functionality of some of the OPT behaviours of the list command from AmigaDOS though!

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Let there be some voodoo magic left in our world… :alien:

Yes, I can still remember those simple sed commands - replace / with \ is like a forest in a wind :rofl:

sed -e "s/\\//\\//\\\\/g"

And that is maybe the easier sort of commands.

Look at it this way if you want to rename you use ‘shorthand’ command rn. How many rn rm misclicks would it take to drop this functionality from unix? :wink:

For me the most confusing is when I want a new file I has to touch it.

It may be for an octopus. I tried it but I didn’t want to break my fingers so I wasn’t very efficient with it. :sweat_smile:

With average Windows 10 users I meet daily at work I can very well say that forced security updates are justified. Personaly I am against a company deciding these things but some people… :upside_down_face:

I do too. It feels like it was created long before any unix systematic was put together but no one wanted to change it later because it just worked and no one knew how and why.

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And I used to think C was bracket happy (coming from Modula-2!).
For a while that drove me back to assembly! Eventually, no one cared about execution speed or memory wastage though…

Here’s a mental challenge - imagine a simple file viewer, with about 20 commands such as toggle wordwrap, select line-end chars (PC, Mac (and C64) or Unix) - auto switch to hex display if binary, search modes including simple wild cards (and embedded count of occurences), page advances - and all capable oif handling any font and size, and any window resizing on the fly (and more). Now imagine what size this would be today - regardless of language…

If I remember correctly, my little CType app took about 7K on the Fish Disks (open source distribution system for Amiga goodies)…

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As opposed to what? Im assuming Windows.

IMO Linux, especially Arch or Arch Based distributions like Endeavour OS, are EASIER than anything else.

For example, lets say I want to install the Exodus bitcoin wallet on Windows, how would I go about that?

Well, I have to go to the exodus website, download the .exe file, go to the download folder, click on the icon, then follow the install prompt.

In Endeavour OS, all I have to do is open terminal, type yay -s exodus (Notice the lowercase ‘s’), this will search the repositories for anything that has the word exodus in it, and will give you a brief description of the software, then you just enter the one you are trying to install (They are numbered, so you just type the number and press enter), and thats it, it will download and install it for you, and then keep it updated as well every time you just the yay command to update all the software.

I was able to install every single application that I use on my system without ever leaving the terminal by using yay.

Yay is a Pacman wrapper and AUR helper in case you’re wondering what it is.

Pacman is the package manager in case you’re wondering what that is too.

Why are you typing so much? Just leave off the -s and you get the same results… :grin:

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Bad habits. :smile:

I like to make things unambiguous and clear for people. Developer habits.

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or yay exodus (-s is the default parameter if none is given) :wink:

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Man, I have a hard time with defaults, for some reason, even with the knowledge that -s is default, I still like to use it for clarity, some weird OCD man, and it also helps me when teaching (I mentor students and entry level professionals on my free time) that way they learn what the parameters are for.

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Exactly same here, i just don’t trust myself to recall defaults in case they change…
Oh wait!! They can change?!? :astonished: :scream: :scream_cat:

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This does not work (it’s a syntax error). A much cleaner way change all / to \ is:

sed 's;/;\\;g'

You don’t have to use / as a delimiter in sed.

But I get the point, the command looks messy because it’s not an English sentence, but has a bunch of unpronounceable characters. sed programs are notoriously difficult to read, and stream text editing is certainly one of the more advanced topics when it comes to using the shell.

Why is sed syntax so weird? Purely historical reasons. sed was designed to be instantly familiar to the users of ed, the standard text editor on UNIX. ed is a fantastic text editor if you do not have a monitor, but use a line printer as the standard output (which was the most common case in the early days of UNIX, when terminals were teletypewriters, or TTYs). Everyone knew how to use ed because it was the most practical way to edit text files (and it saved you a bunch of paper and ink). With CRT monitors becoming common, screen editors like vi became the norm, and ed became obsolete. However, nobody bothered to write a modern replacement for sed, because it just worked (actually, there exist modern replacements for sed, just nobody uses them because sed is better).

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Right, the snake should have been further in the forest

sed -e "/\\//s/\\//\\\\/g"

I know that but I didn’t find this information on man page so a new user may keep to /. I intentionaly used "" so that every \ has to be escaped as well.

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Just because you can, does not mean you should. For example, this is a perfectly valid C++ code :rofl:

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