Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 20, 2023

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Is Systemd-free really for me?

    I've been running Systemd-free distros for the past few years.

    When I first got into Linux in 2016, it seemed like all the "cool" Linux people used Systemd-free distros and hated on Systemd, but now it seems like this group is not held in the same esteem as they once were. More frequently I hear people more so making fun of this mentality and seeing it as overly dogmatic. By the time I had started using Linux Systemd was already ubiquitous so I ended up learning it in the process of learning how to use Linux.

    When I first tried out Void, I remember trying to start sshd and being utterly baffled when I got the message "command not found: systemctl" since on every other distro I had used, that was the way you started things. It wasn't until then that I finally understood really what Systemd was.

    I really like Void, it's certainly a bit less polished than others like Arch, and I wish there was a more standardized package naming convention, but nevertheless I find myself switching back to it every few months whenever I leave. It uses runit, its own init system which is probably as close to bare bones as you can get. Each "service" is made up of a directory with at least a shell script to start it, with additional scripts for other functionality. To enable a "service" you sym-link it to /var/run/runit and to disable a service you delete the sym-link. If all you are doing is enabling a few daemons like ssh and tlp, this makes the process very easy.

  • A New Firefox Workflow

    It feels like the web has really changed a lot over the past decades, but innovation in web browser workflows has been stagnant by comparison. For the most part everyone is still just doing the address bar and horizontal tab list at the top of their screen, and it's only been fairly recently that some browsers like Vivaldi and even Edge have started experimenting beyond that.

    I gave Vivaldi a try yesterday and really liked it. I had it set up with a vertical tab bar on the left and a side panel with various bookmarks at the right, a setup that I think makes a lot of sense since I can sometimes end up with dozens of tabs. Hardly any websites make full use of the available screen width anyway. I almost stuck with Vivaldi, but a couple obscure bugs with keyboard shortcuts had me coming back to Firefox in the end.

  • Golf Log Commands

    A perlrun(1) optimization would be the -l switch, which removes newlines from the input, and puts them back on for the output:

    [...]

    Next, there are five forks. "sort | uniq -c | sort -n" can be replaced with tally(1), which will be a little bit faster, or 158% by one random benchmark. tally(1) got itself written because "sort | uniq -c | sort -n" came up a lot when doing log searches.

  • Maybe MacOS Isn't That Bad?

    I get the impression that whoever's designing this OS has a mild hatred for people who use multiple monitors. When full screening a window on one monitor, it completely hides the menu bar on the other for instance.

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