Tue May 23 09:27:46 PM CEST 2023
# how I got into unix
I see these *my journey with unix* type posts online and I thought I'd
write my own. Now, I've only been using GNU/Linux systems daily for a
year and I'd rather avoid writing about myself in general (it screws
with my ego and I overshare), but here I think there's value to it:
1. There's a pattern to these posts. It's always "someone introduced me
to it" or "I am a certified software engineer and there's this
ubuntu thing", "I was 20 then and am 40 with kids now". Not enough
losers like me writing these. I'd like it to be clearer how people
get into nixes today, and how any idiot can go for it with little
help.
2. While search engines are happy to provide canned answers as to how
you *install steam in linux* or *listen to music in terminal*, they
will not tell you how people actually *use their systems*. You have
to dig for these on forums, chatrooms, friend's brains, but in my
experience mostly gay blog posts like this. It's how you learn what
the thing is capable of, and hopefully how to make it sing, not
smash it's /usr/balls until it spews the right note. Basically, new
people always need to read more of these, ideally contemporary ones.
3. It was mostly painless for me. I think I did something right.
## the first dip
Sometime in 2021, I was still using windows 7. I was an early adopter,
but this installation, committed upwards of 5 years earlier on a then
brand new rig, was already *the old windows 7*. I saw the writing on the
wall and started thinking about updating, but not to windows 10 because
as far as I know that thing sucks. I don't have money for apple products
and heard bad things about them. I quickly converged on something linux
and one evening decided to get started on the move with a test install.
I'm not a believer in trying daily-use-things in controlled
environments, so it couldn't be a virtual machine install or just toying
in a livecd. Didn't want to mess up my rig either, and I didn't have a
spare disk to do it cleanly. However, I had a 2008 lenovo laptop I would
use for windows xp gaming.
I backed up the porn and wiped the disk clean with dban - for no good
reason. At that point, I'm perfectly clueless about computer stuff. I
can put it together with some online searches and am proficient at stuff
I'd use it for - piracy, games, video editing - but if you tell me
there's magic gnomes inside the CPU I'd buy it.
Next came the choice of my first distro. I briefly thought to ask my
more IT-attuned friends for advice, but they don't daily drive unix so I
figured they'd be stupid about it. Indeed, later one prompted me to
install Manjaro, a piece of advice I wouldn't give anyone, ever.
Instead, I turned to my other trusty source of IT tips: the /g/ wiki and
Mental Outlaw YouTube channel. Everyone starts somewhere...
Window shopping for an iso, first issues have arisen:
1. I only have an old 1gb usb stick to put the iso on. Most are bigger
than that.
2. The ones that do fit are network installers, and I'm reading these
have issues over wifi. It's true, but I shouldn't have worried about
it as much as I did. The laptop has an ethernet port, but I'd have
to crash on my flatmate to access our router, and I'm not doing
that.
I settled on some arch iso, which the youtuber has said can install over
wifi, and is around 800mb. I put on his tutorial and followed it to a t
- finishing on a neofetch call and obnoxiously sharing the achievement
with friends included. I didn't really know what I was doing, and I
didn't learn much beyond editing text files with nano - a skill that has
quickly proven useful, arch being the DIY tweaker distro.
Over the next few days, my favourite resource was actually the /g/ wiki.
It had decent software recommendations and linked to some old blog
posts, most useful of which were z3bra's on z3bra.org. This has taken me
through a small nixers.net rabbit hole - I learned a lot from these
guys, though never bothered to interact. Site seemed a bit dead too.
Eventually, with the help of these and arch's wiki, I put together a
201X looking *rice* using spectrwm. It had the terminus font and
everything. Fonts were actually the most trouble I think, alongside
audio. I reused my Dwarf Fortress color scheme. I was pleased to note
the old craptop can browse the modern web, play videos and music, and
even the odd video game, just fine, using familiar programs like mpv or
firefox no less. Spent another few days doing just that and toying with
my spectrwm config, then deemed the experiment successful and put the
laptop back in my drawer - *I'm certain now, linux is the way.*
Lessons learned:
- nobody knows shit
- gnu/linux works
- unix is easy if you can read
I started plotting the move on my main rig: the first step was to buy a
brand new ssd for the install, so I can safely setup a multi boot with
my windows 7 - this did not happen, I had no money for this crap.
## the first deep dive
May of 2022, some failed job hunts later, I found myself living in a
trailer in bumfuck nowhere. For my computing needs, I dug up a 2016
thinkpad edge from my parent's place. It had 16gbs of ram for some
reason, that's more than my rig. I wiped the drive and I wasn't putting
windows 7 on it.
I still weren't confident enough in my linux skills to live without
access to a windows boot, so I thought I'd finally figure out this
multi boot thing. I installed windows 10 first, only after manually
partitioning to make the EFI partition bigger, as recommended online.
The windows, approached in informed manner, weren't as bad as I thought
it'd be, but still abusive. I ended up booting into it to play games and
talk on discord. But most of the time, I was tinkering with the
GNU/Linux installs - plural.
I wasn't impressed with Arch during my test run, so I looked into other
distros. I could use a bigger usb stick now, so you'd think the
selection would be massive - but my criteria quickly narrowed it down to
a handful. The criteria were:
- no systemd
- not reliant on another distribution
- actively maintained by trusted people
I really thought I weren't asking for much. The choice came down to:
- Slackware
- Guix
- Crux
- Alpine, which I thought weren't really for desktop use
Slackware seemed by far the easiest to use, and could do a massive
install without internet connection which was still a pain, so I went
with that. I screwed the initial installs a few times toying with kernel
and trimming down unnecessary packages, but after that it was a pleasant
experience. However, one of it's particularities is how dumb simple it
makes everything. This results in a messy system unless you're willing
to prop up some conventions yourself, something I weren't particularly
good at. It also brought up some feelings on how important packaging
conventions and how crappy community maintained repos are, faults of
both being a bit of a double whammy after adventures in arch.
Later I hopped to Peppermint - a debian/devuan derivative - on a whim,
and found it to be usable, but install with too much crap and a mess of
patches. I enjoyed APT so much I thought I'd try tracking the testing
repos, but Peppermint couldn't do that, so I finally landed on Devuan,
which I've been using on all of my machines since. I wouldn't call it
the best distro, or even a *good* one for desktop use, but I don't know
a better one and I like how orderly it's constructed and patched. APT
though, is easily the best package manager.
I also briefly fooled with Puppy Linux and Alpine Linux frugal installs
on usb sticks, just for kicks, chasing the portable system dream. It
sucked. Puppy's ecosystem felt particularly full of bad ideas (and some
really good ones). Alpine was overall interesting. I still keep it in my
mind for regular use, but I favor GNU software.
During this time, I was trying out a lot of software, trying to find the
best one for everything I do - same as I did on windows way back, before
settling into my picks for years after, but worse, because here I had to
pick stuff as basic as my window manager. My favorites ended up being
ratpoison, notion, and pekwm. I also briefly enjoyed the Mate DE, but it
was too busy for me and I just recreated the parts I liked in pekwm. I
generally favored the software with the least dependencies, with GUI or
otherwise.
At this time, scouring the web for how people use unixes, looking for
programs, inspiring screenshots, general usage tips and history, it
really hit me what's happening here. GNU/Linux isn't really a drop-in
replacement for windows. It's a good environment made for and by
programmers, in contrast to windows which (now more than ever) is dog
shit all around and made for idiots. This means means the more
unix-attuned - good! - programs wil not be palpable to mortals. You want
a decent OS today, you kinda need to grow a wizard beard or it's gonna
be a struggle.
I went ahead and started my studies in *advanced* unix magics with the
book *The Linux Command Line* by William Shotts. It was recommended to
me alongside *How Linux Works* and *Linux from Scratch*, which I haven't
bothered with so far. I think it set me on the right path and would
recommend it to everyone. After that, I started writing godawful scripts
(some of which I still use because they just werk) and studying more
standard unix tools like coreutils and awk - which put me up to reading
more Kernighan, among other things. I somehow fell in love with the
simplicity of it all allowing absurdly complex actions.
Lessons learned:
- people will use really bad software and recommend it to you
- there are no good operating systems
- but you can take the good parts of them anywhere if they fit in your
brain
- code some it's easy
## rediscovering the past
January 2023, I was reunited with civilization, and got hold of some of
my old crap - among them, a Compaq Armada E500, a particularly popular
laptop in years surrounding 2000. Sporting a single core Pentium III
processor, 6MB ATI Rage graphics card and 512mb of ram (the maximum
supported - it'd ship with something closer to 64mb. someone took care
of it!), I figured this machine could do just about everything man needs
in 2023. It couldn't boot stuff from usb, so I bought a few cds (mine
doesn't have a dvd reader), burned a devuan netinstall disk and got
busy.
I was pleased to note just how right I was. I browsed web on netsurf,
chatted using discordo (through ssh - cheating!), read news and mail in
newsboat and mutt, read books in mupdf, and wrote code in kakoune - an
editor I've settled into after trying the usual suspects and more. The
desktop was the familiar pekwm. The last two - both c++ programs - I
compiled on the machine, since I wanted newer versions than available in
stable repos, and didn't want to mess up my other machine with 32bit
development headers. Took less than two hours total.
What hit the most is just how *right* the thing felt. The speakers are
amazing, the screen is crappy but the resolution (rare 1400x1050) is
great at fitting a huge surface into manageable space, the whole thing
isn't even screaming unless you turn on a game, a movie, or a GTK
program - I started to despise the two common ui toolkits, them (and
electron...) likely being the only things barring some programs from
working on this old piece of shit e-waste. The whole thing felt like a
spiritual experience, and I've since sworn to never buy a brand new
piece of hardware - I am now certain there's enough computing power out
there to last centuries, if only we can stop suffering garbage code and
practices.
I lived like this for two weeks, learning the basics of C. That didn't
really go anywhere, but I enjoy the understanding. The endeavor's also
nudged me to stop relying on the mouse pointer in programs I use -
sometimes I'd want to take the laptop somewhere without space for a
mouse, and the trackpad is unusable. Eventually I put the laptop aside
because I had to travel and I weren't taking this shitbrick with me.
Lessons learned:
- C is good and will run anywhere
- Devuan is good and will run anywhere
- I hate modern software/hardware sensibilities so much it's unreal
- I have achieved portability.
## it's lonely on the seafloor
Now I'm on another laptop, slightly more modern, which I got used for
cheap. It runs, of course, Devuan. At some point I swore off all
proprietary software and sized back my configs to a manageable sdorfehs
(window manager similar to ratpoison) desktop and a bunch of shell
scripts. I don't use the mouse pointer for anything, but sometimes I'll
use the touchscreen. Majority of programs I use will run on 23yo
laptops. I'm learning more about programming and cybersecurity as a
hobby, but feel more than comfortable with what I've got - I feel
liberated. Like everything's possible and nothing can ever go wrong.
I don't know who to thank. It wasn't hard or easy. All I can say is that
this has been the single most rewarding endeavor in my life. Wish more
people could get there instead of fretting over which abusive piece of
garbage is the best or "most usable" - for many, the good and usable's
been there all along.
Lessons learned:
- Innovate yourself
- Don't let anyone tell you you need more