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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • What I mean is that many of them have basically the same functionality with the same arguments. I don’t mean I have pristine memory for the differences, but things like alias ls="eza" is basically a drop in replacement with some added features. So when I’m on a server without it, everything is basically the same, just less fancy.

    Helix and fd are an example of the other pattern - they are huge improvements over existing tools, to the point that when I’m forced to use the basic ones, I’m actively crippled. But as an argument not to use the better tool day-to-day, this doesn’t make sense to me. Why would I force myself to suffer 95% of the time to save myself from suffering 5% of the time?

    I mean, for helix/vi it’s even clearer. Vanilla vi is basically unusable for me anyway, and I needed a huge number of plugins to be serviceable - on a basic cluster environment, I’m going to be crippled anyway, so…


  • they either don’t improve upon or add functionality that’s not available, or simply add eye candy. Gaining pretty colors is nice, but not worth losing familiarity with ubiquitous tools.

    The thing I like about a lot of these is that I don’t lose familiarity with existing tools. When I end up on a cluster that doesn’t have them, I’m a bit annoyed, but I can still operate just fine.

    The principle exception to this is actually fd - I now find find (har!) almost unusable without having a man page open in a separate terminal. But that’s because fd is so much more ergonomic and powerful, I would never give it up unless forced.






  • That’s fair. Another example of what you describe that I’m more familiar with is Epic (medical records software). My hypothesis is that the differences that matter are:

    1. Cost of switching is higher and/or
    2. The people making the decision (business manager, hospital admin) are farther from the actual users of the software.

    Could be lots of other reasons too, but these are the ones that jump out at me.


  • Really the only thing that I miss on Linux is creative cloud stuff. Yeah, gimp and inkscape cover 80% of the functionality of PS and Illustrator right out of the gate, and I bet I could get to 90% if I sank a bunch of hours into learning the differences. Which is amazing for open source software.

    But there’s a gap when you have a team of dedicated and highly paid developers and hordes of creatives testing everything out and demanding progress that’s going to be hard to overcome.








  • I really understand this as a starting position, but it can definitely be taken too far. I feel like the details matter a lot.

    A few years ago there was a big dust up in the Julia community when they wanted to add a small amount of telemetry to the package servers - basically the plan was to identify real users from things like CI runs, and to be able to identify the number of unique users , which matters a lot, especially for grant writing (and a lot of academics use Julia, so this would be a boon to the ecosystem).

    The core devs were super up front about it, offered easy opt-out, and even were receptive to a plan that would switch from unique identifiers for downloaders to some scheme that would give an accurate count without the ability to trace a particular download to a particular user, but a couple of prominent members of the community were incensed.