2024-10-01
This is entry 2 of 100 for #100DaysToOffload, and the first blog post of the redesigned website.
Today, for lack of other ideas, I want to write about Linux, and it being a waste of time.
I am a user of Arch (Artix) Linux, and I installed Linux the "difficult" way via the command line. I've had friends describe Linux as a waste of time, or say that you need to "write 1,000 lines of code just to open Chrome". And, to an extent, this is true: well, not 1,000 lines of code, but to do it all properly, there is a lot of manual effort involved. But I think (alongside all Linux users) that it's actually easier for a lot of things.
The difficult part is that it forces a certain understanding of the system as a whole. Not too much: I still don't really understand how seatd, or dbus, for instance, work, but I do know my init system (s6 for my home computer and systemd on my "on-the-go" laptop), and have full control over my desktop environment.
That full control part is the main thing. For instance, take this website. I'll do another blog post about the (sort of half broken) system that I use for building it, but essentially it involves a shell script running commands over files in a /src directory, and copying the output into the /rel directory, that is then pushed to the server. I have written a program in Odin which converts the files (which are written in an almost-Markdown, where the first line is a title, the second a date, and the rest is interpreted similarly to md) into HTML using a template file. To get to here, I had to have quite a good chunk of time that I didn't have my website operational - when really, I could have either done it manually, or have just used an off-the-shelf solution like WordPress. So why not? Well, by doing it this (really bad way), I get:
The website is not perfect, though. In terms of the actual text files, I'm currently in the process of re-writing the Markdown to HTML script from Odin to Zig, as I think the language will be more pleasant to use. But, it gave me a chance to try out Odin, which was good. I also need to add in the rest of the features, e.g. I still haven't fully implemented italics, or hyperlinks, for instance. I have no shame and just release things when they're not finished!
But back on track, I'm learning from this, and getting to enjoy the programming, and so I have decided not to use an already existing product. In fact, if I wanted, I could probably add to the scripts and release it on Git for others to use.
(I have to remember here than I don't have a word count to hit like with wv, haha)
So, is Linux a waste of time? Kind of, but also, it's a good opportunity to learn, and experiment around. The point of having the website for me isn't really the act of *having a website*, it's more that I get something to work on, experiment around with, and use as a justification to try new things. I could well have used a Markdown to HTML converter (pandoc has one, I'm sure there are others) but instead I wanted to try Odin, so I made a (not fully-featured) one in Odin, and now am re-writing in Zig that I've gone off Odin. Sort of the reason why people experiment around with Javascript frameworks, I guess, only less bloat?
Ok, that's all. I'm no good at blog writing... I'll get the hang of it.
(Should I have an "outro" like I do with "have a good one" for wv? No clue!)