About the Author
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I'll be 25 in a month, so I'm basically already dead. Instead of doing something productive like learning another language (linguistics or programming), something relaxing like reading or meditating, or something benign like gaming, I've decided to bombard you with (gasp) unsolicited opinions!
You should have closed your browser while you still had a chance. Now I have trapped you; you must read this page to the end!
I am a huge supporter of Linux and everything that it stands for. Do I believe it's perfect? Hell no. Do I believe it's great? Absolutely. It can be adapted to just about any use-case, is generally lighter than any of the alternatives, and offers a staggering amount of user choice and freedom of all kinds. It's a tinkerer's OS, and something's always waiting for you to fix it in my experience, so it shouldn't come as a shock that sometimes I get lazy -- I do use Windows in some areas (usually retro x86 machines) and consider it a fine choice as well. For 90% of the people, on 90% of the hardware, 90% of the time, it's just fine. macOS is a toy to me though -- a nice UNIX core, and an impressive amount of consistency over the years, but a lot of its power is frustratingly difficult to make real use of. As for consistency: I went from a iBook G4 running 10.4.11 Tiger to trying out a friend's MacBook Pro with 10.10 Yosemite on it (a bit old now, I know) and nearly everything was at least similar to use. Compare that to Windows where stuff can change wildly from version to version, or to Linux where the UX can change depending on user tastes, distro of choice, package selection, day of the week, whether you took a dump that morning, etc. and you start to get an appreciation for the simplicity that can offer.
I see systemd in a much different light than I used to. I still don't particularly like it as it is, but I can understand why people do -- the administration interface is very consistent and intuitive, and unit files are far superior to complex shell scripts for system daemons. I actually quite like the init and service supervision portion of systemd, these days, it's just a shame that's not all it is. I know that wasn't the point, they wanted to make a base set of system daemons and utilities that would be common across all major Linuxes. An old complaint that systemd pinned everything on PID1 doesn't seem to be valid anymore, so I'll only briefly acknowledge it here -- that was dumb, thankfully they realized as much and stopped doing it. These days, I keep my eye on dinit, as that seems to be exactly what I want.
To be clear, I don't mind most of the bits of systemd these days -- udev, logind, dbus particularly I use all the time, I just don't understand why they can't be separate projects that just happen to integrate with systemd. Especially since the forks (eudev, elogind) are separate and work regardless of what they're running on top of. I actually liked timers -- they usurp cron, sure, but in a way that makes sense for a service supervisor. networkd I am less than completely fond of, after prior bad experience with it, but I hear it's much improved. journald I refuse to use in any capacity however, and want whoever decided that binary logs were a good idea to be shot -- out of a cannon, into the sun.
Aside from niche things I tend to just throw Debian on stuff now. It's a pretty good lowest common denominator. So many distros base on it or something else that bases on it for a reason.
These are confusing times for the PC consumer. Intel and AMD are trading blows, but AMD's in some hot water right now for their exploding die trick. Every motherboard manufacturer makes basically equivalent garbage to everyone else, depressingly, and nVidia seems to think you're dumb enough to pay full price for an 8GB card in the year of our lord 2023. I miss FIC, I miss Cyrix, I miss S3 and Matrox, and I miss when paying extra actually got you something of higher quality. I'll say this much, though, if those rumors about AMD making a 5600X3D are true, if the price is right I'm buying one so I can kick the 5500 in my main down to my server to give it a Zen3 IMC.
Specs for my machines are listed here.
I'm gonna block off my political views behind a link so no one can say I didn't warn them. Fair warning, I probably piss everyone off.
Page is best viewed with whatever you have handy. Yell at me if something doesn't work at jacob at sedrosken dot xyz.
This page is dedicated to Keith Kress in his memory. May he rest in peace.