Also, re: dockers etc.

It's not even an especially new of novel idea. I mean, I struggle to see what's different in principal between say a snap, and an old windows or DOS program that installs all it's gubbins, and maybe a runtime or whatever into its own program directory. I'm not saying there aren't differences, but... 

When I started running nextcloud as a snap, of course I was impressed. I'd run owncloud for years and migrated it across boxes and reinstalled it when upgrading distros. then I moved to nextcloud because I'd hit an owncloud error which I couldn't resolve and I was at the limit of free help from the company. Then I found I needed to rebuild the box yet again and the prospect of reinstalling apache or nginx and configuring letsencrypt and all the bollox all over again seemed such a drag, so yes, one command "sudo snap install nextcloud" which did 90% of the work seemed pretty good to me. It has it's irritations, like logs being in a different place and you have to use snap commands to configure things (which I always forget), but I'm not complaining. But I imagine if you're very used to a system managed by apt or rpm etc. then it could be annoying in the extreme.

Back on the topic of systemd, yes, exactly that. I can't see how a layer to manage the launch of things that persist is anything other than a good idea. Then I think, well hang on, so how did stuff work before? Things didn't just fall over or run amok all the time (well yes, some did, but they still do). And when you look, of course there were other solutions. It's just that systemd is sweeping all away. The interesting question is "why is that happening?".
  Or write your own kernel, operating system suite, systemd enquivalent? Call it DinLin, Drew is not linux.

Yeah it's not a million miles away from just bundling DLLs in a directory. We'll go to great lengths to avoid the thing Linux (and BSD) is really good at and everything else is bad at: Dynnamic linking.

Yeah if I were installing nextcloud I'd go with a docker or whatever too. Anything that requires a database and a web server is a pain in the arse. It *shouldn't* be a pain in the arse, I think we fucked up somewhere and containers are a dreadful solution to the problem. But for now, it's easy and it works.

I think the need for a kinda explicit system layer comes with USB, wifi and having multiple devices. Hardware was less transient in the past so things didn't need handling in a dynamic way, really. And you didn't want to take your "account" or whatever elsewhere.

My OS will be written in 100% bash. And it'll be called Dim. Dim isn't Minix.


 

Yes, it's a different world now, and especially with the web as he said in the talk. 

Database, web server, maybe a dash of webdav and that's a recipe for something complicated that shouldn't be. I suppose it's because there are so many dependent components. I lose count of the number of times I've followed a script to install something and broken down because PHP is out of date, or 'command not found' or a folder isn't where it should be because it all changed 6 months ago. Or something. 

Anyway, Dim. That's a properly recursive acronym.

 

Love bash. Probably because it's as far as my coding abilities stretch these days.

I love rexx, although I have absolutely no way to use it these days. May as well learn python.

Bash's syntax is objectively horrible. But I kinda love that. I enjoy how weird and inconsistent it is. Cos it's just something that's gown organically over time.

But what I *really* love about bash scripting is just stringing standard commands together to do stuff. Not having to worry about libraries or frameworks or language-specific package managers.

I'm absolutely done with frameworks and languages that have their own package managers. It's always horrible.

The cool kids are into Lisp these days. The kids that are too cool for python/rust/go.

Some people should never be allowed to teach or offer tutorials  :'-D