geekbird

LOL. My employer has this blocked as a phishing site.

All I see is the display of the egos and so-called philosophy of a bunch of rich "libertarian" punks who's basic MO is "I've got mine, screw the rest of you." They are as altruistic as a hungry bear.

If one of them walked up to me and said "I'm going to make your life better!" I'd have two questions: "How do you define better?" and "What's the catch?"

These are the type of people that push crypto cons and other destructive things.

They want to make the world better? Start by addressing the income disparity between rentiers like themselves and the people who actually build what they claim to have "invented".

IME it's arbitrary criteria - either last hired, first fired, or most expensive people, or older people (illegal, but they use other proxies for age to hide it), or most of a division because they're pivoting/no profitable, or you don't want to work 100 hour weeks sitting on the floor near your new CEOs office, or...

Getting laid off from some places is a badge of honor, IMO.

I'm less than ten years from retirement. I still need to work for those ten years, and probably afterward. Yes, I get a lot of ageism, ableism and sexism in my job searches. I don't look my age, fortunately, but having over 20 years in my field makes people want to lowball me or hire a "cheaper" (less experience) person. It's very annoying.

I get interviews with "coding challenges all. the. time. IDK why, I'm a Linux systems engineer, not a programmer.

But I constantly keep getting jerks wanting btree sorts that are like a college exam or take home challenges that assume I have industry type applications on my home network. No, folks, I don't run containers and terraform infra in my personal network. When I have to spend three hours to install a dodgy application just to start your janky "8 hour project" I lose all the enthusiasm I had for your job.

I've had bouts of unemployment lasting a year and a half. It's really hard to focus on side projects when you are worried about being able to pay the rent and health insurance and your pittance of unemployment insurance has run out.

My advice to anyone in the tech field is to try to have a lot of reserves, because tech is cyclical, and layoffs are inevitable, like every two to five years.

IMO it's partly a problem between sales and the "sprint" based development. Everyone wants fast, new and shiny and a 2 week sprint. No one wants to do tests, maintenance or even any architectural planning for their software beyond a single sprint, and architectural decisions don't flow between sprints. That's what happens when entire companies cargo-cult adopt scrum for their "agile" process, and the software suffers from the engineering equivalent of quarterly report syndrome (nothing longer than a quarter is really planned out in many publicly held companies because shareholder earnings reports are the highest priority.)

Yes, I'm cynical.

IMO it's just new for the sake of newness. Apt and dpkg work fine, but some folks feel they have to reinvent the wheel, I guess to beef up their resume or be more like MS or Apple. If they want to write MS or Apple style software, they need to just go and work for those companies.

Apparently some people think that Linux should be just as deterministic and user limiting as proprietary software. I don't understand it, personally.

Or just get the .deb binaries from Firefox, and install them with apt/dpkg.

There is no real need for "ancillary package managers", and all they do is complicate system maintenance.

IMO dnf is ridiculous newfangled garbage too. Why do people keep reinventing the wheel when it comers to package managers? Apt for .deb and yum for .rpm work fine, manage dependencies, and Just. Plain. Work. without f'ing up the system with autoupdates and bloatware. Seriously, an open source project is not for junior programmers to push their resume driven development on the rest of the community.

That's why I hate Snap. In Linux, unlike Windows or Mac, I should not have to fight my tools in order to configure a system the way I want it. Yet Ubuntu makes me do it every goddamn time for anything on the desktop, between snap and their nasty "Unity" desktop.

IMO Snap is nothing more than bloatware designed as a resume building project by newby programmers.

Not everyone needs bleeding edge.

Worse, they lock down and make their standard UI not able to be customized, and keep "deprecating" standard UI tools and configs in favor of some junior intern's idea of how real users "should" work. This sucks, and is why I won't run Ubuntu on any desktop. If I wanted to be told how to use a desktop by an OS, I'd get a f'ing Windows box or a Mac.

I use Linux because I can configure it to work the way I want. If they take that away, they are just another proprietary pile of shit.

As a sysadmin, I loathe "Snap".

There are two main packaging systems for Linux that are well known and usable. You can also use standard config management software to roll out configs for each package. Snap is a solution in search for a problem by people who are too lazy to use standard packaging that has been in existence for decades.

Listen up kids: "New" is seldom "better" when it comes to system tools. Put your creativity to applications, not trying to reinvent the wheel with "new" packaging systems.

Snap is a bloated mess, and we wish is was not on any system we administer.