gnu

Very nice post Robin! And so honest! Subscribed via my rss reader.

I also forgot to add one thing that tripped me recently but I am sure a solution exists for it that I am not aware of.

In Debian we do: apt-cache search <search string>

It gives quick results.

The equivalent in nix is (correct me if I am wrong, it has been a while since I did this): nix-env -qaP <search string>

This command takes so long to execute. On a tiny VPS, when I did this, it ran out of memory. I wish things like this are improved.

NixOS and Guix are nice! Guix folks are doing some wonderful work off late.

I have used NixOS for a while. But for casual desktop GNU/Linux users, it seem like solving a problem that doesn't exist. Have been using Debian on all my computers since 1998. Unless you are using Debian unstable and updating it daily, I hardly hit any breakage.

Servers and deployments is another story.

Same. I am in the industry for 20+ years and thankfully none of my jobs have involved anything close to ads.

I have been meaning to learn the Plan 9 dialect of C but haven't gotten around to it.

I too learned C from K&R and really loved it. I did not have any other thing to do and there was no internet and no one telling me that C is bad. Nor was I aware of other cool languages. I did not even have a computer at that time, so I wrote most of the exercises on paper. Later my father bought me a 486DX66 and I typed in most of the programs in the book. Those were fun times!

Sure, but that is meant as a personal thing and not meant as a general statement. Everyone should evaluate whether the book (any book) works for their needs.

The main reason is that, it was a very dry read with various rules and syntax etc and I got bored looking at it quickly. It almost felt like I am reading an abridged version of the standard itself. The exercises didn't appeal to me much.

I didn't mean to dis the efforts of the author at all. There is no other book that covers the modern parts of the standard well. I am not aware of any other C book that covers the wide chars than this book.

I didn't enjoy this book, to be blunt. K&R still holds up as an interesting read, despite it not being updated to latest ANSI C standards. It is probably not a good first book.

A few C books I like:

  * C: A reference manual.
  * C: Interfaces and Implementations.
  * Deep C secrets.
  * C: Traps and Pitfalls.

Awesome! Thanks.

Thanks so much for giving us BigBlueButton.

Some of the folks in the Debian community have been trying to package it up in Debian and found it a bit challenging that some of the dependencies of BBB work only with specific Ubuntu versions. Would you please help address that and help them move forward with packaging it up and include it in Debian? Thanks again.