I spent 18 years in the Linux console and I don’t regret it

At my first job, we used Windows 7 as the operating system for our office
computers, which were used for embedded programming. When we needed Linux, we
used Linux Mint, which worked great — no problems at all. I also maintained
the servers, which ran some kind of RHEL. These tasks helped me become skilled
at digging in internals of Web servers, database servers, and also in
iptables, rsync and bash scripts.

At the time, I also had Linux Mint installed at home. I was generally
indifferent to which Linux distribution I used. Anyway, I install the system
in a minimal “console” configuration and then install the rest of the software
I needed, according to the list from my repository with dotfiles. It seems
like an ideal setup, doesn’t it?

But then something strange started happening with Linux. Git renamed the
branch master to main, not for technical reasons, but because of some
political issues related to a single and distant country on the other side of
the globe. Luckily, I was able to avoid this unnecessary change, thanks to the
flexibility of the console software:

[init]
  defaultbranch = master

Then it became popular to replace the usual utilities like grep or ls with
their equivalents, which either print beautiful color output or work faster
(but on the volumes of data that I usually use, this did not speed things up
enough). I tried them out for a while, but I ended up going back to the usual
tools from coreutils. I didn’t want to install into my system another supercat
that can highlight the source code in the output, but however, it is not in
the distribution repositories. So I need to go to GitHub and install it by
hand.

If I need the source code highlighted, I’ll just open the file in a text
editor. Let cat simply print the contents of the file to stdout, as it has
done for decades!

Then, for some reason, developers started replacing ifconfig with iproute2. I
heard, what it was because of the need to work with IPv6. But in FreeBSD, as
far as I know, they simply added the necessary functionality to ifconfig and
people continue to use familiar and time-tested utility 🤷‍♂️.

The last straw for me was when they installed systemd everywhere instead of
System-V init or BSD-style init. I didn’t like the way that non-alternative
pused systemd into Debian, and through it into the Linux Mint, which is what I
use. For about ten years now, it’s been ingrained in me that at startup the
system launches ordinary shell scripts from /etc/init.d/ or /etc/rc.d/. I can
run them directly from the console or even edit them in any way I like to
understand why some tao-cosnaming or other daemon does not work the way I
want. And here we have something alienish thing, to which even the binary
registry has not yet been attached. The binary startup logs that can’t be
viewed through less are already there. Plus, the unit files doesn’t offer the
same flexibility as shell scripts. Plus, systemd diligently replacing all the
individual programs that were familiar to me, which always just did their job
and didn’t bother me over decades: grub, cron, agetty and so on.

At that moment (after, but not as a result) I left my job in embedded
programming and went for a higher salary to the Java-enterprise, with
bytecode, shell scripts, and a lot of ​​regexes — everything I love.

Well, trying to avoid systemd’s attack on my habits, I left Linux Mint for
Gentoo.

I picked it because at the time, it was one of the few distributions that
didn’t use systemd. Instead, it had its own initialization system (OpenRC),
which is very, very similar to the System V initialization system.

I wrote in /etc/portage/make.conf the next line:

USE="-systemd unicode -pulseaudio X alsa"

I haven’t experienced any grief since then. This system has been rock-solid
for 5 years and it’s still going strong. It has easily survived the kernel
update from 4.19.23 to 6.1.57, and it just works. I run the update once a
month, if I don’t forget, and that’s it. I think the reason it’s so stable is
that I use the really simple (like a digging stick) software, created in
immemorial times. It doesn’t have any “innovations” and it doesn’t support
simultaneous audio output to a 7.1 system, Bluetooth headphones in the next
room, and over the network to tablet. Naturally, if everything is designed
simply and clearly, then it won’t break. There were only two times something
broke after the update.

One day, the Midnight Commander developers renamed the configuration file
mc.ext to mc.ext.ini, to make it consistent with the names of other
configuration files. And I had to rename it myself.

The second issue I came across was that the person maintaining the binary
package for Firefox forgot to link it with the libraries for ALSA^{.
As a result, there was no sound in the browser. I rolled back to the previous
version of Firefox, went to the Gentoo bug tracker to create a new bug, but it
was already there and people were actively commenting on it. A few more days
later the package was put back together correctly and that was that.}

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