So I am sort of an embedded developer, and I like to mess around with weird configurations. So the craziest experiment I did was trying to reflash a rasberry pi from a system running in the pi’s RAM. It honestly might have worked, but during the prep work I forgot to resize the filesystem before mucking with the paritions and had to reflash the normal way before I could try again. Ended up just turning it into a pihole instead, but I still learned a lot about pivot_root
I think people believe it is a sign you are striving to excel or that you care about the work you are doing.
In my case I think I talk about how much overtime I work because I got insecurities about my productivity drilled into me as a child with undiagnosed ADHD. Constantly being told you don’t work hard enough regardless of the effort you put in will give you some weird hangups. I think subconsciously its about needing external validation that the time you put in was adequate, or insecurity around ‘work ethic’
The problem is you need a executive body that already agrees with you to select you from their choices of consultant. We’re not rational creatures and are our personal biases make it so we’re more likely to hire the consultant that reflects our preconceived ideas
It’s almost like our economics models with supply and demand barely work for physical products and are even worse at modelling easily reproducible digital goods
One of the main draw of NixOs is the reproducibility of builds, meaning that redoing the build will provide the exact same output each time, so Nix encourages you to make configuration changes through the package manager. I’ve mostly overcome my theming woes with home-manager now, but this comment was speaking to a little wrinkle I had when I was trying to learn and take advantage of the OS’s features as best I could.
NixOS ended up disappointing me a fair bit. I just tried it recently and the KDE support seems very rough so far, or at least I couldn’t find good answers to how to configure it and theme it.
Just as an addendum to your answer. In the command writing to mullvad.list the | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list is using two helpful linux utilities to modify the command. The first is the | which is called a pipe and connects the text output of one program to the text input of another. The pipe is connecting the output of echo which simply prints a string, in this case composed of the outputs of several other commands to the program tee. Tee which is given admin privileges by the sudo takes an input stream and splits it between two files. In this case those are mullvad.list and since no other was provided stdout the output pipeline of the terminal running the command.
EDIT:
In the interest of further completeness. Another utility used in those commands is the command substitution operator of sh. So when the terminal is interpretting text $(some command) gets substituted out for the text output by the command in the parentheses. It is another common way of connecting commands on the shell to allow for more flexible and powerful commands.
I understand what you mean. If you are on the fence and not super interested in init systems, you can pretty easily get by with systemd without thinking about it. Most desktop environments have tools to manage user services in easy GUI’s, and you can find guides for anything more advanced you want to accomplish with them usually.
If you want to dive in though, systemd is a great init system to learn. Nowadays learning systemd is a lot less of a moving target, and it’s in use virtually everywhere so the knowledge is valuable. It’s also fairly well documented at this point, which is great for learning how it works.
My personal advice if you want to go that path is to just open up some service files. There are lots of interesting examples in /lib/systemd/system Systemd service files are just plain text, and pretty straightforward to read. Its divided into nice sections, and naming is pretty straightforward (Or the systemd brainworms are really in deep). Look for names you recognize or programs you use. Especially ones you are familiar with on the command line. I don’t recommend changing them to start, especially in the system directory, just open a couple and you should quickly start seeing the connections between what they are trying to accomplish and whats in each file. Then if you see anything you don’t understand or peaks your curiousity check the documentation. Once you’re ready try writing one of your own for something in the usr service directory. No pressure though, its not necessarily essential knowledge
I think it would not actually be easy to test this. The massive combinations of hardware and software configurations in use out in the world make it nearly impossible to conclusively say one way or the other.
For instance consider the hypothetical of a service with a bug that increases its startup in certain circumstances. If Systemd triggered this bug and OpenRC didn’t because of some default setting in each, perhaps a timeout setting, would you say OpenRC is conclusively better at start up time? Not really, they just got lucky that their default bypassed someone elses bug. Just off the top of my head other things that would probably cause hell in comparisons are disk access speeds, RAM bottlenecks, network load, CPU and GPU temp and performance etc.
You can perhaps test for specific use cases and sets of services, but I think this is more useful for improving each init system than it is as a comparison between them.
You can look up Lennart Poettering yourself, but he was also involved in PulseAudio which if you learned Linux in the 00’s might give you pause, and has had some minor beef with Linus Torvalds before. His Wikipedia page has something like 5 paragraphs for controversies and 2 for his actual career.
I think focusing on him is a mistake, but I also understand people who were still mad about PulseAudio latching on to him if they also had issues with Systemd. This article goes into some of it, but I can’t vouch fully for its accuracy. I will say that the dates of 2008 for PulseAudio’s release and 2012ish for when it became actually fairly functional lines up pretty roughly with my own memory, and systemd was released in 2010 and adopted by Arch and Debian in early 2012, so PulseAudio was barely fixed before the same developer started pushing Systemd, and succeeded in getting the normally very conservative Debian developers on board.