Truly the “good” place indeed.

Wait, no, trio is glad inside. Test this got plus on? Aaaaaaaa!

You… you shut up! Excuse me, I have to go take a shower:-) (/s, edit: to be clear on both sentences here)

Anyway you’re right (no /s) - at one point it filled in a gap between the likes of C++ and Assembly on the one hand and shell scripting (bash, awk, grep, sed, each with its own syntax and very little of that shared in common with one another) and I guess Fortran on the other. I still prefer it enormously to everything else - it’s quirky but fun:-) - though I get why a less experienced person should choose Python and stick with it, even as we all wish that there was another alternative that would work better than either.

And since I can’t resist: Perl is 8-20x faster than Python, and major websites like DuckDuckGo and booking.com use it. Sigh…I guess it’s time for that shower now:-).

Perl is… forgotten entirely, despite its efforts in getting us from there to here.

Yup, checks out.

PHP also, but good riddance:-D.

Shell scripting is the ink that makes up these words - without them, you would never have seen this image.

Hi I’m auto-“corrector”. There, ftfy. :-P

But… it didn’t need “fixing”? Oh…

I’m guessing it says “either I’m being forced to use this language or it’s the only related one I know how to use, but only halfway”:-)

People keep saying Python, despite how it (1) sucks, and (2) is super annoying to keep up to date, with package management and the like, unlike Perl that is more stable. Though Python is also easy to use and powerful and extensible.

But I think each language type is what it is and has its own set of tradeoffs and balances. Unix is hyper-stable and secure but limited, Perl is powerful but requires discipline to use to full effect, and these days most people don’t bother to learn it. Python is… “common”, is perhaps the best way to put it:-). C/C++ is even more powerful, the latter bloated, and blamed for most memory management issues (although really, how much of that is merely bad programming practice? Okay, so it allows such though).

And now Rust is the new hot thing.:-)

See, before they started using Jira, they were happy, get it?! :-P

Is it… (scrolls wheel of browsers) Lynx?

Based on current + recent events, Satan seems busy atm. Please try again at a later time (after the USA elections maybe?:-P).

Having to work within such constraints, it really showed me difficulties that modern languages try to entirely abstract away from you. e.g. there are only so many “registers” that physically exist, before you have to start using much slower to access memory locations - a very far cry indeed from automated variable garbage collection!!

Try assembly then - it’ll freaking blow your mind!:-)

S-s-s

S-s-s

S-s-s

S-s-s-sure!

Sooo… switch to Perl then? 😜

The host OS is likewise limited, but more by hardware, so it might be a small performance tradeoff, depending on whether, as you brought up, you need Linux to be ultimately in control rather than to simply run some software.

So that would not always work, ofc… but it sometimes would!:-)

Thank you for confirming that you think of me as your bitch. This after all is why I left Reddit - to come here to do exactly the same.

I hoped for that at my previous job, and they said it could happen… but it was never going to, and it was a false hope offered. Why do that to me man…? 😭

Then I come to my current job, and they have a super old Mac laptop that was barely holding on that nobody else wanted, and I’m like “yes please”!

Bc if its Windows vs. Mac, and especially if “nothing” isn’t even an option, then a million times out of a million I will choose super old, barely holding on Mac that nobody else wants.:-)

It’s a single SSH command away from my work Linux, and it has MacVim, tons of other open source software available, plus a bunch of stuff that only Mac OSX has, like Preview and other fairly nice tools, which have open source equivalents like ImageMagick and gimp, but aren’t nearly as easy to use.

I don’t need a nice car, and I went without one entirely until I moved to the Midwest where it becomes absolutely necessary, but it’s essential to have a good computer for me:-).

I never said I couldn’t back it up. I only said that if you wanted to know the answer, you could look. But ofc do whatever you please.

Or I suppose you could try to goad me yet again into doing your homework for you, and see if that works? (Surely this time, if you keep trying the same action, surely this time things will work out differently than the other time(s)?😜)

Or you could just think about how likely it is that in the entire history of computing, what are the chances that it was true at least once? Not that it matters, bc I’ve agreed with you so many times that hardware!=software and that for Macs they are tied together, and Macs are expensive, that I think we’ve both already forgotten already whatever it was we were talking about. Take the “win” already?

I was only illustrating how Mac hardware is not identically the same as Mac software. They are tied together, yet distinct entities.

Your lack of recollection neither proves nor disproves anything at all. If you doubt me, look it up? (since surely if I did so for you, you would distrust that as well? 🤪)

I did not downvote you btw.

I mean… a Mac machine will run non-Mac OSX software. Pretty much everything can run linux, with a little effort put into it:-) (unless somehow these M chips have prevented that? even if so, surely it’s only a matter of time before someone cracks that barrier)

But yeah, it’s definitely a choice. e.g., Apple does not even sell cheap Macs, whereas machines intended to run Windows can be bought all up and down the scale - though I recall at various points in time, comparing equivalently-equipped machines, Apple ones were pound-for-pound actually cheaper than their Windows equivalents. This is ofc b/c of the monopolistic practices: when you rigidly control the hardware, you are able to order in bulk, and when you order in bulk, you are able to get large discounts from the supplier!

Though surely nobody was arguing to purchase a Mac, not knowing who or what Apple is or is about? Installing Arch Linux is also known to be somewhat ah… “tricky”, so if we are comparing things like ease-of-use, the question gets back to OP’s “which distro?” And it’s all a matter of choice - what you want to get out of it, and which constraints you want to live underneath.

But anyway, we were talking about “Mac OSX”, which yeah, very much is limited to specific sets of hardware, and cannot be installed willy-nilly on any old machine, this is very much a true statement, to be paid very much attention to by anyone wanting to learn more, or use that in their purchasing / installation decisions:-). I was just saying that while Apple (& iOS) may be evil these days, Mac OSX itself kinda is great, caveat: if you can live with its restrictions, and moreover, those are MUCH less than Microsoft’s set of restrictions these days (whereas Linux has its own set of difficulties).

That Apple blocks you from running every program you put onto it until/unless it can be properly certified, and that “Big Sur can bypass any firewall restrictions the end-user attempts to create”? It’s true that it’s not nearly as bad as it may sound at first, and they even released a statement that:

We do not use data from these checks to learn what individual users are launching or running on their devices.

Notarization checks if the app contains known malware using an encrypted connection that is resilient to server failures.

These security checks have never included the user’s Apple ID or the identity of their device. To further protect privacy, we have stopped logging IP addresses associated with Developer ID certificate checks, and we will ensure that any collected IP addresses are removed from logs.

Though I also understand that if someone wants the ultimate in privacy, it’s difficult to trust such a corporate promise, especially one like Apple known to hide or lie about such things. (Edit: also… “developer ID certificate checks”, so if you don’t register with Apple as a known developer then…?)

I still use Mac OSX myself, but if someone wants to avoid that and use Linux for this reason, I’m not going to argue with them - whereas I would push back a little bit if a friend were to tell me they planned to put Windows (as the primary OS) onto a machine.