After reading a previous post, some of you may have wondered why Linux/Unix got no mention. Some of you might have wondered that almost violently. Linux does seem to stir passions.
I am no stranger to Linux and Unix variants. I have used them quite a bit over the years, and I am actively using them now. I have directly and indirectly created many Linux virtual machines in the cloud and used them to do my bidding. But for the vast majority of my working life, my ‘primary’ machine/OS was never Unix-based. I have never dedicated a physical machine solely to running Linux.
The main reason that I didn’t mention Linux/Unix is that I view it as something that was almost implied by the OSes that I did mention. Windows has WSL2, which has become eminently usable IMHO, and MacOS is Unix under the spiffy UI. So everything that I personally need from the Unix world is already available on the systems that I already use daily. Between my recent foray into MacOS and WSL2’s steady improvements, I am hard-pressed to find a reason to dedicate a machine to Linux.
Editorial: The *nix ecosphere has always been more than capable. Where it fails is the User Interface/User Experience arena. Not necessarily implying that a Windows/Mac like interface is a requirement for a decent OS, but at the very least some kind of consistency in approaching OS tasks would be a good start! (See below for further discussion.)
Historically…
I will confess to a slight distaste for Linux historically. Much of this distaste is not Linux’s fault, but stemmed from the fact that for much of my career the commercial software I worked on was available on both Linux and Windows, but my development environment was always Windows. Only a few developers at those companies chose to use Linux as their primary development platform. When it came time for a software release, there is always a scramble to test to make sure the software works on both platforms. Occasionally software that I had produced or altered would somehow fail on Linux when it worked fine under Windows. This led to high-pressure (“The release has to ship next week!”) debugging efforts on a platform where I am comparatively all thumbs. While this always seemed to work out OK, no deadlines missed, it left a bad taste for me.
I also have a slight distaste for what others may consider to be an embarrassment of riches; all the different software variants and alternatives that are available to fulfill every role within Linux/Unix. Different command shells, different window managers, different forks of every major package or OS component. Each with its own quirks to trip over. This even applies to the operating systems or Linux distributions as a whole, witness my awkward use of the phrase “Linux/Unix” to refer to the unix world in general. I’ll just use “unix” from now on.
To me, unix means using the command shell (but which command shell, grr…), and that means needing to know many arcane commands and all their myriad command line options. I have internalized some common unix commands and their options, but since I don’t use unix all day every day, I could never remember the appropriate commands and options for doing more complicated things. Sometimes the man pages helped, but often it was easier to just seek help by Googling for it, which often led to posts on sites like StackOverflow. I’m sorry to say that I think the unix community in general is not very tolerant of people who aren’t already experts in unix. I have personally never been the target of that snark, but I have seen plenty of posts on message boards in response to the same question that I had that I thought had a very high \(a_{hole}\) coefficient.
Enter Warp
But technology, specifically AI, has come along and made unix much more attractive to me. The AI that now comes with with just a standard Google Search has generally been able to answer my unix questions, with the bad attitude filtered out. Further, I am becoming a fan of a tool called Warp, which integrates AI into the command shell. Warp auto-detects whether I am typing a valid command or a request in natural language at the command prompt. So if I don’t know the command to do something, I can just describe what I want to do in English directly on the command line, just as I might prompt an AI chat app, and Warp translates that to valid unix commands. And after asking my permission for “dangerous” commands, it will run the commands for me. It is fully capable of suggesting and carrying out complex multi-step procedures. It can see errors that are generated when something goes wrong, suggest and carry out checks and tests to diagnose the problem, and then offer to fix it. And its helpfulness extends far further than just unix commands. It is just using a LLM like Claude (or your choice of others) to do the AI, so it knows all about many common open source software packages (and math and philosophy and anything else that AI knows about). I am not prone to hype, but some of the things it did for me as a result of not-particularly-well-worded or explicit natural language requests literally dropped my jaw. It has recently passed my Cheapskating bar and I plunked down for a subscription to it. As will be covered elsewhere on this site, AI has become an increasingly important part of my day-to-day life, and Warp is a top-flight example of why.
Since this post might be about as controversial as any you will find on RetiredThinker, it makes me feel a little better about us not yet offering a user feedback or commenting mechanism on the site.
