What's your favourite "just works, day after day" Linux software?

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openssh

and on the opposite side, nvidia drivers




Proton.

It allowed me to ditch Windows for good. Playing games on Linux, often with similar or even better performance than on Windows, was an insane idea ten or fifteen years ago. Nowadays it‘s rare to see a game not working on day one. And if it doesn‘t, Proton‘s devs oftentimes fix it within a day or two. It‘s an amazing piece of software with an amazing team behind it.

Proton is a god damn godsend. After wrangling four or five WINE tools for a decade, this is a beautiful innovation. Genuinely, made switching away from Windows viable.





MPV

Would change it for anything!

If I can’t play it in MPV, I don’t wanna play it.

Everything else feels like going back to the stone age. No offense to VLC fans. VLC is cool too, and I still recommend it because of its simpler GUI. But MPV is the MVP.



systemd

Those a fighting words

here you go: systemd is so much better then sysv-init, it’s not even funny

I really can’t take people serious that think sysv-init was the superior system. I mean for real, have you ever worked with it and all it’s shortcomings? It wasnt even a system, it was a bunch of bad init scripts

It was a bunch of bad init scripts, but it was our bunch of bad init scripts.


i started my professional software development career in 1999. the amount of older guys who called the web stupid and a fad or “gopher is the future of the internet” was crazy. people hate change


Nobody argued that sysv was better.

Just that there are other options, apart from systemd.

And yet you refuse to give examples…

I use OpenRC on my desktop.




I’ve been using it since I started using Linux 26 years ago until Ubuntu switched to upstart and then systemD.

It did the job and was very easy to work with. I knew what the scripts did and I could write my own. And it didn’t ask for a date of birth either.

funny, I also started around 2000 with Linux, so we have the same time under our belt. I remember doing manually dependency resolving downloading packages from freshmeat.net

Let’s be honest, I hated that “/etc/init.d/apache2 start” went obsolete, muscle memory and habit are a bitch, but you have to move on sometimes. Otherwise, are you really arguing that some obscure start-stop-daemon wrapper that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, because they were created for suse not redhat were superior?

systemd monitors the daemons, can show you used cpu time, can start daemons depending of if the system is connected to ac or uses battery or if a port got a magic package, it know which resources a service needs and much more, all without needing to manually write scripts. Do we really compare that to some scripts with bullshittery like:

case $1 in
  start):
    start-stop-daemon $service_name
    ;;
  *)
   echo fuck off
   exit 1
   ;;

sorry to be so blunt, and im pretty drunk saying this: sherly you can’t be serious, and don’t call me sherly.







Does “Linux” itself count? I can’t even remember the last time I had anything running Linux have a system crash.


neovim

It just feels right. It took me some time to get used to the vim motions. But man, does it make moving around any project so fast and natural. I went in for the customizability. And that’s obviously there. But the sheer speed it gives me is uncanny. My past self with VS Code could never.

I’d also suggest taking some time to write your own config from scratch once you get the hang of it; it’ll be worth it.

Neovim’s amazing ngl. Replaced MS Code with it at work and I couldn’t be happier.



OH! tmux obviously. It’s rock solid.


ffmpeg and rsync are heavy candidates for me



KDE Connect was worth switching away from Mint for. I was blown away. All of this stuff that just works!


Now that I think about it, most of it.

Neovim, curl, ffmpeg, all gnu utils, sioyek (pdf viewer), i3wm, autorandr, alacritty, tmux and so on.


GNU nano.

I don’t know why I bothered using Vim, Neovim, Micro, mg, and JOE for so long, when nano was always there (though not necessarily OOTB), configurable with all of the features I used in the other editors, and has never broken as long as I’ve been using it.

The only editor I may leave it for would be Emacs, and that would be more for the extension scripts and an excuse to learn ELisp than anything else.


foot has been pretty solid for me. No complaints.




xbps as of recent





mpd+ncmpcpp

df -h for a bit of existential dread.





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