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**Dave Eddy:** Oh, it's more structured than that. There's gonna be a directory, I think it's like /var/service, and inside there you just make a directory for whatever daemon you want, and then you give it a run script, and whatever's in that will get executed. They don't necessarily have the concept of dependencies, ... |
But then there's this concept of core services, and core services would be like networking, file systems, things that need to be up... And those are exactly the thing you hate. They're numbered. They're just absolutely numbered scripts that execute in that order. And I totally get why that can be annoying, because you'... |
So yeah, if you start looking in the core services, they're numbered. But you really don't need to. If you're just running your own user-level services, services where you don't care, you know the file system's up, the networking's up... It's great for that. I think it's so simple. |
**Justin Garrison:** Have you ever looked at Go Crazy? |
**Dave Eddy:** No, I don't know what that is. |
**Justin Garrison:** \[42:04\] Not being a -- since you don't write Go, I was assuming not, but it was literally just, it's a Linux distro that just runs a Go binary is what they... I think it can run other binaries if you just shove it on it, but there's no init system. It's PID 1, your thing. |
**Dave Eddy:** Cool. |
**Justin Garrison:** It's meant for Raspberry Pi's. "I have one thing. This computer is going to run one service, and when I want to upgrade it--" I think it has a wrapper around it to do upgrades and whatnot, so that you can actually push it out... But it's just like, yeah, we just send it back out to the console as w... |
**Dave Eddy:** Yeah, they always seem to. That seems like the fate of all software. But no, I love that idea. I think that's so cool. I think people forget this... When it comes to just CPUs in general, people are like "The CPU is not good for this, not good for this." It's like, it's not really good for anything. It's... |
**Justin Garrison:** And that's not only better performance, but also just like better understanding of the system when it breaks. You're like "I don't have 50 different places to look, because this is one thing." And I work at Sidero, we run Talos Linux, which is literally like PID 1 as an API server. And there's no S... |
And yeah, I love the like single-purpose sort of Linux distros, and ones that just find their niche, and they're like "This is what we do. We are not general-purpose." |
**Dave Eddy:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Justin Garrison:** I run Bluefin on my desktop. I think it's a great Linux distro, but it's a desktop Linux distro that does all the things that I need, and can be as complex as I want it to be. |
**Dave Eddy:** Yeah. |
**Autumn Nash:** At first when you get into software, there's so many different choices, right? Like, there's simple stuff, there's more really like deep, and tons of options, you know? But I think now the longer you're in software, you realize that those things all have their place, because sometimes you want to be su... |
**Dave Eddy:** Yeah, a hundred percent. |
**Justin Garrison:** It's honestly a thing I think that Bash does really well. Like, because Bash -- it has a lot of hidden things, and it does a lot of things that are complex and convoluted if you have not tripped over them before. But getting started, you get a terminal, I can literally type help and it just like li... |
**Dave Eddy:** \[45:59\] Oh man, yeah, there's so much there to jump off on. On Autumn's point, the first thing I think about is -- this is a weird analogy, but I think about video games that come out where they have like a character you can play, and there's character customization... There are some people that will s... |
And when you're talking about that - yeah, tech can be daunting. There can be so much configuration you can do. You can get lost in configs, and rc files, and learning everything... Or you can say "I want a desktop that just works." And this is why when people ask me "What distribution of Linux would you recommend, Dav... |
**Break**: \[47:01\] |
**Justin Garrison:** Where do you go to learn? What are your sources for "I need to go dive into this thing"? Are you reaching for books like the Rust book? Or are you just finding more YouTube channels? What is the kind of process there? How do you learn something new? |
**Dave Eddy:** I'd have to think about like what specifically I'm trying to learn... But I sort of have like the cheat code. I know Autumn mentioned you reading books by cheat code... I actually read the man pages. I say that jokingly, but a lot of people are like "Dave, how do you know so much about Bash?" I was like ... |
**Justin Garrison:** "Alright, well, here's a pager, and go run this." And that's the other option. |
**Dave Eddy:** Yup. I've even written my own software, where it's like... I was showing off a piece of software I wrote in C, and they're like "So how does it work under the hood?" I was like "Well, here's a 300-line block comment at the top of the C file. There's ASCII diagrams in it. Go read it. That's how it works."... |
**Justin Garrison:** "Nevermind." |
**Dave Eddy:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. "Oh, I didn't realize that I wouldn't immediately get it in two seconds." So to answer your question, I like to go to the source first, if I can. That's a confusing way of saying it, because it sounds like I'm saying the source code. I'm not saying that. I like to go to the documentatio... |
**Justin Garrison:** Do you still google how to for loop in Bash? |
**Dave Eddy:** No, no. \[laughs\] |
**Justin Garrison:** That's like the bar of like "How well do you know Bash? Do you have to google the for loop?" And it was probably like four or five years ago that I stopped having to Google it. I'm like, I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. |
**Dave Eddy:** Yup. |
**Justin Garrison:** But we're here, and this is just how it's going to be. |
**Dave Eddy:** That became like a little bit of a meme in my community, actually... Someone commented, they were like "I know you couldn't write array handling in Bash without like googling it." And I responded, I was like "I don't know who you know you're talking to, buddy. I do know how to do that, and I don't even t... |
But yeah, it's hard to mix that "I'm confident in what I know", but I don't want to come across as like arrogant. Like, I do try to be humble about it. It's tough with a name like "You Suck at Programming", but... |
**Justin Garrison:** But just remembering how long it took you to learn that, and like putting in the work, and reading the man pages. Same thing for learning systems. I go read the white papers. Because almost every big system came out of some research that they wrote a white paper about. And I'm like "Oh, I'm gonna g... |
And it's like, yeah, that's how I'm going to spend my time. I can figure out why they wrote the thing. What answer were they trying to solve? The man pages are going to give you that stuff. Like, "Oh, these are the built-ins, because we have to have this set. We don't want to execute out to something else, because it m... |
**Dave Eddy:** Yeah. That's the other thing too, is even just like the history of it is important. People ask certain questions like "Why is this an external command when it's built-in?" It's like "Well, that wasn't always built in." I mean, yeah. \[unintelligible 00:53:36.27\] |
**Justin Garrison:** I always start with "Imagine your hard drive was really, really small, and you had to mount some other file system to get that command. What would you do?" "Oh, that's when they wrote this?" "Yes. This is exactly when they wrote this." |
**Dave Eddy:** \[53:52\] Yeah. One that I've been seeing lately on my channel, I was talking about where files are stored for executables on Linux. /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin... And they're like "Why are they all just in one directory?" I'm like "Well, they are now." There are some operating systems that are tryi... |
**Justin Garrison:** Oh yeah, absolutely. There's so many good podcasts and books and everything else that are fantastic. I just watched this YouTube video that you reminded me of... And I'm going to put it in the channel, but I think you would love it. It was like "The bits between the bits" is what it was called. And... |
**Dave Eddy:** That's cool. |
**Justin Garrison:** So yeah, I'm going to put that in the show notes and I'll send it to you. |
**Dave Eddy:** Awesome. Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, I recommend to some people when they ask about learning like systems and C and stuff, I tell them to go to the K & R C book... And one of the things they do in there is like writing malloc from scratch. Like, how do you actually write a memory allocator? And I'... |
**Autumn Nash:** Nothing's really novel. It's the same problems over and over again if you abstract enough things away. |
**Dave Eddy:** One million percent. Yes, that's the truest thing. |
**Justin Garrison:** And some people just -- you don't have to go into the details, so you think that everything below you is magic. And at some point you're like "No, actually, electrons are going through a gate. How they did that? Let's see..." |
**Dave Eddy:** Oh, this is something I deal with, too. One comment basically was like a punch to the stomach. I didn't expect it. It wasn't a bad comment, but someone said "Man, I would love to have the knowledge you have, but I'm afraid to touch a low-level language like C." And I was "C is a high-level language, man.... |
And it stinks, because they start at the top, they try to work their way down... It's like "No, no, you've got to start at the bottom." You mentioned like electrons, and gates and stuff like that. If you start at that level and work your way up, you start to appreciate everything so much more. You learn basic and/or, l... |
**Justin Garrison:** Do you do any embedded systems or like FPGAs? Any of that stuff? |
**Dave Eddy:** I don't. I've done a little bit of like soldering stuff, but that's about it. Like, I've hacked the original Xbox, put the little mod chip in there... I've taken apart the little \[unintelligible 00:57:18.01\] game and watch Nintendo thing and added bigger storage, so that was a fun little solder project... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. |
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