GNU/Linux has changed. And that's good

I got my first laptop in, I think, 2006. It was a fujitsu amilo. I remember this because I chose "amilo" for its hostname when I installed Debian on it. I'm not a particularly creative person, necessarily. Didn't buy a new one until mid-2010's. A Toshiba Satellite. You can play guess the hostname, you won't be disappointed.

This toshiba is still in use nowadays. We're watching a series from a usb hard drive on it right now. And at the same time, I'm connected to it via ssh and writing this post on it. In the same [screen](https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/) session, I have open an amfora browser where I'm reading [Ploum's](gemini://ploum.net) old english gemlog entries (my french is a bit rusty, reading french is doable, but I'd end up with a slight headache :D), offpunk to see if I get the hang of it, an ssh session to [tilde.team](gemini://tilde.team) and another one to [texto-plano.xyz](gemini://texto-plano.xyz).

I'm using another laptop, one I bought from my previous employer when I switched jobs. This one has Windows installed. It has as such not been properly hostnamed, and its name is (let me check) "DESKTOP-7CJ4IJB". It is also not very interesting, and it's serving as a dumb terminal to a laptop with one fifth of its memory. Some day I'll have to wipe it and install debian. I'm just too buys/lazy.

Anyway, I recently got accounts in a set of tildes. And that is what took me to realize some things:

When I first logged into tilde.club, after a neat 'welcome' program, I was impressed by the really nice "userland"

* I was presented with a byobu session, with 3 windows already opened
* in one of these windows, weechat was already opened and connected. I had to re-learn IRC a bit
* another one, alpine
* the las one, a nice and colorful bash PS1 with a very convenient set of preconfigured aliases

I thought to myself: hey, these people really took their time to select a set of programs and configure them to be very welcoming to a user. Nice.

And then, a couple of days ago, I added a user to satellite. This user account got the name 'jmcs', because I created it so I could writhe these logentries locally, and then scp them to tilde.team. Tilde.team doesn't have lowdown installed, and my [bashblog](https://tildegit.org/jmcs/bashblog) modifications use lowdown to translate md to gemtext. But it also uses things like the $USER variable to expand titles and stuff. So, my local username was a small problem (that I solved by creating the jmcs account). Anyway, I switched to the new jmcs account:

```
su - jmcs
```

And it hit me: I've been copying my /home/jchaves (with all the .dotfiles) across laptops for almost a couple of decades now. And I've been carrying with me all my habits: screen, vim with my .vimrc, .fluxbox/keys, .mplayer, .mldonkey (!), what have you... Some of these files come from even earlier computers (there are key combinations around there to watch analog TV via mplayer, and I haven't had an analog tv card since... before laptops).

When I found myself in front of this new account's prompt, I realized the default PS1 was strikingly similar to what I have been finding around the tildeverse. And my trusty debian has been, silently, updating and upgrading, and changing the would-be-defaults for new users to fancy colors and useful aliases. Meanwhile, I had my monochrome PS1 and was convinced that alias ll='ls -l --color=auto' was the pinnacle of user experience ...

And that I'm now a UNIX greybeard (quite literally so, I guess). I find my muscle memory still wants me to type 

> /etc/init.d/-whatever- start 

sometimes. And then, I slap my forehead and my brain tells me 

> "it's service -whatever- start now, dummy!"

and then I remember that systemd has been around for ... too long now:

> systemctl start -whatever-

I sometimes still do this type of dumbassery with things like ifconfig. Or apt-get (some day I'll have to take some time and learn wich one is the recommended one nowadays. 'apt' alone, I supose. Is aptitude still around? it sure is installed in my laptop...)
 
Anyway, I guess the moral of this story is that there's value in finding a comfortable setup you can keep and want to bring with you. But, at the same time, you'll inevitably miss out on new nice aditions. I skipped using tmux for years ("meh, screen works alright, ctrl+a is ingrained in my brain already"), I have pretty much never used any of the "friendlier" shells (fish? zsh with that oh-my-zsh thing?) ... At this point, I'm not even sure of what I'm missing :D

So, yeah, kids: get out there and experiment with things! even something that could be seen as "antiquated" as the unix command line is continuosly being improved, and changed to be more confortable and intuitive. So, that. We all eventually settle down on a set of settings and call that 'home'. But it's never too late to discover new stuff.

Better stop writing now, this is getting long. If anyone makes it to down here, and has any old-fart stories to share, send me an email. You can reach me at jmcs at tilde dot team

Tags: debian, linux, unix, userland, old-man-yells-at-cloud