[afroisalreadyin]

Very sorry to hear about your father's illness, and how the situation was made even the worse by such brazen disrespect for user experience. My parents also have to regularly go through what I think amounts to violence by their electronic devices, but nothing as horrifying as this.

[ehecatl42]

This terrifies me, TBH. I'm almost 50 and a little bit technical (used to admin Solaris boxen), and I just know the day will come when I haven't a damned clue how any of this works any more. For the time being, I'm happy using Linux as a bootloader for Emacs; will that be enough to see me through to my personal end? I sadly doubt it.

[pc86]

> and I just know the day will come when I haven't a damned clue how any of this works any more

I don't think this is a foregone conclusion, and it's easy to say this and sort of throw your hands up and go "oh well, woe is me" but it's kind of a cop out, no?

I have family in their 90's who can navigate whatever tech you put in front of them, because they think it's important to figure things out when they get stuck. My father can barely turn his phone on because at the slightest frustration he gives up and waits for someone to "fix it" for him. Certainly different folks have different aptitudes, but choice and working through things plays an exceedingly large role.

[asciimov]

> I don't think this is a foregone conclusion, and it's easy to say this and sort of throw your hands up and go "oh well, woe is me" but it's kind of a cop out, no?

The problem is that as we get older, we tend to value our time differently. Learning a new interface just isn't as important to us as spending that time doing something enjoyable.

Imagine if car companies randomly update the way you drive a car overnight every 7 or 8 years. You go out one day, and suddenly instead of a steering wheel and pedals you have a stick with paddles, then a few years later its changed to something that looks like an oar. Eventually you too might say to hell with it.

[codalan]

The irony is that if a vendor can't provide a consistent experience every time, why should I remain loyal to that vendor on the next update?

If Windows is going to change their user interface every other year, why would I relearn their UX-du-jour when I can just re-learn once on a Mac and be good for a few years (if not longer)?

If I use hosted Gmail and my UI changes every other month, it just tells me that I should host elsewhere where the UX is more stable.

If you abuse users long enough with this everchanging, constant-beta UI nonsense, you are just telling them to move on to a platform that isn't so unstable, where you only have to learn the UX once, not every X months.

[pc86]

> The problem is that as we get older, we tend to value our time differently.

> Eventually you too might say to hell with it

I agree 100% and that's even kind of my point. You're choosing not to care about that stuff, which is fine (honestly, probably even healthy at a certain point), but it's not as if there is some biological imperative that as you age you are less able to use technology.

[tmnvix]

> You're choosing not to care about that stuff, which is fine

I think the problem is that this is only fine in a world where we aren't forced to rely on these things.

[bmitc]

I’d point out that it’s not necessarily those people’s problems. It’s the tech makers’ problems. Hardly any of this stuff needs to change so wildly and so often.

The somewhat recent FaceTime updates have befuddled even my brother and I. And there’s zero reason for any of the changes. They were just changes, not improvements, and were probably even regressions.

[asoneth]

I am typically able to poke around and figure out why something broke so I can fix the dependencies. And I can search online to figure out where some feature I depend on was moved to, or what extension I need to re-enable it. But I nevertheless resent this kind of mandatory administrative overhead that comes with relying on computers.

On the flip side, I enjoy learning new techniques, languages, and approaches to advance my craft.

The difference is that the former is dictated by developers and required on a periodic basis just to tread water, whereas the latter is self-directed and helps me become more capable.

[bmitc]

I am an active engineer and software developer, and I already feel like I don’t have a clue how any of it works already. I am being a little bit hyperbolic of course, but that’s the feeling.

And to be honest, I don’t think it’s me. It isn’t clear to me that the people who make all this stuff know how it works either. Nothing works as intended in technology. At least some form of technology doesn’t work as it should every day, from your work machine’s OS, or some program, or your smartphone, or Android Auto or Apple Car Play, or your TV, or your Internet provider or WiFi router, or that website you visit, or your smart thermostat, and on and on. And that’s stuff just plain not working or encountering bugs. It doesn’t even address the usability of all this.

We are just shitting out technology left and right, all at the alter of scale. In my opinion, capitalism is part of the problem. The other is human nature. There are no incentives to get this right. And these days, large companies do not care that they get it right. Statistics of failure and user frustration are explicitly part of their business models. They don’t want to even know if there’s an issue with their product. They just let some statistics drive their decision making.

It’s all just a tragedy and comedy all in one. Amazon has their 12 principles they hire with that makes it seem like they hire geniuses left and right. And they can’t even get book selling right these days. And there’s no way to report issues. They do not care.

[codalan]

It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when his/her bonus depends on not understanding it.

Most of these bonuses are probably tied with frivolous, often highly unpopular and unwanted, feature updates. I doubt people get bonuses (or as large bonuses) for fixing usability bugs or improving quality.

[RalfWausE]

A coworker of me never switched from DOS to Windows (he told me he tried it a few times but... meh), recently i helped him getting his new(-ish) Lenovo workstation set up with FreeDOS 1.3.

So... it IS possible to stay on a system where you are comfortable with, if you are willing to make concessions...

[awiesenhofer]

Wow, what does he use it for? Any specific apps you know about?

[RalfWausE]

He mostly uses it for embedded programming, but also does the finances for a club he is in via a spreadsheet (As-easy-as) and does write the occasional letter in (if i remember correctly) wordstart. For emails and web he uses Arachne (with a hack that allows arachne to fetch https via wget).

[Paianni]

Wow, talk about living in the 90s...

[calvinmorrison]

Already happened to me, I have less and less idea how my linux system works now. I haven't kept up with all the various systemd rewrites, buses and random shit I don't know about and it's annoying when I actually want to do something

has journalctl -xe ever dumped any useful information for anyone ever or am I just an idiot? when I restart nginx I want to know if it failed, why , what's the syntax error. instead old reliable /etc/init.d/nginx configtest no I have to dig around

[dharmab]

Here's an excerpt from my cheat sheet:

    # Output all logs since boot
    journalctl
    # Follow all logs in real time
    journalctl -f
    # Output logs for a given systemd unit
    journalctl -u $unit
    # Combine follow and unit flags to follow logs for a given systemd unit
    # Easy to remember: You are saying F*** U to a broken piece of software
    journalctl -fu $unit
    # Output kernel logs
    journalctl -k
    # Follow kernel logs
    journalctl -fk

    # Tip: Use -b flag to see logs from previous boot cycles

    # Learn more, including advanced filtering and formatting
    man journalctl

You can also add that configtest command as an ExecStartPre to the unit, and it will run that before starting nginx and optionally fail early if it finds an error.

[__turbobrew__]

You forgot:

    # Easy to remember: You are saying F**K because your kernel is broken
    journalctl -fk

[Rediscover]

Thank You

[vel0city]

> has journalctl -xe ever dumped any useful information for anyone ever

It can be useful when there's potentially multiple things leading up to the error in whatever you're running, as it is showing and explaining nearly every action that's recently happened in the system log. But if you're just wanting to look at logs related to nginx starting at the most recent then just query for niginx's system log instead of the whole system.

    sudo journalctl --pager-end --unit nginx

or:

    sudo journalctl -e -u nginx

or:

    sudo journalctl -eu nginx

[AndroidKitKat]

If a process or service is using systemd to start and stop it (e.g. You start it with `systemctl start $SERVICE_NAME), I often do `systemctl status $SERVICE_NAME` to get the service-specific logs. For me, it seems to get the job done much better than journalctl.

[topaz0]

If you can set up nginx to do what you want, you can learn how to use systemd. In my experience it is quite usable once you get a handle on it. I'm sure there are plenty of "getting started" kinds of introductions that could make it useful to you after maybe half an hour of time investment. Other commenters have answered your specific question.

[5e92cb50239222b]

systemd is aliased to /usr/sbin/service, so old sysvinit commands still work:

  $ service nginx status

which should cover your

  if it failed, why , what's the syntax error

For anything more complicated, refer to these cheatsheets:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#Using_units

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Journal#Filtering_o...

YMMV. I find systemd a lot easier to work with (I actually started wrapping daemons in proper services instead of sticking everything into nohup or tmux sessions).

[ylyn]

Then use a distro that doesn't use systemd.

[calvinmorrison]

Right, then I have to relearn my userspace setup... well maybe it's time - but I've been on debian longer long before I met my childs mother, before I even grew a single hair on my chest, before I had a bank account, a job, or a cell phone. But perhaps you are right, it's time to quit it

[UncleSlacky]

MX Linux (Debian-based, uses sysvinit with systemd shims) and Devuan would seem to be obvious alternatives that wouldn't require changes to your setup.

[calvinmorrison]

I'll check it out. I have all sorts of weirdness with this system. snap is great because debian doesn't package a lot, yet then all my snap programs are sandboxed in a non useful way. (like mysqlworkbench won't save passwords in a keystore because that hookup doesn't work - and it cant run without a working keystore. like firefox will start once, but if you run the firefox command, it'll error out that firefox is already) lots of annoying little things

[b112]

Debian runs without systemd fine, at least for me.

Try trinity as a desktop with sysvinit.

[calvinmorrison]

I am a big fan of trinity! I have it for the unbeatable KDE 3 konqueror and a few other choice apps.

[eointierney]

In your case assuredly so, for you uttered the magical invocation "emacs" which will be supported 'til the heat death of the Universe :)

[jkepler]

And probably if one can still program lisp, one could write an escape vehicle for an alternate universe...