[oli-g]

> It's for people who want to point and click, can't do a bash for/while loop, don't understand pipe chaining commands, and don't like using vim

"Instagram filters are for people who don't know how to work with Photoshop layers, don't understand basic color blending operations, and who just want to swipe."

I mean, yes.

[distcs]

I have no problem viewing pictures shared by those who don't understand basic color blending and just want to swipe.

But I may have a problem with people who can't do a bash for/while loop or understand pipe chaining commands be responsible for administrating my company servers.

I don't see how the comparison between adminstrating servers and sharing pictures on social media is a useful comparison.

[addicted]

I don’t understand why you think the fact that someone may choose to point and click to do something, a task which depending on the UI can be completely mindless and yet significantly safer eliminating any chance of making a mistake (by throwing in a typo for instance), does not know what a bash for/while loop is?

I suspect most people here used the HN web interface to post their comments, even though constructing an HTPP request to send to HN using curl to post your comment wouldn’t be significantly harder. The fact that they used the point and click HM Web UI doesn’t mean they’re incapable of constructing such a request where it actually is needed.

[distcs]

> I don’t understand why you think the fact that someone may choose to point and click to do something, a task which depending on the UI can be completely mindless and yet significantly safer eliminating any chance of making a mistake (by throwing in a typo for instance), does not know what a bash for/while loop is?

I don't think like that at all. Of course someone can know bash for/while loop and still choose to use a point-and-click tool to administrate their servers. Nothing wrong with that.

Not sure where in my message did I say that if someone chooses to point and click, then they don't know what a bash for/while loop is.

What I said in my comment was that if someone doesn't know what a bash for/while loop is, then I may be uncomfortable adminstrating my servers.

My point was to show that comparing adminstrating servers and sharing pictures on social media is not a useful comparison.

[shortrounddev2]

I think there's an elitism within the Linux world to being a totally CLI user

[jarym]

There does seem to be a bit of it yes, but I thought it had become less common.

Reminds me of a colleague I met once who was happily boasting he's a 'real' HTML developer because he writes everything in Microsoft notepad. I took a look at his work and cried inside - broken tags, bad formatting and of course he didn't escape all his characters correctly.

Being able to type some characters on a keyboard does not make anyone superior to a user that uses a point+click interface.

[sgarland]

> Being able to type some characters on a keyboard does not make anyone superior to a user that uses a point+click interface.

There isn’t a causal relationship, but the two are heavily correlated. Getting deep into the details of most server software means doing so via CLI, because the people who built the software intended it to be used there, since servers are usually headless.

Even if you run a DE, chances are high you’ll still end up editing some config files in a text editor, and running commands in a terminal emulator.

It’s a bit like [n]vi[m] - learning its esoteric commands doesn’t make you good at coding or ops, but there’s a decent chance you wouldn’t bother to spend the time learning it unless you needed the speed increases it grants you.

[BodyCulture]

Diff is to type you need to have better understanding, what is good for IT work.

[robertlagrant]

OP mentioned ProxMox UI as being much better. I think you're focusing on the wrong point.

[shortrounddev2]

What if they CAN do a bash for/while loop, but they prefer not to because bash is the ugliest effing language they've ever seen

[distcs]

That is totally fine. I was talking about people who CANNOT do a bash for/while loop. You are talking about people who CAN do a bash for/while loop but choose not to. We are talking about different types of people. I am comfortable with the latter type of people administrating my servers. I am not comfortable about the former.

Anyway, what has that got to do with my point though that sharing pictures on social media is not a meaningful comparison to make with something like administrating servers?

[shortrounddev2]

> I am comfortable with the latter type of people administrating my servers. I am not comfortable about the former.

idk what kind of legacy orgs people in this thread work for where there are Linux sysadmins working for their companies which directly manage server configs and security settings. "Administering my servers" is an interesting phrase in 2023, because there often aren't any servers to directly administer (even a VPS is hard to find). The last few companies I worked for all used some kind of virtualized infrastructure and usually through some kind of declarative interface (Docker, Kubernetes, or some terraform-style tool). Certainly, the people who OWN the servers have sysadmins managing these things, but such things are an abstraction these days, where many organizations don't have to deal with CLI configuration and bash, and just leave infrastructure to devops or even the developers themselves

[distcs]

> idk what kind of legacy orgs people in this thread work for where there are Linux sysadmins working for their companies which directly manage server configs and security settings.

I don't know if you consider Amazon/AWS "legacy org". When I worked there I didn't think it was a legacy org. Yet they needed skilled Linux sysadmins. Sure they are called by fancy names like infrastructure engineer, production engineer, etc. but the work they did used core Linux kernel skills, scripting skills and programming skills, just to name a few of the skills.

A few years later I worked for another cloud provider and it was no different. I don't understand why you think only legacy orgs care about good system-administration skills.

[shortrounddev2]

Yes, obviously the people who offer the virtualized infrastructure are going to need the sysadmins. I'm talking about the majority of businesses and engineers which aren't cloud service providers, but rather customers of those providers.

[worksonmine]

> The last few companies I worked for all used some kind of virtualized infrastructure and usually through some kind of declarative interface (Docker, Kubernetes, or some terraform-style tool)

Which unfortunately is a problem in itself. A lot of core knowledge is lost and many people running infrastructure don't know how to read actual logs and debug outside of what the GUI shows. Just like you mention it's not even VPS these days it's a Dockerfile pushed to some cloud.

Copy/paste a Dockerfile, edit some yaml for the CI and claim you know DevOps. It's a shame really. I don't mind a nice minimal GUI when it makes sense, but it's important to understand the pieces below it.

[shortrounddev2]

> Which unfortunately is a problem in itself. A lot of core knowledge is lost and many people running infrastructure don't know how to read actual logs and debug outside of what the GUI shows. Just like you mention it's not even VPS these days it's a Dockerfile pushed to some cloud.

Plenty of k8s users are accessing their services and logs through CLI. It's just that the relevant logs are from the application and not whatever the underlying infrastructure is. It makes it way easier to have amazon deal with the underlying server and just let me focus on the actual application. Saves labor costs (in theory) by not having to hire an IT guy, and you can put more faith in the security practices of the cloud providers than in your own organization.

Your criticism reads like old school developers complaining about new devs learning Javascript without learning C or Assembly. Technology progresses, the set of baseline skills required to do your job changes. Few software engineers know anything about hardware or electrical engineering, but that used to be a requirement many decades ago.

> Copy/paste a Dockerfile, edit some yaml for the CI and claim you know DevOps. It's a shame really. I don't mind a nice minimal GUI when it makes sense, but it's important to understand the pieces below it.

What you've described is a way to make it dead simple for engineers to develop code without having to interface with a human being (a sysadmin) in between. It makes deployments consistent and easy. When you add CI/CD into the mix, you don't even need to run the command anymore, you just merge the master and swap your staging and production instances. Amazon can hire the sysadmins, the client can hire engineers.

[sgarland]

People who don’t know how to bootstrap a Linux box have no business spinning up a K8s cluster. It will eventually fail in a Linux-y way, and they will be hopelessly lost, begging ChatGPT for help.

Abstractions leak. They’re great, but you still need to know how they work.

[talent_deprived]

Actually powercrap is far uglier than Bash, for real.

[shortrounddev2]

Being a somewhat C/C# inspired bracket syntax, Powershell's syntax is easily better than bash's schizophrenic usage of brackets and semi-colons. Somehow it seems that the people who measure their self worth and identity based on their proclivity for typing in a terminal are also the ones who bitch the most about how long cmdlet names are. I didn't realize Linux users were so allergic to typing (not to mentions aliases and auto-complete)

[rafaelmn]

Your comparison implies that the web UI is faster than SSH once you know these tools ?

You could have godlike Photoshop skills and it will take orders of magnitude more effort to get results. With SSH and shell scripts you'll likely be faster than the web UI once you're skilled enough. And it's easy to automate.