EnbySpacePerson

Image by joffi from Pixabay

My main operating system is Linux. I use Mac and Windows. I complain about all of my operating systems. Occasionally, when I'm complaining about Windows, I get people telling me I should switch to Linux. This isn't quite as funny as you might think.

When I complain about Linux, I'm often told I should switch distributions.

To be clear, this impulse is anti-social behavior. I've been using Linux seriously for more than 25 years. If you're guilty of responding to people's tech gripes with something that amounts to “change every single thing about everything you do radically, overnight because I said so,” you need to cut that shit out immediately.

There is no Linux which is a drop-in replacement for Windows or Mac. People will have questions ... maybe even about every single thing they do. And, if they ask a search engine, the bulk of the answers they get will be as many as 20 years out of date. It will almost certainly involve reading some tech writing insulting and disparaging things to someone who had the same question umpteen years ago. That's hugely demoralizing and leaves you with the impression that everyone in the 'Linux community' is a gigantic asshole.

In contrast, switching from one shell to another shouldn't be that big of a deal. I've used ksh and didn't like it but I got on alright. I've used zsh and I was mostly annoyed that it wasn't my choice. It seems fine. Mostly, I've used bash because that's the default shell in Debian (not my first distribution but almost my first) and Ubuntu (where I'm at right now for reasons I won't get into ... but I don't recommend it to anyone).

The topic of fish has come up several times over the past few days. I've been exploring tmux and Zellij lately so I'm open to new possibilities. I did my due diligence before installing it. And then I was pretty shocked when I went to use it that it was immediately hugely useful without really having to learn anything else. (I actually can say the same about Zellij, by the way, but I'm still using tmux as my main terminal multiplexer at the moment.)

It's slightly inconvenient to launch fish each time I start a new terminal. I went about figuring out how to change my default shell. I ran into How to Change Your Default Shell on Linux with chsh and started reading through it while working on another task.

Generally, I take a dim view of articles or answers that take the long way around. I learned soooo much reading that. I can't complain about how Dave McKay built the article. In the off chance you see this, thanks, Dave!

I haven't actually changed my default shell yet but it's not because of your article.

Sometimes, I just want to get something done. For that, I could have skipped ahead. I was interested in the things I ended up learning along the way. This wasn't like one of those times where you go to read through a recipe and you have to scroll by twenty photo documented pages of unrelated or mostly unrelated stuff to get to the heart of the recipe. Dave builds on concepts the reader (in this case, me) likely needs to know before making the decision to switch shells.

It's good stuff. We need more documentation like this.