Hacker News Reader

Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

It's from Atlas Shrugged, and I think it's trying to draw some kind of parallel between using Arch and struggling against oppressive forces of mental tyranny. As represented by Apricity perhaps? Arch is for heroic individualists?

Arch is great and all. I love using it, but I get pretty impatient with people who think they're smarter than everyone else because they can follow the detailed instructions in a well-written and lovingly maintained wiki. I get similarly impatient with B.S. Arch derivatives. If you want Ubuntu, just use Ubuntu. It's based on a perfectly legit distribution.

View on HN

I only wish that you'd posted each sentence as separate comments so that I can upvote each one individually.

Back when I had freedom of choice for my OS at my place of employment, I wanted to learn about Linux so I chose it. Then I wanted to learn more about Linux so I moved from Ubuntu to Arch. At first, the documentation is a lifesaver. However, a bit of time invested in reading it carefully will also really educate someone in so many aspects of an OS. Not only that, but so many of the things that someone would really want to use are so well documented. I learned more about PostgreSQL administration and X from the Arch Wiki than the documentation from the actual projects themselves.

Thanks to Arch Linux, my first instinct when using a new command-line tool is to add the `--help` flag, then run `man <command>`. It helped me stop googling crap all the time.

I don't think it's Atlas Shrugged, googling it brings up some kind of spiritual philosopher guru guy. It makes sense in that context, like he's justifying why most people don't understand his enlightened teachings. But I don't get why it's posted here.

Fascinating! You're right. I was misremembering the quote. Furthermore, it's from 1929, well before Atlas was written. Still, it sounds quite a lot like something John Galt would say. Who knew Ayn Rand was so eclectic?

I have no idea where you detected anything having to do with Ayn Rand or any of her ideas. It's a pretty way that saying that the rewards of experience can't be granted and must be earned; not that no one eats for free, unless people eat mountaintops. What is a mountaintop without a mountain anyway?

One of the characters is talking about John Galt in that roundabout way they have of talking about John Galt, and says that he's the man who climbed to the top of the mountain and discovered the fountain of youth, but when he tried to bring it back down, he found that it couldn't be brought back down, only climbed up to. Or something like that. That's why this quote reminded me of Atlas. Probably, they both cribbed it from Nietzsche.

Same with Gentoo. Some people pretended like doing a stage 1 install taught you more about the system. Besides chroot I don't remember anything I learned from it. Loved Gentoo though. Especially how configurable it was.

On the other hand, I learned quite a lot through many stage 1 installs. Don't think I ever would have grown so comfortable with a command line and Linux if it hadn't been for stage 1s (and screwing them up).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com