tyil

I don't think there's a much nicer language when it comes to system configuration than a shell. I'm not sure why people want to write an extensive, complex program in a full-on programming language for simple tasks for which the shell and it's utilities were literally invented. The shell does a great job for managing your system already, and so far I've never had a better experience by making using a more complex language.

I've tried Ansible multiple times. Every time it seemed to cost more effort to do something simple, and once you start mixing OSs, things get much more complicated very quickly.

> It can stream shell commands so you've got all the usual sed awk etc

I can write a couple lines of yaml which includes the line of sed/awk/whatever, or just write the one line of sed/awk/whatever.

> And has a battle tested OS detection logic built in.

You can get pretty far with just checking /etc/os-release, and you'll need only a fraction of the code Ansible brings to do that. Ansible might do a _slightly_ better job, but the increased complexity is definitely not worth it.

> And can copy in different templates depending on OS.

Yes, it can do this, and I have done this. It's a lot of boilerplate YAML you'll need _every_ time you want to write any playbook. It's just not worth the ridiculous amount of hoop-jumping for something which seems to me to be a rather straightforward use case.

I've never used m4 directly, but it might be interesting to look at. I'll try to make some time to look around for information on this. If you have any pointers to get started, I'd be very interested.

Perl has had those since 5.20, although they're optional.

That looks like the previous version shipped with Rakudo Star. A new version was published a very short while ago, so perhaps they will update to 2020.01 soon enough.

> It is a really nice language based off of all the tutorials and presentations I've watched. It just needs some better performance before I'll really start using it

I'm also very impressed in how the language is turning out. It's a pleasure to write and read. I know most people really don't like Unicode operators, but I find them to be very useful. They're short and concise, and allow those writing mathematical equations to stick to their regular symbols. And for those that don't know how to do Unicode on their OS/editor, there's ASCII equivalents.

Performance-wise, it seems to be fast enough for all my personal projects, and it's getting faster every release. Is there a certain piece of code that you want to have running within a certain amount of time? That would allow you (and Perl 6 devs) to have a goal to look at, and work towards.

Have you considered Funtoo yet? It's a fork of Gentoo, led by the creator of Gentoo.

Feel free to come make some friends in #perl6 on Freenode!

Hmm. I personally find the "tip jar" less inviting, but I can talk about using different wording in the article if others agree that a different wording would be beneficial.

If you have any strategic advise or know sources for such kind of information, I'd gladly read more about it and add more to the article.

PayPal and Stripe are 3rd party services as well ;)

Output of lspci:

  00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 06)
  00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor PCI Express x16 Controller (rev 06)
  00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 06)
  00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller (rev 06)
  00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI (rev 05)
  00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
  00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB EHCI #2 (rev 05)
  00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
  00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #1 (rev d5)
  00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #4 (rev d5)
  00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #5 (rev d5)
  00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family USB EHCI #1 (rev 05)
  00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation HM86 Express LPC Controller (rev 05)
  00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller 1 [AHCI mode] (rev 05)
  00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05)
  01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 755M] (rev a1)
  08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA8171 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)
  09:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 2230 (rev c4)

For software choices: Funtoo GNU+Linux as OS vim as editor Firefox as primary browser

I use this laptop for work, as well as for personal work on my own projects.

How would you describe it if not using the word "donations" then?

As other commenters have also pointed out, this is from a moral/privacy(/security) standpoint.

Google reCaptcha's are also incredibly annoying compared to standard captchas, which would be a good reason for people to want to stay away from it.

I'll give it a read and see if I can incorporate anything!

Most people don't do it because it's effort that's not directly associated to programming. It's also easy to think that you won't get any payoff from the effort invested, since it's rare to see to begin with, and even more rare to see anyone making a decent living off of it.

More financial support to free software development would certainly be appreciated. Even a single cent just to show the developer you enjoy his software is a good incentive for a developer to keep going. It seems like most feedback developers get is negative, so anything positive is appreciated.

I'll read through this, and see if there's anything I can add to my article.

OP is not the site owner.

I haven't had any people saying they had any issues with the looks of the site, but I have updated the main font color to be black. I'll look into more improvements after I get the article updated.

Thanks everyone for your comments, both here and via email! I'll work through the comments here and start working on updating the article with your feedback.