Shell scripts were a mistake. The weirdness you have to remember to safely stop executing when something fails is mind-boggling.

nushell scripts aren’t shellscripts?

exactly. Forking for any reason is the essence of FOSS.

Scenarios like OPs were taken care of right from the start. That’s just the legal side, tho. But someone still needs to do the actual work which is why it sometimes fails.

Public funds.

There actually are lots of initiatives (e.g. https://bigdatastack.eu/european-open-source-initiative ) but it’s still young and there are multiple problems between available public money and contributors actually earning a salary.

Money is not the problem.

either earn a good living being a code monkey, or find a job in a small company that has passion

crazy idea: let’s publicly fund FOSS projects so devs working on stuff they like with a passion can actually make a good living and enable sustainable non-profits to hire expertise, marketing and all the stuff a company needs

the result would be actually good software and happy devs

25 years in the industry here. As I said there’s nothing against learning something new but I doubt it’s as easy as “leveling up”.

Both fields profit a lot from experience and it’s as much gain for a scientist do become a software dev as an architect becoming a carpenter. It’s simply not productive.

there is so much time lost in research institutes because of shoddy programming

Well, that’s the way it is. Scientific code and production code have different requirements. To me that sounds like “that machine prototype is inefficient - just skip the prototype next time and build the real thing right away.”

It’s always good to learn new stuff but in terms of productivity: Don’t attempt to be a programmer. Rather attempt to write better research code (clean up code, revision control, better commenting, maybe testing…)

Rather try to improve cooperation with programmers, if necessary. Close cooperation, asking stupid questions instead of making assumptions etc. makes the process easy for both of you.

Also don’t be afraid to consult different programmers since beyond a certain level, experience and expertise in programming is vastly fragmented.

Experienced programmers mostly suck on your field and vice versa and that’s a good thing.

Consequence:

Software can only be good, when enough people WANT to work on it and with it along the complete life-cycle. There’s a critical amount of developers/contributors/testers and (feedback providing) users.

Hence a lot of critical consumer stuff is based on popular opensource.

Also, we’re entering an aera where the difference between hardware/firmware/software gets increasingly blurred. So all of this applies to more and more hardware, too.

• do one thing and do it well

byebye unix principles

otoh you have stuff like FreeCAD or OpenSCAD completely free and usable AND you could modify it as you please.

Back then FOSS CAD was barely usable.

Zorin

Not sure if I’d trust an OS named like a Bond villain.

You could do some automated/scripted installation VM-image builder thingy and release that. Would probably also save some manual work for you. (bash script fetching install image & run qemu, autounattend.xml, etc. all nicely released on github.) And it’d be auditable.

that’d be an awesome way to spread malware with some VM evasion.

not sure if any 3rd-party windows install should ever be trusted. no matter what usecase.

your own fault. get a nuclear reactor next time d’uh…

They did it before and they’ll do it again.

on Android, the OS is the firmware. If you talk about peripheral firmware, I’d not call it “software based” anymore.

healthy eyesight was just a small price to pay back in those days :-P

installing your own OS and/or bootloader is a pain and most of the time unfeasable. And that’s the only way to safely kill software based backdoors.

Rather if they get merged without edits.

I’ve seen even minor changes without flawed technique or style being discussed and changed for days before getting merged.

But it’s also an excellent way to learn from pros. If the PR is worth it, they will spend the time for review and work with you until you fixed everything.

it’s not profit driven, tho.

powertop shows discharge rate in W, Joules consumed since last charging and estimated remaining time in the “Overview” pane.