@cstross Apple had a key like that for a long while in its laptops: the Siri key at the top right of the Magic Bar. I used to hit it at least once or twice a week by mistake.
I'd have expected a little more fact checking coming from a journalist. your timeline doesn't even begin to make sense. GNU promoted a consistent, accessible and richer documentation format than preexisting man pages, but if developments by third parties that started at least a decade later caused fragmentation and incompatibilities, well, I'm sure one can make up ways to pin that on GNU somehow, even if it makes no sense
@amszmidt@lispi314@froztbyte It was the wholesale failure of the Linux community in the 90s to look *beyond* GNU that made a mess of things. (Hint: I was there. Was the first tech journalist to review a linux distro in a mainstream computer magazine in the UK, back in late 1993/early 1994. Coming at it from a UNIX background.)
@cstross@lispi314@froztbyte So before Linux even existed, we destroyed it .. interesting concept. What next, we get blamed for climate change? And if you think "pull package source, debug from there" is easier than hitting SPACE .. I suppose the earth is flat as well.
@lispi314@froztbyte The GNU push towards info format in the 80s DESTROYED the cohesion of the Linux documentation corpus by by introducing an incompatible, randomly variable, and inconsistent style—and worse, by convincing GNU contributors that "man pages are obsolete". Wankers.
@froztbyte Is there a man page for systemd? With all the startup options? And another man page for the configuration file format and contents? Or am I expected to waste bandwidth and brain cells watching fucking YouTube videos with embedded ads to learn how to use it, like most shit software these days?
@cstross haha yeah, systemd continues to be in that “it’s a nice idea, but it’d be nice if it were good” bucket
Admittedly I do tend to use it on a lot of things but pretty much _always_ with some swearing added in (because there’s always _some_ new flavour of bullshit localised)