Comment by seniorThrowaway

2 months ago

>I'm forced to use Microsoft products and they're actively hostile to Linux

How so? Powershell has openSSH built in now, and WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats. I have a Windows 11 laptop and I use it like you are saying as an ssh machine and web browser without much issue.

  > WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats.

It is a lot of annoying things. Everything is just so clunky and I don't think it is surprising given that it is a subsystem. At least in the mac I can still access the computer I'm typing on through the terminal. I mean yeah, I can do that with Winblows but it is non-native and clunky. I mean ever try to open a folder with a few hundred images in it? (outside the terminal) I didn't even know this was an issue that needed to be solved. For comparison, I can open a folder in the GUI of my linux machine that has 50k images (yay datasets) and in <1s I can load the previews. In my terminal, it is almost instant (yes, I can see the images in my terminal, and yes, it is this type of stuff that is a lot clunkier on Windows).

And on top of that, as frustrating as OSX is (even as terrible as OSX26 is) Winblows is worse. OSX feels disconnected, but Winblows feels hostile.

  • What setup do you use for seeing image previews (or the images themselves?) on a terminal in Linux?

    • I use yazi a fair amount but I've also configured fzf to do it. There's a lot of tools to view the images, chafa is a good one.

      This definitely should be improved but I honestly don't use fzf that much. I can fix it if you really need something but I'm sure you could find it in the docs or even an LLM could handle this. Requires you to define a few variables, lsd, bat, and chafa

        $ echo $FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS 
        --ansi --preview "if file --mime-type {} | grep -qF image; then chafa --passthrough none -f sixels --size ${FZF_PREVIEW_COLUMNS}x${FZF_PREVIEW_LINES} {}; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e directory; then lsd --color always --icon always --almost-all --oneline --classify --long {}; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e binary; then strings {} | bat --color always --theme=Dracula --language c; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e text -e json -e empty; then bat --color always --theme=Dracula --style=numbers,grid --line-range :500 {}; fi"

  • Ok, I still don't see how that's "hostile to linux" and not just windows being crappy, which it is.

    • Because I didn't really speak about Microsoft's hostility to Linux.

      I think the moment it turned from annoyance to hate was when they bought Skype and then removed features from the Linux version. Features like... conference calling... but there's a million things like that. Go talk to Linux nerds and I'm sure you'll get a unique story each time. We've all felt the pressure

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