It's Linux Oop North

Because I seem to have a latent streak of masochism, I installed Ubuntu (that is, canonical - no pun intended - Ubuntu, GNOME desktop and all) tonight. Canonical (the company) - and the Ubuntu/Debian family of distros in general, have their problems - for some reason, I've never liked the Debian package manager, apt; and Canonical's repeated attempts to foist proprietary software on us: Unity, Ubuntu One and the ever-increasing number of packages which sneak snaps, with its proprietary back-end, in through some door or other - are irritating, at best; but the Ubuntu family is probably the one you want to introduce your Windows- or Mac-loving friend to, if you *really* want to convert them to Linux. There'll be plenty of time for them to discover and use Arch later, btw.  By mistake, I installed 20.04, the latest LTS, and I'm currently upgrading the distribution all the way to 21.10. And that's after installing the excellent ubuntu-mate-desktop, because whilst some o...

Let's get this out of the way: yes, I know "wherefore" means "why." But people constantly misuse it to mean "where." It's my blog and I'll pun badly if I want to. In 2019, Apple moved to using the Z shell (henceforth "zsh") instead of bash as its Terminal shell on macOS. Recent versions of bash had moved to the GPL version 3, which places limits on patent licensing, and so MacOS had stuck with bash version 3.2, which by then was ancient. Most target users of Macs probably didn't notice, of course - before OS X, Mac OS didn't even *have* a shell or command line of any kind, and the first Mac keyboards didn't include cursor keys, as the Mac was intended to introduce a whole new paradigm to the general public. (The Xerox Alto and other computers from Xerox, which introduced the concept of the GUI, were far, far too expensive for general consumption. The Xerox Alto, for example, cost $100,000 *in 1971 dollars*; the Xerox Star,...