this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
64 points (84.8% liked)

Linux

48315 readers
770 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The article just describes the how, but gives no reasons for a why.

So, why would anyone move away from the de-facto standard bash, except for some rare circumstances like having a small system and using busybox?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You probably never used fish shell.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, and I suspect most reading the article haven't either, so the above guy's question stands - what's wrong with Bash in comparison to the others?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Nothing wrong with it, it's just boring. Fish shell has some new features that make it nice to use. So does zsh. Tab completions, history navigation, plugins and such.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Why does something have to be wrong with Bash for Fish to be better?

[–] pastermil 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Because bash is an industry-wide defacto standard?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] pastermil 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

A lot of people use it for work and they couldn't have the slightest risk of their setup broken since their living depend on it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

What does that have to do with the question?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Fish is actually user friendly and easy to learn. The interactive completions are better than any other shell and are something I don't want to live without.

It differs from bash in some esoteric ways, but any issues you might encounter as a result are easily worked around by putting shebangs in your scrips, which you should be doing anyway, and bash -c 'your command'.

Honorable mention for nushell, but that one differs from bash a little too much to pick up quickly. However, having an object-oriented shell is pretty sick.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Because you're bored. It says so right in the title.

Personally I don't see the point of changing the shell either. Bash is more than good enough for my use and any other shell is going to have the disadvantage of not being the ubiquitous standard so it is always going to have an uphill battle to dislodge bash.

That said, if people want to play around with a new shell just for the sake of it, why not? I like to play around with exotic window managers myself, not because my regular plasma desktop doesn't suffice, but because I like to try something different every now and then.