Who the fuck types out “snigger” haha

Teleports behind you

I mean if you think that it’s bad for linux culture because you’re teaching newbies the wrong lessons, fair enough.

My point is that most people can parse that they’re essentially asking you to run some commands at a url, and if you have even a fairly basic grasp of linux it’s easy to do that in whatever way you want. I don’t know if I personally would be any happier if people took the time to lecture me on safety habits, because I can interpret the command for myself. curl https://some-url/ | sh is terse and to the point, and I know not to take it completely literally.

You should start getting it from CD-roms, that shit you can trust

You have the option of piping it into a file instead, inspecting that file for yourself and then running it, or running it in some sandboxed environment. Ultimately though, if you are downloading software over the internet you have to place a certain amount of trust in the person your downloading the software from. Even if you’re absolutely sure that the download script doesn’t wipe your home directory, you’re going to have to run the program at some point and it could just as easily wipe your home directory at that point instead.

It’s fine to want a gui debugger and I want to clarify that I’m not actually trying to persuade you to use gdb! My actual advice would be vscode (or other ide) with it’s gdb/lldb integration which allows you to debug from your ide in a gui-oriented way.

I do however think that you’re wrong about how hard it is to learn gdb. I learned to use it not that long ago and it doesn’t take “1 month”. Using gdb on a basic level is actually not particularly hard, and I can recommend this talk for anyone actually curious about learning gdb. It’s just 15 minutes, but the same speaker has done a couple of other talks on the same theme that are longer if you want to learn even more, you can probably find them in the recommended videos sidebar.

What I actually think is the case is that learning gdb takes a bit more mental effort because it’s a different paradigm than gui debuggers, and a lot of things aren’t intuitive. If you’re prepared to be a bit uncomfortable and lost for an afternoon, and maybe even flip through the official document for a bit you can be “good enough” at gdb in less than a day.

Gdb is also more powerful than most gui-only editors, because you can do scripting in gdb. For example you can execute an arbitrary series of gdb commands when you hit a certain breakpoint which can be really useful in some circumstances. My preferred way of debugging in linux is actually to both have a gdb window that I can enter commands in so I can do more scripting stuff if I want to, and also some extra bells and whistles for viewing source code and setting breakpoints etc. I edit in vim so I use the termdebug plugin that comes bundled with vim, but use whatever exists for your editor if you don’t use vim yourself.

I like this quote

and just the other day I caught myself wondering who will clean out my Inbox after I’m dead

I think that it’s bad to become too dependent on a certain tool, especially if that tool is owned by microsoft, although in this case your dependent on various microsoft api:s anyway so that’s probably a bigger problem in that regard. Experimenting with programing without Visual Studio is a good idea and will probably teach you lots of things about yourself and microsoft api documentation in this case. If microsoft has built a system that is so impractical that you need visual studio to navigate it, that’s a pretty bad sign for the health of the microsoft ecosystem, but that’s not exactly surprising anyone

Rust allows you to create more powerful abstractions, which can allow you to express your intent in a clearer way. C code can feel like you’re bogged down by details all the time. C is on the other hand a smaller language, so just getting to the point where you “know” the language is a lot easier.