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Comment by kantapproves | Hacker News Reader

Surprise, surprise. Let me be the contrarian: I dislike this attitude of dumbing everything down just because some people can't be bothered to learn how and why their tools work the way they do. They'll invoke "2024" like it means something. Not a great look IMO.

The output of df and mount shows the truth as it is: raw and shitty. Don't dumb it down. Your version of usability might be my idea of a nightmare. I like the raw truth, ugly as it is. If I or anybody needs a `tiktok-disk-usage --fancy` we'll conjure one up. Are we tech or what?

It is exceedingly easy to filter the output of said tools. Nothing to do with money or incentives. It is a completely solved "problem" for the people that need it and are capable of "solving" it. Maybe you should opt for a "desktop environment" that "manages" your stuff so you can have a nice set of disk percentage indicators? I hear good things about "Windows".

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The problem is the raw shitty truth. Not that it isn't hidden, but the mess that it shows.

The underlying reason for this mess is that several popular tools, especially in the systemd and containerization-adjacent space, are built on a bunch of non-standardized userspace hacks (e.g. per-process tmpfs chroot jails) that pollute the mount table of the host system. That is the trainwreck.

I agree. The trainwreck is systemd and Linux in general, but not df and mount.

Why should the default of the tool be totally unintelligble useless (for 90% of single usages) rubbish? You can have your raw truth - strange way of putting it, its a tool, this is not a detective drama - it would be a more useful tool for the average use-case if this was a flag though (or some other option). We can't handle the truth!

It is not unintelligible, it is exceedingly simple. If you are not knowledgeable about your system at this level, then sure, it is quite chaotic. But that’s a different problem and why are you at this level anyway?

Also, a substantial amount of this problem is just systemd. Don’t shit on df, which looks fine on, say, BSD.

This is not for the “average user” IMO.

You like a design which spits out a wall of text, 90% of which is useless. And wrap it up with the idea that you're a high IQ superuser for reading through that crap. I'm just someone who wants to use a tool, so I'm not amazed and impressed with myself for being very clever when the tool drools all over my monitor.

> Don't dumb it down

Where was that demanded?

> It is exceedingly easy to filter the output of said tools.

This is provably false. Consider the content of Linux file systems. There is no one tool to simultaneously observe conventional POSIX properties, ACLs, capability attributes, selinux properties, AppArmor references, etc., to which you might apply a filter. So you have to repeatedly create your own, half-baked, inefficient, throw-away correlation tools on the fly in what little time you can spare.

Why? These features didn't appear last week. Most are older than a lot of people coping with this stuff. I answer that question here[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41288842

“this results in programs like df. or mount.”

This implies both tools need to adjust to reality - aka systemd bs - to make it easier for the user. Also known as dumbing down. I concede it is not explicitly requested, but it’s not that much of a reach TBH.

It is provably true that the output of df and mount is exceedingly easy to filter. You don’t even need tools to do it.

I don’t care about AppArmor and other BS because I am not on Linux. Those weren’t part of the discussion anyway. It is about mount and df and the author explicitly called them out for failure to be “easy”.

I feel like you missed the point of the article. As this

> The output of df and mount shows the truth as it is: raw and shitty.

Is pretty much the point they are making about Trainwreck Design. They are using their output of df as a talking point to illustrate the issue.

Maybe. But they explicitly mention: “this results in programs like df. or mount.”

If you want to call out design shit then just call it what it is: systemd. Leave df out of it, the poor fellow. Mount also has nothing to do with it.

Well, someone needs to stand up for those poor applications, might as well be you ;)

I still think it means you are missing the overall point of the author thoughts by focussing so heavily on them using df as an example.

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