Exactly. I've got 200 lbs of vinyl in a box that still plays when the Internet is down and never sees a title removed from the collection.

Anything you do not physically control or locally install can be taken from you on the merest of whims and you are a fool to trust it. Control everything locally. And, even better, use only FOSS.

My personal philosophy is just to avoid web development. It is inherently Frankenstein endeavor and can never be otherwise. We only trade bolts for better sutures.

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But teh terminal supports emojis! This brings so much value to the user. It's clear why it took Microsoft so many years to get this new console ready for us.

No. Each computer manufactured is individually programmed forever and permanently by dedicated coders.

COBOL?

When I first passed into the "seasoned programmer" realm (first learned assembly programming for the Z80 under CP/M) I kind of informally assumed each new advancement was building a "common body of knowledge" that all who practiced my profession would "just know." It's a saddening process as you really start realizing just how many clever solutions & techniques devised by brilliant minds are racing into forgotten obscurity because some piece of hardware to which they applied became obsolete before these new morons were even born. Then I realize the PDP-11 wizards probably saw me the same way when I'd waste 3 clock cycles with an 'LD A,0' instead of just using an 'XOR A'.

There are no dumb questions, though there remains the potential to be facing an inquisitive idiot.

I ditched the Microsoft world as Win95 debuted and was an OS/2 Warp (Blue Spline) die-hard until moving to Linux in '97. There was a tremendous language & tool set available through the Hobbes ftp site (or Walnut Creek CD-ROM sets for non-connected folks like me). That's where I first encountered vim, which I thought was already pretty mature at the time.

I still regard Warp as probably the best single-user OS that ever existed. Rock-friggin-solid multitasking and I still miss the session-management functionality of the Workplace Shell. Hard to fathom that no one's replicated it on a modern Linux desktop.

Gonna go reminisce about my 35 installation floppies now...

Something worth understanding, especially if you're coming from a Windows environment, is that file extensions on Linux are historically meaningless and served mostly as conveniences and conventions for the human. Unix application file types were traditionally identified internal to the file by means of a "magic header". Read up on the 'file' command and how it identifies files. The Windows-ish notion of file extensions crept in to common Unix usage as an outgrowth of the Internet and the platform-agnostic proliferation of MIME types and a desire to define "automatic handlers" for different kinds of files in various applicational contexts (e.g., display a picture in an e-mail reader). This handler definition in many newcomer's minds represents the "is a tar file" concept. Tar itself doesn't give a rat's ass what the file extension is -- "somearchive.important" would be a perfectly valid filename from tar's perspective, although common sense makes it easier on the human if you tack a ".tar" on the end of it so you can find the file when you go looking.

They're meaningful but they're not meaningful. As much of the meaning in the Linux world comes from convention as from any requirement. Given your example of compressed tar files you're just as likely to see tar.gz, tar.gzip, or tgz -- whatever was convenient and concise for whomever named the file. When in doubt as to what something is, type 'file foo.what.ever" and the file command will tell you what you're looking at. Tar will try and process whatever you feed it.

In a similar notion, there is no bullshit .EXE, .BAT, or .CMD. A file is denoted as executable by a filesystem permissions bit. If a file is binary the active shell will attempt to execute it directly. If it's a text file (a script), the first line of the script traditionally denotes the necessary interpreter to use via a #!/path/to/interpreter syntax. The conventions of tacking a .sh, .zsh, .ksh, .perl, or whatever onto the script name are purely a matter of human convenience and communication.

Regarding default tar behaviors, yes many Unix-family commands have default behaviors that may not immediately seem optimal. It will help to understand this when you understand the Unix philosophy of spartan utility and "Ok, boss, whatever you say." Unix does not try to hold your hand and almost never assumes. It does what you tell it and expects you to be clear and unambiguous. You will eventually find this refreshing and empowering and be infuriated by braindead, hand-holding like you are forced to suffer in Windows (like the "Ultimate Professional" version of Windoze repeatedly warning you every damn time you rename a file "If you change a file name extension, the file might become unusable. Are you sure you want to change it?" -- FUCK YES you retarded crapsack of shit toy OS, I know what the hell I am doing!)

Welcome to a better world.

Perl works great for many, many tasks. Older .NE. bad, Newer .NE. Inherently Better. Learn both, use whichever seems to be the best fit for a given task.

Meh. There are obviously folks who like Gnome but I've personally found it to be ugly, frequented by useless oddities, and overly restrictive (as in "lack of configurability to do what you really want it to do"). I loathe having to work on customer RHEL boxes. KDE rocks. So do a dozen other desktops. But not Gnome.

Ha! Plex is pretty decent, I have to admit. Been running it for about a year now and have been quite the hero to the wife and kids when weather has knocked out connectivity to Netflix.

I wish I could give you a thousand upvotes for that. Nothing is free. If the tool is free then something is being harvested and sold -- information about you, metrics about what or how you work, and certainly source code is not beyond consideration.

On another tangent, beyond a good search engine and discussion forum, I dislike any online dependency in my workflow. I even dislike software downloads and installs from the Internet. Yes, I'm a self-contradicting Linux and Android guy and can't imagine life now without such but I still don't like it. There's something reassuring about knowing that you've got everything you need self-contained or in a box of discs to be able to pursue your coding without being dependent on a resource or tool that's so easy to lose access to.