Add blog article about light on the horizon

blog/linux-users-light-on-horizon.mdwn

@@ -0,0 +1,109 @@
+[[!meta title="Linux, UNIX and FOSS users: there is light on the horizon"]]
+
+Good morning reader. It is Easter Friday, 2018. Great timing for
+writing a blog article in the mountains of Switzerland, next to the
+fire.
+
+## TL;DR
+
+Read the whole thing.
+
+## Introduction
+
+I hope I got your attention and a warm gut feeling already. If you are
+like me, using Linux (or "unix alike" for that matter) for about 20
+years, you have seen a lot of changes.
+
+Some of the changes I observe include:
+
+- Linux getting attention from a much broader audience (developers, users, corporates)
+- Operating system choices have become less important ("people care about higher level stuff")
+- The Free and Open Source movement has lost its traction
+- Linux (stacks) ha(s|ve) become much more complex
+
+In this article, I want to point you, old greybeard, to some hope at
+the end of the tunnel: Devuan
+
+## Devuan
+
+So let's start with a self centric, barefaced advertisement so that you don't
+claim I wrote this article to subconsciously lead you to [[!devuanhosting]]:
+Go to [[!devuanhosting]] and get yourself a Devuan VM, if you like Devuan.
+
+Now, back to the real topic of the post: You might see Devuan as a
+"Debian of the retarted people who don't accept the existence of systemd".
+Fair enough.
+
+However, you should look a bit more closer, even if your opinion is the former.
+Devuan creates a choice. It gives you the choice to run Linux without systemd.
+
+Just for the sake of the argument before, ("people care about high level stuff"),
+it is actually important that this is about an init system at the core of your
+computer. Yes, it is low level. Yes, most people don't care and most people probably
+shouldn't care, because they don't even understand why there is an
+init system, nor why it can be programmed very simple (i.e. compare
+with [[!cinit]]).
+
+What is important here is that a group of **volunteers** spending
+their free time and resource commits themselves to fight for their
+right to have a Linux without systemd.
+
+"Why is that important", you might ask. And the answer is very
+similar: without these people, we would all still be using a DOS based
+operating system with a broken GUI on top of it.
+
+Yes, exactly. If there weren't such volunteers (or even "lateral thinkers")
+before, there would not GNU/Linux distribution for you at all.
+
+## The light at the horizon
+
+So why is there a light? Today I migrated my notebook from Arch Linux
+to Devuan, because
+[systemd crashes my system on suspend](https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/58001).
+
+First of all, I do have the choice to change, because of the great
+work of the Devuan community. But what really opened my eyes, was a
+few things that I had to "manually configure":
+
+Compared to Arch Linux, I needed to install **acpid** and **pm-utils**
+to handle suspending. Furthermore I needed to configure acpid to
+suspend on lid close as follows:
+
+    root@line:/home/nico/Downloads# cat /etc/acpi/events/suspend
+    event=button/lid LID close
+    action=/usr/sbin/pm-suspend
+
+Yes, exactly. It takes 3 commands to install this property of your
+system, it is a very clean separation of concerns and debugging this
+setup is as easy as starting acpid in the foreground and showing the
+events.
+
+While this, as well as the logical naming of devices (eth0, wlan0),
+are just minor things, I see that something changed:
+
+There are again people, who fight for their right to do things "the
+right way".
+
+## Call to action
+
+If you agree to what I read above and you also see the light at the
+horizon, I would like to ask you to be active:
+
+It is not necessary to start developing code to support the Free and
+Open Source Software movement, to support freedom.
+
+For us, it is necessary to be seen and move forward as a community,
+maye it be Linux, BSD or FOSS in general.
+
+So instead of staying abstract like this, I ask you for 2 things:
+
+- Spread the word about this article on IRC, Twitter, or social medium
+  of your choice
+
+- Get yourself a good drink of your choice, sit down and say out
+  aloud: I am supporting freedom of choice and will fight for it.
+
+Thanks for reading, enjoy your time!
+
+
+[[!tag foss unix]]

shortcuts.mdwn

@@ -12,12 +12,14 @@
 * [[!shortcut name=qemu desc="qemu" url="http://www.qemu.org"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=cdist desc="cdist" url="http://www.nico.schottelius.org/software/cdist/"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=cinv desc="cinv" url="http://www.nico.schottelius.org/software/cinv/"]]
+* [[!shortcut name=cinv desc="cinit" url="https://www.nico.schottelius.org/software/cinit/"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=monit desc="monit" url="http://mmonit.com/monit/"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=uml desc="User-mode linux" url="http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=kiss desc="Kiss principle" url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=dhcp desc="DHCP" url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHCP"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=dns desc="DNS" url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=git desc="git" url="http://git-scm.com/"]]
+* [[!shortcut name=devuanhosting desc="Devuanhosting.com" url="https://devuanhosting.com"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=foss desc="FOSS" url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_Open_Source_Software"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=cdistexamples desc="cdist examples" url="https://github.com/ungleich/cdist-examples"]]
 * [[!shortcut name=unixphilosophy desc="UNIX philosophy" url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy"]]