One reason to keep in mind is backwards compatibility and the expectancy that every Linux system has the same basic tools that work the same.

Imagine you have a script running on your server that uses a command with or without specific arguments. If the command (say tar) changes its default parameters this could lead to a lot of nasty side effects from crashes to lost or mangled data. Besides the headache of debugging that, even if you knew about the change beforehand it’s still a lot effort to track down every piece of code that makes use of that command and rewrite it.

That’s why programs and interfaces usually add new options over time but are mostly hesitant to remove old ones. And if they do they’ll usually warn the others beforehand that a feature will deprecate while allowing for a transitional period.

One way to solve this conundrum is to simply introduce new commands that offer new features and a more streamlined approach that can replace the older ones in time. Yet a distribution can still ship the older ones alongside the newer ones just in case they are needed.

Looking at pagers (programs that break up long streams of text into multiple pages that you can read one at a time) as a simple example you’ll find that more is an older pager program while the newer less offers an even better experience (“less is more”, ¿get the joke?). Both come pre-installed as core tools on many distributions. Finally an even more modern alternative is most, another pager with even better functionality, but you’ll need to install that one yourself.

ouch stands for Obvious Unified Compression Helper.

great name

I just use atool (archive tool) instead. It works the same for any common compression format (tar, gzip, zip, 7zip, rar, etc) and comes with handy aliases like apack and aunpack obsoleting the need to memorize options.

Many do as it’s considered good practice, but it’s not guaranteed, it just depends on the individual command (program). Usually you can use the --help option to see all the options, so for instance tar --help.

Open Dyslexic has you covered. It was designed by experts for this purpose.

Interesting. In German typography we used to use lower quotation marks at the beginning of a quote and lower quotation marks at the end of a quote, both in handwriting and print:

„Amazing“

But the lower version isn’t found on the default QWERTZ keyboard layout so in personal digital communication (instant messages, emails, etc) especially you find double upper ones a lot:

“Amazing” or ‘Amazing’

The formal spelling rules haven’t been updated and you may still find the lower-upper vision in professional publications where the software adjusts the quotation marks according to a global setting. But most anything that is typed directly by a user will use the lazy lower-lower version.

Well at least it consistently unlogical. But wait: it actually depends on the grammatical case for example:

die Mädchen = the girls das Haus der Mädchen = the house of the girls // the girls’ house

So depending on context male, female, neutral articles are all used (der Mädchen, die Mädchen, das Mädchen) 🤷‍♂️

Wikipedia confirms, in particular on this page on the expression ye olde.

Also bonus content:

singular: “das Mädchen” (neutral) - the girl

plural: “die Mädchen” (female) - the girls

So in the plural form you have to use a female article again, but the actual spelling of the word is unchanged. Go figure 🤷‍♂️ 🇩🇪.

No idea why lol.

This always confused me, even as a native speaker so I looked it up some. Ultimately it’s because modern German is the confluence of multiple older, historic languages one of which came from a tree with a strict male/female rule for nouns while the other one’s grammar defaulted to a neutral case.

As languages merge or adopt from others they often becomes a conjoined mess of multiple rules coexisting at the same time. A contemporary example is that in English the plural of a word is usually formed by attaching the suffix “s” to the singular form, aka house becomes houses. However there’s plenty of exceptions (mouse, mice) in particular if the words stem from a different language (octopus, octopi but nowadays octotuses is also acceptable). In that sense to people not privy to the etymology of words and who only study/learn the language per se there would be no perfectly accurate mechanism to predict the plural of a word.

related to maid, mädel. confer “maiden” in English

Yean, I hate it too. The difference to selecting text on a desktop system is night and day especially because with a proper mouse you can shift click the desired start and end points and don’t even have to drag.

I’ve found that zooming in generally makes it more precise but that doesn’t help if it means that you now need to scroll the screen because of the zoom. For some reason drag-selecting text upwards also yields better results for me than downwards.

Another trick is to request the desktop version of a page instead of the mobile version and see if it’s easier there.