Author here, I thought I'd respond to a few things.
I tend to write posts on my blog in a particular style. It tends to run towards bombastic, deliberately, for effect. My point with this entire post was more how something simple can unravel into a deep hole, and how, in particular, I hate the way Ubuntu does many, many things. It's not that I hate change: I hate non-obvious change.
I often don't write posts as a systems administrator might approach something (my main complaints about honeycomb, as an example, were more focused on how an average user might interact with it as opposed to, say, me - I was just annoyed), and I tend to like to turn over rocks and see what is underneath. My post serves to relay an experience, rather than plead for help, or whine, if that makes any sense at all.
I should have titled the post better, admittedly. And for the record, I don't hate Ubuntu. Or Unix. Or Linux. I've been using them in various iterations for fifteen years. Try not to read so much into a rant written mostly to amuse a few of my friends.
I guess the root confusion is whether or not you expected the equivalent of echo "foo" > /etc/motd to replace the symlink with a new file containing "foo", or not.
Or if the symlink semantics just weren't something you considered at this point, which lead you to keep hunting.
The post is more about having the reasonable expectation that editing /etc/motd is sufficient to change the motd. It isn't. It's not that I didn't notice it's a symlink, or that I couldn't have just removed the symlink. The issue is more that a reasonable expectation unfolds exponentially into (what I consider to be) a surprising amount of ridiculousness. That is the point of the rabbit hole post.
I tend to write posts on my blog in a particular style. It tends to run towards bombastic, deliberately, for effect. My point with this entire post was more how something simple can unravel into a deep hole, and how, in particular, I hate the way Ubuntu does many, many things. It's not that I hate change: I hate non-obvious change.
I often don't write posts as a systems administrator might approach something (my main complaints about honeycomb, as an example, were more focused on how an average user might interact with it as opposed to, say, me - I was just annoyed), and I tend to like to turn over rocks and see what is underneath. My post serves to relay an experience, rather than plead for help, or whine, if that makes any sense at all.
I should have titled the post better, admittedly. And for the record, I don't hate Ubuntu. Or Unix. Or Linux. I've been using them in various iterations for fifteen years. Try not to read so much into a rant written mostly to amuse a few of my friends.