Give Clojure a go.
It's a modern variant of lisp that runs on the JVM and has deep interoperability with Java, so you can leverage your existing knowledge of Java libraries.
But as it's a lisp, it will have you thinking about problems in a very different way.
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Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
Nothing there saying it's specifically for Linux News.
That all seems ... incredibly complicated.
Why not use fwupd? (link is the Arch wiki but should be relevant for any distro). I've been using fwupd to keep my Dell XPS15 BIOS updated for the last few years, with no problems at all.
I'm not sure why Docker would be a particularly good (or particularly bad) fit for the scenario you're referring to.
If you're suggesting that Docker could make it easy to transfer a system onto a new SD card if one fails, then yes that's true ... to a degree. You'd still need to have taken a backup of the system BEFORE the card failed, and if you're making regular backups then to be honest it will make little difference if you've containerised the system or not, you'll still need to restore it onto a new SD card / clean OS. That might be a simpler process with a Docker app but it very much depends on which app and how it's been set up.
It's not a numbers game. "They killed one of our children" does NOT make it OK for us to kill one of their children.
systemd [is] a niche
Maybe in the wider world of all the operating systems installed on all the computers, but for Linux-based computing it is, like it or not, near ubiquitous these days. And in particular for server systems (and this is, after all, /m/selfhosted), good luck finding something that isn't systemd-based unless you're deliberately choosing a BSD or aiming for a system which has ever-decreasing amounts of support available.
what if I'm not using CoreOS?
Podman runs on any distro (or more strictly: any distro that uses systemd). It's essentially a FOSS alternative to Docker.
Your photo makes me feel a little bit unwell. Sorry.
GRUB (or any other bootloader) doesn't care about and in fact doesn't even know about X, Wayland, or any other userland GUI system.
There is a long abandoned (but it still runs) project called eDEX-UI (https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui) which basically provides a working, useable terminal surrounded by all sorts of the crap visual appearance of hacker terminals in the movies. Pair that with a terminal editor and you've almost got a movie IDE!
It's kinda fun for a while although I'd be amazed if anyone actually used it as their main terminal emulator program. But you could.
It's not a perfect analogy, but a good way to think about it if you're not a programmer is to say "why do we need recipes when we can just buy a product in the store and read the ingredients list".
Just because you know the ingredients, that doesn't mean you know how to put them together in the right order, in the right quantities, and using the correct processes to recreate the finished product.
Without a published POC there's a slightly longer window before clueless script kiddies start having a go at exploiting the vulnerability, though.