For the purpose of algorithm verification, the final and/or pushdown automaton or probably sometimes even Turing Machines are used, because they are easier to work with. “Real” regular expressions are only nice to write a grammar for regular languages which can be easily interpreted by the computer I think. The thing is, that regexs in the *nix and programming language world are also used for searching which is why there are additional special characters to indicate things like: “it has to end with …” and there are shortcuts for when you want that a character or sequence occurs

• at least once,
• once or never or
• a specified number of times back to back.

In “standard” regex, you would only have

• () for grouping,
• * for 0 or any number of occurances (so a* means blank or a or aa or …)
• + as combining two characters/groups with exclusive or (in programming, a+ is mostly the same as aa* so this is a difference)
• and sometimes some way to have a shortcut for (a+b+c+…+z) if you want to allow any lower case character as the next one

So there are only 4 characters which have the same expressive power as the extended syntax with the exception of not being able to indicate, that it should occur at the end or beginning of a string/line (which could even be removed if one would have implemented different functions or options for the tools we now have instead)

So one could say that *nix regex is bloated /s

Those not using it are playing with their computers.

What is your definition of playing? I use it to code, access my server for some self-hosted services, do office stuff and sure, also for gaming and watching videos. Am I disallowed to wanting to develop at ease with a minimal setup compared to windows and avoid shit like forced cloud stuff because I am gaming on this os? Isn’t it my choice and compliant to free and open source software to have the freedom to use the OS one has the best experience with?

About the gaming stuff: As I have said, I am just currently converting to wayland, so I don’t know of issues because I haven’t tried linux native games extensively. Wine doesn’t have working wayland support but is still (in my short experience) working with xwayland. Linux native games I will try soon are Cassette Beasts, Stardew Valley and maybe Cross Code at some time, all actually native games.

Why do you think waypipe should be the most important thing? Sure remote graphical sessions are neat but there are only a few people who really need it or not? At least I do not see how this is really that beneficial on linux compared to just basic shell stuff that most people are using when doing something remotely. Maybe it is something that the big businesses are using but then there will probably be a discussion to really add it to the protocol directly (if that is even actually needed, waypipe is a software stack that works (with limitations) with the current protocol; wayvnc for wlroots-based compositors seems to work fine and gnome and weston also implement some kind of RDP)

Also, what do you mean “it is made for gamers who can’t be bothered to stand up for linux native games”? Are there actually that many issues with xwayland for native games until Wayland support is added, just like using the pulseaudio server for pipewire until pipewire is completely supported? I am currently slowly transitioning to wayland so I don’t know if there are actually any so please tell me if it is the case or if I am missing something.

You could also use Void Linux with glibc but install base-minimal instead of base-system when following this guide: https://docs.voidlinux.org/installation/guides/chroot.html They also have a docker image using busybox (the other thing that makes alpine that minimal). So you could have a look at how they setup it and try that yourself. It is not well tested tho, so it’s probably not a good idea for a server.