HN user
Freelance software developer. Living in Czech republic, Prague. Free software enthusiast. a.k.a. Frantovo.cz
I agree that spaces, quotes, encodings, line-ends etc. are problem, but this is not problem of „the pipeline model“ – this is problem of ambiguously-structured data. See https://relational-pipes.globalcode.info/v_0/classic-example...
Unix is seriously cool and I consider myself still young :-) But it could be better. See https://relational-pipes.globalcode.info/
If it is too long for you, some key points:
- free software
- support decentralized internet: „Users must not be pushed to register at a proprietary social networks resp. at particular providers of such services. Users without such account must not be disadvantaged – use open and decentralized networks/protocols instead.“
- do not mix software engineering with irrelevant political topics: „in order to contribute, it must not be required: to sign any political, religious or other proclamation or agree with it“
Rest of the Manifest is mostly related to quality and security issues.
It is your problem – if you don't like Java, just don't use it, that's all. For many other people Java/JDK is very useful tool for creating the software and building systems.
I personally don't like too much Java desktop applications, I prefer native UI based on Qt/KDE or GTK. But for server-side and command line, Java is perfect language and platform.
I live in CZ, so I use this one, it is quite OK here. Also in DE is active free software community, so they might help you if some problems occur. Maybe RU or CN could serve good (if you don't fight against their governments, of course), but I don't have personal experience with these TLDs.
Rent a VPS in some democratic country. Run your postfix, dovecot, SOGo or RoundCube, for chat use ejabberd or other XMPP server, use owncloud or other similar piece of software. Or there are preconfigured GNU/Linux distributions which give you these features out of the box (but I usually configure these packages myself).
Ad TLD: there are many national TLDs, grab any, but choose carefully the company where you register it (someone outside USA).