Yep. You can download/verify that script by hand, or hit the endpoints yourself. They just run stuff to provision your user and files and add you to our LDAP directory.
There /is/ a modern, well-managed open-registration shell and IRC service, similar to what you're talking about, called Hashbang. You can join via https://hashbang.sh.
We're reasonably active, and we have almost 1400 registered users [edited: i was corrected by a hashbang admin as to the amount].
The ultimate purpose of hashbang is to expose more users to a traditional remote UNIX server and command line, as well as teaching people how to use it.
We've created a slight barrier to entry with the intentionally obtuse signup flow, as we don't want completely non-technical users flooding the service.
Exactly. I see so many people complaining about the Linux kernel SLOC versus other kernels; it's an unfair comparison because no other modern kernel I know of has such a wide selection of in-tree drivers.
For instance, when I install Windows on a computer, I will often have to install additional chipset drivers (odd USB3.0 controller, motherboard chipset stuff, fan control).
When I install Linux, all of that stuff works out of the box, no drivers necessary: it's rolled right into the kernel.
Making modifying stuff a felony still just slows down peoples' efforts, unless there's a reliable way of enforcing it, which is... not really possible.
It may be retired, but Sparkfun still sells it[1].
If you're looking for other faster microcontrollers with Arduino toolchain support, there's a bunch of stuff out there. See the Wikipedia page on non-atmega Arduino-supported boards: [2].
Additionally, if you're willing to learn how to use the ARM CMSIS HAL and write raw C++, there's the STM32 series of microcontrollers. Those also support Mbed, if you want to learn that instead (it's much easier than using CMSIS with C++, it's basically the equivalent of arduino for many 32-bit ARM microcontrollers).
The reason someone serious about embedded development would want to buy Arduino boards is that they're convenient Atmel-architecture microcontroller boards.
The ESP8266 may be "arduino compatible", but a large number of those Arduino libraries running on it had to be rewritten.
If you want convenience and ISA/peripheral-register compatibility with existing low-level Arduino code, you're locked in to atmegas unless you want to do some fun porting work ;)
Yeah, I'd love to get the new Razer[0] that came out this year, but unfortunately they went the way of "thunderbolt3.0 all the things" which is... not going to work with Linux. At all :(
Yeah, I can get that. When I was working with SDCC, I really would have preferred GCC or clang - SDCC has some funky quirks that really pissed me off and introduced some weird bugs.
And yeah, AVR8 (and IIRC 16 and 32) have GCC toolchains as well as avr-llvm, which is pretty sweet.