3 ms·

> They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot. (Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging

by chmln 10y ago

> They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot. (Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging systems, and configurations). How can plaintext configs be confusing for a competent software engineer? On Linux, you can make your OS work for you just the way you like it. Good luck changing anything significant in Apple's walled garden

gkya 10y ago
Plain text configuration comes in a million flavours. The differences in syntax goes from large to subtle, and it's easy to make mistakes and usually hard to debug. Documentation of both syntax and semantics varies wildly in quality. If only there was a convention... Nowadays I'm on a Xubuntu box, and I've managed to have zero system-wide configuration. I've made a metapackage that depends on the software I use---and in the years I've optimised that to be a couple dozen---and installs a package repo for itself. Until recently I was running a FreeBSD box where all the desktop setup was my own (VTWM, dunst, many little programs; I ran Arch for a couple years before that). That's nice, but it becomes a baggage quickly. So many points of failure, and only me to maintain it. Now I'm back on (X)Ubuntu, all I have to do is configuration for my shell, git, mercurial, and then my emacs.d. It isn't even close to how plesurable it was to run BSD or Arch, but the minutiae is tiresome. I'd rather configure as small as possible and focus on my actual work and indispensable tools (Emacs, VCS, shell, in descending order) instead. The usual Unix level of customisations are good on server, but for daily use they're hard. And the configuration files, with the lack of conventions makes it harder (one has to know tens of dialects and languages).
- chmln 10y ago
  > Nowadays I'm on a Xubuntu box, and I've managed to have zero system-wide configuration. That's awesome. In most cases, you don't even need to customize much. I was arguing about the ability to customize that's just not present in OSX and W10. Knowing that you can always change things is liberating. I do believe that people go overboard sometimes, but that's not the fault of plaintext configs at all. I've been running XFCE on Arch with just a handful of visual tweaks for 3 years now. For the most part, everything just works.
72deluxe 10y ago
You can edit plist files that litter the ~/Library directory???

by chmln 10y ago

gkya 10y ago

Plain text configuration comes in a million flavours. The differences in syntax goes from large to subtle, and it's easy to make mistakes and usually hard to debug. Documentation of both syntax and semantics varies wildly in quality. If only there was a convention... Nowadays I'm on a Xubuntu box, and I've managed to have zero system-wide configuration. I've made a metapackage that depends on the software I use---and in the years I've optimised that to be a couple dozen---and installs a package repo for itself. Until recently I was running a FreeBSD box where all the desktop setup was my own (VTWM, dunst, many little programs; I ran Arch for a couple years before that). That's nice, but it becomes a baggage quickly. So many points of failure, and only me to maintain it. Now I'm back on (X)Ubuntu, all I have to do is configuration for my shell, git, mercurial, and then my emacs.d. It isn't even close to how plesurable it was to run BSD or Arch, but the minutiae is tiresome. I'd rather configure as small as possible and focus on my actual work and indispensable tools (Emacs, VCS, shell, in descending order) instead. The usual Unix level of customisations are good on server, but for daily use they're hard. And the configuration files, with the lack of conventions makes it harder (one has to know tens of dialects and languages).

chmln 10y ago
> Nowadays I'm on a Xubuntu box, and I've managed to have zero system-wide configuration. That's awesome. In most cases, you don't even need to customize much. I was arguing about the ability to customize that's just not present in OSX and W10. Knowing that you can always change things is liberating. I do believe that people go overboard sometimes, but that's not the fault of plaintext configs at all. I've been running XFCE on Arch with just a handful of visual tweaks for 3 years now. For the most part, everything just works.

72deluxe 10y ago

You can edit plist files that litter the ~/Library directory???