4 ms·

> Vim. Linux. Blender. All of which are famous for having user interfaces/experiences that aren't very intuitive for the newbie. Which is okay, but perhaps dif

> Vim. Linux. Blender. All of which are famous for having user interfaces/experiences that aren't very intuitive for the newbie. Which is okay, but perhaps different segments of the population have different needs and therefore are best served by different software.

skinkestek 5y ago
> Linux To be fair a couple of mainstream distros are far easier to get than Windows or Mac, only people have a lot of previous Windows experience by the time they encounter Linux. These days iPads of course are at a different level, but that wouldn't be a fair comparison. Source: I had a 6 years of power user experience from Windows when I first started using Linux.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >To be fair a couple of mainstream distros are far easier to get than Windows or Mac Until you try to plug in a WiFi Dongle, printer, SD Card reader or pretty much any other piece of hardware that isn't a keyboard or mouse.
  - ginko 5y ago
    Those all mostly work out of the box these days. Even devices that don't get driver support on newer Windows anymore.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      Depends on your definition of "work". I've had issues with every device I listed on Kubuntu 20.04.
      - Jorengarenar 5y ago
        I, on the other hand, had an issue with every type of device you have listed using Windows, but none on Arch Linux. And I can add to the list devices like: an SATA to USB adapter, gamepad (not only DualShock, but also X1 Gamepad [sic!]), external CD-ROM, Wacom tablet With each of them there was an issue on Windows, but on Linux it's Plug-n-Play; heck, even my gaming mouse needed drivers on Windows for all buttons to work, while on Linux noting additional was required
        ginko 5y ago
        A while ago I bought a used Nikon Coolscan negative scanner. The last edition of those came out in around 2004 and the last driver only supports Vista. It came with a PCI Firewire card. My installation process on Arch was installing the card, rebooting plugging everything in and installing SANE. That's it, I could now scan my negatives.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        It's very hardware-specific so it's impossible to generalize, but usually stuff will either work out of the box or not work at all on free systems (Linux, BSD). The exception is if your distro refuses to ship with proprietary software (good!) in which case you need to install extra drivers (eg. firmware-linux) for stuff to work. Something to consider is how old the hardware is. Typically, drivers will land in Linux kernel 1-2 years after hardware is released, so you need to use slightly older hardware and/or a distro which keeps up to date on a rolling-release basis. For example, good luck finding 802.11ax hardware supported by free systems right now: 802.11ac on the other hand (spec from 2013) works perfectly for 90% of chipsets. To be clear if you're not familiar with driver development: this is 100% the fault of crappy hardware manufacturers who are doing everything except their job. Their job is to produce hardware and publish datasheets for them: problem is due to corporate/copyright culture and abuse of dominant position from Microsoft since 90s (see IBM/Microsoft scandals and the threats to dismantle Microsoft), they stopped to publish datasheets and instead publish a crappy windows driver that's full of bugs and will stop working with new releases. We should not be supporting these vampires with our money but hey the problem is the hardware vendors who do distribute their datasheets can be counted on our fingers and their hardware doesn't have the raw power of your latest NVINTELDIARM. Excellent usenix talk on this topic: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-keynote https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke... Previous HN discussion on this topic, about Lenovo more precisely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977175
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Since around 2008 most of the stuff I use have been better supported on mainstream Linux than on Windows. Literal plug and play.
simion314 5y ago
>All of which are famous for having user interfaces/experiences that aren't very intuitive for the newbie. Does any other vim alternative have less features and settings? Notepad is not an alternative. I am not a vim fan but my text editor and my IDE are power user tools and have settings. Linux, probably the OC is referring to the kernel, otherwise GNOME is famous for it idiotic simplicity where you must modify your work to fit the software and not adapt your server to fit your work. Blender , what does Maya (or other alternatives) has less settings and menus? I think you missed the point, pro users are not all identical, working all n the exact same way on the exact same things, your application that targets professional needs to adapt or reject from the start a big part of the user base.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > Does any other vim alternative have less features and settings? As a long-time vim user who doesn't use the power features (except search/replace patterns) i've found micro to be a very decent alternative to vim/nano to teach to people new to CLI land. Select text with shift, save with ^S, quit with ^Q, find with ^F... it's just like windows notepad, but with colors/indentation out of the box. There were also some conversations a few years back in emacs mailing list about the choice of defaults. Some people argued emacs defaults should try to accomodate people who've never used emacs before but are familiar with other key bindings and UI paradigms, because power users will always find how to configure their favorite workflows but newbies will leave if they can't accomplish the most basic tasks without reading a 50 page manual.
  - simion314 5y ago
    You don't need a default war, you hopefully have intelligent enough users so you can show them a popup where they can select a profile that is more comfortable for them. I hated vim so I can't say too much about it, just that I hate when it is set as default on some servers (or some colleague thought is cool to make it default) but I would not attempt to attack the vim project or vim users for their choices, I understand that it is perfect for them and we need hyper-complex-text=editors too, it would be stupid if Notepad users will start writing blogs that say Notepad++. vim and emacs are complex because the developers or users are stupid and are using Notepad wrong. The reason I stopped hating vim is because they added instructions on how to quit it, so I can quit it and rerun my commands with EDITOR=nano in front when vim pops up unexpectedly.

skinkestek 5y ago

> Linux To be fair a couple of mainstream distros are far easier to get than Windows or Mac, only people have a lot of previous Windows experience by the time they encounter Linux. These days iPads of course are at a different level, but that wouldn't be a fair comparison. Source: I had a 6 years of power user experience from Windows when I first started using Linux.

AussieWog93 5y ago
>To be fair a couple of mainstream distros are far easier to get than Windows or Mac Until you try to plug in a WiFi Dongle, printer, SD Card reader or pretty much any other piece of hardware that isn't a keyboard or mouse.
- ginko 5y ago
  Those all mostly work out of the box these days. Even devices that don't get driver support on newer Windows anymore.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Depends on your definition of "work". I've had issues with every device I listed on Kubuntu 20.04.
    - Jorengarenar 5y ago
      I, on the other hand, had an issue with every type of device you have listed using Windows, but none on Arch Linux. And I can add to the list devices like: an SATA to USB adapter, gamepad (not only DualShock, but also X1 Gamepad [sic!]), external CD-ROM, Wacom tablet With each of them there was an issue on Windows, but on Linux it's Plug-n-Play; heck, even my gaming mouse needed drivers on Windows for all buttons to work, while on Linux noting additional was required
      - ginko 5y ago
        A while ago I bought a used Nikon Coolscan negative scanner. The last edition of those came out in around 2004 and the last driver only supports Vista. It came with a PCI Firewire card. My installation process on Arch was installing the card, rebooting plugging everything in and installing SANE. That's it, I could now scan my negatives.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      It's very hardware-specific so it's impossible to generalize, but usually stuff will either work out of the box or not work at all on free systems (Linux, BSD). The exception is if your distro refuses to ship with proprietary software (good!) in which case you need to install extra drivers (eg. firmware-linux) for stuff to work. Something to consider is how old the hardware is. Typically, drivers will land in Linux kernel 1-2 years after hardware is released, so you need to use slightly older hardware and/or a distro which keeps up to date on a rolling-release basis. For example, good luck finding 802.11ax hardware supported by free systems right now: 802.11ac on the other hand (spec from 2013) works perfectly for 90% of chipsets. To be clear if you're not familiar with driver development: this is 100% the fault of crappy hardware manufacturers who are doing everything except their job. Their job is to produce hardware and publish datasheets for them: problem is due to corporate/copyright culture and abuse of dominant position from Microsoft since 90s (see IBM/Microsoft scandals and the threats to dismantle Microsoft), they stopped to publish datasheets and instead publish a crappy windows driver that's full of bugs and will stop working with new releases. We should not be supporting these vampires with our money but hey the problem is the hardware vendors who do distribute their datasheets can be counted on our fingers and their hardware doesn't have the raw power of your latest NVINTELDIARM. Excellent usenix talk on this topic: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-keynote https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke... Previous HN discussion on this topic, about Lenovo more precisely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977175
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Since around 2008 most of the stuff I use have been better supported on mainstream Linux than on Windows. Literal plug and play.

simion314 5y ago

>All of which are famous for having user interfaces/experiences that aren't very intuitive for the newbie. Does any other vim alternative have less features and settings? Notepad is not an alternative. I am not a vim fan but my text editor and my IDE are power user tools and have settings. Linux, probably the OC is referring to the kernel, otherwise GNOME is famous for it idiotic simplicity where you must modify your work to fit the software and not adapt your server to fit your work. Blender , what does Maya (or other alternatives) has less settings and menus? I think you missed the point, pro users are not all identical, working all n the exact same way on the exact same things, your application that targets professional needs to adapt or reject from the start a big part of the user base.

southerntofu 5y ago
> Does any other vim alternative have less features and settings? As a long-time vim user who doesn't use the power features (except search/replace patterns) i've found micro to be a very decent alternative to vim/nano to teach to people new to CLI land. Select text with shift, save with ^S, quit with ^Q, find with ^F... it's just like windows notepad, but with colors/indentation out of the box. There were also some conversations a few years back in emacs mailing list about the choice of defaults. Some people argued emacs defaults should try to accomodate people who've never used emacs before but are familiar with other key bindings and UI paradigms, because power users will always find how to configure their favorite workflows but newbies will leave if they can't accomplish the most basic tasks without reading a 50 page manual.
- simion314 5y ago
  You don't need a default war, you hopefully have intelligent enough users so you can show them a popup where they can select a profile that is more comfortable for them. I hated vim so I can't say too much about it, just that I hate when it is set as default on some servers (or some colleague thought is cool to make it default) but I would not attempt to attack the vim project or vim users for their choices, I understand that it is perfect for them and we need hyper-complex-text=editors too, it would be stupid if Notepad users will start writing blogs that say Notepad++. vim and emacs are complex because the developers or users are stupid and are using Notepad wrong. The reason I stopped hating vim is because they added instructions on how to quit it, so I can quit it and rerun my commands with EDITOR=nano in front when vim pops up unexpectedly.