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Reading this from an Arch Linux machine with everything configured to my liking from the system initialisation to package management to window management to ter

Reading this from an Arch Linux machine with everything configured to my liking from the system initialisation to package management to window management to terminal emulators feels very strange. Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to? The problem is probably: "Googling for some obscure mail archive to find I need to change “bop” to “boop” in /etc/something/config.ini. The amount of time that I had to spend doing this crap was growing instead of shrinking." If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system. On the other hand, not everyone wants to read man pages, they'd rather something that "just works"... which Mac does way better than Ubuntu, unsurprisingly.

riobard 14y ago
“If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system.” That's a very big “if”. The author said “I was tired of spending time on my computer working on my operating system instead of working on my projects.”
- pilgrim689 14y ago
  I think he could have taken the time he wasted Googling for duct-tape solutions and used it to read deeper documentation. Then, he wouldn't be so tired. Nonetheless, he wanted something that just worked, which Ubuntu didn't; so the take-away from all this is that Ubuntu is just not such a "consumer friendly" distribution after all. Linux is Linux... it has its roots in a community of hackers that build for hackers... it's hard to escape that ><
  - Gotttzsche 14y ago
    it's not like it's a good thing for hackers if their OS doesn't "just work".
    - pilgrim689 14y ago
      Of course it's not a good thing... If you want to hack on your system only to find out that it's all been prepackaged and filled with bells and whistles that can't be removed, there ain't much hacking you can do!
      - stcredzero 14y ago
        Sometimes, one wants to hack on other than the system.
        pilgrim689 14y ago
        I'm not sure who you're addressing, because I never argued against that... in my original comment: "[some people] rather something that "just works""
andybak 14y ago
There are many reasons I'd love to be using a Gnu/Linux system over a Mac but I fiercely, passionately and vehemently don't want to be reading man pages and editing config files to get my damn hardware to work. Too old for that shit.
lumberjack 14y ago
Ubuntu Docs: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WiFiHowTo https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WiFiHowTo Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless_Setup https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless_Setup I don't know about others but for me one of the above is clearly superior and really the biggest reason for it being my OS of choice.
- bendmorris 14y ago
  Agreed. I had heard so many stories of Arch being only for experts, difficult to figure out, having to do everything yourself, etc. Then I discovered the Arch wiki and tried it out for myself. The documentation is incredible. Even my specific brand of laptop has its own page with a few common hardware issues and steps to resolve them. Ubuntu's supposed to "just work," but when it doesn't, you're screwed. Arch "just works" because a very knowledgeable community has probably been through what you're going through and took the time to write down what worked.
  - celerity 14y ago
    Eh, it is so easy to forget to set something up on Arch and scratch your head all the time to figure out what it was. Things that start working on Ubuntu fail rarely.
- celerity 14y ago
  Arch Wiki is the best! I use it to set up stuff on my Ubuntu computer, sometimes. The thing is, Ubuntu already does most of the stuff from the Arch Wiki automatically.
pjmlp 14y ago
> If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system. I was doing this back in 1994-1999, while I was a single geek guy with lots of free time at the university. Nowadays I have better things to do with my life. Either a distribution works out of the box in a given hardware or it lands in the dustbin.
danieldk 14y ago
I was a Slackware and BSD user from 1994 to ~2007 (with some Libranet and CentOS in between). I knew Slackware and NetBSD inside out[1]. Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to? For me, I just did not have the time anymore. I was fed up with getting audio to behave consistently, compiling libdvdcss after every upgrade to be able to play DVDs, the Word and PowerPoint that people sent me and came out misformatted, overhauls of desktop environments, rewritten device management infrastructure (hotplug / devd -> udev), hand-mounting of encrypted disk images because it was broken in the desktop environment again and the list goes on and on. I decided that my time was worth more than the 499 Euro for a Mac Mini (in 2007) and I never really looked back. [1] I wrote this book: http://rlworkman.net/howtos/slackbasics.pdf http://rlworkman.net/howtos/slackbasics.pdf
- autotravis 14y ago
  This is where I'm at now. I love Linux distros for servers, but I've been essentially fighting with desktop versions of Ubuntu/#!/Mint/etc for 4 years and I'm tired of it. It was fun, but it's no longer fun and I want my computer to get out of my way and let me get stuff done.
zhobbs 14y ago
I loved Arch, but I recently bought my Mac after USB keyboards and mice stopped working on my arch box after a `pacman -syu`. I spent a week trying to figure it out, essentially putting me a week behind on the project I was working on. Decided that it'd just be cheaper to get a Mac. :(
espadrine 14y ago
I keep using Linux because it has a real file system, fails less often, and feels faster (maybe because of a better scheduler), but the blog writer has a point. Documentation on Linux is sparse and incomplete. You talk about man pages: more often than not, I am looking for some feature and cannot find it in the man page. At the end, though, I see the following: > The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. Guess what? The feature was in the info page. And that's when things are good, because sometimes the info page doesn't exist. Since each component has its own conceptual model (and config file format), configuring one system gives you little information about how you would go about configuring another system. You often end up with contradicting config instructions in different files, and knowing which takes precedence is impossible, unless you are the developer (and even then…) As a result, you can't just sit down and learn everything, even if the documentation was there. You can't drink the ocean: it never ends. All of that would not be an issue at all if we had a way to automate the annoying parts: - A way to search through all configuration files, a way to search through all documentation on all systems. (I can't believe that Googling it is usually better than searching through installed documentation!) - A better package management than dpkg / apt. This system gets old fast. Conflict resolution is awkward, big updates can break things. Projects such as Nix and its spiritual successor Guix make me hopeful, but will it ever displace the elephant in the room? It's particularly painful to watch from my node.js background. Never had a single issue with npm. Apple's OS is lacking on both front (and the author will soon realize that, at least once he installs Homebrew and fiddles with BSD's lesser set of tools). The only praise I can make is its standardized plist configuration system, which is awkward to use and which most cross-platform programs ignore anyway. However, Apple feels better because its defaults are amazing. For instance, I tried to install NVIDIA's proprietary drivers today, because Nouveau only goes so far. Installing it was easy; debugging it was so hard that switching back to a lower standard (Nouveau) was the best option. Apple has the better option in by default.
wglb 14y ago
Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to? When there are literally hundreds of buttons available to press or adjust to tune Unity or Gnome, that exceeds my threshold.

riobard 14y ago

“If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system.” That's a very big “if”. The author said “I was tired of spending time on my computer working on my operating system instead of working on my projects.”

pilgrim689 14y ago
I think he could have taken the time he wasted Googling for duct-tape solutions and used it to read deeper documentation. Then, he wouldn't be so tired. Nonetheless, he wanted something that just worked, which Ubuntu didn't; so the take-away from all this is that Ubuntu is just not such a "consumer friendly" distribution after all. Linux is Linux... it has its roots in a community of hackers that build for hackers... it's hard to escape that ><
- Gotttzsche 14y ago
  it's not like it's a good thing for hackers if their OS doesn't "just work".
  - pilgrim689 14y ago
    Of course it's not a good thing... If you want to hack on your system only to find out that it's all been prepackaged and filled with bells and whistles that can't be removed, there ain't much hacking you can do!
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      Sometimes, one wants to hack on other than the system.
      - pilgrim689 14y ago
        I'm not sure who you're addressing, because I never argued against that... in my original comment: "[some people] rather something that "just works""

andybak 14y ago

There are many reasons I'd love to be using a Gnu/Linux system over a Mac but I fiercely, passionately and vehemently don't want to be reading man pages and editing config files to get my damn hardware to work. Too old for that shit.

lumberjack 14y ago

Ubuntu Docs: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WiFiHowTo https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WiFiHowTo Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless_Setup https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless_Setup I don't know about others but for me one of the above is clearly superior and really the biggest reason for it being my OS of choice.

bendmorris 14y ago
Agreed. I had heard so many stories of Arch being only for experts, difficult to figure out, having to do everything yourself, etc. Then I discovered the Arch wiki and tried it out for myself. The documentation is incredible. Even my specific brand of laptop has its own page with a few common hardware issues and steps to resolve them. Ubuntu's supposed to "just work," but when it doesn't, you're screwed. Arch "just works" because a very knowledgeable community has probably been through what you're going through and took the time to write down what worked.
- celerity 14y ago
  Eh, it is so easy to forget to set something up on Arch and scratch your head all the time to figure out what it was. Things that start working on Ubuntu fail rarely.
celerity 14y ago
Arch Wiki is the best! I use it to set up stuff on my Ubuntu computer, sometimes. The thing is, Ubuntu already does most of the stuff from the Arch Wiki automatically.

pjmlp 14y ago

> If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system. I was doing this back in 1994-1999, while I was a single geek guy with lots of free time at the university. Nowadays I have better things to do with my life. Either a distribution works out of the box in a given hardware or it lands in the dustbin.

danieldk 14y ago

I was a Slackware and BSD user from 1994 to ~2007 (with some Libranet and CentOS in between). I knew Slackware and NetBSD inside out[1]. Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to? For me, I just did not have the time anymore. I was fed up with getting audio to behave consistently, compiling libdvdcss after every upgrade to be able to play DVDs, the Word and PowerPoint that people sent me and came out misformatted, overhauls of desktop environments, rewritten device management infrastructure (hotplug / devd -> udev), hand-mounting of encrypted disk images because it was broken in the desktop environment again and the list goes on and on. I decided that my time was worth more than the 499 Euro for a Mac Mini (in 2007) and I never really looked back. [1] I wrote this book: http://rlworkman.net/howtos/slackbasics.pdf http://rlworkman.net/howtos/slackbasics.pdf

autotravis 14y ago
This is where I'm at now. I love Linux distros for servers, but I've been essentially fighting with desktop versions of Ubuntu/#!/Mint/etc for 4 years and I'm tired of it. It was fun, but it's no longer fun and I want my computer to get out of my way and let me get stuff done.

zhobbs 14y ago

I loved Arch, but I recently bought my Mac after USB keyboards and mice stopped working on my arch box after a `pacman -syu`. I spent a week trying to figure it out, essentially putting me a week behind on the project I was working on. Decided that it'd just be cheaper to get a Mac. :(

espadrine 14y ago

I keep using Linux because it has a real file system, fails less often, and feels faster (maybe because of a better scheduler), but the blog writer has a point. Documentation on Linux is sparse and incomplete. You talk about man pages: more often than not, I am looking for some feature and cannot find it in the man page. At the end, though, I see the following: > The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. Guess what? The feature was in the info page. And that's when things are good, because sometimes the info page doesn't exist. Since each component has its own conceptual model (and config file format), configuring one system gives you little information about how you would go about configuring another system. You often end up with contradicting config instructions in different files, and knowing which takes precedence is impossible, unless you are the developer (and even then…) As a result, you can't just sit down and learn everything, even if the documentation was there. You can't drink the ocean: it never ends. All of that would not be an issue at all if we had a way to automate the annoying parts: - A way to search through all configuration files, a way to search through all documentation on all systems. (I can't believe that Googling it is usually better than searching through installed documentation!) - A better package management than dpkg / apt. This system gets old fast. Conflict resolution is awkward, big updates can break things. Projects such as Nix and its spiritual successor Guix make me hopeful, but will it ever displace the elephant in the room? It's particularly painful to watch from my node.js background. Never had a single issue with npm. Apple's OS is lacking on both front (and the author will soon realize that, at least once he installs Homebrew and fiddles with BSD's lesser set of tools). The only praise I can make is its standardized plist configuration system, which is awkward to use and which most cross-platform programs ignore anyway. However, Apple feels better because its defaults are amazing. For instance, I tried to install NVIDIA's proprietary drivers today, because Nouveau only goes so far. Installing it was easy; debugging it was so hard that switching back to a lower standard (Nouveau) was the best option. Apple has the better option in by default.

wglb 14y ago

Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to? When there are literally hundreds of buttons available to press or adjust to tune Unity or Gnome, that exceeds my threshold.