Comment by nativeit

1 year ago

Fully this. For all its foibles, Linux was built to never presume too much, and its users tend to be power users who will almost certainly have dotfiles to tune their systems to their needs. In the context of making choices that will necessarily be universal, I admire how thoughtfully most standard Linux packages have been designed to never interfere with the users’ intentions.

Making things customizable doesn't mean the defaults should be useless. zsh, tmux, emacs, vim and bash, out of the box, for instance, have both pretty nice defaults and are highly customizable.

I know it's hard to make things like this but let's do it anyway.

And to all the linux noobies[0], you'll be a hell of a lot more efficient if you learn the philosophy of the design early. It will make it so that you can learn a new command and instantly know how to use several options. It will dramatically reduce the number of things you have to learn. I also HIGHLY suggest learning a bit of bash scripting.

Take a look at the manual

  https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/index.html

and bookmark "Bash Pitfalls"

  https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls

Live in the terminal as much as you can. It is harder at first, but you will get huge boosts in productivity quicker than you would know it (easily <2 weeks). It sucks doing things "the hard way" but sometimes that comes with extra lessons. The thing is, those extra lessons are the real value.

[0] no matter how many years you've been using it there's no shame in being a noobie