Comment by maxhille
10 months ago
I prefer config files a lot to settings GUIs. Two most important points that come to mind:
1. I can manage them in Git 2. GUIs change all the time. With configs you have a much higher probability that some solution you googled will still work even when it is a couple of years old.
But GUIs show you all available options without having to read the docs. They only change when you install updates. You can simply not install updates that you don't like.
Linux fanboys are completely delusional, if we listened to them, we would design an airliner cockpit with a keyboard and a single display to run a terminal and input everything as commands.
They have just invested too much of their ego into knowing the arcane commands (and typing them well and fast) when it doesn't have much value, so they try to get dividends on that poor investment any way they can.
There is no reason to not make a proper GUI for pretty much everything, unless the devs are lazy or trying to save time/money.
> There is no reason to not make a proper GUI for pretty much everything
Until you realize there are like 10 competing "standards" for settings, from config files in various incompatible formats in random places (not even obeying the XDG standard paths), to GSettings which is a Windows registry knockoff (and I bet KDE has its own - incompatible - equivalent), etc.
And don't you dare try to centralize all that into a common system - last time someone tried something similar by centralizing system service management with systemd, people lost their shit. Orders of magnitude more effort has been wasted ranting and arguing about it than fixing its issues (if they were real in the first place, and not just theoretical or outright made up).
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I mean I know how to use a unix system through the terminal, it's a basic skill for a software engineer, but I'm not enjoying any of that. Most CLI software is ridiculously user-hostile too. Oh you don't remember whether it's "update" or "upgrade"? Or which order the parameters need to be? Or whether it's one dash or two? Well fuck you, go read some manuals and come back when you're ready.
And it's not just discoverability. A well-designed GUI is impossible to get into an invalid state. A CLI, on the other hand, offers infinite possibilities for invalid commands.
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