Recursive comments

YAML is good for scripting services (like docker stacks), but otherwise I agree, stop using it for absolutely everything.

Sounds like you’re gonna love nixos

Hey, hey - stop that.

They deprecated that to prevent users from messing with things

No, there’s a couple rogue advanced dialogues but the control panel’s finally been well replaced

I think you just discribed windows I know my head hurts looking at GPOs.

That’s why you put it in 3, with no rhyme or reason for which goes where

Now we got it only in config files where we can’t find anything. Also don’t you put a single wrong character in there, it could break everything.

Well-made GUIs can even prevent disaster by exposing settings in a diggestable way and making sure entries are properly edited. Good UI/UX conveys functionality through form and can be navigated intuitively.

To make settings inaccessible on purpose or even alienate people deemed “too stupid” for them is called Tech Paternalism, and it fucking sucks.

2nd half in uncompiled source code because gentoo

I have no idea what SMIT(ty) is, so I’ll just smile and nod [smiles and nods]

Systemdgenie is good enough for me, but that’s just me.

There really aren’t any simple settings for grub that need a GUI and honestly the systemd service CLI for enabling starting and disabling is pretty damn easy

Calls it stupid take, proceeds to give me most absurd noodle of a commandline for something that could simply be a Enable/Disable button on a device list panel that every idiot with no prior knowledge of Linux, CLI or memorized command could do it. I think proved my point once again.

This, so much.

I genuinely could have said something very similar but in reverse.

I don’t want to use a GUI that does stuff that I don’t understand behind my back. Terminal is simple. You read the man, the output, the return value, etc and you just know what happened.

imhi GUIs are a pita proportionally to how complex what you’re trying to do is.

Everything I know about bash I learned by spending a decade copy-pasting random commands I found online into my terminal.

It’s really that easy. You’ll be sudo apt update-ing with the best of them in no time when you spend a decade copy pasting commands you found on the web to your terminal.

You don’t need to “learn how to program”, whatever the fuck you mean by that, to interface with texting terminal. We’re interfacing via text right now and you seem to do it just fine, you don’t seem to need a selection of colourful boxes to understand what I am saying

This is just not true. The average Windows user never has to open the registry, only devs and tinkerers have to. Neither a shell.

For Windows admins do in 30 minutes and you in 30 seconds takes a normal user either 30 minutes ib Linux or, way too often, 30 hours because the random command in the internet didn’t work, did work but had unforeseen consequences (way worse and way too often) or outright broke their system.

Even KDE lacks settings, and even if they ARE there the community is so god damn “terminalistic” that you’ll barely find the correct answer for the GUI, just a bunch of CLI commands that will age like milk and cause future people who look for help to accidentally break something.

NOBODY should be forced to enter a superuser command they can’t understand to achieve a goal they very well do. The community is still fighting against the users’ ability to open a file browser or text editor as superuser WITHOUT going through the command line. It sucks, and normal users constantly get alienated by the lack of these fundamental things on a system that pretends to give them full control.

Full control it does give; after 2 years of painfully learning the command line and its bells and whistles. And this sucks.

What teo windows admin do in 30 minutes I do in 30 seconds

You know that pretty much everything in Windows can be done with powershell, right? Just a few and very specific things need to be done using older command line tools, or extremely rarely using a GUI.

It’s trivial to write a script that changes the DNS configuration on every server for example. It’s even easy to parallelize it.

You pretty much only need something like this.

$Servers = “server01”, “server02”, “server03”

$Servers | ForEach-Object { Invoke-Command -Computername $_ -Scriptblock { Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceIndex 12 -ServerAddresses (“10.0.0.1”,“10.0.0.2”) }}

I can’t guarantee that it will run, since I wrote it on my phone (hence formatting), but it wouldn’t be far off. You could also do it without pipes using something like ‘foreach $server in $servers’ but that’s harder to type on a phone and I prefer pipes.

kwriteconfig6 is barely documented because you’re not really supposed to use it. All of the settings that users are expected to change are in the nice settings app that Plasma ships with. Using kwriteconfig (or equivalently a dconf editor on GNOME) is like editing the registry on Windows; you are implicitly opting into more power, out of most guardrails and into potential breakage. The UX being a bit questionable (though honestly it’s really not as bad as you’re saying, it does exactly what it sounds like it will do?) is to a degree intentional, because you’re not supposed to be using this unless you know what you are doing.

I keep all the little snippets like that in an org-mode file, and write notes about what I was doing and why, and org-babel can even execute the code right there in the document.

and it’s not even running a terminal!!

This is why GUI exists. So you don’t need to memorize idiotic and long commands.

Portainer is your friend

You’re probably talking about Docker Desktop. It may not be on Linux (or at least your distro or whatever) because it’s not actually FLOSS. If you want to use Docker with a GUI I’ve had success with Rancher Desktop which is made by SUSE and is FLOSS. It’s still Docker (unlike podman which is not technically Docker), but it has a GUI for some stuff too.

I tried installing Docker Desktop at work and realized the license doesn’t actually allow that without paying. It was weirdly difficult to install Docker by itself on Mac so that led me to finding Rancher Desktop.

Yeah, I’ve definitely grown to like TOML, especially after spending hours trying to edit a giant (nested) YAML file…

I didn’t realize the indentation in TOML was purely aesthetic.

This

[servers]
  [servers.alpha]
  ip = "10.0.0.1"
  dc = "eqdc10"

  [servers.beta]
  ip = "10.0.0.2"
  dc = "eqdc10"

equals this

[servers]
[servers.alpha]
ip = "10.0.0.1"
dc = "eqdc10"

[servers.beta]
ip = "10.0.0.2"
dc = "eqdc10"

which equals this

{
  "servers": {
    "alpha": {
      "ip": "10.0.0.1",
      "dc": "eqdc10"
    },
    "beta": {
      "ip": "10.0.0.2",
      "dc": "eqdc10"
    }
  }
}

Oooo… new toy…

Meanwhile i’m using my own silly bash script to symlink all my dotfiles from my repo 🗿