Let the apologists have a field day in the comments.
*Laughs in CLI.
Also TOML lol
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" } } }Once the file is big enough wouldn’t it be better to convert it to json before editing, then converting it back?
Let the computer deal with indents and all that stuff.
I love this comment. JSON is by far the format that cares the least about being human-readable or -writable, but you’re seriously proposing writing it rather than YAML. And I kind of don’t even really disagree. But a big problem with that strategy is that you won’t find documentation for how to write the configuration in JSON.
I disagree that json is not human writable. JSON is perfectly writable since it has explicit visible separations between elements.
It might look ugly but it’s perfectly readable and writeable.
Granted, I always read json after parsing it with an auto formatter. Maybe that’s why people say that json is difficult to read? It’s true that unformatted json (minified) is way worse than yaml but no one in their right mind would not format the json, specially when it’s natively supported by most code editors.
BTW, about documentation, post formatting json looks very much like a yaml, all yaml docs can be converted to json instructions if you think a little bit.
Oh, that is actually the part I do agree with. I don’t think everyone will, but I do actually think JSON is easier to read and write (correctly) than YAML. I specifically wrote that JSON cares the least about that, because it was designed to just serialize JavaScript objects into strings and back. As far as its original purpose is concerned, no one would ever need to hand-edit JSON. Which is also why it doesn’t support comments (which is still somewhat of a dealbreaker for a configuration language, although I guess for your proposed workaround, one could potentially use a JSON flavor which supports comments; potentially, you can even write your JSON in the YAML file with comments directly and then not convert it, since YAML is a superset of JSON).
As for documentation, yeah, it is possible to convert, but it makes it more annoying, particularly also if you then can’t easily re-use configs in another project. And if you’re working in a team, having to explain to all your team members, how they can convert the official documentation, is also not really acceptable…
Because … well … wait, not a bad idea. Although, this would get rid of comments. Which in my case, I didn’t have too many, so I could have manually added them back.
Is this some peasant meme I am too NixOS to understand?
(Joking, joking. A good system settings center is important for graphically managed distros.)
You get a gui?
dwm gang rise up!
I’ve been using linix for like 18 years and I still prefer GUI over CLI hands down. Make things easy by letting me click on some nicely explained buttons.
“No, honey. We have Linux at home,”
Linux at home:
linix
The janky cobbled-together UIs straight out of 1994 are part of the charm!
*openSUSE enters the chatroom
SUSE/openSUSE are the only ones that have it figured out. It requires a lot of polish, but it’s the only distro that seems to really care about a deeper system configuration through GUI, and that’s really appreciated.
My favourite part of Linux cli is you only know you’ve done something when you get no feedback at all.
Hey man, it’s no surprise the gui people are good at making the gui settings in the gui :P
Sure… Want to fix the stupid new menus in windows 11? Oh it is just a new guid key in the registry in a location you wouldn’t expect. You know just cut and paste shit into the registry you found on the internet. Windows is just as annoying, if not more so.
In any case: what system GUI’s do you want? GUIS make everything so much harder, careful what you wish for.
Does Windows 11 still use the Windows 7 control panel?
No, there’s a couple rogue advanced dialogues but the control panel’s finally been well replaced
rip in peace, control panel. will be missed.
Ehhhh, you can still get in there. Also there are several control panel only functions. It’s been pretty frustrating how they’ve incremented change. I feel like they should have gone menu by menu in control panel and just built their new settings application page by page and then just pushed one big control panel alternative. Then they could phase the old one out or leave it in for legacy users or whatever. But the new settings and how that menu changes every few months is frustrating as hell.
They deprecated that to prevent users from messing with things
12 years ago maybe, plasma made a lot of improvements since then
Can I edit systemd services and bootloader settings somewhere?
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
Systemdgenie is good enough for me, but that’s just me.
reminds me of the one time I tried to configure a proxy on fedora KDE and then realizing most apps don’t even use the inbuilt proxy settings and there are three separate ways to configure it that are only accessable via the terminal and it is pain
I’d just like one standard for all config files. Yaml, json, whatever…let’s just choose something and standardize.
I used to dislike editing text config files but once you have one written you’ve got a template for the future. So long as the documentation is throughly written it’s not too bad to follow.
Linux config in YAML
God no, please spare me
Nix intensifies
What people expect:
✅Fix my box
❎Fuck my shit up
What we would get: System Kernel Interface
🔳 Regex Recursion
🔳 Kernel Language (Internal) [Dropdown: en-us, Dvorak, binary, Klingon, non-binary (Borg analog), Esperanto]
🔳 Ignore LPT on fire
🔳 Memory hole on sysctl
🔳 Mansplain man(8)
Yeah some people seem to have this expectation that there should just magically be a button to unbreak the PC. They talk about their personal pain points when using Linux as if there’s a conspiracy of devs to hide the unbreak buttons for the sake of elitism, but that… just isn’t a thing? If it was that easy to fix an issue, you probably wouldn’t need to fix it because the system would already come unbroken by default. I sympathize with everyone’s Bluetooth configuration woes but mostly it’s a pain in the ass because Bluetooth, in general, is a pain in the ass, not because of elitist devs (who I should mention are doing this in their free time for no pay. There’s almost no money in desktop Linux, unlike in servers).
I expect a Red x
You ever try to put together a GUI? I absolutely get why they look like crap! Although I have been having fun playing around with egui.
Since suggestions in the comments are just words of apologists, do you have a proposal for a solution, or is this just a rant post?
All I’m getting right now is a vague idea of some Master GUI that resembles the cockpit of a commercial jet that no “average user” is ever going to try and decipher, anyway.
do you have a proposal for a solution, or is this just a rant post?
I think this post captures a commonly felt problem whether or not it is still a fair criticism.
