2mo ago

Just edit the config file, so easy!

Let the apologists have a field day in the comments.

179 comments

It's why I'm so furious about Linux in general and how every god damn intent to change almost any setting begins with "open Terminal...". I don't want to use the damn Terminal. It's 2025 now, put the god damn basic ass settings into control panel so I can click it without first spending half an hour to find a long noodle of commands for Terminal that I don't even understand, paste it in and hope for the best.
Like, I had issues with Bluetooth module in my laptop and I wanted it disabled so my BT USB dongle is main. In Windows I'd just go to Device manager and disable that device. Done. On Linux I spent hours diging on how to disable BT module and weed out all the bullshit on how to disable the function itself because I need it, just not from the fauly module. Then I spent asking on Reddit where someone finally posted a working Terminal command that I had to save into config file using Terminal because file manager is to stupid to save it into system area by just asking me if I want it there or not. I now have a folder with config file and instructions on what stupid ass copy command for Terminal I need to use to copy the config file where it needs to be.
Just so much unnecessary bullshit for something that could be done in literal 5 clicks at worst if the damn option was in GUI to disable single device on the system. Also fun fact, Linux has a "wireless devices" tool, command line one and it uses device ID to apply it and the fucking ID changes every time for the device so you can't make a permanent setting. I kid you not. I've never seen anything more idiotic.
- How ungrateful! Do it yourself? It only takes learning how to program. Thats like... a 45 minutes search. 80 if you want to learn how to program an OS from scratch.
  
  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.
  
  And, in the meantime, you'll only destroy your OS maybe a few dozen times!
  
  True story - I keep blank audio CDs around because my cars have CD players. The fact that I still burn CDs is another story, but Debian is still small enough to fit on a CD-ROM. So I keep a backup of Debian 12 on a CD-ROM so I don't have to lose a flash drive to that task. Very convenient. And I've broken my system a few times tinkering. I'm not even sure how. But hey, I love to go fast and break things. I probably made an edit to a file long ago and forgot about it and now it borked stuff. It happens.
  At this stage, I've got it down pretty good. If I break my OS, I can plop in my boot CD, use rescue mode to back my home folder up to a flash drive and wipe the system. I keep lots of other things on extra HDDs so all I ever wipe is my boot SSD. I have an Nvidia GPU so before I log in for the first time, I just get back into rescue mode and set up my root password, user account and password, reclaim my home folder, change ownership to the new account, set up fstab, and install drivers and programs before ever logging in as my user for the first time - all from the console.
  As for data loss, I haven't lost any. I have never needed to wipe my hard drives so as long as my home folder is intact, retrieving that is easy enough. I don't keep just one copy of irreplaceable files, either. While my phone does back up my stuff to Google Drive, I keep additional copies of my favorite pictures and videos on DVDs. Three copies, on at least two different media, one of them off-site.
  Breaking your OS is really not that big of a deal once you know how to retrieve stuff without it. You don't even need CDs lol The boot CD is just for convenience. You can bork the system on a computer with just one storage device and as long as you have two flash drives, you can get it all back pretty easy.
  But I'm only here after years of experience in bash. If I went back ten years with a busted laptop and told my 22 year old self to use lsblk, mount, and cp to copy the home directory to a removable device all in command line, younger me would probably cry lol
  
  As the other comment said, not OS friendly XD
  
  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
  
  You're asking average people to learn a new language so they can install software (thats not on the stores) or to do some beyond basic configs. Why should they bother learning bash when they could just use windows and learn somethint else with that time?
  How many times did i find a post telling me to create a weirdly named txt just to change my touchpad settings? Its not trustworthy for noobs. How is a noob suposed to know if a command on a tutorial is safe or not if many linux distros let you destroy them via rm -fr? Are they supposed to search each and every command before they use them? Im sure lots of people rightfully reject using the terminal (and therefore linux) for this reason.
  
  How a noob supposed to know anything? By learning. You pretend that learning how to click through 5 confusing sumbenues is easy as fuck, but learning how to read basic ass words is an esoteric knowledge that only wisards can learn.
  You pretend that nobody can comprehend that apt-get install steam will install steam, but searching through the website, downloading an installer, looking through your system for a file, executing it, and following through twelve steps of a wisard is suddenly magically a knowledge that everyone just grasps.
  You pretend that "find this file, find WhateverBullshit=1 and change 1 to 0" is incomprehensible and requires a whole new language to understand, but "click this menu, open this submenu, scroll untill you find this subsection of subsection, look for the menu that opens a window of menus and then look for a tickbox that they actually moved three versions ago" is so simple you don't actually need to even think about.
  But as an experienced system administrator, I can tell you from an experience, if the person doesn't want to learn, or can't, they will not, and it's not because they're intimidated by the concept of letters, but because the whole idea of learning a skill is confusing or intimidating. When people aren't in the mood they will look at the window telling them to press the only button on the screen, and they will call for help.
  And if they want to know their instrument, they will learn whatever they need, and since reading is one of the fundamental skills we have in the modern society, they will learn how to read configs and write commands without the problems you envision.
- KDE has an enormous system settings GUI.
  Having said that, I use the console for like 90% of tasks. Basically I use either the GUI browser, an editor (I'm a dev) and the console through yakuake.
  I use the console because it's way WAY more efficient to get shit done. What teo windows admin do in 30 minutes I do in 30 seconds, and that was an actual event where we had to change DNS configurations inna large amount of customer servers.
  Command console is not old tech, it's efficient tech.
  Having said that, most normal users shouldn't have or need to access the console either and for most of the time, this rings true with Linux now. Yeah, there are few exceptions here and there, but then again, windows too requires these senslrss Registry settings, or sometimes even command line actions as well
  
  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.
  
  I’m sure it’s different in many distros, but in Mint the ability to open a file browser as root is in the right click menu.
  
  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.
- I don't want to use the damn Terminal.
  Unfortunately the people who code prefer not to use guis if they can help it.
  
  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.
- I don't mind using the terminal, but how the fuck am I going to remember something like kwriteconfig6 --file startkderc --group General --key systemdBoot false? (In fact, there aren't even man pages for that command). Like the scribbles of a mad man I've had to put down commands like that in a sort of personal instructions manual, because ain't no way I'll remember these commands by heart.
  And you often end up just saving the most used commands as aliases or functions in the .bashrc meaning you don't retain the syntax for the commands you use. Well, maybe I'm a unique case of fish memory.. The thing about humans is that we greatly rely on our vision, and having GUI's to show what's possible greatly improve ones understanding of how to manage it going forward.
  
  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.
  
  Tbf, disabling systemD autorun is the only thing I've ever user kwriteconfig6 for, because with it enabled bash scripts don't run correctly.
  
  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.
- This is such a stupid take. Gui obscures the thing that you want to do behind endless buttons and menus and some bullshit that some self-proclaimed "user experience engineer" thought would be "intuitive". With cli it's like you're talking directly to the computer. Want to stop the networking service? service networking stop. Couldn't be simpler!
  Also fun fact, Linux has a “wireless devices” tool, command line one and it uses device ID to apply it and the fucking ID changes every time for the device so you can’t make a permanent setting.
  Are you talking about rfkill? Strange, for me the ID's don't change. But even if they do for you, what's stopping you from getting the ID just by grepping for the device name? Something like rfkill list | grep YOUR_DEVICE_NAME | cut -d ':' -f 1 | xargs rfkill block.
  
  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.
  
  It would take you less time to put together that one-liner than to find the correct button in an unfamiliar gui. How exactly does that prove your point?
  
  BS, I looked online for hours and waited for replies on reddit and no one gave me this line. So, no, I'd in fact do it via GUI in minutes where it took me hours for some backwards config that doesn't look anything like this that made me do what I wanted. With extra steps to copy that stupid file into system folder, of course via stupid Terminal because I couldn't do it through file manager in any way. The level of stupid Linux has to configure trivial things is just astounding.
  And what's weird is how Linux purists always whine about it. Like, I don't care, keep using your stupid Terminal, just give me damn GUI for this basic shit. I don't want to waste time and memorize idiotic noodles of commands to do trivial shit. No one is taking away any of the stupidity you love, just give ME the choice. Instead the only choice is use of stupid CLI. Ugh.
  Also it's not "unfamiliar" GUI. It's called practical deduction. If I need to do this and this I already know I might need to look under this and that category in settings or just type rough related words in search and it would show me the setting. If whoever makes GUI isn't a complete moron, it would be easy to find. Good luck with any of that with CLI where you need to input exact command from start. Your logic just makes no sense.
  
  I don’t want to waste time and memorize idiotic noodles of commands to do trivial shit.
  Also it’s not “unfamiliar” GUI. It’s called practical deduction.
  Can you not see how the two arguments you're making are completely contradictory and self-defeating? Nobody is asking you to memorize "noodles of commands". What, do you think we all have little books full of shell one-liners for every task imaginable? You just have to know a few basics: The pipe redirects data, cut splits lines of text, xargs builds up arguments raw text, etc. Put them together in whatever way you wish to accomplish the task at hand. It's -- exactly as you say -- practical deduction.
  
  You're really not making the case in your favor with this argument. So, now I have to memorize even more dumb commands. What in the fuck? You really have no clue about GUI, do you? Youbdon't have to memorize ANYTHING, just have general idea in which category of settings to go. And that's it.
- I have a similar rant with Docker.
  On macOS there's a Docker app. You can use it to install stuff, see what it's up to, restart it and whatnot. On Linux you have to remember what commands you have to use in Terminal.
  Why?!
  There are loads of us out here who would appreciate a more user friendly way to use FOSS, but we're made to feel like fuckin noobs because we don't want to spend ages typing in commands when we could just press a couple of fucking buttons.
  Anyway, apart from that I've been enjoying my adventures in Linux.
  
  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, the Docker desktop license is crazy. Pretty sure it was changed recently too.
  
  Portainer is your friend

179 comments