zlacker

>>tonyst+(OP)
Yeah, no. Maybe with old laptops, but newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn't update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it's a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can't connect more than one device at a time, so I had to buy a dongle to connect two joycon controllers.

Granted, I've always had these kinds of issues with new laptops, especially when it came to proprietary nvidia or AMD graphics (before AMDGPU) and I agree it's improved a lot, but I still need to tell people that there's caveats with some (especially newer) laptops.

>>mid-ki+H5
With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed.

In 2022.

That is the kind of basic thing that does not work.

In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way.

>>_skel+Eu
Wayland just generally is missing config files...

Like just give me a big text file with hundreds of tweakables and tunables like X had...

They hide behind 'you just need to get your client to make the right API calls'... but that just means most wayland compositors don't support most of the available options...

>>london+wv
If we are talking about desktop Linux, a lack of config files is not a problem. If you expect people to edit files to get their desktops to work properly, you have already lost.

The same config pane where I adjust my pointer speed should let me adjust my scroll speed.

>>twblal+Tv
Generally those config panels write to files for you (how else would their changes be persisted?)

>>bee_ri+nz
The storage mechanism is not the interaction mechanism, and Linux config files are not user friendly. All other desktop operating systems have a control pane for this stuff.

>>twblal+0C
Configuration files are a developer-friendly and user-friendly way of supporting customization. It allows more conventional Linux users to do their customization using their favorite text editor, in the familiar interface that they already like. And, if somebody decides they want to write a GUI for configuration (maybe to chase users who are more familiar with consumer OSes), all the GUI has to do is write to a file (an easy task in most languages).

>>bee_ri+JM
I'm a user and I don't find being made to directly edit config files user-friendly at all. Why on earth would I want to use a text editor to configure my printer? I don't use Powerpoint to edit photos either, even though in theory I probably could, but what a hassle. That sort of paradigm is fine for applications intended for professional use to be deployed to servers etc., but config management systems exist for those uses and the people managing these applications tend to be paid quite well, which is no coincidence. Targeting ordinary users? If there is no (decent) config UI, then it may be developer-friendly, but it's definitely not user-friendly. Yes, that can be a valid trade-off for resource-strapped hobby projects, and yes, it's fine if there is a config file in the back, but that shouldn't be the only way to configure an application. No other platform tolerates this sort of thing, and with good reason, given that most people find configuring software to be both intimidating and annoying even under the best of circumstances. I think devs actually believing that all users are just like themselves for decidedly non-dev applications plays a sizable part in why desktop Linux fails to break out of its tiny hardcore technical people and sometimes their parents niche year after year. Most people's favorite (i.e. only) text editor likely will be Microsoft Word, and I'm not sure how many of those people would say they like it.

>>divide+OR
Because you can diff the configs after changes?

You can check into git so you have a history of changes?

So you can copy the config to another machine?

There are lots of reasons why text files are the preferred format to store configuration in.

Other than perhaps a slight performance boost, why do we want settings in a non-human readable database?

Hell, even Microsoft are starting to use json config files for stuff like Windows terminal because they know people like to be able to quickly copy and edit settings.

>>nikau+wg1
But you are talking about something else!

You are talking about the configs being stored in text files. The comment you are responding to was talking about being forced to edit text files to configure.

Yours is about the format of data representation and theirs is about UX.

The first step of not forcing users to edit text files is having sensible well thought out defaults. If I have to think about configs the designers of the app failed me.

The second way to not force the users to edit text files is by having a well thought out gui for the kind of changes you might want.

The format of how the config settings are stored is almost orthogonal to this questions. And yes, you are right, a text based format is preferable over a properitary binary one.