zlacker

> What motivation is there to attract non-technical users? Particularly ones who require lots of effort doing uninteresting polishing related tasks to keep them happy.

First of all, adjusting scrolling speed is not an "uninteresting polishing related task," it is a basic standard of usability.

Secondly, if you don't think Linux on laptops should be broadly usable by the general population, you are in the wrong thread. The central point of the HN post we are all commenting on is the usability of the Linux desktop ecosystem on commodity laptops.

>>twblal+(OP)
Adjustable scrolling speed is useful (I mean, I haven't used it, but I can see why one might want it). Creating a GUI to adjust it is an uninteresting polishing task.

Swaywm has the ability to set this (you have to edit the config file). It seems weird that gnome or whatever you use lacks this option. Although, gnome has a lot of t's to cross and i's to dot, maybe they just haven't gotten around to it.

>>twblal+(OP)
This isn't either/or - you can have a nice preferences GUI and a sensible yaml or toml config file backend.

>>nikau+C6
Except on Linux usually most environments stop at the config file part. And if a GUI tool happens to exist, it isn't kept in sync with the file format.

>>pjmlp+M8
Yes - ideally there should be a standard library for this. There is no reason the GUI cant update the config file and refresh from it when it updates.

>>nikau+r9
A convention for writing JSON, YAML, or whatever config files that standardized types of options, their default, and something about their types (is it a toggleable boolean, a bounded continuous value, an integer, etc etc) could be nice. It might be possible to provide enough info automatically generate the GUI (draw the first as a button, the second as a slider, and the third as a number box), and that sort of info would be helpful to have if you were writing the file by hand anyway.