Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I think there is a lot of space between what you use and what might work for other people. It's not that there is anything wrong with Arch. Rather Ubuntu is probably easier for many people. The general idea here is Linux.

Similarly, there are several tiling window managers. A neutral description of the options and links to resources might have broader appeal. Text editors are another place where the right tool varies among people.

I guess what I am getting at is "highly opinionated" is better suited for ongoing processes than it is for soft goals. Arch Linux is highly opinionated. This makes reasoning about the ongoing process of maintaining a Linux installation consistent. The strong opinions of Arch Linux are orthogonal to the goal of switching to a tiling window manager. Ubuntu has a different way of reasoning about system maintenance that might offer less friction for other people. Tiling window managers are not dependent on distribution.

I'm not trying to change your opinion. Rather, I think that there are ways to make the book a more useful resource for more people by broadening it to "here's how I do it and here are some other ways that might work better for you."

Good luck.

If I simplify a bit, I see two different approaches:

1. You write something broad as you say. You present many options to the reader. The book is not practical anymore, because you don't speak about something in particular but some general ideas. As a result, the readers can't really practice with a concrete project, and they might end up lost in an ocean of links. If I wanted to do that, I would have created another "Awesome list of Linux tools" on GitHub.

2. You write something more focused, as I did: the readers can practice, you can describe and explain everything they're doing because the focus is more narrow. You eliminate a whole class of problems as well, because you know exactly the tools they're installing and using. As a result, you enable them to understand what's happening.

I went for the second solution, because I think we lack books which are really practical. I wanted the readers to be actively engaged into a project, learn by practicing, and be able to swap every tool they want afterward. Because they'll have a deeper understanding of Linux, a modal editor, a tiling window manager, and so on.

It's not because I use these tools that I want to impose them to the world. I choose these tools for the book because they allow the reader to understand what's happening under the hood. Even if I was using another wm or another distro, I still would go with these tools, because it allows me to teach what I want to teach. Because they're not too difficult for beginners if you explain them right. I think people are smart, and I think they can learn way easier than most people think.

To me, Ubuntu is highly opinionated. Who cares? It's not about me, it's about what the readers can learn from the experience. I'm not convinced you learn a lot by installing Ubuntu, or that you understand the benefits to work with a tiling manager, or you understand the important place of the shell in the Linux ecosystem.

Thanks for the good luck :)

In my opinion, you're absolutely correct to write a focused, narrow book as that's the only way to stand a chance of addressing a topic completely.

The information available on the internet is vast, as authors it is more often our job to surface, connect, and curate a tangle of information to give readers, as you said, practical direction.

Thanks for that. It's reassuring. I've always tried to do exactly that, and my readers were always thankful for this kind of direction, so... I continue :)

I guess what I am getting at is the vitality of book recommendations not technical merits. There’s nothing wrong with Arch, but I hesitate to recommend it without knowing someone pretty well. The same with Zsh over bash and neovim over Vim.

As personal choices backed by experience it’s a different context than a tutorial for others.

That’s what I am saying.

If someone is diving down this rabbit hole, they most likely have some level of tech savvy going in. Given that, they likely can decide if the book is for them by doing some very light research on Linux distributions. With a cursory set of results in hand (which will tell me that Ubuntu is easy and Arch is a bit more advanced but not quite as advanced as Gentoo or LFS), I can decide if a very practical book that says it focuses on Arch is a book that is right for me or not.

For me: I'd LOVE this book. I've been around the block, but don't know everything I know I could. Your criticism doesn't seem to have much merit when clearly there is a market for this book and clearly the potential buyer should be trusted to decide whether this book is right or not.

It doesn’t need to be a rabbit hole. Or at least no more of a rabbit hole than essential.

This answer convinced me to buy the book, books like (2) tend to be my favorites. Looking forward to it!

Thanks! I hope you'll like it! If you have any question, feedback, or problem, don't hesitate to write me an email. It's on the page where I sell the book.

Using i3 with Ubuntu made me realise it doesn't matter all that much for me. CentOS, Ubuntu, Arch, it all looks about the same to my toolset.

I would tend to agree with that, distros are not that different from one another in the grand scheme of things.

But there are still differences; I speak about them at the beginning of the book. For Arch Linux, the three important ones are for me:

1. Installing it teaches you quite a lot about Linux-based system. If you have any problem with another distro, you'll know pretty well what happens under the hood and you'll be able to debug the problem more easily.

2. Arch is a rolling release, which means that every program you use will be up to date. No need to wait for the next LTS like other distros. It has some drawbacks, but I think the benefits outweigh them.

3. It let you choose exactly what program you want. It doesn't install much by default. Freedom is important for me, and Arch just gives me that.

And did I speak about the crazy amazing Arch Wiki? And the repos which have... everything? Sorry I stop, I'm doing my fanboy here :D

One can't possibly write a coherent book and also cover every possible Linux setup there is.

The target audience obviously won't be a someone who already loves to tinker with a lot of different setups.

A book like this will be much better if it introduces an opinionated setup to follow.

You can find a good middle-ground for example with Manjaro. It has the affordances of Ubuntu, but the power of Arch. I've been using it for a couple of years now, and I'm very happy with it.

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