That is extremely concerning, then, that it is so difficult to use after all that time.
I had hopes in the back of my head that "maybe it'll get better/more ergonomic in the next few years".
I had hopes in the back of my head that "maybe it'll get better/more ergonomic in the next few years".
It's just as easy to make a mistake with git today as it was however many years ago; git hasn't fundamentally changed in ways that make it easier. Git still more/less requires you to have a good understanding of what's going on in order to be comfortable using it.
But, since use of git is now widespread, it's less of an issue. And the git CLI has seen some UX improvements.
Nix is very weird. I'm sure there are some ways its UX could be nicer; but to some extent, doing things in a strict/pure way is always going to have friction if the tools/environments don't easily support that.
Pro tip from an actual pro :
git became significantly easier for me once I decided
1. to just use a good comfortable gui (at least one tui also look good) for anything beyond commit and push. (maybe not everything can be done from your gui of choice but at least you get a good overview of the situation before you dive in with the cli.)
2. and to just stick to the basics. (And when you need to help someone else who didn't, take it carefully even if that means you don't look like a wizard.)
In fact even working on the command line feels easier once I had worked in a good gui for a while.
Don't believe experts who claim that you need to study vim and stick to the git cli to "get it".
But of course: if cli is your thing, use it, just stop writing blog posts that claiming it is the only true way.
I do agree with you that some workflows are just easier with a GUI, since I used to use TortoiseSVN and it was much nicer for diffing two commits than the CLI is. But I haven't really dug into git GUIs.
At times I have used ungit or git extensions (which, despite its name contains a full desktop application.
Today I use VS Code with a combination of Git Branch for visualization and Git Lens for the rest. Git Lens might need some configuration (I rarely use all the panes, but I use the interactive rebase tool from it as well as some annotationn features. For the visual rebase tool to work I had to configure VS Code as my git editor, but that is how I like it anyway.)
Again: try a few, find one that makes sense for you.
Jetbrains tools for example are generally good, liked by many and well though I understand, but still the git visualization (and a couple of other things) consistently manages to confuse me.
GUI vs CLI shouldn't be about which is a less confusing way of using git.
(Though, yes, magit is excellent, and there are very few tools which come close).
SourceTree: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/
Windows and Mac. Free. Feels sluggish, but is also really dependable, the graph view is lovely and it covers most of the common things that you want to do - also, staging/discarding chunks or even individual lines of code is lovely. Oh, and the Git LFS integration, and creating patches is also really easy. And it gives you the underlying Git commands it uses, in case you care about that.
GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/
Windows, Mac and Linux. May need commercial license. Feels like a step up from SourceTree, but i find that using this for commercial needs is a no go. If that's not an issue, however, it has a good UI, is nice to work with and just generally doesn't have anything i'd object to. IIRC it saved my hide years back by letting me do a ctrl+z for a repo after accidentally forcing to the wrong remote, so that i could fix what i had done (memory might fail me, was years ago), just generally feels intuitive like that.
Git Cola: https://git-cola.github.io/
Windows, Mac and Linux. Free and open source. Perhaps one of the more basic interfaces, but as far as free software goes, it does what it sets out to do, and does it well. I use this on Linux, whenever i want to have that visual feedback about the state of the repo/staging area or just don't feel like using the CLI.
TortoiseGit: https://tortoisegit.org/
Windows only. Free. Recommending this just because you mentioned TortoiseSVN. If you just want a similar workflow, this is perhaps your best option. Honestly, there is definitely some merit to having a nice file system integration, i rather enjoyed that with SVN.
Whatever your IDE has built in: look at your IDE
On any platform that your IDE runs on. Same licensing as your IDE. Some people just shop around for an IDE that they enjoy and then just use whatever VCS workflows that they provide. I'd say that VS Code with some plugins is really nice, though others swear by JetBrains' IDEs, whereas others are fine with even just NetBeans or Eclipse (Java example, you can replace that with Visual Studio or whatever). If you're working within a particular stack/IDE, that's not too bad of an idea.
The CLI: https://git-scm.com/
Windows, Mac and Linux. Free and open source. You'll probably want to know a bit of the CLI anyways, just in case. Personally, i'm still way too used to using a GUI since dealing with branches and change sets just feels like something that's more easy when visual, but the CLI has occasionally helped me out nonetheless.
Actually, here's a useful list of some of the Git GUIs: https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis
For example, did you know that there are some simple GUI tools already built in, git-gui and gitk?
When something goes wrong I just bork the whole repo and clone it again, then manually merge the last set of saved changes.
In some bad days I even miss Clearcase.
Easier? Who needs that? Soon then you will have common unlearned folk and peasants trying to use git. </snark>
They had the super obtuse git reset, that was four different things bolted together, so they fixed it by adding git restore, that does slightly different things, but you still need both...
Nix (and Haskell) has its warts, and undoubtedly a new system would avoid them (compatibility needs make some changes very challenging), but the fundamental difficulty remains because it is fundamentally different and solving a truly difficult problem set.
> I had hopes in the back of my head that "maybe it'll get better/more ergonomic in the next few years".
I feel much the same way about wanting to run something like FreeBSD and having it just work, as opposed to running into weirdness because of the driver situation, with which GNU/Linux seems to be getting better at (even though you sometimes are forced to install proprietary ones for optimal experience, should get better in the next decade).
So, might have to wait for a bunch more years, or just pick something else, like OpenBSD, or just run in a set of constraints for having a really predictable and well supported hardware configuration, which isn't always possible. Alas, my off brand Polish netbook will just have to wait before i can (hopefully) run BSD on it comfortably. Well, short of making the missing pieces of puzzle myself, for which i'd probably also need a decade or so of systems level development experience, as opposed to just web dev and occasionally dabbling in lower level stuff to mediocre success. Of course, by then the netbook itself might not be relevant, so who knows.
I also feel much the same way about GNU/Hurd - a project that is conceptually interesting, but isn't yet quite stable, even though apparently you can get Debian for it: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Now, i don't have almost any experience with it, apart from reading about it, but some people tried figuring out when it could be released based on the bug reports and how quickly they were being addressed, and the number that they came up with was around 2070 or so.
In summary, there are probably projects out there, for which their age isn't necessarily related to how usable they are, whereas other pieces of software will have never truly achieved that stability in the first place. Not all old software is good (edit: at least not for certain use cases).
Of course, there are exceptions, for example, you can look at Apache2/httpd: it is regarded as old and dated for the most part, however just recently an update was released, which added mod_md. It now lets you get Let's Encrypt certificates without external tools (like Certbot), in some ways setting it ahead of Nginx: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_md.html Not all old software is always boring.
Same for Docker and any other tools. If developers use tool A for use case X, instead of tool B, then maybe there are some very good reasons for this widespread usage? That's also probably the answer to this debate - regardless of their conceptual/technical benefits, the usability will probably decide which tool will win in the long term.
I also submit that to understand why that happened, one needs to consider the context at the time that the decision was made:
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GNU-HURD-Altered-visio...
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050727225542530
« RMS was a very strong believer -- wrongly, I think -- in a very greedy-algorithm approach to code reuse issues. My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today.
RMS wanted to work together with people from Berkeley on such an effort. Some of them were interested, but some seem to have been deliberately dragging their feet: and the reason now seems to be that they had the goal of spinning off BSDI. A GNU based on 4.4-Lite would undercut BSDI.
So RMS said to himself, "Mach is a working kernel, 4.4-Lite is only partial, we will go with Mach." It was a decision which I strongly opposed. But ultimately it was not my decision to make, and I made the best go I could at working with Mach and doing something new from that standpoint.
This was all way before Linux; we're talking 1991 or so. » -- Friar Thomas Bushnell
They looked at BSD. The BSD people were not sure, so RMS decided on another path.
If GNU had picked the BSD kernel, there could have been a working Free xNix before Linux and things would have been very different.
Secondly, I think it's important when discussing microkernels and microkernel OSes to consider more than the most famous one: Mac OS X.
Xnu is based on Mach, but it's not a pure microkernel: its Xnu kernel contains a large, in-kernel "Unix server" derived from BSD code. This was done for performance reasons – remember, macOS is Mac OS X is NeXTstep, written for a 25MHz 68040 in around 1987-1988.
There are better examples. QNX is probably the best: a working, true-microkernel, Unix-like OS, dating from 1982. At one point shared-source but not any longer.
There is also Minix 3, which is a different OS from Minix 1 & 2, the OS that inspired Linux and upon which Linux was initially bootstrapped.
Minix 3 is still quite limited: no SMP, some missing APIs etc. But QNX proves that a true microkernel, on generic hardware such as x86 and ARM, can support SMP and so on.