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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

If I'm honest, Linux is...exhausting. I'm technically proficient, but even the "user-friendly" Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script.

A. I'm looking at pointer speed section in Mouse Preference in Control Center. It's pretty simple. It give acceleration and sensitivy.

B. Just about every GUI aims for decent defaults and doesn't allow endless customization and such customization generally isn't a beginner task.

I've used the Linux desktop for ten years (Mint then Ubuntu-Mate). Haven't customized anything with a bash script for many years. It is currently clearer how to do things than Windows - it's fricken TWO start menus jumping over each other.

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Should have been clearer: mousewheel scroll speed, which there's no way to control from the GUI.

Is there such a setting in Windows/macOS? (genuine question, haven't used either much in years)

Yes. It's in the GUI in both cases.

Thank you!

result #2 in google: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/change-mouse-scroll-speed-win...

Sure, but that is a fairly obscure setting that I don't think merits your earlier build-up "Something as simple as...".

On the one hand, I'd certainly admit Linux has "warts". It's GUI is perfectly usable and clear - it's more now what one is doing than the horror that is Windows 11 imo (and I'm working on that occasionally now). But the warts of Linux are accentuated by the OS attracting a certain kind of "OCD" user who will tell you how terrible it is for lacking X utterly obscure feature.

I agree with the parent comment. This isn't that niche a requirement and its just one of huge list.

Dismissing people's needs isnt the way to solve this.

I'd like to see a comparison between, say, how many people want to customize their scroll speed (hard on linux, easy in windows/macos) and some other use cases, like how many people to sandbox and control permissions for individual apps (easy on Linux using Flatseal, hard on window/macos).

Then we can get a better sense of how niche these demands are, and how well these desktop OSes support them

> control permissions for individual apps

Sandboxing is ridiculously bad on all 3, the best being MacOS. But this is one area where desktop OSs are simply way behind mobile ones.

Nah, it's pretty inexcusable for Gnome to not surface such a setting. LXQt's mouse configuration GUI lets you configure it, and LXQt has no more than a handful of people working on it. Gnome has more developer resources and could implement this easily, but they also have an attitude problem and bad priorities.

Yeah, the clear problem here is GNOME and it's arrogant disregard for users... Which I guess really is historically in line with Linux culture, unfortunately.

GNOME and Ubuntu are not representative of "Linux culture".

"Linux culture" is whatever most Linux users use. I don't know about Gnome, but Ubuntu is certainly that.

“Linux Culture” is also similarly full of these sorts of “no true Scotsman” arguments, as well as deferring blame to other projects, and “oh you just simply need to use [package] Instead”.

These are all things that make Linux on the desktop inaccessible. The moment you start talking about weird cultural minutiae like this, the whole thing is already incredibly inaccessible in my eyes.

“Computer Culture” is also similarly full of these sorts of “no true Scotsman” arguments, as well as deferring blame to other systems, and “oh you just simply need to use [operating system] Instead”. These are all things that make computing on the desktop inaccessible. The moment you start talking about weird cultural minutiae like this, the whole thing is already incredibly inaccessible in my eyes.

Seems approximately equally true and arbitrary.

It's sad that Red Hat adopted GNOME for desktop.

It's obscure on Linux, perhaps! Meanwhile this setting is in the control panel on both windows and macos. No shell scripting required.

Mousewheel scroll speed is not a niche feature.

I haven't needed a bash script to customize anything but I have had ti spend countless hours in the terminal making seemingly mundane software and hardware work.

Just because you've used Linux-training wheels edition and don't remember having problems isn't grounds to dismiss the large number of people who do have issues with Linux.

I also find Linux exhausting. I use it daily in servers and containers. It excels from an administrative perspective. I avoid using it as a client desktop pc at all cost because that is not where it excels.

A scroll wheel speed of one line at a time is not a good default.

Ubuntu has not been user-friendly for many years. It's unstable while being stale. And you points soundsore like your issue is with Gnome.

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