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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

This is a perfect example of a choice that a developer makes to suit his/her personal preference and environment, believing that everyone does (or should) use their computer the same way. Which is sadly becoming a more common trend.

I like the idea, but I don't think it should be on by default. The rest of us have just used root-specific shell prompts for the last few decades or so.

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It's fine.

Not every software needs to be infinitely configurable and open source just in case the configurations don't cover the needs of all.

We need opinionated software, if you don't want to make any choice for me, you can't even give me an assembly editor for fear of forcing your CPU arch of choice.

Counterpoint: GNOME and the modern GTK framework

(I needn't say more.)

Gnome is great if you're willing to do things their way. I Like Gnome a lot actually.

Gnome's UI peaked at 2.32. Find out how the users operate and implement so users can work efficiently. Don't make changes just to make your mark or to make users work on the desktop like they see on a cell phone. That is so basic.

I have no idea why Gnome keeps on insisting on breaking expectations. From the shell as a whole to the widgets and even the window titlebars they seem to insist on being different for the sake of being different.

Because their choices are better, at least for some of us. Users who prefer the traditional desktop paradigm have a wealth of alternative DEs to choose from.

I suppose my brutally minimalist Sway config with barely there titlebars and a skinny little status bar and not an icon, button, or widget in sight doesn't give me great standing to call for a respect of conventions.

I suppose I should say I found Gnomes luridly chunky decorations and widgets to be personally offensive.

What widgets? Gnome has just the one black bar at the top.

And it's a thick monster with all kinds of extra crap (I'm my not so humble opinion) shoved in it.

It literally has an activities button, the time and date, and a tiny button for interacting with settings on the right.

I don't know if you are DE shopping, but I've been very happy for the past few years with the MATE Desktop Environment, which "...is the continuation of GNOME 2. It provides an intuitive and attractive desktop environment using traditional metaphors for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems."

https://mate-desktop.org/

Among a great number of things I really like, I will mention that Caja, the MATE version of GNOME 2's Nautilus file manager, can still be switched to spatial mode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager

Generally speaking, I too really liked GNOME 2.32 and its predecessors, and, as far as I'm concerned, MATE is as it describes itself.

EDIT: Wording mistake.

These days KDE gets a lot of the same things right that GNOME 2 did.

Gnome is always getting better (if you want to do things the Gnome way). Why should a DE show any elements begging to be clicked on my desktop while I am working (window list, etc)? I am only interested in what's in my IDE, terminal, and browser. Present Gnome comes closest to my ideal of fading into the background and letting me focus on my tasks.

actually you do, because gnome is great

Yes. I prefer having tools that do one thing well. That's the point of unix. How the user uses them should be up to her.

GNOME offering a monolithic environment with heavy opinionation is the opposite.

How is GNOME a "monolithic environment"? The entire GNOME ecosystem is basically small apps that do a single thing well:

https://apps.gnome.org/

So is X11, by that logic

https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/

That page literally just lists all sorts of random apps that work under X11, so yeah? Of course it's not a single monolithic system.

You can't think of ways this could break things? I would find this a useful feature, but I'm also aware of how this works, and the issues it could cause.

No? Of all the esoteric escape sequences that terminals handle the ones that change colors are well trodden.

There are at least 3 different ways of expressing colour as covered by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors, and given the wide propensity of newer terminals to misidentify what they are (I know I have some additional checking in my shell startup to unbreak things if needed), and/or bad termcap/terminfo settings on older systems, sending terminal sequences that are apparently supported but are not happens surprisingly often (enough such that I've made sure to always install two different terminals which use different rendering backends, e.g. xterm and VTE).

Will you install a new systemd version on such an old system with wrong termcap/terminfo settings or attached to a physical vt100?

It could, but this is a non-default tool focused on new use so the first question I’d ask is how many of the people using it are running the weird edge-case terminals where that’d break something. I wouldn’t want to end up in a Microsoft-style trap where nothing can improve because someone somewhere depends on strict fidelity with 1993.

I don't understand the part about the assembly editor, but I'm not sure I agree with the rest.

Whenever I hear someone describe their software as "opinionated," I have found what that usually means is that the developer thinks they are smarter than everyone else and all of the unfriendly attitude that usually comes along with that.

Whoever made the decision that run0 should turn your terminal red by default doesn't understand that there are practically infinite terminal configurations out there that this will interfere with or be outright incompatible with. My argument is that the decision comes from a place of ignorance of the sheer diversity of the users of the software, not from a place of, "we are so smart, and are the first ones to think of this feature."

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