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Comment by ayaros | Hacker News Reader

One thing I appreciate about Windows is (in my experience at least) you almost never have to go into the command line to change a weird setting. There's always a toggle in the GUI somewhere. I mean, I'll use the command line if I have to... I just like the fact that the supported options are enumerated visually; I don't have to worry I'll break something. Also, I can peruse through a place like the group policy editor to find settings I would have otherwise never considered changing.

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The equivalent in the win world to obscure command line settings is the registry. There is a whole heap of documented and undocumented config in there. 99% of the time you don't really need to go in there, but its often the more automatable way and occasionally you will find some fun options.

and unsuprisingly that's considered one of the worst parts of windows

Mm, I still recall the time my Windows 98 installation corrupted its registry somehow. The only fix was to reinstall, and the machine had no floppy or CD drive... getting Windows back on there was a task.

No floppy or CD? You were just asking for trouble then IMHO. It was common to have to reinstall windows every 6-9 months in the win9x days. That didn't even really work for ME, but by then win2000 came in to save the day. Software was primarily distributed on CD those days, being without a CD drive must have been a huge hardship.

I vividly remember having to reinstall Windows also in the XP days at least once a year due to malware or due to anti-malware software slowly strangling the OS.

Once upon a time, someone at Microsoft wished on a monkey's paw for a way to replace thousands of undocumented INI files throughout the filesystem.

It curled, and we got the registry.

I appreciate linux for the inverse reason. Because everything is either a nice text based config file or a command line tool, scripting changes to settings and automating things is a breeze.

That works for technical folks, but it's also a barrier to Linux adoption when too many things require dropping to a Bash terminal and dorking around. Try getting Grandma or Katie from HR to be able to do that . . .

Frankly, scripting makes it easier form me to help users: "double click on this when you return home. It will put your computer on the correct wifi, give it a fixed ip address, and poison your hosts file so that stupid NAS works and then setup a guest mount for the two SMB share that are still using SMB 1.0"

It's a barrier not because it is hard, but because people are not familiar with it. Ask a non-technical user using the GUI to edit their display settings and they'll be equally flummoxed.

Grandma, if she is on linux I probably set it up for her and left myself ssh access so I can update/fix it for her. Katie from HR shouldn't touch settings she should file a ticket and wait for the helpdesk monkey or IT to fix it.

Grandma gets her computer setup by family, Katie probably has tech support or a managed device. I've been setting up Linux for friends and relatives and apart from 1-2 niche issues I didn't even have to do any support because stuff just works.

You’re probably right for grandma or Katie, but CLIs are definitely an issue. I know it because they are an issue even for someone like me. And I’m someone who is fairly techy (heck, we’re on HN) and can read the docs/rtfm. I’m more comfortable flashing a kernel I’ve never heard the name of for the first time, than editing some arcane wayland settings.

Simple example, I wanted to customize my gestures in gnome. I installed another app for it on the recommendation of multiple stack overflow and Reddit threads.

I ended up losing the default gnome gestures, and even disabling the app didn’t help.

I only use my windows (10) ltsc installation now. (Where, fwiw, I do have an absolute *ton* of customization/“ricing” apps for everything from custom ux themes to taskbar tweaks. Amazingly, pretty much everything is stable.)

Interestingly, I feel polar opposite to you. Digging through a clunky GUI, going multiple levels deep, to find a tick box is annoying.. When I can just run a single one-line to achieve what I need. I suppose different strokes..

MacOS has the best of both worlds - you can interact with propertylists through the gui, or you can use the commandline.

I agree

as a long time windows user, I wish linux copied this feature more

I think the issue with that is that linux is the kernel. Everything around it is how you interact with it. So how to change settings would be the responsibility of the shell used. And there are several shells and even window managers on top of those. I forget if there's a graphical shell, but it's irrelevant.

And that's not getting into the issue of whether or not something is a kernel issue or not. And it could be the responsibility of the distro to provide the tools to change the settings.

Basically, it's a lot of people with no obligation to each other trying to work in concert.

The situation on Windows is different. Windows is both the kernel and the shell and the window manager and the provider for a lot of the core tools.

Apple sidestepped the issue with OSX. They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.

> They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.

They used NeXT’s XNU kernel which was a merger between CMU’s Mach and Berkeley’s 4.3BSD. They later refreshed it with code from OSF’s MK derivative of Mach (which also incorporated some code from the University of Utah) and code from FreeBSD, and have added a huge amount of new code of their own. They continue to pull new code from FreeBSD every now and again, but it isn’t so much a plain fork of FreeBSD as a merger between parts of FreeBSD and a lot of other stuff with a completely different heritage

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