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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

Because Linux is full of sharp edges which nobody seems to find it fit to fix.

I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.

Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.

This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.

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While I dont disagree, Mac and Windows also have their own sharp edges that for some reason no one finds fit to fix even though they get paid millions of dollars to maintain the software. The other day my mom told me her Bluetooth speaker no longer worked on her windows laptop. I was like, ok, lets try the normal troubleshooting steps. Turn it off and on again. Restart computer. Unpair and repair. But I couldn't unpair. It just said no.

I installed ChatGPT on her laptop and allowed it to run a certain subset of shell commands and it finally worked.

If im gonna have to muck around in the terminal to do the most basic of tasks, I may as well use Linux so I actually have a semblance of ownership on my computer.

Bluetooth issues are as much on the manufacturers of BT cards and devices as they are on OS vendors. Outside of the Apple sphere the only way I’ve found to mitigate issues with it regardless of OS is to 1) buy Intel BT chipsets (or hardware incorporating such) and 2) avoid no-name BT devices like the plague.

That's fair, but this was an HP laptop with an Intel chip, and her speaker is an Anker speaker. I cant speak to the hardware quality of HP but her old HP laptop worked fine, and the problem was still resolvable via shell commands, which points to software, and I feel like Windows dropped the ball in many ways (i turned Bluetooth off and on and then even though it was on another panel said Bluetooth was off, i naively clicked on troubleshoot this issue and it also reported Bluetooth was off, and simply removing a Bluetooth device should be a fairly simple task regardless of hardware; I've never had an issue like this even with cheap devices)

but mac has software at least

Everything is full of sharp edges. It's just a matter of which ones are more painful to you.

The author's inability to uninstall or fully disable AI features is one for Mac OS. Window management is a common one for people used to other systems.

Windows has many, with (again) AI features that are hard to get rid of, and attempts to coerce users to create an online account being two of the most prominent lately.

So yeah, KDE's NetworkManager frontend is a little janky sometimes, and they should fix that. Is it worse than trying to coerce the user into using services they don't want to? For some people, probably. For me, no.

The defining difference for me is the number of affected users and how much the issue debilitates the system.

Should AI features be easier to switch off? Sure, no argument there, but a problem like a network interface vanishing, breaking internet connectivity, and re-adding not working as expected is much more serious, even if it’s an issue that impacts fewer people. At least the system with unwanted features is still usable for work.

I don't disagree in principle, though I question it in practice. I suspect network interfaces disappearing from KDE on mainstream distributions is rare. That may vary if you're using "Dave's Janky Arch Fork" or some such.

Commercial operating systems aren't immune. I found several people having a similar problem with Windows 11 on Microsoft Q&A, as well as a thousand third-party sites offering instructions to fix it, likely all infested with ads for "fix your computer" programs that will make things worse: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5583596/...

I'd expect Mac OS to be better, in part because it only has to support a few models of computer. Perhaps it is, but it's also not immune: https://superuser.com/questions/1756912/ethernet-interface-d...

I've had computers with interfaces that vanished before. I've found that disabling NetworkMangler or whatever, and just raw-dogging a wpa_supplicant.conf with whatever wifi networks I'm likely to be interested in, cures the problem in near 100% of cases. Yes, it means having to sudo and change the config whenever I connect to a new wifi network. For me this is not a big deal.

GNOME is a project whose manifesto is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", for a very specific value of not sucking roughly equivalent to "Let's make Unix into a shitty version of Windows". I'm picking on GNOME because its development psychology has infested the Linux ecosystem, yielding horrors like NetworkManager, dbus, frickin' systemd, et weary cetera. There's a sense that Unix-style composability, modularity, and (conceptual) simplicity is something that has to be hidden from the poor end user, but the people who are implementing the means to do so lack the organizational competence to pull it off. So the absolute state of things for Linux desktop use in 2026 is a tradeoff between jank and brokenness on the one hand and being exposed to Linux's technical underside on the other. I don't mind so much because I've never minded getting technical. I'm the kind of guy who still logs in at the VT console and types 'startx' to get a graphical session going because I came up on early Linux and appreciate being reminded of what underlies that UI convenience. And it sure beats being stuck on Windows or Mac, where it works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you often can do little but shrug your shoulders and say "wellp, them's the breaks".[1] And that's before adding in AI cruft, advertisements, mandatory online accounts and vendor spyware.

The price to pay for having a hot rod is a lack of a luxury interior from the finest Swiss craftsmen. But a) you have a hot rod; b) it won't sell your driving data to insurance companies!

[1] In the 90s I heard stories from hackers about normies who just kind of assumed that computers were flaky, fragile machines that lost your work every now and then and needed to be restarted at least once a day in order to function. And when they heard of Linux or FreeBSD, their minds were blown because they didn't know computers could do that. But the computer wasn't flaky or fragile; Windows 9x was.

Yeah a lot of this comes down to the mindset one came into computers with.

While I have no aversion to CLI use, editing config files, etc where that is the best way to do things, my introduction to computing was Classic Mac OS. As such my platonic ideal OS looks a lot like Classic Mac OS without its well-known weaknesses: practically nothing is hidden or obfuscated away from the user, the filesystem is laid out for humans before computers and is easily navigable by even non-technical users, GUI control panels are treated as canonical configuration rather than a loosely bolted-on layer, and extending and customizing the system is as simple as moving files in/out of designated directories (e.g. /System Folder/Extensions/).

It’s a vastly different mindset than is found on any *nix-based system, and as well as modern macOS works for me even it still doesn’t meet that standard.

I think there's a fundamental difference between having things you need to ignore (windows bloat) and having problems that prop up when you try to do things (linux stuff).

I think people are generally more willing to put up with the former.

Inversely, I've ran KDE on bleeding edge for three years now and have only ran into a handful of bugs, and nothing critical that required me to drop to a terminal to fix. The networking issue seems particularly specific and I have never seen this occur across any of my desktop or laptops.

Im on PopOS and I had one boot problem where I had to pop in a ubuntu flash drive to run boot repair on, but that was like 3 years ago. There are definitely issues that come up sometimes when I upgrade to a new kernel version but it mundane stuff like my printer wont scan duplex. But now AI just helps me fix that stuff I don't spend too much time on it.

I wrote an article on my transition [0]

[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/blog/publication-looking-back-w...

There's definitely some rough edges still. I wasn't ever able to get CUPS to work with the specific model of Canon imageRunner printers we had in the office. I also never need to print, so I stopped trying after it wouldn't take a few test prints.

LLMs are great though. I had a physical RAM issue that resulted in a bad pacman upgrade, failing the mkinitcpio process and corrupting that kernel upgrade. I had never ran into this before and it was complicated by LUKS being enabled. Claude was able to get me the right steps to remount the LUKS drives while I was chrooted in on a live USB, from there I was able to reupgrade and all was well.

> yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity

While I'm not deeply familiar with Red Hat/Fedora - I'm curious if you know what happened here? What changed to trigger this behavior?

Looking at a few search results - looks like an upgrade to 44 likely exposed/introduced a bug in power management that result in the Ethernet being turned off, and the kernel mode unloaded?

I'm guessing the intention behind the change was to enable more power saving.

But that is certainly a valid concern with most Linux distros - ocationally an improvement (higher resolution, faster, better color depth console or driver) will mess with bootloader, x/Wayland etc.

Still driver yank isn't unheard of with windows upgrades either. With MacOS I'm just going to assume any os upgrade is likely to cause some issues - even when Apple owns both the hw and os.

that's really ignoring two big points. 1. windows and macs don't "just work" either... they have their fair share of pain points that you have to accept and/or workaround. 2. linux is different than windows and is different than macos in the sense that you've spent a long time learning the quirks of windows and macos and have the fixes mostly ready. once you learn the quirks of linux it's basically the same.

After the learning curve of linux desktop(well kde) it's basically the same as macos for me and for most people that would use it. most of the computing is done in the browser and that's basically the same experience in any os.

Anecdotally: I usually run Linux on my desktop and have a windows partition only for one game I play. When I booted into Windows, it didn't see either of my two wifi cards in the system. I ran a cable across the house, updated drivers, BIOS, and eventually saw in device manager > hidden devices that the OS thinks my card is unplugged.

It was there before.

In Linux it's there.

Next step is unseat/reseat the PCI device, check connections to the motherboard, and leave powered off for a few minutes. Hopefully windows will decide the device exists.

I ran into this too. It blew my mind that I could run Linux just fine but I couldn't even install Windows because it had no wifi driver and it wouldn't install without a network connection.

I tried putting the driver files on a USB stick but the Windows installer refused to recognize those.

The thing you describe with NetworkManager is worse on Windows. I am uncertain how many different user interfaces there are for networking in Windows, and many simple actions take at least 3 screens, and still doesn't fix the problem.

Every time my connected monitor wakes up from sleep it steals audio back from my internal laptop speakers, the only way to fix it is (with the help of a chatbot to write a script) to permanently turn off the monitor speakers.

All of the rough edges with Linux that are legitimately worse are not things that are the fault of Linux. Tools and games and video streaming services which are either not tested or deliberately designed so they cannot function on Linux.

Microsoft Windows is so bad that most consumers just throw away their old computers and buy new ones when Windows stops working. The more persistent ones will search through some forums for solution, or nowadays try to work through something with AI.

The big difference, even if that is the case, is that they can easily find new computers at any random computer shop with Windows pre-installed.

GNU/Linux has had a few moments with netbooks, or selected XPS 13 models, both now past memories.

Goodwill now resells donated PCs with various linux distros pre-installed, probably to avoid paying for the M$ license. If one looks for a stripped down distro while the look maybe quite retro it tends to just work. I've been on antix linux on all my computers for over a decade and I'm far from a power user -- but a reinstall takes less than an hour and updates are either automatic or requested. Which is to say, M$ doesn't take over my appliance for hours every timeI turn it on because it is ancient hardware -- it just works.

On one (15year old MB) we stream videos nightly.

If you try again, be less ambitious. Don't try to get KDE or Gnome going.

Do a minimal install. Add just enough packages to get X working.

Configure a simple window manager like openbox or dwm.

I uninstall the networking managers. I wrote a simple bash menu program. In one terminal I used that to launch wpa_supplicant for the current network. In another window, I run dhcp. I have a workspace just for that.

When I stay in a hotel, I need to set up a new wpa supplicant profile, and that takes a few minutes. It's klunky. But system upgrades pass by without me noticing.

It's like running an old car with carburettors and simple electrics. You learn the machine once, there's hardly anything to go wrong.

"Frustrated with how critical details are missing from the GUI, requiring you to learn console commands? Don't be so ambitious, stop using a GUI for these things at all and write your own CLI for them!"

I also like old carburetors and simple electronics, but we're in the vast, vast minority. Most people want a car they don't have to think about or understand, looks pretty, and will take it to a shop when something goes wrong.

It’s also possible for a system to both be a “carburetor type” while also being well-considered and elegant in design and function so it’s easy to tinker on if you want to, but doesn’t need that 99% of the time. I just don’t think that’s ever been a serious goal of any desktop-oriented Linux distro or DE. They all embrace the complexity and add to or multiply it.

I agree about system design, but I think - especially in the context of your networking example - the complexity lives below the OS and not a case where it's a lack of effort.

Networking protocols, connections, error states, etc are inherently complex and require equally sophisticated handling that linux may not always do. Some software chooses not to handle at all and expose directly to the user - but others like KDE simply lack the millions of dev-hours of polish that Windows and Mac have.

Agree that this is an area that this is an area where complexity is unavoidable.

As for KDE polish, the only reason that’s true is because of someone’s choice to not put energy toward that part of the desktop.

Is it that simple though? There could be so many other reasons. Maybe the particular issue is related to a specific hardware or network configuration that the developers have never run into or can't reproduce.

Linux needs polish for sure, but given a finite amount of time, energy, and money the reasons are likely more complicated than "they don't care"

From my ~25 years of using Gentoo Linux, I'd say that it's exactly what you describe in your first sentence. The complexity is there if you want it, but only if you want it.

Gentoo is quite a bit more work to get set up than other distros, but

* Once you get it set up, it just keeps on going

* If you're already fairly familiar with Linux system administration, the setup process isn't hard... it just involves a lot of waiting, unless you use the distro-provided precompiled packages

* There's really good documentation that walks you through the installation process and leaves you with a computer with a functioning bootloader and kernel, Internet access, and some pointers towards what you might want to install next

What's a "carburetor"?

A touchstone for people who forget that engines have been fuel injected for decades.

My great-grandfather - a carpenter in the 1930s - apparently had a saying: "If a man can make it, a man can fix it."

While /technically/ still true, I lament that it is increasingly inapplicable to the world around us today.

is this a copypasta? _this_ is your answer to "linux is too hard to use for most people"?

No, I replied because I think cosmic_cheese should be more cynical. Linux is hard, and won't get better. The X-Windows clipboard design is awful, the wayland team made a decision not to improve on it. I replied to the frustrations of trying to create a daily driver.

When was the last time someone asked "does it run on Windows"? Probably somewhere in the mid 90s.

> be less ambitious

Yes, don't try to actually get any work done, install anything you care about, or use it in a way that improves your life at all. Just reorient your life around learning this clunky system and don't expect to get any actual benefit from it until you've spent years learning it.

This is the standard Linux pitch, followed by "why doesn't anyone use it!?"

Thank you for saying this. This is how I feel. I used Ubuntu as a daily driver for a while, and then I went back to MacOS and life was so much better.

That's why I use Linux Mint, even if some Linux guys might think less of me.

Switched from Windows 11. My work system is a Mac. I just love how the Linux gets out of the way, everything just works, UI much better and consistent than Windows.

And I'll probably keep receiving security fixes and app improvements in 10 years for my old Thinkpad.

Get it working

Keep it working

Forget about it

That is me on Debian.

I’ve tried the minimal tiling WM thing several times. It’s not for me. Too many little QoL holes that require manual setup to fix and the disjointed patchwork of small utilities that don’t work with each other or share config conventions quickly becomes grating.

I spend a disproportionate amount of time tinkering with Linux desktops trying to make them act the way I like anyway, but the amount of tinkering is exponentially higher with a minimal WM setup. I can’t get any work done under them.

I also don’t really care to administer everything via the CLI and don’t find it a good use of my time to write Bash scripts for everything. If I’m going to do that I’d rather just write my own DE, because even if that’s a wildly larger task than writing a few scripts I’m going to get vastly more satisfaction out of it since I can make everything work exactly as I think it should.

To be clear - I agree with your statement that Linux is full of sharp edges that won't get fixed. I got abandoned by a series of desktop systems. Like you I had gone to and from the linux desktop but had found it unpolished. I was with Mac OS X for a while, and then a major upgrade broke my workflows. Finally I gave up on having a nice desktop. Once I had accepted that, I found a kind of contentment. It has been 15 years, I wouldn't go back now.

I don’t think I’ll ever give up on having nice things. I’m very firmly of the opinion that my computer should bend to me and do its absolute best to serve me and my needs. A machine that sporadically requires manual twiddling does not meet that requirement.

I've been in and around hobbyist computer topics for decades, and I'm still not 100% sure if this comment is straight serious or a really well executed humorous trolling. They'd read essentially the same, so IDK...

I have used Windows for decades. Not once have I thought "I should make my own file manager."

I thought that after a few months of using Linux.

I really can't tell if you mean "Explorer.exe is good enough and I never felt like it needed improvement" or "Oh, I can make anything I want to, with free tools? This is great! I'll make a file manager for my personal usage that's perfect for me."

The former. You use one DE, typeahead triggers full text search. You use another, no metadata like image width/height when selecting images. You use a third one, no folder thumbnails.

Well yeah, different tools are different. That’s the point. You use the one you like. Do you think there is no good file manager available for Linux?

"Just learn hundreds of different tools, spend dozens of hours reading all their man pages, understand all their limitations, and pick the correct one before starting your task, all so you can accomplish something completely ancillary to the task you actually want done. Geez, it's not hard."

"Choice is bad because I might have opinions and then instead of the computer saying no I might switch to software that better suits my preferences. I just want a corporation to tell me what to want"

It’s more like, “I already have opinions and preferences and despite the various options available, none of them suit me well and so choosing any one results in a high degree of compromise, and so the next best thing is using a different one depending on the circumstance which brings its own compromises.”

If you don't like something on Linux, it has alternatives you can use instead.

If you don't like something on a proprietary OS, you can save a lot of time by having no way to change it and suffering the problems permanently.

Unfortunately, just because you have choices that doesn't mean those choices are good.

I was forced to the file explorer on Windows, and the file explorer was good so I didn't mind. I was also forced to use MS Paint. And it was good for a long time, until they added layers. Now my primary use case of it (pasting an image and cropping it) doesn't work as well as it used to.

On Linux I don't even have that choice. There are choices, yes, but none of them do what I want anyway.

What truly drives me insane is that if you say "I just want what Windows does" people tell you that it's not Windows, it's "different(tm)." Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D." So it's double-think. Developers are aware proprietary software spends tons of money they don't have in R&D, and yet they shy away from just copying the results because they don't want to be Windows.

I just want Windows, but with freedom. I don't want "different" if it's not going to be better.

> Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D."

Are there actually people who claim this? Microsoft has plenty of money but the premise that they use it to improve the user experience seems contrary to evidence.

When something sucks on Linux with no alternatives it's usually because most people don't use the feature you want, e.g. because there is another way to do the same thing and more people are doing it that way, and then no one bothers to make thing you want because their desire to have that is already being satisfied by something else.

Of course, one of the choices you have is to build the thing you want yourself, which is why it works out that way. The chances of someone having done that go up the more people want it to exist. When the number is low, you have to decide if you want it enough for the person who makes it for everyone to be you. And it's fine if your answer is no, but now you know why that thing doesn't exist.

Microsoft actually doesn't have to improve anything because people have been using it for decades. It is muscle memory.

It's baffling that you can't see that what OP is getting at is that there is not in fact any 'file manager he likes'. 50 half baked solutions are just that - half baked solutions.

Someone did though. Otherwise they wouldn't have created FilePilot. I have never had issues with any file manager in Linux. Explorer on the other hand is annoying as heck. Of course I am not picky with a file manager as I rarely use it on Linux anyway.

Gotta ask what hardware you are running. It makes a world of difference.

This machine is deliberately boring and well-supported. Higher end “prosumer” or “pseudo-workstation” motherboard (Asus ProArt X570 Creator), Ryzen 5950X, RX 9070 GPU. I actually swapped the GPU out for a better Linux experience (was originally running a 3080 Ti). Every distribution I’ve tried supports everything out of the box with no hoop-jumping.

> ...most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection.

What are those correct settings? Do you need something particularly special done for your Ethernet connection to function? Given that you were there because you were troubleshooting a NetworkManager failure, I'd also wonder if NetworkManager changed in a way that made that "add interface wizard" not work correctly anymore.

> ...the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky...

As you've discovered, NetworkManager is intermittently horrifically flaky. Every time I think about how it's the default for most Linux distros, I get so angry.

I used to enthusiastically use it for everything until the maintainers released a version that would always attempt to set the interface MTU to 0 after bringing it up, which the OS would clamp to something else... 12xx or 14xx, I can't remember. [0] After that clownshow, I dropped NetworkManager forever and used the "legacy" tools that had been working reliably for ages and continue to work reliably.

In the case of wired Ethernet interfaces, all that needs to be done for pretty much every home user is to bring the interface up and start a DHCP client like 'dhcpcd'. In the case of WiFi ones, you bring the interface up and start wpa_supplicant which can be managed with something like wpa_gui. Not-coincidentally, the Linux distro I use supports using both of these with its network configuration-and-activation tooling.

[0] For those who don't know what MTU is, know that the effect of this misconfiguration is that your network communications will intermittently stop dead for no clear reason at all. Things have gotten quite a bit better since then, and you can run mixed-MTU networks if you're careful about it... but back then, this immediately launched you into flaky network purgatory.

My network is extremely ordinary and doesn't need any special settings. PC is plugged into an unmanaged switch which is plugged into the router. Super standard stuff.

Specifically, on my machine interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on, and this is not represented by a corresponding checkbox in the wizard or when editing the interface. As a result I could ping other devices on the network and external IPs like 8.8.8.8, but not browse the web or do anything else that requires DNS resolution. One has to use nmcli to toggle that flag off.

> ...interfaces created in KDE settings have a flag to prevent automatic DNS resolution toggled on...

By this, do you mean that interfaces created will get their IP addresses via DHCP, but will ignore DHCP-provided DNS & etc servers?

If so, given how incredibly insane that is to be a default, there's no way that the wizard is doing that. Given my past experience with NetworkManager, I expect NetworkManager made a batshit-crazy backwards-incompatible change and didn't bother to tell anyone. I know that that doesn't fix your problem, but maybe it will encourage you to find out how to stop using this fantastically complex network management software that you don't even need and is clearly maintained by a pack of ADHD-addled clowns.

EDIT: And no, I'm very aware that this does nothing but reinforce your point that some of the components that the major Linux distros are using are nothing but boxes of razor blades. I guess I'm just lucky that I came across Gentoo Linux a quarter-century ago.

GNOME doesn't have sharp edges

Gnome's sharpest edge is that it has tried to simplify to the point that it doesn't have a UI for the thing I want to do. There might be an extension, and if I'm really lucky, it isn't broken and actually supports the current version.

I've been using it on my tablet, as I do find it to be a nice UI for the touchscreen, but I may switch to KDE because Gnome's onscreen keyboard is horrid, and difficult to replace.

It has plenty of them, especially for former power users pre-GNOME 3.0, starting with JavaScript for all extensions, famous for its early memory leaks, and the whole deal having to install several extensions to get the old behaviours back.

And then they decided the Windows registry is such a good idea, they should replicate it.

Mate / Cinnamon is quite nice, actually, for those who haven't gotten used to the Mac-style app bar.

These sharp edges are a lot less annoying with agents to help solve the problem.

Perhaps, but even as someone who uses LLMs I don’t like them being allowed to run amok on my machine. I don’t trust them.

They’re also a crutch that shouldn’t be necessary for tasks so commonplace and simple as adding a network interface.

fwiw, I haven't had this issue on Fedora on GNOME. Ubuntu/Debian have always been a pain for me, but Fedora has been great.

I see this as IBM/RedHat is a better steward/maintainer than other projects.

Yeah, the install was originally a GNOME one, but I added KDE after because it handles some things better. For example, GNOME tray item extensions will crash some tray-item-spawning programs running under WINE/Proton, which isn’t a problem under KDE.

I think GNOME gets some things more correct (it has a much better grip on design for instance), but I don’t agree with its strictly-minimalist philosophy that makes the macOS desktop look full-featured in comparison.

XFCE and Cinnamon are probably the closest to striking the right balance as far as I’m concerned (and are boring in a good way) but sadly they don’t get a fraction of the development resources that the big guys get.

They're the next step in UI for computers. Telling codex to add a network interface is easier than a GUI which is easier than a terminal program which is easier than manually editing a config file. None of those are a crutch. They are increasingly useful tools.

Frankly I find terminal applications considerably easier than most GUIs for most purposes, but I agree that natural language is generally an easier interface layer than either, and that an interface layer to the functions of a computer in general seems to be LLMs' destiny as a technology

I’ve been using command lines for over 25 years now and the thing that rubs me the wrong way about them is that nobody can agree on conventions with regard to how a CLI utility should work, which limits the amount of knowledge that’s transferable between them. Each effectively has to be learned individually which gets old fast.

I mean I think there's about as much convention and overlap as there seems to be for GUIs at least, and with much more discoverable clarification to boot

The issue with manpages is that they need to be pulled up independent of the program, they’re overly verbose, and often don’t include practical usage examples or if they do, bury them under miles of flags I’ll never use.

Sometimes CLI utility help commands fill the gap, but often they’re too spartan or don’t even exist.

Sure, documentation could always be better. My first attempt is usually tab-completion in the shell, then I'll try --help or something, then I usually go to either the archwiki or web search, which increasingly these days is equivalent to asking a chatbot, or asking an llm in a TUI. I find I'm generally not getting past the --help part of that more than 10% of the time, and the web or wiki search solves my problem with one query 99.99% of the rest of the time, but I'm willing to believe this is aided by experience.

No amount of experience using GUIs stops me from about 40% of the time I don't already know how to do something having to find a youtube video that explains what arcane path I need to take through a menu to find a setting, and if the menus have changed I might have to find the part of the video that explains what I'm looking for, watch it, realize it's changed, and hope I can find a more recent one. This goes for both native and web applications, for mobile and desktop, for every operating system I've ever touched. Sometimes there's a text explanation I can find, usually via a web search or llm. Sometimes I can guess at where something might be (Tools > Preferences? Wait maybe it's settings? Is this one a view setting? Hamburger menu? O wait no that one's in account settings. Ah, that one's under a different specific tab because the org that makes the software considers it an integration and also they A/B tested that it's more discoverable in this other place so they moved it since the youtube video I saw about it). On a web browser it's helpful to be able to dig into the page via debug consoles, sometimes I can search for some string I know is the name of the setting, or a value that's probably currently set. I can do all that, if necessary, but I'm certainly not comfortable claiming it's "easier"

I'm curious how you get codex to do anything when you don't have a working network?

In no way is a stochastic system that has zero ability to understand anything "the next step in UI". That's a recipe for disaster and even greater frustration.

But what if you switched to Linux to avoid having to use AI?

This is a genuinely incomprehensible take to me. You damn well better learn to use the tool, or you will be obviated by those that do (at least, as long as your job depends on it). Linux or no Linux.

Also, you are now using the tool that is best suited to "use AI". You will hit those rough patches, and it's good to know how to work through them. But sometimes there is just no time for such bullshit, and you now have a tool at your disposal that can just sweep these problems away. It is not without its downsides, but this is a clear "dumping the baby out with the bathwater" scenario.

Your post has the same energy of the old codgers who won't "learn computers" and impotently swim against the tide. It's fine if you want to do that (you do you), but you are swimming in the wrong direction IMO.

(If you don't work in tech, the magnitude of my recommendations would soften towards you in particular, but the velocity would remain the same.)

> "You damn well better learn to use the tool, or you will be obviated by those that do"

These vaguely threatening LLM promoter comments are almost like cultish "believe in $DEITY or you'll go to $PERDITION" preaching. It's just freaky.

I'm genuinely wondering what goes through their minds when they post this.

What goes through my mind is some combination of "Holy shit, this technology is incredible." and "Holy shit, this technology is retarded." and "If I don't stay on top of this shit, I'm going to lose my fucking job.".

On the other side of the fence, the aversion to using the tool seems equally cultish, like not working on the Sabbath.

If it makes you feel any better, I don't think this tech is "AGI" and that it seems to have some fundamental limitations that make it perform worse than a 3-year-old can perform on many tasks. But it's foolish to avoid something that could cause you to be replaced by some idiot that can do untold damage with just a few prompts, all because you didn't (assuming you work in tech) want to stay on top of the tools available to you.

-1 because why would someone who is annoyed with AI features in macOS migrate to Linux, where they would then be “forced” (in order to not waste their own time) to use agents to fix breaking OS-level functionality..

I've been a Linux user since at least 2013, I don't think I've ever been forced to use agents to fix anything?

Yes but we should not need an AI chatbot to solve problems which should be trivial for us to solve ourselves. Linux should just not have these issues, period.

OK, good luck with that attitude. Until the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally arrives, you can use the available technology to solve the problem in a practical manner.

Agents aren't a panacea: The sharp edges shouldn't be there to begin with.

IE, the ethernet port shouldn't just disappear from the OS; it doesn't matter that now it's a little easier to fix the problem.

Should is a four-letter word, my friend. The sharp edges are there whether you want them to be or not.

Do you need glasses? I count 6 letters.

If you don't have ethernet the agent isn't going to get a lot done

I had a local model help me to revert a bad kernel last year. I think it was Qwen-3-Coder, and I had no GUI and no network.

This is actually a great point. I've taken some esoteric issue with my Debian Linux install and gotten exactly the needed fix. Especially when the error is extremely misleading ("/dev/root: Can't open blockdev" was that I forgot to install the actual kernel image itself...) Distros could ship open-weight LLMs that sure, might take a minute to come up with the answer, but they could be preset with the privileges to actually execute the solution.

However, those only exist because real people talk about problems on forums. If we fully integrate an LLM into the desktop and nobody discusses the issues they run into anymore, will LLMs continue to be able to solve the problems?

> "These sharp edges are a lot less annoying with agents to help solve the problem."

That applies just as much to Windows and MacOS as it does to Linux.

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