I think the biggest culture shock for a lot of people is “fewer surprises, more options.” On my machine at least, updates don’t run automatically – I might get a notification that “updates are available” but that’s it, I still have to say “okay, now is a good time to update”, it won’t surprise me with them.

Similarly, if I want to set a hotkey for like “take a screenshot of the current application”, I can do that! But the downside is that it might not be set up by default, I have to go to settings -> hotkeys or something similar.

Linux “gets out of your way” and lets you solve problems, but that also means it’s not always going to solve them for you. It’s getting better at this over time – if lots of people have the same problem, the solution might get merged “upstream”, but a lot of things are still “well, how do YOU want it to work?”.

is this available in text form?

this is my sticking point with fish. I still need to know bash for writing portable scripts, so its hard to justify scripting in fish.

I still use firefox despite their questionable leadership, for one major reason: it prevents Google from setting whatever web standards they want. Sites that aren’t standards compliant will usually still work in Chromium-based browsers, but they will break in Firefox, and then I can report the bugs.

Probably Emacs. /j

I have Syncthing set up to copy save data between my pc and steam deck, but not just for emulator stuff: its got my entire modded minecraft directory and my balatro modloader nn there too.

wait how does your clipboard shortcut work op? that sounds nifty!

i use a joplin notebook. its like a private wiki, and it works on android too.

syncthing is the easy option if you have some files you always want to have on both. if you just want to access your desktop files from your phone, I recommend Cx File Explorer for Android, it’s a file browser that supports various network file share protocols including Samba and SFTP.

Starting anything from scratch is a huge risk these days. At best you’ll have something like the python 2 -> 3 rewrite overhaul (leaving scraps of legacy code all over the place), at worst you’ll have something like gnome/kde (where the community schisms rather than adopting a new standard). I would say that most of the time, there are only two ways to get a new standard to reach mass adoption.

1. Retrofit everything. Extend old APIs where possible. Build your new layer on top of https, or javascript, or ascii, or something else that already has widespread adoption. Make a clear upgrade path for old users, but maintain compatibility for as long as possible.

2. Buy 99% of the market and declare yourself king (cough cough chromium).

optional autocomplete is a nice-to-have, eager autocomplete is a pain in the ass. as long as it only completes when I ask it to, I don’t mind.

My experience with pacman was via rwfus on steam deck. I was coming in as someone with experience with apt, npm, pip, even choco and winget on windows. My expectation from pretty much every other command line tool is that commands are verbs, flags are adverbs. So having to install with “pacman -S” (or is it “pacman -Sy”?) just feels unnecessarily cryptic. Same with “nix-env -iA”. I understand that there are some clever internals going on under the hood, but you can have clever internals and sane defaults. For instance, “npm install foo” both downloads the package to node_modules and updates package.json for me, so I can see what change was made to my environment. Nix should do that.

I’ve also seen it as pacman -Sy and pacman -Syu and so on. I really just think “install” should be a subcommand, not a flag. That’s really my only issue I guess, I’ve only ever used pacman via rwfus on steam deck so maybe my usability problem is with that.

pacman and nix are both really neat conceptually but they both fail at the most obvious usability test, which is “I just want to install a package”; its like exiting vim all over again.

edit: yes, I know you can set an alias to pacman -Sy or whatever, but if you need to set up an alias for a command to be usable, then I can’t in good faith recommend that OS to anyone, and I don’t want to use an OS I wouldn’t recommend to others.

If you’re gonna dismiss it like that then I’d love to hear what your pain points are. What’s so bad about containers for multi-platform applications?

this is written like a lily-livered wimp who is anti-woke and won’t admit it