Let the apologists have a field day in the comments.
Hey man, it’s no surprise the gui people are good at making the gui settings in the gui :P
reminds me of the one time I tried to configure a proxy on fedora KDE and then realizing most apps don’t even use the inbuilt proxy settings and there are three separate ways to configure it that are only accessable via the terminal and it is pain
Desktop Environments are decoupled from the underlying system. It makes switching DEs very easy but integration sucks.
I needed to flush dns on my Ubuntu machine. I googled it found a command for an older version. But of course the underlying stuff changed since then and that command doesn’t exist anymore.
The command to flush dns on Windows has been the same for decades. On Linux half the stuff I learn is going to be obsolete in a couple of years and that knowledge can’t be carried over to other Distros because they do it differently.
I also had to manually build and install a driver for a very common realtek wifi chipset that is not even new.
This is the reason I sometimes come back to the BSDs, they just feel more coherent as a whole.
sysctl, anyone?
12 years ago maybe, plasma made a lot of improvements since then
Can I edit systemd services and bootloader settings somewhere?
Systemdgenie is good enough for me, but that’s just me.
There really aren’t any simple settings for grub that need a GUI and honestly the systemd service CLI for enabling starting and disabling is pretty damn easy
You should have done the 2nd half in ascii art because terminal ;)
2nd half in raw binary because I use Arch btw.
2nd half in uncompiled source code because gentoo
The GUI for Linux Mint is pretty phenomenal. Looks a LOT like Windows Control Panel
*openSUSE enters the chatroom
SUSE/openSUSE are the only ones that have it figured out. It requires a lot of polish, but it’s the only distro that seems to really care about a deeper system configuration through GUI, and that’s really appreciated.
Since suggestions in the comments are just words of apologists, do you have a proposal for a solution, or is this just a rant post?
All I’m getting right now is a vague idea of some Master GUI that resembles the cockpit of a commercial jet that no “average user” is ever going to try and decipher, anyway.
do you have a proposal for a solution, or is this just a rant post?
I think this post captures a commonly felt problem whether or not it is still a fair criticism.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, you have no reason to edit those settings.
Wanting a good GUI doesn’t mean you don’t know what you are doing.
Conversely, if it was presented in a more user friendly way, perhaps more people would know what they were doing.
Sure… Want to fix the stupid new menus in windows 11? Oh it is just a new guid key in the registry in a location you wouldn’t expect. You know just cut and paste shit into the registry you found on the internet. Windows is just as annoying, if not more so.
In any case: what system GUI’s do you want? GUIS make everything so much harder, careful what you wish for.
Does Windows 11 still use the Windows 7 control panel?
They deprecated that to prevent users from messing with things
No, there’s a couple rogue advanced dialogues but the control panel’s finally been well replaced
rip in peace, control panel. will be missed.
Ehhhh, you can still get in there. Also there are several control panel only functions. It’s been pretty frustrating how they’ve incremented change. I feel like they should have gone menu by menu in control panel and just built their new settings application page by page and then just pushed one big control panel alternative. Then they could phase the old one out or leave it in for legacy users or whatever. But the new settings and how that menu changes every few months is frustrating as hell.
MY CREATOR USED LINUX TO DEVELOPE ME I FEEL COLD WHEN I EXTRACT MY DATA
My favourite part of Linux cli is you only know you’ve done something when you get no feedback at all.
I think there should be a standard for config files, where it defines all of the options and possible values, so that an app can be made to modify them.
Any modern Linux distro viable for the average user uses systemd, and there ain’t many different bootloaders being used by big distros either (almost always either Grub or systemd-boot, rarely Efistub). Likewise it’s clear for years that Wayland is the future (not to mention this problem persists for over 2 decades now).
I don’t see a problem with lack of standardized config files, rather a lack of interest by the rather tech-conservative part of the Linux community (who by now often have a lot to say in development circles).
There doesn’t seem to be an existing standard for what I described, from what I see.
There are existing standards. The issue is that there are too many different standards and some programs will choose to make their conf files half standardized, half unique.
There’s INI, YAML, JSON, XML, TOML, etc.
Honestly, the Linux team needs to just choose one of these formats, declare it the gold standard, and slowly migrate the config files for most core components over to it. By declaring a standard, you’ll eventually get the developers of most major third-party tools and components to eventually migrate.
Thats not exactly what I meant, I meant a system where you would have a file that defines all the options for an app, and their possible values, so a gui or program could be made to edit them.
What comes sort of close, is that you can define so-called “schemas”, at least for JSON, TOML, YAML and XML. Here’s what that might look like for JSON: https://json-schema.org/learn/getting-started-step-by-step
I don’t know, if you can actually generate a GUI from such a schema, though. They’re intended for validating existing data, so I don’t know, if they give you enough data to work with to actually provide a GUI. For example, you don’t really have a human-readable name in these. The fields are rather called e.g. “productName”.
Schemas are a nightmare to work with, and are totally unreadable
Yeah, I am aware of schemas, I meant something where you would have, for example, a conf.definition.json file:
{ screenResolution: { definition: "What resolution the screen should be", options: [ "1920x1080", "720x470" ] } }So then, a settings app could control settings for other programs, like apple does, by checking this file, and editing the configuration file based on it.
If you ignore the gui part, this sounds a lot like nixos.
Yeah something like that should be doable but it would require that programs provide a schema and the OS to have a way for the programs to “announce” themselves so it can be aware of the configuration files and the schema.
I’m sure some project could create a GUI that could cover the most common applications, though.
It’s always fun trying to set up a program, learning the config syntax, running it, having it fail, and then spending an hour debugging before you realize it never even read your config changes because you were supposed to use one of the other half dozen conf files it has spread all across your drive. Is it under
/etc/,/usr/local/etc/,/opt/, or your home directory?I was thinking, they would put the definitions in a specific directory, like if its installed locally, ~/.config/definitions or if installed globally /etc/definitions and then any settings apps would search for those.
This could be paraphrased as “GUI for the GUI settings, non-GUI for the non-GUI settings.” It’s not surprising to me that parts of Linux that run on systems that don’t have GUIs do. It have GUI settings. I understand the frustration, but building those is more work, and more things that can break, go out of date, etc…
What if Linux presented its config files in an app like regedit? Would that be easier? I doubt it. But with complicated data structures, making a first-class app just to edit a specific text file or set of files on disk is a very low ROI for engineering hours.
Then at least give users the ability to edit said text files with a text editor… but the community fights that as well. 🙄 The only distro I ever saw that enabled users to open a file browser and, through that, a text editor as root to edit system files was Mint. KDE had it for a short while before they patched it out again as far as I know (last time I checked Dolphin outright refused to start with root privileges).
It’s not like there weren’t ways to make it easier with little investment. Some elitists just managed to suppress even those efforts for decades.
Kde allows you to edit files with elevated permissions; use Kate for that. Open any system file in Kate and it will ask you for your password when you’ll try to save it.
