its funny how detached linux ricing people are from actual computer science
showing some weird twm setup and saying "THIS is real CS!!", if they set foot in any software engineers office theyd get a stroke because the average setup there is whatever old desktop is the default and some fuckass editor you never heard about yet they do more work daily than any of these larpers could do in a year

@rose I made a post about this a while back, nobody who rices their terminal does any work in it. zshell this, fish that, bash gets work done.

people really dont understand what "just use whatever gets the job done" means
even as an emacs user i would NEVER recommend anyone to switch to emacs because the initial learning curve is not worth it compared to just using vscode or whatever and learning how to efficiently work there
its always "but.. this uses less ram" and "this has better colours" and "this needs less storage" the majority of computers nowadays have more than enough storage or ram to comfortably run literally every editor there is

@rose CDE <3

@rose yeah. I use vim bindings in the titanic sow that is JetBrains editors, because I had to learn vi the hard way and it stuck. I won't ever tell anyone they need to use either tool for whatever reason. Its what works best for me so its what I use, the company can buy me more memory if I need it.

@prettygood @rose zsh is how you clock a macfag who's trying to get into linux

@rose @prettygood if you don't already know exactly what you're going to be using emacs for going in, you have no business using emacs.

yeah exactly
like full truth, emacs SUCKS as just a text editor, it's once you get into the other stuff that it becomes useful, i know people who are used to emacs keybinds but dont wanna mess with emacs itself anymore so they just use vscode with an emacs plugin

CC: @prettygood@socially.drinkingatmy.computer

@rose if i could read this inwould get upset

you cant read the post?

@rose @prettygood that being said, I think the anti-ricing narrative is quite overblown in a lot of places, it's not as if people haven't been running heavily customized wm and shell setups ever since the early project athena days, one look at something like xwinman and you'll find plenty of what would in modern parlance be called "rices" which are old enough to drink, my favorite example thusly being attached

@rose

@allison @rose @prettygood I miss using i3 on a three monitor setup on my previous job. But there's always some program that refuses to work with a tiling wm, so I eventually gave up trying and just use kde.

@affine @allison @rose I loved the simplicity of XFCE but there's so much just missing that it started to feel lacking so I just use KDE lol

@prettygood @rose I just install fish and fzf and boom i instantly have a nice and comfy dev environment. It’s pretty much the opposite of this issue as it gets you a fully modern shell with lots of quality of life without the tinkering of zsh.

@rose Sheesh, I always dread getting fresh-out-of-college people on the job touting their shiny new CS degree. All that ever means is that I have to spend 6-months breaking delusions and forcing them to UNLEARN textbook nonsense that they will never actually see in real life.
"But an Access database should never reach 2GB!"
"Well, this one did. Now buckle up because we need to unfuck it and we've got maybe 20 minutes before managers start losing their minds about downtime."

@prettygood @rose
could point you to one "senior developer" (quite good one) using fish, though would never touch it me 😅

@rose
maybe it's some kinda selection bias, but computer people i've been friends of (in systems/embedded programming, webstuff, old dude managing uni supercomputer) have all used some kinda i3 or ratpoison or whatever

and, even after switching careers, personally still use zsh・vim・hlwm and friends but for writing lots of latex・wrangling thousands of files・simple website and server admin etc. though not required for "serious work", but if you have previously put in the time such things really can be much more efficient and ergonimic in the end because "whatever old desktop" is a repetition of old mistakes and confusing idiosyncrasies forced into a "lowest common denominator" + needless glitz body

and for some people (e.g. me) this kind of customisation is requisite to do anything effectively at all. connective tissue disorder means my fingers get strained very easily, and being able to switch between tags or windows with a single key chord (no wrist movement) on small split keyboard with very light switches and customised better-than-qwerty layout, rather than having to move a hand to click on things or swipe around or at least move to press a weird key every few seconds, means being able to type・search through docutments・whatever for hours rather than rapid pain of macos or something that gives even normal-body people rsi

@rose
※ergonomic (io are still next each other in this layout because constrained design to be vim friendly

@rose@snac.pinkro.se I'm a professional software engineer with a degree in CS and my main computer is a macbook pro with the default wallpaper for the current version of the OS (still on sequoia so its a photo of some redwoods)

@prettygood @rose sometimes ricing is just what you do during breaks, or just to have fun

but yeah none of this unix weenie crap is the least bit ergonomic. i’ve tried a bunch and always went back to KDE programs because IN PRACTICE they’re easier to work with. today i tried meli and went right back to kmail because it was orders of magnitude slower and i would’ve had to rice the theme and all the keyboard shortcuts to be able to use it at all (i have a custom layout to prevent RSI) – and it still would just fucking suck on account of having only a single window at a time

zsh is unironically nicer than bash though, both for interactive use and for scripting. you don’t even need to rice it. batch rename files? zmv. run shit in parallel without the weird find -print0/xargs crap? zargs. convert a bunch of images? shortened for syntax for i (*.tif) avifenc $i ${i:r}.avif
also has fewer pitfalls around variable expansion and better types.

@mia @rose I just use `parallel` for running things in parallel. But good points about the others, I lean on some file manager tools for bulk renaming (infrequent)

I can't stand kmail though.

@prettygood @rose what pisses me off the most is that these people, either because they’re elitist and want to feel better about themselves, or because they’re boomers with calcified brains, just have no vision of what modern computing could be, and no inclination to solve any of the actually annoying problems. things like pipewire and wayland are the closest we’ve ever come to having something actually nice, and they waste their breath and everyone’s time shittalking them

@allison @rose @prettygood Yes, but when you look at what people "riced" 20 years ago, you find that most of it looks dorky with the colors schemes, but it is generally a functional configuration. If you ignore the obvious "just for looks" themes of the older days. What people make now on r/unixporn and related looks very nice, but is largely disfunctional. Meaning that you start using it and it gets in your way.

@phnt @rose @prettygood I'm quite aware of this, actually just made a lockpost about a different but related issue which I'll take the liberty of quoting here in its entirety

> honestly I think a big problem which is developing over the last few years is that this kind of directness and hands-on learning is being lost, but the outward form of it remains. your average r/unixporn rice nowadays is some hyprland thing, almost certainly set up from a script, almost certainly having everything abstracted away so that the person using it doesn't actually learn the subtleties of what it is they're using.

@prettygood @mia @rose
> I lean on some file manager tools for bulk renaming (infrequent)
I have vimv for that, if I need more than simple file type conversions.

@rose or a macbook

@mia @rose FWIW I used to be this way but I switched to wayland when I went to KDE and it just... worked. I had trouble with one old game in Proton but i just had to disable the game's own vsync and it was fine.

40 years in this business and I use plain vanilla vim in bash on a windows terminal session.

@mia @prettygood @rose Problem of elitism and refusing opinions of the opposite side is on both sides. Wayland's approach to my computer being a phone with XDG Portals and a bunch of useless permissions is an evolutionary mistake, same with the hellscape called dbus.

@rose i do not believe that ricers think that

@prettygood @rose i use fish ><>

@phnt @prettygood @rose portals are good though because they let me use KDE’s file picker instead of GTK’s. permissions being an annoyance is chiefly a distro problem if you ask me.

and idk, dbus has terrible code aesthetics and there are many things i don’t like about it, but at the end of the day it’s solving a problem, isn’t causing me any additional ones (ymmv i guess?), and mature enough alternatives have either not yet materialized or not been around for long enough to be supported by anything.

@prettygood @phnt @rose annoying permissions is the same class of distro skill issue as the thing where GUI stuff suddenly wants to open everything in wine internet explorer

@mia @prettygood @rose It can't be a distro issue when I can't turn it off, because there isn't any "don't care, fuck your sandboxing" option besides building the software without the support for it which is getting more and more difficult mainly thanks to gnome autism pushing it (glycin and bwrap in everything). It's more of a sofware developer knowing "what's best" for users issue. I simply don't care about the whole sandboxing idea when I already sandbox things needing it manually and better. I find the whole idea of Portals throwing messages over an open bus just to get access to a single file or detect simple stuff like dark/light theme mode incredibly dumb and overengineered. Same with getting video and audio capture working in Wayland over Pipewire.

As for dbus, I consider it a security failure due to it's unauthenticated and wide open design. It's IPC done the worst way, completely in the open. Which is why it's a very nice target for anyone wanting to breach a system due to wrongly written policies and root daemons (see the whole openSuse and Deepin saga on the bugtracker).

@phnt @prettygood @rose all symptoms of linux desktop IPC just being fucking cooked. what’s even there to replace it? android’s binder?

@mia @prettygood @rose UNIX sockets on defined locations

@affine @rose @prettygood this is funny because i was made aware of fish by a friend that has used mac his entire life

@KaiserKitty @rose @prettygood exactly

@anemone @rose > default wallpaper
ok that's inexcusable

@mia @prettygood @phnt @rose i managed to disable that wine behavior with some env var

@rose all hyprland setups are larp, same with neovim, ghostty, alacritty, etc. etc.

@ageha@tomo.airen-no-jikken.icu @rose@snac.pinkro.se i work at a silicon valley tech company doing webshit and half the engineers in my department are also very very particular with their setups. lots of custom layout split keyboards, crazy vim configs, highly custom keybindings etc etc though we are all limited by the fact that IT hands out macbooks.

and anecdotally there is a correlation between having non-default desktop setups and actually giving a shit about being good at programming

@PurpCat @phnt @mint @rose @prettygood no idea