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by smarx007 1998 days ago
Well, you certainly need "tips and tricks" to make Arch Linux fully usable. Every powerful tool needs to be adjusted to its use (Github is full of dotfiles and macOS bootstrap repos). Doing so is a sign of professionalism (craftsmanship).
1 comments
acdha 1998 days ago
I think that’s saying more about Arch than anything else. While it’s not wrong that people add dot files to track preferences, those aren’t necessary for basic usage. Someone using macOS without customizing anything still has a good experience.

A key distinction is between domain complexity and what the product adds to that intrinsic complexity. If you use GitHub or GitLab issues with no customization you’ll have a better experience than a Jira user because they work well out of the box without requiring customization or adjusting your workflow just to accomplish core tasks.

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smarx007 1998 days ago
You are right, Arch has a poor product experience.

On the other hand, I do not view those systems as products when it comes to professional use. A non-techie might see a Mac as a fancy laptop but for me it's a tool. Just like an HSS cutting tool in a lathe, you'd carefully maintain it (you don't want to use a dull cutting tool) and tune it. Just like you want to regrind a cutting tool depending on the part you are machining, I disable Intel Turbo Boost using http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com when I run long perf evaluations of my programs for academic projects. If M1 based Macs will not allow me to disable their boost clock functionality, they will be unsuitable for my work as a tool. When that happens, you simply pick the most fitting tool. Not necessarily switching dev platforms, in this case a separate machine running Linux for the eval may be OK.

Regarding issue trackers, there are still some things I miss about Bugzilla after moving to Github issues such as sorting issues by two fields in order (eg first by prio and then milestone). I similarly like complex queries that can be saved in YouTrack. I will admit that 5 years ago I thought that Bugzilla was ugly (it still is) and not user-friendly (one of the worst) but now I simply see it as a professional tool that does not get in my way once I learn how to use it. On the other hand, most of the tools with proper UX (not all, most notably airplane cockpits have proper UX but still do not get in the way of a pilot doing their job including manual overrides for all kinds of malfunctions) have some "user journey" which gets in the way of almost every pro user.

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