Setting up Postgres is a PITA compared to SQLite. It comes bundled with python these days. Obviously it's going to be a trade off as to which one causes you more pain.
I manly work as a sysadmin for small companies. (Most people don't call us when they install new tools, they call when they exploded.) All my hatred goes out to the (Windows) programs (and its creators) that think they need MS SQL Express or the likes to save their two bytes of dust.
All my love goes to the programs that just run/save from/to a UNC path.
Has SMB locking, and OP Locking become that much more reliable?
Pretty much one of the classic desktop support calls for me was "my access database on the shared drive is corrupt"
I'm out touch now, but one of the failure modes seemed to be that a client would take out an oplock, so it could do local caching etc. Then someone else opens the file, the server sends the oplock break to original client but that message gets lost/ignored, and we end up with 2 or more clients now making unsynchronised changes to a file.
Any smb client access to shared data more complicated than documents and spreadsheets just makes me twitch these days.
It was a long time ago now, and it probably was more prevalent in larger environments.. just more chances for things to go wrong I'd guess.
If something is designed for shared filesystems that's different, but my experience was that at the low midrange things aren't. They seem to work, until they don't.
What's wrong with sql express? Assuming you fit within its size constraints?
agreed, running pg locally is a pain. I use a cloud postgres instance (even for local dev). They're dirt cheap and it's not worth the hassle of working with a local pg.
I love Postgres.app on mac, makes running locally a breeze. Running Postgres fast on the cloud is what I always struggled with (without paying enormous sums)