ooh! super cool! yeah, window manager customization is hugely empowering. twitter.com/NoraDotCodes/s
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then there's this very interesting suggestion to *remove* the GUI
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Replying to @Studio8502 and @ireneista
Make a *toy* distribution that is specifically designed to be Fisher•Price My First Unix. Give it a basic command line shell, friendly colour scheme, *no* GUI tools of any kind, just terminal emulator windows that minimize to icons on the desktop.
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yeah. this seems really important, being able to roll back to a known-good state. twitter.com/NoraDotCodes/s
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re: UI customization again. absolutely agreed. we get *why* it's rarer today - it makes it easy to break things, and corporate OS vendors would rather you see their brand elements than your own customizations - but it's deeply saddening.
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Replying to @ireneista
I'm sad that it's gotten so much harder for 99% of computer users. Once upon a time you could at least, like, set your widget colors on every consumer OS out of the box. Now you, uh, just can't without outright patching things in kinda-sketch ways.
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trust NireBryce to have thoughts on how to make *terminals* more friendly. seriously, this is great to see, especially since it dovetails with one of our back-burner projects.
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Replying to @NireBryce and @ireneista
get rid of the 80col limit, make it easy to split a terminal so you can have the docs on one side like you're doing lisp in emacs, etc.
always have status bars for commands in the command line, unless you disable them. even when it will slow down the runtime
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100%. there needs to be a lot of attention paid to making sure users are *aware* when they're customizing something in a way which makes the UI harder to make sense of.
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Replying to @ireneista
also you need everything to be tweakable, but slowly reveal itself as you learn more instead of just hitting you, MSWord vs VSCode
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another vote for making it safer to experiment with internals. we're personally enthused about declarative-state distros such as NixOS and guix, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done to make them beginner-friendly.
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Replying to @ireneista
In my history as a newb I felt like it was all fun and games until I poked my eye out. Making it *safe* for experimentation practically requires a standalone system you can afford to recreate from scratch and lose everything on from a bad choice.
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Yeah, I've been getting into Nix (on Mac) for this reason. Ultimately I'd like to be able to use Linux more, but I feel scared about getting into trouble/breaking stuff. Nix is still pretty intimidating to get into, but I'm hoping it will help me long term with that.
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Would be really cool to see the barrier to entry go down for stuff like Nix though. It's still a huge learning curve! Although it seems like it is improving more of late.