I recently installed the shiny new Mint 20. I have a lot of experiences that the fictitious cook with the kitchen inspector has. Am I just getting old? Do I just want the kids off my lawn? Why is it so damn hard to find anything now? Case in point, I was using a pretty old distro on my computer, one of those dang mini-itx jobs where the BT and WIFI are impossible to turn off from the bios, but you turn them off in software. Of course, on the old linux, they were just off, you had to configure them. Well, I am hardwired in my house (again, maybe I am too old and need to be killed?) and I do not use wifi for my servers/workstations. Install Mint 20, well, first off, it wants to do WIFI, nope. Hrm, open a terminal, why isn't the wired connection getting an IP? I know, beyond all reason, that my dhcp server is working. I try to do my normal config or look in /etc... nope. It is controlled by some kind of automagic thing now. Ill just get on the inter... oh, yeah, its off. So I look around the gui, that config does not show why it is not coming on?
Where is the normal "turn this on/off button in the gui? Why am I using the gui? Oh, right, my old method is long gone now"
I feel like although this example could be trivial, but a lot of things seemed to have gone away. I will not rehash the systemd vs init discussion here, but it sure seemed like a lot of configs used to be easier. Here are a few that come to mind:
My dns was just one text file away.
My network config was a very simple cli change away.
I want to change my prompt... wow, why is it referenced in 5 places in this bash file now?
My path is referenced all over the place... what happened here, I will just check with the set command. OMG, what is all this stuff now?
I think in our quest to make things "easier" for people, we made it a lot more difficult for those who want to change a few things and use the computer.