> I feel like this article gave up way too fast on gdb's tui mode, especially given that gdb works and tui didn't crash like half the debuggers in the list, other than "the command tui disable crashes gdb." which I can't reproduce.

I've had the same conundrum for a various categories of development tools on Linux:

For a particular category (e.g., remote debugging, Vim C++ autocomplete system, etc.), an initial search uncovers 3-10 software combinations that people have documented as working.

And when I work through the list, trying to find one that works for me, I often hit problem after problem. It's hard to know if (a) that particular recipe is no longer workable, (b) there's something about my particular setup that will forever damn that approach, or (c) I just need to keep working through the problems until I finally get things working.

So it's hard to know how long to bang away at a particular recipe to determine if it's (a), (b), or (c).

The unfortunate result is I often run out of time for the investigation, and fall back to using Vim + gdb + ctags for developing on remote servers.

Mostly I'm just surprised that Visual Studio in 1999 gave me a better debugging experience than I've been able to cobble together on Linux in 2020.