Comment by CoolCold | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CoolCold | Hacker News Reader

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> I’d much prefer grepping a directory of files for keywords

Do you think it's right way in general? If yes, please join my imaginary experiment case:

* you are part of Corporate IT support team

* your company is let's say Korean speaking and your OS interface (locale) is Korean as well

* you have phone call for support request on for something simple like changing desktop background or changing laptop sleep interval be not 5 minutes but 15

I can imagine in say Windows 11, someone press "win", type "battery" in local language and finds the needed setting, but how someone would "grep" for something in non-native language - I'm not sure.

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I can imagine more examples, say - what is the way to ask for remote assistance or MDM or disk encryption rollout by CorpIT or wiping data in case of loss or... which would demonstrate to me - it's not ready for broader audience beyond 5% of deviation of population (nerds). And your grepping example, to me, says - such use cases are not even considered when someone says "linux is ready for desktop".

Internationalization is a strong argument.

I don’t like it, but you might be right. I’d still prefer a layer of abstraction between config file keys/comments so your configuration can be localized, but there are additional issues here with user-vs-author comments which the UI solution wouldn’t need to consider.

Of course you are correct, I couldn’t imagine teaching grep to my grandpa, most relatives, or even all coworkers. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it would be lovely if this was always an option. I’d much prefer having control, than an opaque system that migrates my settings forwards. Maybe I’m advocating for a system that supports both?

Thank you for posting, I never considered this, I need to think about it.

I'm glad if it helped you to take a look from another angle.

Then probably this would be helpful too - try to imagine why the most popular Linux based user facing systems - Android and Chrome OS, are not any kind of "traditional" Linux desktop distribution alike. Does it says something on users?

What wonders me as well - when Linux desktops start to finally use telemetry and stop being blind on real user cases, not on the imaginary nerds needs. It will give great productivity boost. Microsoft has it and they know their auditorium. The techies who knows in person how logging is important on fixing bugs - has no such logs! Ridiculous to me.

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