Comment by shirro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shirro | Hacker News Reader

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I had to configure modelines on my first PC, bought so I could run a *nix at home, specifically Linux. The video card was a Tseng ET4000W32 and that is about all I can remember about the hardware in that PC. PC monitors seemed to rejected frequencies that were out of spec and shut off so I think the hardware damage thing was an urban legend or it might have been a thing with screens that weren't designed for the consumer mass market.

I didn't use X much initially because my version of the card wasn't properly supported in Xfree86 and had some colour/palette problem. Also the resolution and quality and size of cheap CRTs at the time made Xterminals less readable than the console IMO. The SVGA support in console for things like image viewers just worked. It was only when Mosaic came out that I started to run X more often and it wasn't my default for a few years I think.

Before PCI, PlugnPlay and Windows 95 everything was configured with dip switches and port numbers and interrupts went into configs even on the DOS side. Partitioning a disk wasn't a trivial thing. Even so modelines seemed kind of silly even back then. When people say Arch is complicated I just chuckle to myself at how far things have come.

XF86Config (or was it XF86Setup?) had some nice defaults for things like "Monitor that can do 1024x768@70Hz" in case you were like me and had an offbrand monitor not listed amongst the supported ones. Hacking modelines wasn't strictly necessary even in the mid-late 90s.

Arch is complicated. It doesn't even come with man pages or documentation. "Hi! Here's a Linux box with a getty and a shell, and you're lucky we even included that much. Good luck!"

At least when configuring XFree86 on Slackware in nineteen-ninety-something, I had local man pages and documentation to refer to out-of-the-box.

The install medium had documentation loaded, and installing which forms of documentation you want to the persistent system is right in the installation guide

TIL.

And that's great for people who know this, and who also know in advance what documentation they'll want in the future.

It's less-great for people who have booted their new installation without knowing one or both of these things.

I mean: I get it. I do realize that a line must be drawn somewhere on what to include or not include by default. I just don't like where that line is drawn in this particular instance.

My feeling is that storage is cheap and plentiful... unless it isn't.

It seems to me that the people who would benefit from superfluously-available documentation the most are the ones who are likely to have plenty of space available: They're newbs -- newbs who are not building something to fit into less than 2GB of flash, and who are not making a template that will be used for a thousand instances. They're just trying to get their feet wet.

And it also seems that the people who would benefit most from a system that is a wee bit leaner due to a lack of auto-installed documentation are the same ones who would have the least amount of difficulty removing that documentation.

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