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I might've already posted about this, but someone just reminded me of my achieving Linux enlightenment moment. Many years ago I was fascinated with more and more "advanced" distros and as one does at some point installed Arch Linux and I was talking to my father (IT-saur) about how it doesn't do anything by default unless you tell it to and it's so cool to set up my system exactly how I want relatively from scratch even if it sometimes takes some time and effort.

He responded that it seems kinda backwards, and that he remembers when some version of bash installer came out and if ran normally it would automatically detect everything and set up with sane defaults without any need for further tinkering. You run the installer, you get functional bash. And I suddenly realised he's right; that was the future and I believe it's still the way now, I'm all for customising my system as much as I want, but I'd like my software to install with sane defaults and presumptions and not require me to understand its inner workings and connections to other parts of the system just to be able to use it. Software should work for me and save me time and effort if I so desire.

This is something that Gentoo, Exherbo and especially NixOS do much better.

@Amikke Hi!, your father is right, one could do the same analogy of owning a car.

You don't need to set up the whole mechanics, like knowing in detail what happens in the combustion chamber, or the exact viscosity of the oil that best suits your needs. However, some people find joy in knowing and doing those stuffs as a hobby. And if you do it like that, I think is nice.

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