[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 06:03:01AM +0200, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Saturday, 14 September 2013 at 02:56:52 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> >So then recompile after you do a distribution upgrade.
> 
> Of course there's ways around it, but talk about an enormous hassle.
> 
> >I'll be sure to look, but one bad thing doesn't mean everything's
> >bad
> 
> Like I said, I've been a Linux user for a long time, and that's by
> choice! But I still envy a lot of what Windows gets right and still
> long for the good old days of DOS where it was just you, the
> hardware, and a little tiny helper library that was there if you
> needed it.

I remember those days too. :) But I dunno, IME, when Windows 3.1 came
along, it had so many gratuitous limitations that I said to myself, this
sucks! So now I can't have direct access to hardware in the name of
"protection", and what do I get in return? Nothing but being
straitjacketed into a system that can't even do what I want. So I stuck
with DOS until Win95 came along, and it became pretty clear that the
days of DOS are numbered. I hated Win95 just as much for the same
reasons: the hood was welded shut in the name of "protection", but
little protection was actually offered, and a lot of lack of
functionality. I clung on to DOS until its dying days, then somebody
suggested Linux. I wasn't too pleased to hear that either -- I had been
using Solaris in my CS classes in college, and I wasn't particularly
impressed with it. But I did decide to try it. I gave up after a while,
'cos of the sheer difficulty of actually installing a system that worked
(this was in the days before linux installers existed.)

Some time later, as all hopes of DOS-style programming faded away, I
decided to seriously look into finding a Linux distro that I could live
with. I chose Debian. It was a bit of a challenge to get it to work --
this was before the days of apt-get. But when I finally did get it to
work, I was actually quite pleased with it. It offered one thing that
Windows and most of the other distros at the time offered: the ability
to install a bare minimum system that could still function without
*requiring* X11, and (the beginnings of) a sane package management
system that doesn't suck -- I could, for example, specify that I *don't*
want fvwm (which was all the rage at one point) installed by default,
and the packaging system would actually take that and *work* with it
instead of saying "you don't want the defaults? OK, then you're on your
own, if it breaks, you get to keep the pieces", like most other distros
were doing at the time. It allowed me to select a different default
shell from bash without totally collapsing into a heap of mess, unlike
some other distros that I tried, that simply assumed /bin/sh ==
/bin/bash.

Anyway, long story short, I found that while Linux, like any other
modern OS, required sacrificing some flexibility -- you don't deal
directly with the hardware anymore -- it also offered a lot in return:
protection of programs from each other, so that X11 crashing (which was
a frequent occurrence in those days) doesn't bring down the entire
system, and typing the wrong command as a user won't delete system
files. Customizability. The ability to reach inside the innards of the
system and modify stuff. Personalize it to the point nobody else knows
how to use the system. Sure, things weren't perfect. But at least you
had the fighting chance to do something about it. Whereas on Windows, I
had to sacrifice the same flexibility, yet what I get in return was a
system that can be easily brought down by a misbehaving program, typing
the wrong command(s) can delete system files and require a full
reinstallation, a straitjacketed "you-have-to-use-a-GUI-or-else" design
mentality that makes it impossible to customize things without literally
*everything* breaking left right and center, and a hood that's welded
shut 'cos obviously you, a puny user, aren't qualified to look under the
hood, and sure as heck don't know how to *fix* anything the MS couldn't
fix.

For all of its flaws, I still prefer the freedom of choice I get with
Linux.  I never looked back ever since.


> >if you remember the days when you'd be listening to music but
> >couldn't hear any sounds from sauerbraten
> 
> Actually, that's still the way things are on my system (there is the
> alsa stuff, but the OSS emulation actually works better. Get
> that.).... and over the years, I've come to see it as a feature!
> 
> See, I would keep one program running just to thwart random Flash
> crap from spewing noise. Now I use noscript, but still I've come to
> like locking the speakers with another program.

o_O What system *are* you using?? I've been using Debian's default ALSA
installation for the last, oh, decade? -- and I've never had a problem
with two (or more!) programs simultaneously producing sounds getting
perfectly blended together without any one locking out the other. In
fact, I've actually tried spawning 50-odd copies of mpg123 before, and
it actually manages to blend ALL of the outputs without any sign of
distortion. I'm honestly quite surprised you're having so much trouble
with it. It's like your system was frozen in time in 1998 when these
things were still being sorted out (judging by the fact you still use
OSS), 'cos that was about the last time I remember having issues of this
sort.

No wonder you're having issues that none of the rest of us linuxers
experience, if you insist on using 15 y.o. software that hasn't been
maintained for who knows how long. ;)


T

-- 
Why can't you just be a nonconformist like everyone else? -- YHL