this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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I spent much of yesterday getting Debian to work on my old MacBook.
In theory it's relatively straightforward, but there are so many little niggles and roadblocks that it really sours the experience.
I set up a user account upon install, as it asked me to, but when I tried to do something with sudo it just kept telling me that I wasn't in the Sudoers group. Mine is the only account on the machine, why isn't that set up by default? So I searched for a solution, which appears to have a bunch of different ways to do it, but none of them quite worked, or worked first time. The first few solutions involved using the terminal, but in the end it was easier to open the document in the file manager and edit it as a root user. Linux users are hard for using a terminal when they could just open a document in a text editor.
In the end I got everything set up how I wanted, but it probably shouldn't have taken a whole day of irritation.
This remains my #1 gripe with an annoyingly large bit of the Linux community, though there slowly becoming a smaller and smaller group
CLI is great for some things, but holy shit it's terrible for all of the uses you people try to shove down it's fucking throat. A text editor works better when you can scroll through and click around if it's any bigger than a few lines, my audio mixer is a lot easier to use with click and drag sliders than it was as ASCII text in a terminal, and in what fucking world is "MV file/path/could/be/long/as/shit another/long/as/shit/path" faster than click-drag between the 2 windows I opened to copy the path names in the first place?
The command line is always there and always has the same basic tools, assuming the system is bootable at all. You can't guarantee that a given system has a working GUI—it may be broken, inaccessable, or never installed. Having some kind of TUI editor installed is usual on non-embedded systems, but you can't guarantee which one or that it's fit for purpose (coaching a newbie through a
visession isn't something anyone wants to do). That means that the generic instructions that get passed around because they're fit for most systems (regardless of distro or purpose) use the command line tools.So there is method to the madness, but if you're coming from a "GUI or bust!" OS it can take a while to get used to.
There was a checkmark for adding the user to that group, IIRC.
Searching for a solution using Google is problematic, yes.
I use DDG, but yeah, it can be tough to find answers.