Re: A rookie's query: Want to about Debian and the related
On Tuesday, December 03, 2013 12:12:36 AM Robert Holtzman wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 11:51:41AM -0600, yaro@marupa.net wrote:
>
> .........snip.........
>
> > Oh, that does clear it up. But again, I don't see that as a "free vs.
> > nonfree" issue. Most software will choose defaults for you and you can
> > change it, even Mozilla. I'm a KDE user, often a lot of KDE defaults I
> > don't like or don't make sense, Kopete being perhaps the worst offender.
> >
> > I often don't care for software that requires user-side configuration to
> > already be in place when run. By user-side I mean dotfiles in home
> > directory. I do not really mind if I have to set something up in /etc,
> > however, largely because I will most often be changing the defaults.
>
> What's the difference between "setting something up" in /etc and editing
> a dot file in your home directory?
This shouldn't have to be explained to most Linux administrators.
/etc is for system-wide configuration of software, meant to be handled by the
administrator and if there's no "default" there's good reason for it. Most the
configuration there is for stuff you don't want the average user to muck around
with OR might cause trouble if poorly configured. Not to mention the average
user has no permissions to change anything on /etc barring root privelege.
It's not the place for an application to offer *preferences* but pure
configuration to make sure it works with the system and how the administrator
NEEDS it to. It is reasonable to expect anyone trying to change THIS
configuration knows enough about the files to actually understand what they are
doing.
Dotfiles are all about enabling a user to supply preferences as opposed to pure
configuration. Instead of it being about setting up the software to work
"correctly" it's about getting it to be about how the user wants it to do its
job. The reason why I think a sane application should just set up sane
defaults is because an end user wants to run their application and then maybe
change how it works in settings dialogs. *Not* open up a man page and figure
out the details of the format, syntax, and semantics of a configuration file. It
is NOT reasonable to expect the average user to understand what they are doing
with that in this context.
This might be fine for a power user (Of which I am one.) but I wouldn't put
anything that requires manually editing text files for preferences on someone
else's computer and expect them to use it.
>
> > I prefer Google anyway, though, as I have yet to see a search engine that
> > works nearly as well. I know a lot of people rave about Duck Duck Go, but
> > every time I use it it loves to bring up results in an order that doesn't
> > hit the same sort of relevance as Google. But Google using my search for
> > advertising doesn't bother me.
>
> Neither, evidently, does it's personal data collection.
Google is hardly the only service that does this. Chances are the second you
set up with your ISP someone's already gotten ahold of your personal data.
Going "fear Google" is unproductive because by the time you even visit their
site for the first time some information on you is already had. Granted, your
ISP is unlikely to blindly share it.
I know it's all the rage to villify Google these days but it really is a
constant double standard how people blatantly ignore the hundreds of other
places you give up personal data to on and off the Internet. I'm not saying
Google is justified, I'm just saying the near-blind Google hate is getting old
and tired and I have no reason to really care about my personal data as I'm
not dumb enough to shovel anything actually sensitive in my Google searches.
There's no real guarantee of anonymity on the Internet even if you use things
such as Tor. I feel fussing and going out of your way to try to get the non-
existant 100% anonymity thing is a waste of productive time.
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