Some of those design choices are pretty good, they stick around for good reason. Everything is a file/chaining together tiny commands/text-based configuration files are computing zen for a large portion of users.

A lot of text config now has way more documentation -- right there above the freaking setting! -- than a Windows design analogy could ever cram into (never-used) help files. The majority of config I deal with is like 25 lines of comments for every 1 line of setting.

Systemd's not that bad either, I will take writing systemd config files over trying to make a service daemon in init.d scripts any day of the week.

So what happens if you accidentally delete the comment in the text config? There's a parser that generates an error and recovers from there? Or it's just gone? LOL.

Do you know how annoying it is to have to go into etc/netbeans.conf, scroll all the way down, then find the JDK path from somewhere else and paste it in the quotes after netbeans_jdkhome= just to get Netbeans to run? That's not computing zen! It's the reason nobody uses Netbeans -- old, bad design.

The more people use your help files, the more you know your program sucks. This is not disputable. This is why Linux requires a literal support group called LUG.

LUG = Linux User's Group? That's more of a fan club...

If you accidentally delete the comments you can usually look the file up online, sometimes even just googling the name of the file will do the trick. Sometimes there's a default or template sitting right next to the file in its folder.

And I don't think you're going to find any arguments against your experience with Netbeans, at last recently. It's old software. New software doesn't just magically spring into being, it has to be written. And there's plenty of good replacements for NetBeans (I like IntelliJ) so I don't know what the issue is there. It's like calling Windows 3.1's Program Manager 'dated'... its like, well duh, of course its dated. It's old!

Also can't you just `echo $JDK_HOME` and paste that output into your config?

> The more people use your help files, the more you know your program sucks.

I really hate it when programs make important decisions for me. Having optionality kind of requires documentation, so one can understand the change they are trying to make. One man's intuitive is another man's pain in the ass. To say nothing of differences between culture, time period, training, or upbringing, that might change those assumptions.

If you want mindless information appliances, you are very likely holding one in your hand right now. Mobile is fantastic for that form of braindead design.

I believe Ubuntu came out 18 years ago. Almost as old as Netbeans. Much of the user-facing commands date back to 1973.

>can't you just `echo $JDK_HOME` and paste that output into your config?

Yes, but every time I download a new version of Netbeans this has to be done again. I only use Netbeans to make sure my project works there, so a significant percentage of my experience is the annoying 30 seconds of telling it where the JDK is (which if they put in any effort they could do in a startup dialog).

>One man's intuitive is another man's pain in the ass.

Press 1 for English. Press 1 for QWERTY. Press 1 for GUI. It would be nice if there were Press 1 for GUI! It's up to the user to hack his OS with shady third-party hobby projects to get a GUI for basic functionality like entering key value pairs. Why don't webpages force users to enter "last_name=Jones;\nfirst_name=Bobby" when filling out forms? It's clearly so much better than boxes! The world has moved on for a reason. 1971 was the year of the nix desktop when chmod came out.

I quit Android development because I hate phones and I'd quit Linux development too if I ever was dumb enough to start because it's a bunch of unproductive hobbyists trying to make everyone's OS into vim. And I'm on Windows 10 as always. Which is very customizable. And not in the dwarf fortress way like linux and bsd.

All I can really say then is, be the change you want to see in the world.

We're all just writing code to scratch our own or others' itches, everyone has differing opinions on what is good or not.

I would call deferring to the API design of the 1970s pathological humility. Like, humans and code are literally forced to use the same API. LOL.