Second approach is better as it teaches you to fix and understand the system you’re working with
Of course, this is a more complicated and energy - demanding approach, though. But if you wanna stay on Linux, you better figure such stuff out, this will be invaluable in the long run.
I should also mention that Debian, despite the Bookworm introducing more user-friendly options, is not a newbie-centered distribution and fixing things in there tend to be more tedious for an inexperienced user.
The upside, however, is that once you’ve set it up, everything will just work. But first you might face some pain.
I wish there was a way to see what the default values in a config file are for a given distro.
I’m guessing there probably is, and I just don’t know it.
Usually if its a boolean or nullable, a good config file will have a # uncommemt this line to enable this feature/disable this feature/bind to this IP address/give this thing a name that is at least vaugely hints what the option does. But yes, its still fairly annoying.
You should check out the Fedora atomic distros if you haven’t already. Making the system work more like a git repo is what they are doing with rpm-ostree. I am liking it a lot.
Second approach is better as it teaches you to fix and understand the system you’re working with
Of course, this is a more complicated and energy - demanding approach, though. But if you wanna stay on Linux, you better figure such stuff out, this will be invaluable in the long run.
I should also mention that Debian, despite the Bookworm introducing more user-friendly options, is not a newbie-centered distribution and fixing things in there tend to be more tedious for an inexperienced user.
The upside, however, is that once you’ve set it up, everything will just work. But first you might face some pain.
I wish there was a way to see what the default values in a config file are for a given distro.
I’m guessing there probably is, and I just don’t know it.
Maybe I should just make
/a git repo…Without knowing a better way, my go-to solution woukd just be getting an full installation image and diffing my files with the files on it
Don’t modify the config in
/etc/, copy them in~/.config/and then modify them. You’ll always be able to just look at the/etc/for defaults.Usually if its a boolean or nullable, a good config file will have a
# uncommemt this line to enable this feature/disable this feature/bind to this IP address/give this thing a namethat is at least vaugely hints what the option does. But yes, its still fairly annoying.You should check out the Fedora atomic distros if you haven’t already. Making the system work more like a git repo is what they are doing with rpm-ostree. I am liking it a lot.