Yea. When people talk about how simple things were in the past, I think they oblivious to the fact we were all writing out X11 configs by hand and having them break in all sort of strange and interesting ways. Open source has always been very "I gave it to you for free, I'm not going to hold your hand".

I've written X configs by hand, but only to get a few extra pixels of overscan. I've never needed to do this. My experience has always been that things just work. The UI has never been great, in that I need more explanation than the built-in manuals provide – unlike, say, Windows 95, where you can learn everything you need to know by clicking around – but it's not hard to avoid breaking things, and it's not that hard to learn to do new stuff if you have a good book (or, lately, blog post) to consult.

The amount of sleepless nights because an update broke sound, video or networking on Linux is uncountable. It was fun though.

You hang out on weird hardware hacker forums and spot what people are working on. You can try buying the things multiple people are working on and getting good early results on. But most of it will end up being ewaste.

Good article. But the Makefile part should really be replaced by tox as a best practice. Tox even has a uv runner now that will handle setting up all the environments.

There’s a bit of a bootstrap problem there in that Tox (and its dependencies) have to be installed first, unless your makefile is calling “uv run tox” or similar. Uv’s standalone nature makes it ideal for bootstrapping projects in a way that tox isn’t.

I like just or mise tasks as often my python projects contain many other language commands (SQL, docker, pnpm, etc ...).

IMO mise tasks are fairly close to the ideal polyglot task runner, because features like argument definitions can be used as progressive enhancements. That means I can write the task logic in shell scripts that can be called without mise, and when I integrate them into mise, I don't have to manually write extra wrappers or duplicate anything. That's my pet peeve with most similar tools, so I can't recommend mise enough!

Strong disagree on tox. I was all in on it back in 2020-2023 and I found it was a consistent source of headaches and complexity. Whenever we’d run into venv issues it was always tox, often passing or not passing some critical under-the-hood ENV var resulting in reproducibility errors that were difficult to immediately diagnose. It also blurs the line between env vars used to set up tox env and those you want set in your final test env.

We just use containers in CI instead now for matrix testing and it’s so much more clear what is going on with the test env.