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In my wiki roundup post I complained about DokuWiki’s reliance on plugins, but after scouring the landscape of FOSS wiki offerings nothing else offers exactly what I need. So I settled on DokuWiki with a bunch of plugins. I have plugins for tagging pages, moving pages, blogging (which I use as a place to quickly catch ideas as they come to me before pushing them to the wiki proper), listing orphaned and wanted pages, among others.

The reason I initially disliked the idea of relying on plugins are that they may interfere with one another, interacting with the different plugins is inconsistent, and updating and management become more complex. But like I said, they get me what I need.

On the other hand, I’ve also been working with BookStack for another project. In many ways it’s the opposite of DokuWiki. It looks modern, it has a noob-friendly wysiwyg editor (important when you need people of different technical skill levels to use it), and tries to be “batteries included” in the dev’s words. The problem it’s missing some features I consider essential for a wiki, chief of which is the ability to link to nonexistent pages. There isn’t really a centralized way to manage uploads, either. And since it isn’t extensible, you’re stuck with those features unless the dev decides to add them later.

So I can see why people may prefer one approach over the other, but how about you?

Since I am a fan of blender I most likely have to vote for the first one. However it was kind of a blessing when many of the features that had to be installed as add-ons before now is a part of the plain software. They tend to implement all of the very popular ones, as a part of the standard program. I think people would lie if they didn’t love everything working right out of the box, so we don’t have to spend time on configuration and more time on actually creating.

I don’t have a real preference, but one more advantage to the plugin route is that if you need something that’s not available, cobbling together a plugin is much simpler than modify most projects directly.

I recently spent a lot of time doing this with Odoo and I was very grateful for the modularity.

By the way, in case you haven’t found it, there is a pretty decent wysiwyg editor plugin for DokuWiki. I use it at work and it’s been pretty simple for my users.

If I have enough time to customize it and configure it, barebones with plugins/extensions. If it’s softwar that I need to start using ASAP and getting results, all-in-one

I really like software that is from plugins but it needs to have some stable ‘core’ plugins shipped by default, like emacs for example. Nothing by default is pretty useless but it all depends on constraints and requirements.

Multiple separate software vertically tuned to work perfectly out of the box for the single thing they are meant to do 🤣

This sounds like a very sane bit of both approach.

Support plugins so anyone can extend however they like, but integrate the most popular plugins into the software.

I like it.

I do most my work on the terminal so I prefer something in the middle: convention over configuration, most functionality included but rather small by default. More complex needs can be compiled in.

As a side note, I wish more Linux distributions’ package managers would allow for binary installation alongside source compiled packages. In FreeBSD I’m amazed at how well pkg’ binary packages play with ports-compiled ones.

Plugins. But only if they come from the same software provider and are tested in the same way. Otherwise the support is crappy and I’d prefer the features bundled in.

Barebones, usually. In general I prefer software that does only one thing and one thing well. Input or output to/from said software can be handled by other pieces software.

I’m a big fan of modular designs where you can swap out any layer with something else, provided that the data interchange is c9mpatible.

Lacking the above, I usually go for barbecues with support for plugins/extensions.

What about a nice middle ground option? It has all the features that most sane people would want, but not the kitchen sink.

I hate diagnosing 3rd party jank so if I had to pick one or the other then I’d pick all in one. Oh you updated and now your whole ui is broken? Good fucking luck guessing what adon wasn’t updated for this change.

It kinda depends. When I want to get going right away I want something that can do everything I need right away but over time I might just want what I use and no more. Right now im using an out of the box distro but I have plans to move to one that does not. If I had not done the out of the box though then I might have used my windows machine more to get something done rather than looking around for what would allow me to get it done on linux.

My preference is usually a big kitchen sink application. I dont care about the application size and resources as I’m not anywhere near being resource constrained yet.

Used to love plug-in-heavy, customizable tools. Then I realized I loved spending time customizing and installing all those plugins, and not a lot of time getting work done.

Now I just prefer good tools that can do everything I need but not necessarily optimally. As long as they feel really efficient for 95% of use cases and the other 5% are possible (but not optimal) I am good with that. I don’t need to reach for “the perfect tool” anymore.

I think I like plug-ins so long as there’s a good set that’s easy to get. Nicely bundled defaults, ya know?

A little of both. I think it’s good for software to be customizable, but layering on plugins often tends to lead to instability or other issues, so the ideal for me is where the program does 90% or more of what I want out of the box, and plugins fill the gaps.

Somewhere in the middle. I generally avoid using plugins of any sort if I can avoid it, and prefer sane defaults over customization, but I also avoid software that comes bloated with features I’ll never use.

In my wiki roundup post I complained about DokuWiki’s reliance on plugins, but after scouring the landscape of FOSS wiki offerings nothing else offers exactly what I need.

This is generally how new open source projects are born. Someone can’t find what they’re looking for among the current offerings so they make their own, fulfilling what they perceive to be a niche use case. Once they release it, it takes on a life of its own because it turns out it wasn’t a niche use case after all. Much to the horror of the dev, who now finds themselves the leader of an open source project.

Its a story as old as time.

Considering how CISC (i86) won over RISC (ARM), monolithic kernels like Windows’ NT kernel and Linux itself won over microkernels, and systemd won over a bunch of different daemons in most Linux distros, I would say we collectively preferred the latter.

I probably lean more to the all-in-one side of things. Having one standard version of the software makes it easier to set up and learn.

I run my house services on an extremely low power PC. So I like bare bones.

Count the RISC processors and RISC ones in your house that isn’t the central one of a PC. You dishwasher, washing machine, tumble drier, TV, routers, WiFi access points, everything else, will be RISC. Normally ARM or MIPS. Apple has gone all ARM. Microsoft are trying to be relevant on ARM. ARM servers are now in low power data centers. RISC-V has a bright future due IP anticompetitive nonsense of x86 and ARM. Oh and x86 has a RISC heart and instruction conversion chips. Which “won” again? ;-)

Also NT is normally said to be a “hybrid” : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel

Barebones with a wide selection of useful plugins. That’s kinda how OMV operates, and it’s fantastic.

The more bare bones, simple and customisable, the better. I will compromise if the only option is an all in one, but it’s never my first choice as nothing is ever perfect.