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.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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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.
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 softwares with support for plugins/extensions.
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.
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.
I really like software that is built 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Multiple separate software vertically tuned to work perfectly out of the box for the single thing they are meant to do 🤣