Emacs has a shitload of bugs (sorry for the language), and an ad-hoc configuration and package installation that inevitably turns your Emacs installation into a bespoke ball of mud.
(Goes in hand with 'malleability', I guess, but still a very subpar user experience.)
I'm not going to "defend" Emacs here, it's a piece of software and you use it if it suits your purposes, but I find it to be quite stable for the feature set it offers. Also if you put moderate effort into it, it's possible to achieve a reproducible packaging and configuration state. I can check out my .emacs.d (https://github.com/afroisalreadyinu/emacsd/) on any Linux computer, start Emacs and work on it as if it's my own computer.
I spend most my time in emacs; my experience is it's pretty buggy. Probably mostly packages & their interactions than emacs per se, but for me emacs is all about the customizability & the packages...
Yeah there's this dilemma. Emcas, out of the box, seems stable enough (and performs well enough?). But for many of us, the features it offers ootb are nowhere near enough. So you start installing packages and it quickly turns into a clusterfuck and you have bizarre little bugs and interactions everywhere. And it still doesn't work exactly the way you want, even if the bugs were not present.. so you have to spend a huge amount of time trying to figure the clusterfuck out so that you can start working on it and make it right. And figure out why it got slow. Or sigh and give up.
It isn't helped by the fact that some devs insist on using bleeding edge melpa packages and their stable versions are broken. Other devs' bleeding edge versions are prone to break..
Emacs, with its packages, is one of the most chaotic things I've seen. I don't know if there's any hope for me to tame it in a reasonable timeframe.
Ha, yeah, you've captured it nicely. I have a TODO list 25 items long of problems to try to track down; occasionally I'll pick one off, but I think the list is growing faster than it's shrinking.
It's an open question, but I suspect it's not impossible to have both a robust and flexible system...think Emacs, but instead of the wild-west of Lisp as the extension language, something more in the vein of Rust...
Eh, no.
Emacs has a shitload of bugs (sorry for the language), and an ad-hoc configuration and package installation that inevitably turns your Emacs installation into a bespoke ball of mud.
(Goes in hand with 'malleability', I guess, but still a very subpar user experience.)