Coddling users is harmful.
The main point of computers is to make things easier for people. Most of us make our livings because computers are very good for that. If most users really had to deeply understand the technologies involved in solving their needs, a lot fewer of us would have jobs and much more time would be wasted by people who were just trying to get something done. So yes, let's absolutely coddle users.
The point of computing is to be a tool to make people more powerful and efficient, an extension of our abilities, able to do more or better.
The point of a tool is to make things easier for people.
Also, youtube just served me an un-skip-able 12 minute add 30 seconds into a video. It was the 3rd add. The thought police is all over the web now. My windos cant download photos from my iphone. My windos is rebooting when it feels like it. The glued in phone battery life is garbage after 2 years. I must have purchased 30 chargers now. My new laptop requires a microsoft account. Google search is not working anymore. Adsense is driving up prices.
Its like trying to get nutrition from MacDonalds. The mc drive is convenient tho. Very easy for users.
Sure you could spend hours reading pf man pages. But maybe it would be better use of time if one person figures out how to do it, writes code to do it automatically, and shares that with other people so they can spend more time watching all the movies they download instead of configuring their bit torrent client.
"Oh, well, your torrent client decided to automatically use your vpn because it saw one running and somebody decided that was the right behavior because they thought you were dumb."
Users have preferences. Users can read. Let them learn and sort it out. Don't ruin a simple program with tarred assumptions of what is correct for users. Prefer simplicity.
Also don't assume using a vpn is more secure. That is a wrong assumption.
A bittorrent client, even in CLI form, is not simple software at all. Have you ever taken a look at the myriad of available settings?
Most GUI clients have a sort of "wizard" that helps you pick acceptable connection parameters. This feature alone has a truckload of assumptions coded in. And that kind of feature exists for a reason: no nonsense-seeking users. They're the majority. Just let me download my file bro.
It baffles my mind when developers just expect users to tweak low level settings. Sure, it's good if stuff is configurable, but it should work correctly out of the box. Like, you spent days or weeks working on this feature, don't expect your users to do the same...
But to be more specific with my feedback, it seems a bit silly that Transmission (I'm trying 4.0.0b1 right now) doesn't allow me to specify that it must use "VPN X" (as opposed to "VPN Y", which is also available) for downloads.
I understand that I could mess with namespaces or containers or VMs and probably make that work, but "use Bittorrent client with VPN" is more or less a universal use case and should be straightforward.
I agree with this statement, but what should a user ‘read’ in order to understand this?
We need an open protocol for establishing tunnel/VPN connections. Apps implement the protocol, which lets you enter your tunnel provider and go through a quick OAuth flow to establish a tunnel. This would be a big win for VPN providers as well because people would be sending only specific traffic through them instead of everything.