Comment by G3rn0ti
3 years ago
It sounds like the author is getting old. I am not saying that to dismiss him. But when you grow older you have more responsibilities and you start value your own time differently. All this computer hackery at home was fun back when I had lots of time at hand at home. But nowadays I work with computers all day and don’t want to bother with technical issues at home.
For a long time I didn’t even have a real computer at home. I was mostly watching YouTube on my chromebook and checked my bank account. Wrote the occasional letter. That’a about it.
Now I got into casual gaming a bit and enjoy playing games on my linux laptop. But I am using Ubuntu and not Arch or anything weird. I try to keep the tinkering to a low profile to keep it enjoyable.
What I find funny though, is all that time I spent hobbying around my OS back in the day has paid (and continues to pay) extreme dividends.
What I mean by that is my machine is some kind of basic linux desktop with a tiling window manager.. I haven't looked at the configuration in about 8 years, and even then it was probably 5 years before that that I really cared to give a lot of attention to it -- it survives OS upgrades and hardware replacements because what constitutes my HOMEDIR just gets copied over to new machines and I just install all the tools that are missing as part of the setup process.
But now, my machine does not do things randomly, it does not have weirdly undefined behaviours, it does not change it's UX, it does not prompt me unless necessary, it does not do unexpected things on shutdown or boot up or kick me off to perform upgrades.
Everything my computer does, happens at my pace, on my schedule and it's extremely rare I have any noticeable bugs from those updates.
I'm not saying this to brag, but it's interesting how often people who take the "easy" path end up spending so much more time fighting or re-learning their computer than I do.
Same thing here. My own scripts to configure a new Arch install automatically. Much quicker to install with the few things I want to install, than installing Ubuntu (for example) which bundles everything in, and more. It also does exactly what I script it do, so my scripts install specific versions of software whose version really matters. No surprises.
My custom Emacs configuration build? Automated my own way. My AwesomeWM configuration? Automated my own way.
I'm so glad I took the time to learn to do stuff manually, so I could tell them specifically how I want them done automatically. And it should last me quite a while.
I think that's another part of it; the novelty's worn off. When smartphones became ubiquitous, they were exciting; people would tune in on e.g. Apple's keynotes to see what they came up with this time.
But then it became more of the same. The difference between phone generations became more about performance and photography technology than anything new. The iphone hasn't done anything major since the iphone 4 or 5, or whenever they did their big redesign effort - IMO anyway, not to dismiss their efforts because in terms of power and software technology they've pushed the boundaries. Unfortunately it's mainly in areas I don't really care much about, that is, photography. Interesting to see how much the instagram generation directed phone development focus I guess.
The author mentions things like Netflix as well; it was written six years ago (ish), but it's only gotten worse. Netflix is full of what feels like artificial programs now, box ticking exercises; cartoon aimed at ages 3-6, check; segment aimed at PoC and/or women, check; David Attenborough nature documentary, check; political drama, check; desaturated Scandi crime show(s), check; video game tie-in, check; buddy cop film with high profile actors, check; the list goes on.
Reminds me of this quote from Linus Torvald
> I’m sorry, you may want to close your ears now, I want a distribution to be easy to install, so that I can just get on with my life, which is mostly kernel.
Also sounds like the author needs a reality check. Pointless whining about a device which helps you earn hundreds of thousands of dollars.