Comment by dijit
3 years ago
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.