this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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I can't say I share this experience as I spend a lot more than half my time using Linux watching documentaries on youtube in a web browser. If you are obsessed with personalization I could see this happening, but I happen to prefer using default (as in "possible to consistently re-apply") settings on most things.
Regardless, troubleshooting makes you better at resolving trouble that you didn't bring about on your own, and life is defined by unexpected troubles. It is better to be antifragile than happy!
I guess you're lucky (or much more tech-savvy than me). I tried to switch to linux once many years ago (pre-COVID, which is like ancient times now). It was horrible. Oh, I now need to learn about file systems and NTFS and ext3/4(?) - i guess i’ll try Linux on a separate, old hard drive. Ok, something didn’t work, I now have to figure out what driver wasn’t supported and what I need to download. Great, people on forums are helpful but they’re asking me a bunch of gibberish. Now I gotta figure out this command line thing. Oh cool some people built GUIs for certain stuff so i don’t need to play with the command line, but then the GUI doesn’t work occasionally and now I have to figure out if it’s the GUI that broke or something else. And then at some point I got stuck because of file permissions.
If I was in your situation, I would try installing openSUSE or Fedora Linux on a computer where you don't care if the entire disk gets wiped occasionally, using a flash drive you also don't care about getting wiped occasionally. They probably have sufficiently comprehensive installers and installation instructions for you to succeed in using one of them, and if you don't care about the content of the disks you use you'll be more willing to experiment with the installation process (even though it's unlikely your computer will work worse due to trying to install a Linux distribution). If you use a computer that has become slower and less usable than you'd like you will probably be pleasantly surprised by the results!
Also, you can back up your product keys and prepare a Microsoft Windows installation disk if being able to go back to Windows 10 makes you more comfortable with experimenting.
Overall, Linux enhanced my ability to to get productive work done, and also the opportunity to experiment and learn more about how to use computers to solve problems. I think learning how to use a GNU operating system is a good long term investment, though if you still need to keep around at least one computer that runs Microsoft Windows to protect your income I won't disparage you.
The key to customization is not going out of bounds. If you customize, do it the way it was intended to be customized, not by finding weird, hacky shit that works like some kind of digital Rube Goldberg machine. If you find yourself writing convoluted bash scripts, and dredging up plugins on GitHub with the last commit from 2012, you're on a crash course with destiny.
Hey, how'd you see what I've done to my Android phone?
Cause this exactly describes what I do to it. Then I get weird conflicts. Lol. I do it to myself.
I was primarily noting that I usually don't engage in unnecessary and unproductive customization, as there will always be some way you could meet your desires a little better, but unless you're creating and documenting an automated system like https://larbs.xyz/ or even just "copy this file to
~/.profile" your customizations will eventually be lost when your system fails, leaving you with new reason to spend more time customizing.As the video I linked said: if computers are as powerful as the universe and the universe was created in billions of years, you may only be done customizing billions of years from now (and at that point you will have had even more billions of years to come up with new ways you want to improve your customization).
If I'm spending time on something that won't result in an update to a git repository, or a Lemmy comment, or even speaking to someone in person or me acquiring more property, I consider it more frivolous than not.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
obsessed with personalization
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.