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I used to be a tinkerer, happily maintaining my own fork of, say, Rails. Or Postfix. Or the Linux kernel. It was tremendous fun and a great way to learn intern

I used to be a tinkerer, happily maintaining my own fork of, say, Rails. Or Postfix. Or the Linux kernel. It was tremendous fun and a great way to learn internals, but also a colossal time sink. I don't fight the platform anymore, I just use whatever's vanilla out of the box. And I'm actually a lot more productive as a result. I think it's more than okay to go through the tinkerer phase, it's one path to growing as a developer.

organsnyder 9y ago
My Linux distro progression was Linux From Scratch -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu... My personal laptop has been on Kubuntu LTS since I bought it seven years ago, and it works fine. My employer-provided laptop is a Mac, so I use MacOS there (with some tweaks, especially to get keyboard shortcuts for window management). My home desktop runs Windows 10 for gaming, but I find it fine for occasional dev work. Basically, I use whatever is in front of me, now. I seem to have gotten more flexible as I've gotten older.