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I used to love customizing my system as well, but I've grown out of it. A highly customized environment is a timesink of its own, a source of frustration whene

• andrepd 6y ago
  The point is that while that is your choice, it might not be some one else's.
  • loopz 6y ago
    Tough luck if it's not your system. Only way forward seems to be FOSS.
  • unishark 6y ago
    Not only that, but it's a choice for "lowest-common-denominator" users, not power users. So they will by definition make a trade off in lower real-world functionality in return for ease of basic use or other things. Like the cooking example in the article. Another example would be to replace your steering wheel without your consent with some stupid new gui and removing the option to put the steering wheel back. It works great for people who don't really know how to drive and would never be able to drive at highway speeds. Of course it does severely limit the places and speeds you can drive in your car now. Oh and of course it causes your car to crash constantly now.
• zoid_ 6y ago
  What! A default, non-personalised vim setup?!
• ziml77 6y ago
  Same thing here. Infinitely customizable doesn't matter to me anymore, sane defaults do. I think it was putting work into a vimrc that finally changed my mind. It was great customizing vim, getting it to be just right for myself. But there were a few things that ended up bothering me over time: * No end state meant I was just constantly toying with it and wasting time. Sometimes the changes would be minor things that barely mattered, but I couldn't decide which way I liked things more * Not always available, leading to needing to essentially remember two different versions of vim. Mine, and the default. * Keybind clashes. Bringing in new plugins was always a pain because there was a good chance that one of my custom keybinds clashed with the plugin, requiring me to make a mess of the plugin's default bindings or to reassign and relearn the colliding binding. With sane defaults, these problems nearly disappear.
• dkarl 6y ago
  I feel this way for 95% of my system, but the last 5% is important for my ability to focus and work efficiently. An underappreciated aspect of customizability is that you don't have to learn new habits when the defaults change. You can't know your tools if they're constantly changing in ways you can't control or override. I feel like just another dumb user. I've been using VSCode a lot recently, and I just don't feel the motivation to learn anything about it. Learning a tool is for suckers. Just google for what you need right now. No sense going out of your way to remember anything if they're going to pull the rug out from under you next month. Not a knock against VSCode; I acquired this attitude before I started using it. Maybe if I invested in learning VSCode thoroughly, the investment would pay off. I've just been so thoroughly trained not to treat anything outside the terminal as stable that I can't bring myself to do it anymore.
• dbsmith83 6y ago
  Why can't there be reasonable defaults and also the ability to customize/override on your own box? Profiles can always be used for if you need to use a different environment and want to use the default.
• rcxdude 6y ago
  I've kind of shifted in the same direction too. I used to build a custom launcher/theme/background widget setup, now I tend to even keep the stock background because I basically never see it anyway. Same with customising apps. I tend to just learn the defaults and then it works wherever I use it. That said there are certain customisations which do really impact my productivity, and they tend to be ones which are 'off the beaten path', so I'm very much in favour of keeping software configurable. There are also tools which I spend a lot of effort hammering into a usable state using their options and extension support, and I wish they would take a more 'toolkit and framework' approach (as opposed to thousands of ad-hoc options), and/or present a more useful default.