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This is the core problem with so many software efforts now, there are just too many efforts that portability suffers. I remember years ago mucking around with

This is the core problem with so many software efforts now, there are just too many efforts that portability suffers. I remember years ago mucking around with my home computing environment, making it so convenient, custom UI shell, monitoring widgets, highly customized bash environment with all sorts of fancy utilities that were just so handy, and all sorts of nifty features everywhere to tackle any problem I encountered. Alas, the second I went anywhere else to do something--some friend or business's system, none of that underlying infrastructure existed. I lamented, "oh if only these other people followed my model I could just use X right now," life would be better. At some point in my career I realized I was just wasting a whole lot of time customizing my native environment because those features were non-portable and the more I dealt with working in other people's environment, the more I realized I should just focus on learning the best way to do things in the popularly adopted environments because it meant my knowledge transferred almost everywhere.

pessimizer 6y ago
I'm the same way, and I don't think it's ideal. I tend to do my work with the minimal set of tools that I usually expect to be available, and I'm extremely biased towards using the default settings and configurations of those tools. I do have settings that I really prefer so I have to use, but I naturally keep them to a short list that I can set up within a minute or five. I can tear them down in a minute or five also - I may not be using my account; I often find myself on Company X's account installing Company Y's software on Company Z's servers, and I wouldn't want someone else coming after me to be confused. I don't even really change the wallpaper on a desktop anymore, feels like polishing a hammer, a waste of time. I wish you could carry your environment around with you, but I don't see how it could possibly work that way neatly. An exception is that I usually end up installing a lot of stuff on Windows desktops to make them vaguely usable and scriptable, but Powershell and WSL will probably eventually mean I give up doing that, too. The previous sentiment was really about UNIXy systems.

pessimizer 6y ago

I'm the same way, and I don't think it's ideal. I tend to do my work with the minimal set of tools that I usually expect to be available, and I'm extremely biased towards using the default settings and configurations of those tools. I do have settings that I really prefer so I have to use, but I naturally keep them to a short list that I can set up within a minute or five. I can tear them down in a minute or five also - I may not be using my account; I often find myself on Company X's account installing Company Y's software on Company Z's servers, and I wouldn't want someone else coming after me to be confused. I don't even really change the wallpaper on a desktop anymore, feels like polishing a hammer, a waste of time. I wish you could carry your environment around with you, but I don't see how it could possibly work that way neatly. An exception is that I usually end up installing a lot of stuff on Windows desktops to make them vaguely usable and scriptable, but Powershell and WSL will probably eventually mean I give up doing that, too. The previous sentiment was really about UNIXy systems.