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> he may love fiddling with settings, but the vast majority of people do not. I used to love to fiddle with settings. I gave up because the constant churn of m

by avian 5y ago

> he may love fiddling with settings, but the vast majority of people do not. I used to love to fiddle with settings. I gave up because the constant churn of modern software made it too tedious to maintain non-default settings in most applications. What use is spending time to make a more comfortable environment when the software will randomly auto-update in two weeks and might undo all my settings, or worse, change its behavior in such a way that my custom settings just make things worse.

mjw1007 5y ago
Right, I think a lot of people enjoyed customising their first computer, and then when they got a new one or reinstalled Windows because it got slow they couldn't be bothered to do it again. But maybe things are a bit different nowadays. Web-based software might not have this problem so much, and I think mainstream mobile OSes do a good job of importing your setup when you get a new phone.
jacobr1 5y ago
This happened to me early on in programming career. Coming out university I had a highly customized emacs environment, that I regularly tweaked. But then on my first job, while I could use emacs on my workstation, our production systems were all Solaris were I could only use vi (not VIM, vi). The cognitive load between them killed me and I retrained myself on vi. Today I use vim, but really only change a few things like the theme.
wvenable 5y ago
But I wonder if this to the authors point. You used to love fiddling with settings (I do as well) but modern software continuously makes that less rewarding.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I don’t think rewarding is the right word. It’s still very rewarding but modern software decides from time to time to undo all your work. Maybe we could say that modern software disrespects their users.
  - wvenable 5y ago
    It becomes less rewarding because of the effort wasted. Making the same settings changes over and over is not enjoyable. But saying that modern software disrespects user settings is a very good way to put it as well. It should be easier than ever to maintain settings; the tooling is so much better now.

by avian 5y ago

mjw1007 5y ago

Right, I think a lot of people enjoyed customising their first computer, and then when they got a new one or reinstalled Windows because it got slow they couldn't be bothered to do it again. But maybe things are a bit different nowadays. Web-based software might not have this problem so much, and I think mainstream mobile OSes do a good job of importing your setup when you get a new phone.

jacobr1 5y ago

This happened to me early on in programming career. Coming out university I had a highly customized emacs environment, that I regularly tweaked. But then on my first job, while I could use emacs on my workstation, our production systems were all Solaris were I could only use vi (not VIM, vi). The cognitive load between them killed me and I retrained myself on vi. Today I use vim, but really only change a few things like the theme.

wvenable 5y ago

But I wonder if this to the authors point. You used to love fiddling with settings (I do as well) but modern software continuously makes that less rewarding.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
I don’t think rewarding is the right word. It’s still very rewarding but modern software decides from time to time to undo all your work. Maybe we could say that modern software disrespects their users.
- wvenable 5y ago
  It becomes less rewarding because of the effort wasted. Making the same settings changes over and over is not enjoyable. But saying that modern software disrespects user settings is a very good way to put it as well. It should be easier than ever to maintain settings; the tooling is so much better now.