> I hate losing settings and having to fiddle with everything all over again. > I remember, back in pre-windows XP days, me and some of my friends would spend

> I hate losing settings and having to fiddle with everything all over again. > I remember, back in pre-windows XP days, me and some of my friends would spend ages going through the appearance options and customisimg pretty much everything. Even later, I knew of people who had a meticulous desktop ordering or spent substantial amount of time ordering favourite icons in the browser. > All that was great fun until the first time, the settings were lost. Maybe you had to reinstall the OS (or got a new PC) or maybe the program updated and simply erased the settings. In any case, trying to redo everything you had arranged before looked to be an enormous amount of work and not fun at all. So after the second time, this happened, we gave up and accepted the standard. I was like this, and felt exactly the same. When I discovered the magic of unix windows managers, it felt like a miracle. Suddenly, I could adjust every frivolous detail to my liking, and _have it reproducable_ in a version control somewhere. When my laptop broke, I just reintroduced my package list, inserted the config and it was just like the old one! I think it's a shame so relatively few people will ever reap the benefits of a customized system over the fear of losing it randomly to a hardware failure.