3 ms·

Ten years ago everybody enthusiastically installed every piece of shareware (windows) or open source (linux) software they could lay their hands on. There were

Ten years ago everybody enthusiastically installed every piece of shareware (windows) or open source (linux) software they could lay their hands on. There were a whole lot of portals devised to desktop software. People's desktops had all kinds of weird hacks in it, tweaking every imaginable bit of appearance, user experience and features. But I think we all came to conclusion that it does not pay off. Yes, your 3rd party file manager is much more powerful but does installing it on every of your PCs in life pay off? It does not. The whole experience becomes much more generic and throwaway. Yes, I tune some programs, but I'm ready to leave the whole setup at any moment and start with a blank screen again - and I actually have to do that every 2-3 years. No longer I use dozens of programs and have 5 DEs installed but just a few and exactly one.

Sauce1971 14y ago
Same boat. Only my essential developer tools and very few apps. Used to try everything. For Win if it's not on Ninite it's not on my PC. It's just to much hassle when reinstall and I wan't the same tools on my MacBook an PC
icebraining 14y ago
With package managers and text-based configuration, setting up my system from scratch takes 5 minutes of manual time (and some more unattended). I just keep a git repository that contains my dotfiles, /etc and the output of 'dpkg --get-selections'.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  In five years most of your config files will confuse then-recent programs. Then you will perhaps discard some.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Not really. Programs don't tend to read the configuration files of others, and they don't tend to change their own configuration files that much either. Since I started using Debian, six years ago, I probably had to modify three or four files and maybe delete a few more. Time that is more than paid off by the time savings of some of these configurations.

Sauce1971 14y ago

Same boat. Only my essential developer tools and very few apps. Used to try everything. For Win if it's not on Ninite it's not on my PC. It's just to much hassle when reinstall and I wan't the same tools on my MacBook an PC

icebraining 14y ago

With package managers and text-based configuration, setting up my system from scratch takes 5 minutes of manual time (and some more unattended). I just keep a git repository that contains my dotfiles, /etc and the output of 'dpkg --get-selections'.

guard-of-terra 14y ago
In five years most of your config files will confuse then-recent programs. Then you will perhaps discard some.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Not really. Programs don't tend to read the configuration files of others, and they don't tend to change their own configuration files that much either. Since I started using Debian, six years ago, I probably had to modify three or four files and maybe delete a few more. Time that is more than paid off by the time savings of some of these configurations.