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Comment by boznz | Hacker News Reader

Spot on.

I spend 3-5 years getting the perfect PC setup only to have it knocked down again every time I get a new PC and all the settings have moved, half the programs that used to work now either wont or has a replacement that's not quite what I want.

I am not against progress but I just need to work so I now specifically keep the last two generations of my PC offline just so I can compile a clients firmware or modify a PCB with the same environment I developed it on. The next generations of development environments are going on-line so it may not be an option for me.

At one point I designed complex communications systems from ISO layer 1 to layer 7 but these days I dont have a clue how to use the top layers, they change daily and I the guy in the IT dept to fix any issues with my smart phone or connecting to a clients network so I feel everyones pain.

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This is why I switched away from Windows, and then Mac, to GNU. I loved both of them, but I got tired of things changing without me asking them to.

This is my workstation, not a playground.

I personally don't mind rethinks. I do this myself often. New insights come up all the time, I'm especially enamored with tiling window managers right now.

But what I do hate is taking away choice. A lot of these 'updates' have actually significantly removed configurability. "We removed this option because we don't think you need it" happens way too often. A computer exists to serve us. Not for us to bend to its will (or its manufacturer's).

It gets tiresome at some point. My first PC was in 1993, with MS-DOS and some kooky custom GUI that Packard Bell cooked up on their own. I'm a bit jaded now because I got really good at several of the early UIs I used and they of course are in the dustbin now. Nothing like having your skills thrown in the trash every couple years.

The Unix CLI skills that I learned in the late 90’s in university have had the longest staying power of anything in my career. They have extended their usefulness to Mac and now Windows with WSL. Pretty cool.

And SQL ;)

> I spend 3-5 years getting the perfect PC setup

My solution is... don't try to get the perfect setup.

Learn to just be happy with the defaults and get on with what matters - the work you're using it for. I change maybe 1 or 2 settings on a fresh macOS install and that's it. I don't even change the wallpaper.

> I just need to work

So don't distract yourself with trying to create the perfect setup! Worse is better.

"Just let Apple decide everything for you, they know best!" is exactly the sort of attitude that is causing us to lose this war.

I don't know if Apple know best or not - I didn't say I thought that anywhere and I'm not sure who you're quoting - the point is the opposite - I don't care. As long as the system is usable, get on and use it and actually focus on your work rather than tinkering for the sake of tinkering.

The only war I'm fighting against is wasting my time with system setup.

I think, rather, that parent posts were complaining that these manufacturers defaults were:

1) constantly changing Willy Nilly

2) less than useable, né breaking functionality

A proprietary OS has no obligation to care about your needs, but more importantly, does not allow you TO do anything about it.

This is why I am moving everything to FOSS over the long haul

Defaults are designed for common users, who barely know how to copy and paste.

Their setup is really not working for me.

I want my desktop designed for me, from me. And if the OS thinks, it knows better than me, how to handle things and regulary rearanges or reconfigures, than screw this OS.

> I want my desktop designed for me, from me.

Right but when you write it out like that can you see how it doesn’t make sense to expect that from a company? Not reasonable to complain when you don’t get it.

Why can't I expect from a company that they give me the tools I want, if I give them money?

"Designing the desktop" is also just aranging icons. That works since decades.

> Why can't I expect from a company that they give me the tools I want, if I give them money?

Well you could expect it but you probably wouldn’t like the price they quoted you.

To make the price realistic they have to design something which works reasonably well for millions of people, not perfectly for one person.

Or not remove the configuration utility, in some cases. No one here asked for telepathy and amazing defaults, but take away my configurability and I get upset.

Think about it like this - every single extra simple boolean configuration option doubles the configuration state space of the program. Add just ten option checkboxes for a feature and you have made the system three-orders of magnitude more complicated. Everyone pays for that complexity.

In reality this added complexity is not always so dramatic, when you have a solid architectural base.

And I believe Windows for example has one. And windows still runs fine for me without cortana for example. But I have to resort to hacks, to make that change. So I do not demand more features here.

I demand just more control, what features I want to use. That was there and is getting removed for other purposes than complexity of developement.

Ha, I stopped changing the wallpaper when I realized I would never be looking at it.

You were an outlier before in all likelihood. It’s vanishingly rare for one person to have the skills design at both the PHY layer and application layers above it. It may have been possible in the earliest days, with lower speed and more resilient comms protocols, but I’d wager it’s practically impossible now at 1G Ethernet or wifi.

You are basically correct but even today I can add a PHY 10/100MB Ethernet from a low spec microcontroller understand and compile a basic TCP/IP stack, and add some simple telnet or HTTP server on top, several of my projects do this and a lot of engineers have that basic understanding. Even humble AVRs and Casio calculators can run a basic TCP/IP stack but the difference between this and a gigabit ethernet on some massive multithreaded operating system is night and day and as you say well beyond most.

I got sick of things changing too, so I developed my own platform which abstracts away from the underlying OS, so I won't have my settings changed randomly or have hard links broken. It may seem like overkill but stability has a price.

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