Hacker News Reader

Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

Deal with what? I selected some click and point options from a very clear and easy to read menu, downloaded some themes from a nice shiny, easy to use theme downloader, it took me all of a half hour to an hour or so to set things up about a decade ago and I have had to do a minimal amount of work since.

Little tweaks,improvements here and there as I find better ways of doing things but otherwise, it was not much work at all.

Install from a live CD...actual CD originally, USB these days, go to the options menu that has all the things, click some buttons and menus, drag some widgets around, browse through the shiny WM themes, download, install, done.

If you can use a computer to do basic tasks, it's really not hard. If you can't navigate some menus that have confusing titles like, desktop settings and themes and display options and widgets and you can't click and drag things around, whatever OS you use will be a struggle.

View on HN

I have a _huge_ problem where if I can endlessly tweak something, I will waste hours doing so. I used to do the same with my Android devices, flashing newer nightly rom builds every night for cyanogen. My macOS/iOS devices "just work" and I have very few gripes with their chosen defaults.

Exactly this for me. Why spend hours tweaking something to look and work a certain way when all I am going to use it for is to launch some other program that I will likely run maximized?

Options beget choice. Choices need a decision, which requires energy. We can reframe what is called in german Innerer Schweinehund as our innate, hardwired wetware program to conserve energy. Lions and all other cats sleep most of the day, because hunting, which succeeds 1 out of 10 times, requires a lot of energy. We now live in an environment where food is abundant, no running after gazelles till think break down from overheating required. Now it becomes apparent why many people prefer convenience without thinking over choice.

That's nonsense. Having options doesn't mean you have to pick one. Having 1 choice or 10 with a default set is the same unless you start digging into options. This smells like "Apple Knows Best".

That's not true, for many people. If you increase choices then people often feel less happy.

Having more varieties of mayonnaise at the supermarket doesn't necessarily make us happier--it just forces us to expend energy choosing, or worrying that we've made the wrong choice. If there's just one variety then we don't have that issue and we're probably happy with the mayonnaise that we get.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

I don't use Apple products

Please read those: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We want to have an open, respectful site, where we can discuss differing opinoons respectfully.

I’m both Mac OS X and Ubuntu user. There was no need to change anything in OSX because there was no need (defaults are good enough) and I use some tweaks on Ubuntu. I understand that this is anecdotal but I guess this is how OSX users feel.

>If you can use a computer to do basic tasks, it's really not hard. If you can't navigate some menus that have confusing titles like, desktop settings and themes and display options and widgets and you can't click and drag things around, whatever OS you use will be a struggle.

I did the Unix porn thing for years, it got old. Not a single bit of that sounds appealing at this point in my life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com