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Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

100% agree. I tried running Pop OS as my main system a few years ago and got sucked into ricing, WMs, extensions and themes. Spent all my time customizing and fixing the bugs that arose, hated it and went back to Windows.

Now I'm back on Pop but this time I know enough to not customize too hard and it works great. A DE/WM is meant to function as one cohesive piece even if its built out of many components, so if you take a functional DE and start poking around then of course it will break. Even the amount of customization I can do easily without breaking anything is far above what Mac/Windows offer.

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> 100% agree. I tried running Pop OS as my main system a few years ago and got sucked into ricing, WMs, extensions and themes. Spent all my time customizing and fixing the bugs that arose, hated it and went back to Windows.

This is always my issue with Linux. Windows is boring and ugly - to the extent that I probably can't fix it - so I don't bother and I just get stuff done instead. But with Linux, I can imagine this perfectly configured workstation and I know it's possible because I've seen the things people do. So I spend hours tinkering until I break everything or get bored. Then I come back months later and the Nvidia kernel module fails to build after a kernel update or something and I have to start over from scratch. Not a recipe for productivity.

This isn't a problem with Linux, per se, more of a personal failing. I think I've almost got it out of my system.

It's actually the same thing on Mac or Windows. Younger me spent a lot of time poring over forum posts for tweaking macOS (those undocumented `defaults write` commands) to customize things. One day an OS update broke my highly custom /etc/sudoers and I lost sudo access. That's the moment when I realized I'd gone too far.

I do the same nowadays. I spend extra time learning the defaults (muscle memory etc.) in my OS and programs, which is about the same effort as customizing them (if not less).

The difference is that when setting up a new environment it costs nothing. If I had tons of tweaks and custom scripts that would be a setup cost every time.

I still run manjaro on one of my laptops but just recently returned to windows 11 for my other laptop because running 2 different resolutions (external display) on linux is just too much of a pain. Windows just works. But with wsl2 I find myself not missing linux :/

Same here... when I started with Linux (around 17-18 years ago), I had to customize everything - from the aesthetics, ergonomics to the system level stuff.

Now I just change wallpaper and mouse cursor theme, check enabled services and remove the packages I consider unnecessary. Including the fresh installation time, it is less than 1 hour effort.

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