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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Aka, one of the main reasons to choose 'boring' technology. Something new and experimental may have some interesting properties that make it fun to play around with, but chances are you'll have to fix everything yourself if anything goes wrong.

Meanwhile, picking whatever everyone else is using at least means resources will exist out there and that other people will have had the same issue at some point in time. Hence why I'd pick React or Vue over a newer framework, or plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript over a framework in general.

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Boring technology is honestly the best technology, I’ve never regretted using boring stuff because it can usually do 95% of what I want without too much hassle. I get tempted by shiny stuff, but I’d never rely on anything new for something important

I too like boring tech and try and avoid shiny stuff. I'd like to refine this idea though: is it that I like boring tech because it's old and battle-tested, or just because it's old and I'm familiar with it?

E.g. Bazel. Is it shiny new or is it boring old? It only made v1.0 four years ago, but it's based on Blaze, which has been developed internally at the Google mothership since 2006. To a Googler, Blaze probably seems boring - does Bazel, too?

I don't think many would call Arch "boring technology". It's a cutting-edge distro, and it is designed with the expectation that you will read the wiki, since you don't have any chance to properly install it if you don't.

I don't think it's near as "exciting" as many make it sound though. These days I usually run Debian on my personal machines, before anybody thinks it's fanboy-ism or Stockholm Syndrome.

I've been using Arch on and off for a while. Back before systemd, and it had an installer.

I can't remember anything earth shattering in quite some time. Certainly no big paradigm shifts.

Packages are up to date, but they're the developer's latest release. If something is broken, wait for the fix to be released and that's about it.

I ran ~15-20 developer workstations on Arch for a couple of years. They were there before me. Being a Java shop, we managed our JDKs/IDE outside of the system packages.

Arch stays pretty close to upstream and rolling release means you only get little updates, no version upgrades.

It is boring in the “don’t do anything unexpected and avoid catastrophic changes” sense.

Arch is not what I would call cutting-edge, and I would call it boring.

The overriding philosophy of Arch is simplicity. That simplicity pushes the burden of having some basic understanding onto the user, as many kinds of guided tutorials and wizards are anything but simple.

> it is designed with the expectation that you will read the wiki

It is designed with the expectation that you will read the documentation, which is true for many things, as a simple example, many home appliances.

I call it "Stackoverflowability".

If you go by that name alone, and select stuff best represented on Stack Overflow, you'll get the side effect of ignoring all the best documented projects.

I guess the best term would probably be 'searchability' then. You want something where info comes up if you type it into Google/Bing/Kagi/your search engine of choice, and where there's enough of a community that other people will have experienced similar issues to you in the past.

(for this reason, it's also probably better to choose projects with unique/well known names that don't conduct their support operations on Slack or Discord).

boring technology for work and whatever you want to explore outside

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