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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that tinkering is a side effect of curiosity, and that curiosity leads to expertise, which has value.

I parleyed my curiosity in hardware into my first job. (My car-fixing skills alas didn't take me anywhere.) Hardware was fun for the first 10 years of my career, but now, well, it's just not interesting.

I played with Linux as well along the way, but I confess that too has dulled. Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so.

The past couple years I've gone down the solar energy rabbit hole, and I'd love a wind turbine (but I just can't make the economic argument for having one.) If I do end up getting one, it'll be to prove to myself that it was a dumb idea all along.

In some ways we never stop tinkering. But the focus moves on to the next challenge.

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> Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so.

Building a Linux box led me back to Apple.

I had been using UNIX at home, school and work for several years, and decided it was time to build my 3rd Linux box. Went to CompUSA out of idle curiosity to see what equipment they had, and the only computer in the store with Internet access was a Mac.

I hadn't used a Mac since the SE/30 days, and I suddenly realized that the NeXT acquisition which I'd mostly ignored had changed everything. Why build a Linux box and be locked out of tools like Photoshop when I could have UNIX workstation that ran commercial software (for, admittedly, significantly more money).

Never looked back.

> Why build a Linux box and be locked out of tools like Photoshop

That's what VMs are for. You're never really locked out. It may not make sense to go that way if Photoshop is THE thing you work with of course.

> when I could have UNIX workstation that ran commercial software

Because for lots of software MacOS is a second class system. Partially because there's just no way to test things on it without investing lots of money in hardware, so many people don't.

If you're doing lots of sysadmin / software maintenance style work, MacOS just provides unnecessary pain.

> That's what VMs are for.

For me, the psychic angst of using Windows is much, much worse than any Mac-related inconvenience.

> If you're doing lots of sysadmin / software maintenance style work, MacOS just provides unnecessary pain.

Amazingly a significant amount of the software that you use on a daily basis, perhaps unwittingly, is developed and maintained with macOS and Windows!

I'm working on packaging things for Darwin platform. And helping people deal with homebrew/compilation issues. I'm painfully aware how much is developed by people with no access to or interest in MacOS. And unless something targets windows explicitly (not wsl), you can basically expect issues going in. In a twisted way, I'm one of the enablers of the current situation where things are usable on a mac.

Sometimes you can tell by the simple fact that the git repo contains files in one directory that conflict in naming. Linux has no issues with "Foo" and "foo" coexisting.

Nothing to do with Linux, and everything to do with case sensite filesystems common on UNIX.

macOS uses case insensitive filesystem by default for backwards compatibility with HFS+.

You can turn case sensitive on HFS+ and APFS if so desired for the "Linux" experience, via Disk Utility or the equivalent CLI tool.

And if looking to have some fun on an ecosystem that doesn't expect it, you can equally turn it on on NTFS, via fsutil.

> > I'm painfully aware how much is developed by people with no access to or interest in MacOS. [...] Sometimes you can tell by the simple fact that the git repo contains files in one directory that conflict in naming. Linux has no issues with "Foo" and "foo" coexisting.

> Nothing to do with Linux, and everything to do with case sensite filesystems common on UNIX.

Of the three major desktop operating systems (Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and the Linux family), only Linux has case sensitive filesystems by default. Therefore, it's likely that someone who didn't care about filename case conflicts was running Linux.

Indeed, why get a lesser experience with Linux laptops, when I can use Apple and Microsoft platforms, and use Linux in a VM when I really need to.

The Year of Linux Desktop is delivered on a desktop VM.

If that works for you, great. My default works better with Linux with only occasional other system. Makes me least angry. (Also because Linux is the only system that handles sleep/hibernation for me without issues, ironically...)

I think the awkward part of your first post is that you appear to start with a value judgement that tinkering is for poor people who's time is worthless. That's not remotely fair to either poor people, or rich people who like to tinker. No one's time is worthless. Not your time. Not mine. It's all just time.

Fair enough, and no I didn't mean to impinge time is worthless. It's not the value of time that changes, but the amount of it you have.

In a work context a shortage of time (more customers than you can handle) means you need to discriminate, which means you can't make everyone happy. Which usually means differentiating based on value. (Aka, you get more expensive. )

For personal time you also become more discerning. Spend time with spouse, or build another computer, or lie under a car etc. Life has more demands, so there are more choices.

Incidentally, one of those choices is to work less.

The tinkering never goes away, but I prefer to tinker in profitable areas now. (I get to tinker for work.)

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