No Config for Old Men

There has been a major shift in IT culture between 2010 and 2015 where the general mindset went from "Let's see if we can make computer do this" to "How can we stop the computer from doing that". This is most obvious in the latest advancements with LLMs - back before 2010 LLMs would have been incorporated into IT to help both users and developers create better quality/more advanced produces but today it all seems to come down to monetizing as much as possible while providing as little as possible and restricting access as much as possible.

Changing the system font looks like a recipe for trouble.

For years one of my pet peeves about desktop Linux was that they weren't careful about font metrics and you might have 75px of horizontal space with an 95px wide label in it. (It's gotten better)

In the Unicode age who knows what you'll break. Just having a terminal where line drawing characters work is something you can't take for granted at all and you never know when some Chinese characters are going to show up. Nice to have something tuned that "just works" as opposed to being able to set your system font to comic sans for pure vaingloriosity.

I spent Days customizing my mouse pointer on Amiga, even did ones for playing specific games!

Man, I miss that thing.