I sometimes feel like I'm the only developer who doesn't want to spend all his free time fiddling around with his operating system.
To me, that's not developing. It's just extra work that's completely orthagonal to building cool software.
To me, that's not developing. It's just extra work that's completely orthagonal to building cool software.
Turns out there are technical terms for the behavior. For OSes, you and I are satisficers: we just want it to be good enough. I used to be a maximizer, where I wanted it to be perfect.
Learning to choose which approach to take in a situation has been really great. For example, restaurant menus. I used to be a maximizer, trying to pick the best thing. Eventually I decided agonizing over my choice was a fair bit of stress for little or no gain; it was easy to finish my meal and think, "Damn, maybe I should have gotten that other thing." Now I just skim the menu and go with the first thing that looks good to me.
Usually I just copy my configs over to a next box / laptop that happens to become my workstation, and continue nearly where I left. It worked more or less smoothly for last 7 years.
Yes, sometimes I do fiddle with my settings to make my experience more comfortable and thus my work more productive. I don't think that spending 5-10 minutes a month on it is such a waste.