| > It's just that customizing your OS often doesn't justify the time spent. That really depends on a) what you choose to customize, and b) how adept you are at customizing. In other words, it depends on your skill and foresight. With enough practice - you get it by simply working with computers over the years - you can recognize the pain points with the biggest payoffs quite accurately. With enough skill, you can fix them relatively quickly. This way you get a "10x" setup tailored for your specific needs. Of course, trying to indiscriminately customize everything while putting a lot of time into learning how to customize them is a net productivity sink. That's normal. Most people start with such approach, get burned by it, and conclude that the whole customizability-as-a-feature is not worth it. It's quite possible that it's true for majority of users. The well-tuned, A/B tested, in-depth researched defaults can be good enough for many. I have nothing against such defaults. However, forcing me to use them, while I know precisely what I personally need to be more productive, is something I can't agree to. My current setup is Linux, AwesomeWM, Firefox, and Emacs. I customized away all the pain points I had with them a decade ago (half a decade with Awesome). The time spent on maintaining the configs across upgrades is trivial, on the order of tens of minutes a year. To sum it up: customizing your OS can be well worth it if you do it right. You can also go wrong with it, too. But, using software which doesn't allow for customization not only removes the risk of customization going wrong - it also robs you of the possibility of doing it right. |
Amen brother! Exact same setup here: Linux / AwesomeWM (with a dedicated modifier key on my keyboard only for AwesomeWM related keybindings), Firefox, Emacs and the occasional IntelliJ IDEA for Java stuff.
> The time spent on maintaining the configs across upgrades is trivial, on the order of tens of minutes a year.
Exactly.