[uberduper]

They don't think about the time they spend updating brew, or dealing with pipx, or waiting for corporate McAfee AV to update, or figuring out weird docker/rancher/podman on osx issues, or "ffff `date` doesn't work that same as anything else..."

[afavour]

Out of that list updating brew is about the only thing I regularly encounter and even then I can just it run while I do something else.

[diffeomorphism]

And you think those two hours are not "while I do something else"? I highly doubt you can spend two hours of active time a month on maintenance even if you tried. However, if you count "clicked yes, then it took 30 minutes to download and update" as 30 minutes, then this seems about right for any OS.

[olliej]

I think your phrasing caused issues then.

I am not doing any significant manual configuration, tweaking, or futzing with my system setup beyond maybe half an hour after initial install. There might be occasional changes I try but they are (1) rare, (2) just toggle a setting, and (3) are very occasional - in the order of seconds-single digit minutes over the course of a year.

Your phrasing makes it sound like you are spending multiple hours every month fiddling with your system.

I think most people aren’t measuring the time spend doing updates because for most people they are done overnight, and aside from major updates take just a slightly extended reboot if done during the day. No one is including the os updates, chrome updates, etc downloading in the background as time that they’re are spending maintaining their system, etc.

It is reasonable to read someone saying “I spent X amount of time doing Y” as meaning the person is saying that they were personally spending that time doing Y, not “my computer spent X amount of time doing Y while I was using it”

[diffeomorphism]

> I think your phrasing caused issues then.

Who is "you"?

[olliej]

Ah, I assumed from your comment you were the original commenter that said "I don't think I spend more than an a couple of hours per month maintaining my configuration", but I see you are not, sorry!

[afavour]

I dunno, if someone is saying “I spent a few hours every month maintaining” and they mean “I do other things while packages download” then they need to phrase it better.

[sanderjd]

Linux doesn't keep you from having to update packages.

I agree that there is all this software tedium as well, that I'd much prefer to eliminate, but it sadly exists across all platforms.

But that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about time spent getting and keeping hardware working properly, writing stuff into x11 or networking config files, that sort of thing. I have always found myself doing significantly more of that when running Linux (specifically on a laptop) than I have any interest doing anymore.

[uberduper]

I don't understand why you'd need to configure x11 or networking more than once.

My routine maint tasks are `fwupdmgr get-updates` and `yay -Syu --devel` followed by `reboot`

I'm not sure what else people are doing other than tinkering with how things are setup. I spend a lot of time trying out other window managers and compositors or setting up various keybinds or automations I think would be useful, but I don't consider those maintenance tasks.

[sanderjd]

Oh you definitely don't in theory. But you totally do in practice. There's no good reason, it's just the actual experience many people have.

> I spend a lot of time trying out other window managers and compositors or setting up various keybinds or automations I think would be useful, but I don't consider those maintenance tasks.

This is the kind of (in my opinion) low value tedium I'm talking about.

I'm aware that we're talking past each other in these threads. Some people are thinking of software updates, others of us are thinking of stuff like trying out window managers and messing with keybindings, and these are indeed very different kinds of toil.

[uberduper]

>Oh you definitely don't in theory. But you totally do in practice. There's no good reason, it's just the actual experience many people have.

What are you referring to here?

That's like saying it's low value tedium to set folder view in finder to compact. Or trying out Rectangle or one of the auto-tilers, enable night shift.. They're preferences and I don't see how the experience would differ from one OS to another. Maybe you like the way everything works out of the box on OSX. That's cool. I don't. I don't really like how any OS (or wm or compositor) works out of the box.