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by gausswho 20 days ago
I did find this odd at first too, but then I realized something: it's a pain to maintain a device. Customizing it to the way you like it is not only a waste of time, it's tedious and never ends in an age where defaults are often adversarial to your interests. It's enough work taking care of one pet/kid, you might not want another.

Now I'm a nerd and I went through a realization that I should treat my devices as 'livestock not pets' and went to the trouble of building a NixOS config so that I can have two or three machines that all behave the same. But that's its own labor and still doesn't solve the phone problem. Or the fact your employer won't provision you a Linux with root.

Living by this personal/business separation is probably something most folks would aspire to, but technology as we practice it conspires against them.

1 comments

"your employer won't provision you a Linux with root" - there's your problem!
Fair. I am curious how many folks are able to get root access on their work machines across the software workforce. If you do, what sort of surveillance tech does your IT expect for you to have on there? Are you given special exemption compared to Mac or Windows company machines?
Perhaps I've somehow avoided that for a long time and don't appreciate how lucky I am. I've maintained my own Linux based workstations for the past ~8 years. IT hates it, but we seem to have been grandfathered in from back when productivity trumped compliance.
I thought that's what VMs were for?