I love that fresh VM smell...
Rather than turning a bunch of preferences and habits in to hard requirements, I prefer to just go with the flow. If the gnome design team says workspaces are now horizontal instead of vertical, I just go with it instead of building a plug-in or fork to turn them vertical again.
Same with Apple products, they are design well, so just go with it.
Occasionally plugins are worth the expense though. I finally discovered Argos[0] and I’m using it to show time in UTC and a couple other time zones. Super handy.
But if I try some new software and find that I have to tweak it a bunch to make it usable, that means the devs have different aesthetics and I should probably try something else.
Emacs enthusiasts seem to be the same way: oh, it’s so configurable that let me recommend you do all these crazy things just to get started.
Default setup (absolutely no customization) works great for newbies right out of the box.
(And I say this as someone who’s been using emacs for over 45 years; it’s still my daily drive for editing, web browsing, mail reading… but a beginner doesn’t need to know any of that)
At some point I figured out that I spent so much time configuring everything at home, but I couldn't do the same for the other multiple computers I used at work (work machine + remoting to client's computers) and that started to grate on me.
I just gave up on customising and used everything pretty much on the default settings. Haven't regretted it at all.
The only "custom" bits I have is a homeshick[0] setup and a Brewfile that install some basic shell tools for me on a new computer.
I get the best of both worlds with nix and home-manager.
the hallmark of good application design is to have defaults that are good for the majority of users and don't require fiddling to become useful.
just recently i decided to look for a better way to switch windows in gnome. alt-tab is not convenient because the window previews are to small. the activities overview was a little bit better but slow because i had to use the mouse (i just found i can use arrow-keys too, but it's a bit awkward).
so i went out to search for an extension that would let me cycle through the full sized windows. that let me stumble over a comment that pointed out that i could do that without an extension but with alt-esc.
look ma, no extension. defaults for the win.
Feel like this often is a recipe for fragility too. I used to be big into customizing a linux environment and editors/IDEs for personal use, but often turned into an enormous time sink when troubleshooting would be required just to maintain usability.
Ubiquiti APs failed this test. The moment one started an OTA update, my mom temp unplugged it to make room for a blender. It soft-bricked itself. Parents couldn't figure out how to reconfigure it after a hard reset.
Took awhile to get the approval but when you have a large pile of RMAs sitting for 6mo to a year due to a bad firmware update, for only a standard 1-2 year limited warranty, and they stop responding, and replacements were back-ordered for ages. Well, you do what you have to.
Usually the power brick is poorly isolated and/or you have dirty electricity, it results in errors on an ongoing basis that get logged to the small amount of onboard memory. (not usually a circular buffer.)
When the errors have sufficient volume the memory fills up, and it stops working at resource exhaustion.
In a real pinch, I've resolved this in some of the more milder cases by simply using one of those walmart plug timers that turns off for a few minutes in the morning when everyone is asleep.
This is how you burnout people - have people do boring yet frustrating work, make them do it the hard way, then put them on a deadline with other competing priorities.
We had zero say in most of the APIs we use. When I started demanding clients take part in our API design, they were pleasantly surprised.
The last two years of my life.
There are tons on Amazon etc that do basically the same thing.
I recently got started with Ubiquiti and haven't run into any problems myself. Do you have any examples you could pass on?
Sounds like you got past those parts already.
And imagine how many person-hours went into making that remotely manageable, when unlike you, they control both ends of the connection!
I have my ISP’s hardware in dumb bridge mode because otherwise it won’t do what I want. And all the things they block or cripple? I firmly believe they were right to do so — few people want to do the weirdo stuff I want.
Like you, I set my parents’ setup to the generic defaults.
The final working setup: Basic ISP-provided modem/router/wifi combo, cheap near-zero-config wifi APs to reach distant rooms, entire setup on a lamp timer to cut power for 30min a day at 4AM. The thing is, that solution is decent even if you understand the more advanced stuff.
Now at work I see how many SWEs are, in a way, too smart for their own good. I keep telling them, make your solutions less galaxy-brained. No you are not making another custom DBMS-type thing just to serve a few kinds of requests from adjacent systems. If random other people can't understand it, it'll get rewritten in 2 years tops.