Every time people say that you need to first install 30 pluggins before you can use gnome I just think “uh no, you don’t. It works just fine out of the box.”

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.

I'd trust Apple's design changes over Gnome's.

Same, I don't mess with desktop GNU/Linux in general. Headless Linux VMs and servers make sense of course.

I’ve heard this called “the defaults lifestyle” on the Software Defined Talk podcast. I’m forever locked out of nirvana because I have an iPhone but not a Mac, but that’s fine.

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.

[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/

> Every time people say that you need to first install 30 pluggins before you can use gnome I just think “uh no, you don’t. It works just fine out of the box.”

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)

I had this revelation around 15 years ago. I was fiddling with custom i3wm setups and complex hotkey setups and my .emacs was longer than some short stories. I even had Windows with a custom explorer replacement that re-did the whole UI.

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.

[0] https://github.com/andsens/homeshick

I'm with you. If I can't either take the custom config with me (.emacs, for instance), and it goes beyond a few simple things, like changing a couple of defaults on OSX, I just don't mess with it anymore. It's not worth the overhead of either having to use an unfamiliar configuration in other contexts or having to spend the time to completely reimplement my custom tweaks again (which might not even be possible due to IT policies).

> 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 get the best of both worlds with nix and home-manager.

if i don't like the defaults in an application i tend to look for alternative apps that have better defaults before grudgingly changing the defaults in this app. i just don't like spending a lot of time fiddling with settings.

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.

> Customization is super fun but it's just another layer of complexity at the end of the day.

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.

Yeah, I constantly heard people at work complaining about whatever minute changes broke their ultra-customized workflows. Past tense cuz they got laid off.