A story telling to save me from a therapist consultation.
No space square world. I realize that that this could be my theme philosophy. This is my general approach:
- windows manager: tiling (bspwm)with no spaces, squared windows, no decorations, no visual effects
- theme: transparency and grey background buttons/white text
Over two decades I went from a fancy looking machine to its complete opposite where minimalism is king. How did I make such a big jump?
To make it brief, recreating this comfort look that invaded my real environment felt reassuring at first in my virtual life. But as time went by I noticed that smooth rounded stuff that transiently showed up on my screen created:
- more and more distraction and negatively impacted my productivity
- some frustration when something didn’t run as expected because I felt that everything should be as smooth as the appearance of my screen
I would definitely say that I feel way better now and I’m more efficient but I also admit that I’ve reached an extreme where:
- I don’t appreciate screens over 14" anymore because I feel like it’s taxing on my eyes movement and again a waste of space
- I don’t like wasting a pixel of space if not justified. This is also maybe influenced by preference for small screens
- I need extreme simplicity (which brings efficiency) to all aspects of my workflow. So I use a 36-key split keyboard, a trackball, vim-like keybindings everywhere possible, use terminal as much as I can, use fzf for all my file searches…
Hope you will never end up like me but nice to have friends in this group if it’s too late for you ^^
Right. Actually one of the things I love about Linux is that it offers so many options so you can make your own combination to create the perfect system for your specific needs.
You can get all the visual distractions out of your way and tweak litterally everything to an incredible granular level. No other OS can pretend to be so user focused while staying so simple in appearance. You’re not adapting to your system, it’s built for you.
The problem I have with customization options is that I don’t want to customize it, and when I go looking for a setting to change, I don’t want to be drowning in options that I’ll never use. The way I always thought about it is when I buy a saw or a hammer, I go straight to using it. I don’t customize my saw or hammer. That’s not why I buy them. I buy them to build things with them. The tool is not the end goal. Similarly, the DE is not the end goal. I want to spend time getting work done, not spend time customizing my environment.
Recently though I’ve been looking around again a little bit, looking for a DE that has what I want out of the box. LXDE seems closest so far.
We’re exactly on the same page: “the tool is not the goal”. The only difference may be that I see chosing options for an app as options for a tool. If I want to cut wood or metal I need a different saw. Even though the tool is basically the same it doesn’t serve the same purpose. Hence I configure options once and for all, like I would consider which hardware I need exactly in terms of use, ergonomic, power… before buying it.
I don’t spend time tweaking the look of a tool because it’s doesn’t fit my approach of things anymore. As such I don’t even use a DE. But I feel the need to build the right tool (i.e. system app) I need to perform a job as efficiently as possible while keeping the tool itself minimalist and as invisible as possible. On my daily use I have tools that I couldn’t live without anymore but if you ask me a list I will either forgot them or put them at the bottom because I will not think about them right away since they became a second nature.
I certainly see the comfort of the out of the box approach and it can serve a lot of people. In my use case I just realize that - using the example above - it could be like using a wood saw on metal in some cases. It may work but not as good as you would expect to have the job done properly. Also, the fit them all approach means building an app with tons of options activated and I prefer to have available to me only the options I really need. The philosophy feels less bloated to me and I’m not overloading my system with stuff I’ll never use. It’s more time consuming at first to chose the right app but with time it became quick enough and it definitely save me way more time in the long run when I use my system.