Tech keeps stealing my life, and I want tips on how to make it stop doing that
** Please do not tell me how to fix my issue below; this is an example, not a tech-support request **
I have a (LibreOffice) spreadsheet, personal tracking data. The other day, I got a new laptop (Framework), put a new OS (Debian trixie RC2) on it.
Now, on the new machine, when I add a comment to a cell, the background color of the new comment is wrong/different from every other comment in the spreadsheet. When I add a comment to the same spreadsheet, opened on a different machine, the new comment still has the "correct"/standard background color, but any comments I added on the new machine continue to have the wrong color.
This happened once or twice in the past couple of days, and I just manually "fixed" the color of each new comment, but this morning, I tried to figure out what the deal was, how to fix it properly/permanently.
And just like that, my 3-minute daily edit of this spreadsheet turned into a 2-hour wild goose chase. I still haven't fixed it, I still don't know whether to blame LibreOffice, Debian, the new laptop, or some other variable I haven't even thought of. All I know is, someone has stolen 2 hours of my life from me, and I really want to know who that is.
Bigger picture ...
This happens all the time. Every day, often 3-4 times a day, it is a regular point of stress, of contention in my life, deciding whether to devote hours (sometimes days) of my life to strong-arming software into working the way it was supposed to work in the first place, or to try my best to accept that we just can't have nice things on our computers, and move on.
This definitely predates the word "enshittification", but I don't think it really predates the concept. Stipulated -- software development is complicated, and software is used in so many different situations -- different hardware, different OSes, different libraries, different supporting/complementary software, versions, etc -- it is extremely hard to make software that "just works" for everyone, all the time.
Nonetheless, I think the entire software development industry just collectively decided that is it okay to release stuff that doesn't work ... dating back to some point in the 20th century, long before Linux, before the Internet, before smartphones ... this issue--this philosophy--goes waaaay back, and there's just no fighting it at this point.
But also, I do not want to live in a world where I have to surrender hours and days and years of my life, fighting with software that doesn't work, because "that's just how software is".
So, that's my gripe. Is there any kind of viable middle ground here, that is less extreme than "cabin in the woods"? 'Cuz I am (yet again) seriously weighing that option this morning.
If anything this absolute mindset, to me, seems to be the core of it more than software itself. This is already defined by your choice of software which reflects the idea that software should function exactly in the way you configure it and want it to work.
Which I think is overall a valid sentiment I recognize to a certain degree. But, for my own sanity, is also one I try to approach as a spectrum not absolute. I get the feeling you do approach it more as an absolute "all or nothing" mindset. Which, to be frank, will make you miserable even if the software by all accounts is reasonable.
To be clear, your example is annoying. But not everything needs to be perfect all the time. Which also did take me a long time to accept but sometimes it really is worth it to just accept "good enough" do what you actually wanted to do and move on to do other things.
With you example, I'd probably accept the new color is the new color and embrace the rainbow. Because it doesn't actually impede functionality.
Yes, I'd also want to understand it, but with time being finite there are also technical projects I enjoy sinking time in.
Because, just to drive the point through, I don't really think the software is the issue in this instance. At least not the main one.
One last note, I realize you didn't ask for solutions but it occurred to me while writing so figured I'd share my thought. Comments are a collaboration tool, usually they change based on the author. New machine, new installation, this makes you on that machine a different author.
You're firmly in the "tech is my hobby" circle of the world from what I'm reading there, unlike the majority of people who are in the "Tech is that thing I hope works and so it had better do it or else" circle.
Not going to say I haven't been stuck chasing ghosts on Windows or Mac using something like excel/sheets/numbers, but it happens a hell of a lot less, and certainly isn't the kind of problem you're having, which you KNOW is going to bug the shit out of you and have some archaic weird issue that will likely just be solved on a random update or full reinstall.
Farther off the beaten path you go, more "oh that's weird" you get. I'm guessing you decided on those choices for software/hardware/OS for good reasons, but honestly a huge reason I'm ONLY using linux for a small home server (mostly for practice) is exactly because of shit like this.
I cannot afford to have something I'm doing for work turn into "oh uhhh oops that's weird, let me look into it" any more than things already do. And when i'm using windows with excel I can at least hop on someone else's computer, quickly try, and confirm what the fuck is going on(which I literally cannot remember the last time that happened). When i'm doing libreoffice with linux I'm down a whole rabbithole of debugging and testing, and that's just been in my personal at home testing.
So yeah, if you don't want to keep losing hours to weird edge case stuff, don't run edge case products. I can't speak for framework, but I've been using libre office on both windows and unbuntu in a personal capacity (considering switching my gaming/hobby machine to linux), and have had a few gremlins.
Whew wipes brow glad it's not just me.
This is exactly what I wanted to say and what I have said in plenty of previous comments: this is Linux and open source software in general.
Now before my back gets jumped on, I use Linux. I have several machines in my household that are running it, doing various tasks and am setting up several more in the near future for very specific tasks.
But yeah, this sounds 100% like my experiences when I'm dailying Linux on my main machines. Constant little weird issues that I end up chasing down, maybe finding a solution to and sometimes having to do what's mentioned elsewhere in this thread and say, "Well, that's weird, but I guess it's just like that now..." Then it's on to the next issue that crops up, stopping me from exactly what I want to do.
Case in point: KDEConnect - It's just weird and like that: when it scrolls all the way to the top of the message screen and I cannot scroll down." or Refuses to load contact names for no clear reason. or, or, or...
That's just one instance of one application that has an issue, there's always more and always one that is stopping me from doing what I want to be doing, because it's actually either an irksome minor annoyance or something much bigger that's causing a complete stop to what I want to do (Game runs, fans won't move over a few thousand RPM, causing throttling.)
I can accept some instances of "software is just weird", but it needs to function the way that it's intended to, without having constant little things I need to chase down and fix. I have a lot of that in my life already and when I sit down at my computer, I want accomplish what I want to accomplish, whether that's building a Resume or playing a game, without having to chase down little issues.
I switched from a very long term Linux user to Mac recently, and it's no better there. I've been dogged with little irritations ever since. If I settle down to try and solve one it takes hours and sometimes I don't. At that point I just end up living with the little pile of irritations. It might be that I'm not in Kansas any more, but from researching my issues on online fora, it appears I'm not alone in experiencing these irritations, so maybe not.
E.g. right now, the 'Unlock Password Manager' is popping up asking for my credential. Why? Don't know. Can I stop it? Nope. Are there unresolved discussions on Apple forum about this? Yep. I consider this to be a pretty big thing, because it looks like software application unkown is attempting to get a password for authentication but I have no way of telling what or why.
It's not that Windows or MacOS don't have them, it's that I find them so much less frequent. I've had one just this week, in fact, but it was just that one time and then I was able to move on with my life.
I don't know what it is, but every time I try to daily it, it's just issue after issue. Works great on my PiHole, my dated Gaming computer, my Steam Deck and my HTPC though. I've heard some mention here that it's the fact that I daily a laptop (Thinkpad though, which is supposed to have solid Linux support), which could definitely be the case.
Laptops on the whole are definitely more problematic than desktops. I hardly ever have (had) desktop linux issues, because I choose my components with care for minimal friction.
Laptops though, you don't really have much of a choice. Even revisions of previously solid models can mess things up that were once smooth sailing. You have to make it work on what's there. The fingerprint reader on my Acer will never work. I've had to replace WiFi cards in laptops from time to time to get a working one. Sleep is often an issue.
I find these sorts of irritating time sink issues on all platforms I think is what I was getting at. I used (and still do really, just not on the desktop) Linux since the mid 90s, Windows since 2.1, DOS, Mac OS (sporadically around the G4/G5 era, and full time now on the desktop), and these things exist everywhere, and as far as my experience goes, always have.
The more familiar I am with a platform, the easier they are to fix, but always on every platform I end up with a laundry list of irritations that I just live with, because increasingly as I get older, I find myself less and less willing to spend time resolving them. It's the one currency I'm running out of, and I can't get more.
I wonder if this has more to do with that "traditionally" you don't expect to be able to fix small annoyances (and up to bugs) in PCs running Windows or iOS - you just stop using the feature or software and/or find another tool - while you expect to be able to fix them in PCs running any flavour of GNU/Linux?
Hmm, I don't think so? I've been a Windows Sys Admin and there's a lot you can disable or fix in Windows. That said, I don't find a lot of annoyances with Windows, it tends to "just work" for me and often, I can fix stuff that is bothering me or I find annoying (aside from Settings and Control Panel being different. Dumb.), whereas I find it tends to be the opposite with Linux, especially given I'm not a developer.
Like for instance my previously mentioned issues with fans where they just...don't work? But only in some software. There's no apparent reason for it and given that my daily is a Thinkpad, fan control is locked down and I can do nothing about it. No issues with the same software under Windows.
Or KDE Connect versus Microsoft Phone Link, where one just works and the other is constant fiddling or weird behaviors that I cannot fix.
There's plenty I can fix in Linux, but therein lies the problem in that I have to generally fix it. Unfortunately, I lots my log of issues I had resolved or was resolving or was learning to live with in Linux, otherwise I could go into more detail, but again, it's just always something that needs me to work at it whenever I actually want to use my PC. I feel like Linux also has this legacy of someone deciding things should be a certain way and that tends to be it, such as the way middle mouse click works. I suppose that's a personal preference though, as I prefer the way Windows does it and I've used the Linux method plenty, I just don't prefer it, so I won't complain about that.
At least personally I know that’s not the case. I use these tools professionally. I can’t “just deal” with a bug.
A lot of things wind up being users misunderstanding these insane monoliths (Excel is FULL of unintuitive gotchas) so they file it away as gremlin when it’s technically user error.
That said I’ve noticed that the people who are extremely picky about how they think things should work are the ones who most often have issues. In my experience this is a mix of the previous problem (not adapting to workflows) and heavy “no i don’t need this” customization with downstream effects.
A huge one I’ve witnessed over and over is all the “debloat windows” scripts that try to lobotomize the system. I hate the tracking and the bullshit as much as anyone, and have toggled off most of what I can through the menus, but running these scripts often takes this brutal hack and slash approach that usually hits things like the windows store, which turns out is randomly important to desires and processes.
I stopped having many of my issues when I stopped running scripts from stack/git/YouTube to try and make things perfect and just went through the provided interface to get close.
I've had the exact opposite experience with Windows. Doing a full reinstall is recommended as standard diagnosis process as it's pretty much the only way to resolve a myriad of issues, while I've never ever had to do an actual reinstall on Linux.
A year ago, every single game with EAC suddenly started triggering bluescreens when running them for over a minute on Windows. I know that this would almost certainly be fixed with a reinstall but I never bothered because they work perfectly fine under Linux.
MS Office has quite a bit of jank and I've had to fiddle with it to do things like show invisible characters then hunt down specific glyphs to fix my formatting. It especially breaks in spectacular ways the moment you interact with shared documents or the online 365 client. The amount of incompatibilities and syncing errors is truly impressive.
And don't even get me started on Windows itself, I receive advertisements on both the start menu and desktop notifications despite disabling all notifications everywhere. Things like Copilot just randomly appear in my task bar.
That said, LibreOffice has unfortunately not been too great either. I usually either reach for the stripped down formats like LaTeX/Markdown/CSV or go with other proprietary software; WPS Office and Google Docs are rock solid in comparison to the Libre/MS suites.
There's plenty of rock solid open source software—mpv on Linux has never failed to play a valid video file for me, while everything else (VLC, Windows Media Player, even mpv on macOS once) has—but LibreOffice is not one of them in my experience.
I feel like this is more of a therapy angle. Or that may be a bit extreme, but meditation? Stoicism?
Fundamentally it’s not healthy for something like the color of comments on a spreadsheet being different causing a 2 hour stressful event. This seems like it’s causing serious quality of life issues, and is worthwhile seeking mental health resources.
My therapist used Zoom; I was forced to fire him.
(only half joking)
Hey @Eric_the_Cerise , first of all, please know that you are not alone! I've dealt with aspects like this for my entire life. And, i'm also a technologist, so the exposure for this kind of thing (like what you described) is not isolated to the home environment, but also places like my dayjob.
Now, about a year or so ago, i re-saw the Judd Apatow movie "This is 40"...and there's a scene near the end of the movie where Paul Rudd's character laments to the punk rock older man (Graham something)....that the latest record from said older punk rocker was not selling well at all. To the surprize of Paul Rudd's character, Graham replies about not worrying about album sales because his expectations are nowadays quite low! I think his line in response to Paul Rudd's character is something like: "Oh, you expected the record to sell!?! They never sell nowadays..." And, then he goes to advise that one should keep their nut (i guess expenses, costs, etc.) as low as possible. Something like that. Well, after watching that scene and pondering a bit, a sort of digital minimalism struck me.
I started reviewing and thinking on my home lab setup, my laptop, what tech and tools etc. that i use.....well, all manner of areas of my daily, home tech life. And, one of the things i started doing more of was: simplifying things as much as possible - especially my tools. For example, for decades i would capture notes, journal entries, whatever within word processor docs (think: Word docs or FLOSS equivalents). So i started using more basic text files. I use markdown files many times....but now about half the time, i don't even need markdown, and simply use bare text in a literal text file. But, not only that! I use a simple text editor instead of a more comprehensive LibreOffice (or whatever office suite software). Not only that! I also started using more TUI apps, that is text UI apps within the terminal! Coincidentally over this last year as i have adopted simpler tools, on some of my linux/FLOSS podcasts there seem to be more interest in TUI tools too! (I'm sure its my bias in noticing these things more nowadayys that i am using them more, i guess.)
Anyway, what i am suggesting is consider if you need more simplicity in your tech life in general. Yes, sometimes you do need a spreadsheet, and sometimes you do need some features from an office suite software...but, if not, then stick to simpler tools and simpler approaches. By the way, please don't take my suggestion here to imply that "just doing this" is easy...its not! At least, for me its not, so maybe it might not be easy for you either! But, when it works for me - and hey, my journey is still in its infancy - it really works great! So, yeah, think how you can simplify things - both in ways of working/approaches as well as your toolset...and maybe it can help, as it has been helping me. Good luck, and happy to listen to you more! (BTW, I hope you don't mind that i started following your fediverse account...so, on this or any other topic, I would be happy to continue engage with you in discussion, but only if you wish.) Take care!!!
I have been leaning this way for years. I am a Cal Newport fan (Digital Minimalism, etc), and I am gradually headed down a similar path. I keep fantasizing about walking away from the Internet entirely. Walking away from Linux entirely -- one of these days, I'm going to give OpenBSD a solid test-drive; I understand it is a bit slower and more rudimentary than other OSes, but it is also next-level solid, built with actual engineering standards in mind, etc.
But mostly, yeah, just one by one, find tools I can live with, and cut out as much extraneous "stuff" as possible.
Yeah, Cal Newport is an author that i am becoming a fan of! While i have not yet read his books, the historical blog posts are quite inspirational on their own. (But a couple of his boos are on my "to read" book list.) And, yeah, someone mentioned to me whether i'd consider one of the BSDs - because of my heading more towards tech minimalism. So, might give BSD land a bit of a whirl. :-) And, great to hear that you're on your simplification journey!
Just to clarify, FreeBSD is the most popular of the BSDs, and by all accounts, it is very good. However, OpenBSD is in a class all its own for using strict engineering standards and developing and maintaining a rock-solid piece of software.
Yeah, i had heard that there are different BSDs fr different sort of purposes, like Ghost BSd if yuou want an already-baked/done desktop experience, NetBSD for X, FreeBSD for Y, etc, etc. I guess when i dive in, i'll see which makes most sense for my minimalistic approach. :-) Thanks!
I think the first step is to stop using Release Candidate software. Use only full releases of software. After that, I'm not sure. I honestly don't run into that many new bugs, so I haven't had the experience of issues coming up like you have. The few bugs that I do run into (audio crackling because of PipeWire or my dac needing a restart, Rocket League putting me into matches without the party leader (or various issues that come and go like notifications), or Team notifications not always working at work (more common now that I've been forefully upgraded to Win11) are consistent issues that I expect and no longer have an emotional reaction to just resignation. For some of them I have workaround (restarting my computer/dac for audio), aren't too meaningful (game bugs), or I just don't care about (if I don't get notifications because the software my company uses is bad - that's a them problem. Provide me with better software or cope.)
Can you tell us more about how the glitches have affected you? You've mentioned that you've spent a lot of time trying to fix them. How else have the affected you/what is motivating you to spend time fixing them?
Debian trixie is less than a week away from stable release ... also, it's Debian. That said, though, I explicitly noted that I'm using RC right now, to clarify that this particular occasion is, perhaps, an edge case. Ditto with running on a Framework laptop, and broadly, just with using FOSS software in general (though LibreOffice is among the best-supported/maintained FOSS projects out there).
Normally, I am running my critical systems on things that are considered to be core, stable, reliable projects, like Debian, the ODF, etc. The broader issue permeates all FOSS and, in slightly different ways, almost all software in general.
I think the 'problem' you outlined is not even specific to software - it's something that occurs in any tool, invention, handiwork, organization, etc. that mankind has created. On a fundamental level, reality is complicated and chaotic and has its own set of rules that are orthogonal to human goals. There is not a single thing created by mankind that doesn't break on edge cases, fail to adapt to changing environment, or require maintenance (proportional to its complexity).
Now, it's natural to be frustrated by all this. In fact I'd say it's part of the human condition to run up against what I think of as 'the bureaucracy of existence'. I think Franz Kafka does a great job capturing this frustration - he gets a reputation for his commentary on literal bureaucracies, but I think he was ultimately more interested in the metaphorical bureaucracies - i.e. the futile complexity of social organization and the general living of daily life. The main theme of his writing basically amounts to 'what are the rules?'. If Kafka were born in the 90's, he probably would have written about software and other technology.
My point in saying all this is that assigning blame related to this problem should always be fraught with moral considerations. There are certainly situations where, despite the universal quality of these problems, people can be blamed. I think most examples of this boil down to the nature of contracts. If I buy a tool from you, it is a contract where 1) I give you money, and 2) you give me a tool which performs X, Y, and Z properly. There may also be a literal contract (what we'd call a warranty) but there is also a sort of moral contract, is my stipulation. If the tool does not perform as advertised, you are in breach of this contract and my upset is justified. Obviously nothing is perfect, and I try to be cool-headed with the my appraisal of a tool's performance. If my toaster oven breaks after using it for 15 years, I tend to think 'it's a miracle it managed to work for so long!' even if I could view it as a contract violation. But then, there are more obvious or even outright malicious cases.
Let's look at your spreadsheet problem. What is the nature of your contract with LibreOffice? To my understanding, it is free, open source software. If you didn't pay for it, what expectations can you justifiably have about its performance?
I'd like to challenge something in particular you said - "all I know is, someone has stolen 2 hours of my life from me". To me, this seems like a ridiculous statement. If I spent 2 hours building a sandcastle and then the ocean sweeps it away, would I say that 'someone has stolen 2 hours of my life'? On an existential level, software is just as much a complicated, chaotic part of reality as the merciless encroachment of the ocean. And unless I'm mistaken, you do not seem to have any sort of moral contract with someone to fix the problem for you. In fact, saying that LibreOffice is obligated to fix this kind of problem is sort of an attempt to steal 2 hours of someone else's life (and perhaps more than 2 hours, given the complexity of software design).
I don't mean to make you sound selfish, but ultimately I think at least some of your problem is attitude. It doesn't help that we live in a world saturated with technology, which tends to make these kinds of frustrations especially frequent. But the more you want to accomplish, the more you will have to deal with petty inefficiencies, failures, and such. It's not anyone's fault - it's just the way reality is. Kafka struggled to make sense of how to live in such a reality. We all struggle with it, consciously or not.
I certainly see your point, broadly, philosophically, the nature of entropy, yada ... but I also believe there is a big bright red difference between how (most) software works (or doesn't) as compared to most "physical" tools and projects.
I'm not so sure. Almost every task will have little imperfections, that may or may not be "solvable" depending on how much energy you put into it.
Ok.
If you feel that someone is stealing your time by supplying you with free software, I would suggest you stop using it, and be freed from the burden of dealing with this constant theft.
To be fair, pretty much every paid program has that disclaimer as well unless you're paying multiple thousands for support contracts.
Aside from the first clause :)
I'd say other than the word free :)
No.
In my mind, this is just not a valid argument. Period.
When literally every piece of software on the planet carries the same disclaimer, or worse, you are no longer allowed to argue "if I don't like it, go find something better".
More explicitly, the "someone" in question may not (in fact, probably is not) anyone involved in the specific project that has pissed me off on any given day, but rather, some half-forgotten judge who made a ruling 27 years ago, saying some company's shitty EULA was legal and their customers can go pound sand if they don't like it.
You are complaining about libre office and Debian and claiming that the millions of man hours that have gone into providing an astounding commons has left you worse off than if it didn't exist. That these developers are stealing your time from you.
You aren't bound by the caprice of some judge enforcing a EULA. I was quoting from the GPLv2, which exists to guarantee your freedom of access to software and rights to modify it.
I can and will make the argument all day long.
The idea that the computer is a tool and that it should simply do what you want it to do has indeed slowly been eroding for years. Decades even. Although I recognize the struggle, I feel lucky that I learned to use computers before this started, because that means that I have a good intuition to discern whether something is hard because it is hard, or because the pile of software I am using is bad and not up to the task. Today, in 90% of the cases, it is the pile of software that is bad.
I think this came to be because, for various reasons, in software it is much easier to paper over problems than to actually solve them. Just add another layer, another app, or another framework, and it is "fixed". Sort of. In a Rube Goldberg machine kind of way. A contraption that grows and grows and becomes more unstable all the time.
There is no easy solution. What works for me, somewhat, is digital minimalism. Cut away as much as you can. Throw away everything that is not absolutely necessary. Try to find a few applications that work for you. Then become a master user of those apps.
Maybe LibreOffice is a good one for you, even though the handling of cell background colors is not (yet) up to par. But if you pick LibreOffice, make it a resolution to use it for at least five years. That way the time you spent on strong-arming it won't feel lost and the knowledge that you gain will compound over time.
This happens to me all the time. I have lots of computer-related hobbies, so you'd be surprised at the high profile software I tend to run headfirst into issues on as soon as I try to do something serious with it. Tech just sucks! We're a terrible industry full of uncaring or incompetent people (and I'm perversely happy to say this to people, all the time, these days). And then there's this. Can't really expect much from that guy, can you? He's doing his best.
Sometimes I go and spend, say, a month of my life fixing the thing myself. Sometimes, if there's a proper issue tracker, I open a bug report, which the developers will proceed to ignore for a few years to a decade (before vindicating me by actually fixing it, at which point I've long given up on using the thing). I don't bother opening issue reports for modern web applications where the issue tracker is based on a popularity contest, since the issues and suggestions that bubble up to the top never have much to do with actual brokenness and severity and are more about how many followers people have and how dopamine inducing they are, which I suppose is good for profit.
Most times (with the benefit of experience) I give up quickly and try working around the issue. Did you know you can't export PDFs with different page sizes in LibreOffice? Who'd ever need that, right? All pages must be the same shape and size! Welp, no point in dwelling on it, ditch the software and find one that does what you want. And if you can't, do you really need PDFs with different page sizes? Yes? What for? Will one that already exists do? How badly do you need it? Maybe a script can generate one for you? Hell, maybe shudder ChatGPT can write the script.
There was a time when it wasn't like that. This very issue once made me feel very defeated and definitely affected the spark I used to have as a software developer. I don't think it's as old as you think. Some very modern software have ballooned in complexity to accomodate the needs of its many users. Others could only be developed on top of a business model that relies on moving fast and leaving five hundred TODOs in each module (speaking of modules, let's not even talk about dependency hell). None of these will ever get DOne, because there really isn't time or money for technical debt. It won't generate profit and it won't boost your career.
And, most of all, just a couple decades ago documentation was much more consistently better than it is now, and this affects the whole stack. I'm not saying modern software with good documentation doesn't exist anymore, but there are surprisingly many things - often developed and maintained by very large companies with thousands of employees - with absolutely garbage documentation. Even AI can't necessarily always help with that, because it can only connect you with the solution to your problem if people asked about it before and other people who blundered blindly into the solution happened to connect with the question (or a developer, I suppose). Maybe we're so full of ourselves that we think our wonderful modern interfaces are intuitive enough that everything is easy to figure out (note: It isn't. Some modern interfaces shit all over good UX principles, see for example Windows).
Anyway, sorry about the ranting. Where was I? Uh... Wear sunscreen! (Tech can't hurt you if you're lazing on the beach!)
Hey, all.
This thing yesterday was mostly just rant-venting, sorry for that. But the underlying theme, I think, remains valid. For a bit of context, I was a programmer (primarily) on the Microsoft stack for 20+ years, so I'm not clueless, and I do know the difference between FOSS and commercial code, and etc.
FOSS tends to be worse for the specific kind of thing I'm griping about above ... I think, the primary failing there is the fractal nature of "this doesn't work quite how I want, so let's just fork it", producing more and more versions with less and less support. And also, primarily volunteer support, differing standards, etc.
Still, the whole meme-level "have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again" Microsoft "support" tip convinces me that commercial software is not better, just differently bad.
And again, Bigger Picture ... I still maintain that, philosophically, How We Write Code is just not up to snuff. These days, every code monkey with a year of experience gets some kind of "Engineering" title, but I have seen very, very few software projects that are actually handled with the rigor of any other kind of engineering project. OpenBSD and its subsidiary projects like OpenSSH are the only examples I know of, of "code done right".
Literally everything else I have ever looked at needs to be thrown out the window and re-planned with better standards -- Linux distros, git, Office Suite, Android (ye gods, the entire mobile development sphere needs to be burned to the ground with extreme prejudice).
At any rate, thanks for the feedback everyone (except that one guy -- you know who you are).
If you’re considering cabin in the woods maybe you are ready to accept Apple as your lord and master. It’s definitely not perfect, but it will use a lot less of your time as a lot of the things do just work.
I used to be in IT, tech support for years. Windows gamer, Linux, Android. At some point I just had enough and decides I’m done with tech and only need a few basic things outside work. I spent enough time in front of the computer at work so I deprioritized tech in my personal life. While the hardware is a little pricy, it lasts many years and overall I had very few issues.
I am not (yet) ready for this. Cabin in the woods feels preferable.
Which is ironic, because I literally got started on programming and All Things Tech on an Apple ][+ back in the early '80s.
I don't mind the price, but I do mind the price-gouging ... 50%, 100%, 200% markup on products (just because they can) after a years-long, billions-dollar ad campaign convincing people that Apple Is Cool (like, literally, every person in every movie ever made anywhere on Earth uses a Mac ... how the fuck much money have They spent on that?!?), all coupled with the violently anti-programmer walled-garden they've built to--again--price-gouge in the other direction ... it's just too offensive to me.
Tentatively--I haven't looked very closely because I hate them--I do suspect Apple products actually are better ... but then again, that may well just be the long-term advertising talking.
Fair, fair.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think they are cool. I never bought into the marketing. I tried a lot of other tech first and at this point in time Apple stuff feels like the right spot in terms of function and not spending time fiddling with it. I do often think of ditching them for open source independent stuff, but the amount of extra work just doesn’t appeal to me. Smart phones alone for example: android is no better. Google is just as bad. Independent ones that have some form of custom Android likely require tinkering. Same goes for anything Linux related on a computer. Windows these days just makes me sad and I’m forced to use it at work anyway so no thanks.
Cabin in the woods is definitely my goal one day, maybe when I retire and don’t need to interact with the world. Until then, I’ll probably just choose the thing that requires less tinkering. I tinkered for enough years and nothing to show for it.
Really depends on your luck and what you're looking for from your hardware and OS. I've had endless issues with MacBooks randomly dying or being practically impossible to customize. On the other hand, my old ThinkPad has been humming along just fine for years, and I can do anything I want with it.
Definitely not made to customize much. The dying part, I guess I’ve been lucky with MacBook for about 15 years and other devices for about 9. The only thing that stopped working was a HomePod mini.
I feel with you. I have never been much of a tech savvy person to begin with, but I enjoyed customizing my experience using a computer and getting my tools to work just the way that I think they should.
With the years, however, I just gave up, much for the reasons you and others have listed.
I have since chosen Apple devices as the tools that I use for all my computing needs. I humbly submit myself to how this company dictates that their hardware and software should be used, and mostly stick to only using the tools that are built into their ecosystem.
Yes, I use Notes, Numbers, Safari, you name them...
I basically live in a golden cage now, but at least my time and sanity is preserved.
Hey all,
I have posted a couple of responses. But again, this post was mostly just a frustrated rant-in-the-moment, and I'm kind of tired of rehashing, re-debating stuff I've long since decided, so I'm just gonna call it a day on this thread.
Thanks for playing.