Linux Sans Flashy Stuff To Mitigate Distraction

Well, I have absolutely no clue how you operate your computer and certainly don’t want to guess the pattern. Because every workflow is quite different unless you are paid to follow the rules of the shop from where earn your month-end paycheck.

What I adopted two decades back and tried to apply in general in my life, helped me fall on my face many a time. But, like my other lacuna, am blessed with stubbornness, so get over the fall as quickly as possible. But, that is not always the case, though.

People who are not born with or have the metal to excel cognitively at scale, they have to have some sort of mechanism in their armory to get along or provide stuff that helps them to survive and essentially provide the basic amenities of life.

By any stretch of the imagination, I can not count myself in that category, where people do things effortlessly. I am jinxed with a fact, most of the time, it takes at least a second effort to get the damn thing out as expected by me. Except, for a few cases, where it clicked in the first, lucky me!

Computing is an upheaval task to get along smoothly. Whether you believe it or not at this juncture of time, where you are facilitated by many supportive mechanisms. I can recollect, a decade or two, it was not as affluent as it is today. Boon in disguise. Kiddos embrace all the offerings in open arms, without giving much thought to the avalanche of trouble it also brings along. Nope, I am not trying to rant about it but to make sure people get it.

The glittering effect of the cheap and shiny things overawed the power of simplicity at bay. People just have their guns just by looking at the tip of the iceberg. Also, I don’t blame most people, they have been fed with aplomb to engulf it and react to the providing. But, the consequences are not so pleasant nor desirable.

How to encounter this ever-thrusting implication on you, especially related to computing(which essentially reflects on life, because it is so integral today)? Fortunately, there are ways to help yourself kinda things. It is a long route but a better route to be traveled.

Let me start, with what I did and continuously doing to get my life aligned with my expectations. See! The stressing on my expectations. That matters a lot. When I decided that computing would be a thing I would be doing for the rest of my life, I had to give it a long thought of what is necessary to make me feel that I am not lost. In that quest, I have applied a few things to my day-to-day computing, which has helped me immensely to date.

Here are a few things:

• I had to figure out what interested me the most about computing platform
• What exactly I am going to do with my interest in that platform?
• Eliminate so-called recommended stuff and evaluate things for my needs.
• Curious to know from people I believe have done something useful.
• Didn’t follow blindly what every other tom-dick-harry doing at that time.
• Embrace DIY in vengeance and figure collaborate with other people

…… the list could go on some length, which I refrain from doing so. It was not an easy decision to practice but to live with every single day. Lots of little incidents impacted the way I have trimmed down the present computing scenario for me it is the effect of sticking with my liking.

I am inclined to do better for myself and importantly any possibly good way to do better for people, not just by saying mere words(that kind are flooding space for a long time, miraculously they are getting away, what a skill!)but by providing actual work to benefit them.

Shortcomings should not be an excuse to defer to doing something, that benefits you and importantly others. I personally do not hold back, knowing very well my limitations. Trying to improve has an ingrained pain and overcoming that is not certainly fucking fun. But, until I have made an attempt to overcome it(..and still doing so), how do you know, when things stuck, how it feels the enigma or when things work what the ecstasy means?

I am a dogged worker and I cling on to something I value. Adopting something takes way more time and discarding becomes so natural. Nope, you don’t have to be blatantly dismissive in your actions to show your preferences.

Linux and real people around that teach me, how to be focused and be productive. The posers are getting fad away more quickly than I have imagined. People I look up to are rare species and show all the qualities of better human beings. They are a handful and I am happy with that number.

I wrote about Linux And The Rule Of Elimination in my previous post about the endeavor I am into.

Sticking to my requirements is the key to letting go of all the fads and sticking to a platform for a long time gives you the benefit, which certainly serves me well to evaluate things in that spectrum much more concisely. I am not afraid or ever hesitated to ask for help or clue. The primary reason is not like being stuck with something that hinders progress.

Linux provides pain, whether you like it or not. Sometimes quite unbearable and I was on the verge of giving up. Alas! My tenacity to discover more about it has not allowed me to do so. This brings a lot of learning curves and days of head-banging. Also, seeking help is probably easy from the known places but getting the right kind of help needs lots of work involving so much elimination. Why? Because, most places provide you with help, based on a certain set of understanding, which might fit or might not fit. Then it comes to the evaluation phase to understand the help. Nope, blatant induction is certainly NOT the way forward to understand something correctly.

The easy route is for the timid. It sounds great, but the tough route actually imposes so much of a burden on your shoulders to learn the correct thing to make it an easy thing in the future. And it is time-consuming. Whoever told you otherwise, is probably a schmuck or has lived a utopian life. So, that kind of information gets trashed the moment I hear it without engaging my gray cells.

Linux allows you to have software of your choice and a system to be made of your choices. No, it comes with the cost of being prudent and vigilant of your stuff, a slip will gobble up your and others’ time immensely. But, that is how you live on the edge, the thrill of dying looms large if you are not careful enough.

On the enterprise, the impact is less, because of two main things:

• The software comes from renowned vendors, who are providing service too.
• The stuffs are more stable than bleeding edge, so have predictability.

But it is always the case of diverging interest groups between two poles, enterprise and personal computing. Nothing new about it. Stability has its priority in the enterprise and it is bound to be. Because business can not be run on fragility, can they? Likewise in the embedded world, where predictability at high, because of the nature of the device, the implementation happened.

I used to hop a lot when I was in a nascent stage of using Linux. And gradually realized, that it cost me dearly my time and nothing new is getting added to my repertoire for useful. I have written about that phenomenon of distribution hopping surge here Nope, Linux Distro Hopping Doesn’t Help. What it also does, when I stopped doing so, allows me to concentrate more on the problem and in essence solve it with much ease. So, in essence, your head is not getting fragmented over some vendor’s peculiarity of dishing out their offering.

I have written it many a time before, one more time for the sake of refreshment of your memory, I have various Linux distributions (Gentoo, Slackware, and Debian) in their own physical slice and things get transferred from machine to machine. A very specific Window Manager (been sticking with it for the past 7 years now, and chances of moving away from it are dim) i.e. I3 Window Manager, and some specific set of software that drives my day-to-day activity. Unfortunately, nothing fancy I need or crave for, you see, the limitation of my choice.IOW, pretty boring.

I don’t know, it never strikes me enough to jump or integrate something others are using and getting popularized by some fad. Yes, I was influenced, when I saw people I value use some specific software, that intrigue me in some way. But, it takes time to evaluate from my perspective, whether it is a good fit or not. If the person is fluent enough in something, does it make any sense to my workflow? Oftentimes, the answer is plain NO. Now, I have adopted some software once I was intrigued by seeing the demo of specific people I value, and the point is I am still using that software after almost 15 years now, daily. So, once I am hooked on something not generally let it go easily.

Now, the question might pop up in the head, is it good to be confined?? In what way? If the confinement brings value and produces more useful stuff, don’t hesitate.