I love this analogy, and it's remarkable at how much sense it makes when I look at the choices I make in my day to day life generally.
Hotel-chic is very clean, very minimal, very sparse. Just enough to have the necessary conveniences that appeal to everyone, with absolutely nothing personalised for any individual.
As of about 10 years ago, I made a conscious choice to stop customising my desktop (and then later, mobile) experience away from the defaults as much as possible, as I was fed up of having to document and then re-deploy all of my customisations every time I had to reinstall for whatever reason, which was far too frequent for my liking.
At the same time, I'd been moving home roughly every year for the 7 years prior already, and had grown weary of all my physical effects. I started disposing of more and more of my things (inadvertently marie kondo-ing my life before it was a "thing" I was aware of) and decreasing the personalisation of my physical space down more and more.
I now essentially live a hotel-esque lifestyle, with most of my personal customisations fitting in a small corner of the room. Added bonus of this is with the frequent travel I need to do for work, I can take one or two items with me, and the hotel room instantly feels like home.
I guess this explains why I'm relatively happy as an Apple user. The lack of customisation doesn't bother me, as I don't customise anything outside of the bare minimums (wallpaper and privacy settings, thats about it).
It also explains how I'm able to use Windows 10 at work without killing anyone, while my colleagues are all using tiling window managers under Linux and looking at me like I'm crazy for not wanting to spend a week tweaking and customising my environment....
> I made a conscious choice to stop customising my desktop (and then later, mobile) experience away from the defaults as much as possible, as I was fed up of having to document and then re-deploy all of my customisations every time I had to reinstall for whatever reason.
I just copy my home-dir settings everywhere I go. I have a different setup on my desktop and laptop. It is mostly .config that I need. But when moving, it just moves along to a new machine or install. Happily living on the same config files for 20 years now, and I only need to adjust as I desire. I do have daily backups ofcourse.
> Happily living on the same config files for 20 years now
I just wanted to draw more attention to this particular snippet. That's a remarkable achievement, and you should be proud of yourself and your working environment.
Regardless that most other people (myself included) are unlikely to be able to replicate what you've done, the reality is you've done it, and it works for you. Good job.
I have a similarly low, although very important to me, set of requirements for my personal configuration.
I use KDE, which has many, many, many buttons and knobs available for tweaking. I use hardly any of them: I can set KDE as I wish in about 2 minutes. I add a "Keep window above others" button to the default minimize-maximize-close set, activate "Focus follows mouse", and swap Ctrl and Caps Lock. I think I also change the task switcher (Alt+Tab thing) to only cycle though not-minimized windows on the current screen.
For everything else (Zsh, SSH, etc), I just carry around my dotfiles. I've done this since about 2002.
If I were setting myself up with a clean KDE environment more than once every 2-3 years, I'd make the small effort to work out which bits of KDE config I need to keep. So far, it's not worth it.
>Regardless that most other people (myself included) are unlikely to be able to replicate what you've done, the reality is you've done it, and it works for you. Good job.
It's more about personal psychology (willing to stick to something that works and not tinker, or even willing to do with less and not seek improvements all the time), than some technological feat (e.g. achieving some "perfect" config).
> In case you didn't notice, Windows 10 is now a tiling window manager with virtual desktops, by default, if you just learn the new keyboard shortcuts.
But it's not comparable to sway/i3 - not in terms of customisability or functionality. What I suspect we have on Windows, are virtual desktops and snap-to-edge/quarter tiling. Maybe you can get some rigid layouts if you install PowerToys/FancyZones, but it's still a far cry from my usual working environment where I can dynamically create layouts by opening new windows, configure shortcuts to my own desire, programmatically send messages to the window manager and so much more.
With Windows (and to be honest, macOS too), you get least-common denominator functionality aimed at users who don't know what a window manager is.
I make this same comment every time this topic comes up, but Sysinternal's lightweight utility Desktops is far, far better than the W10 window manager. Its orders of magnitude faster and requires fewer inputs.
I have a couple config changes i make to use W10, and Desktops and f.lux are must-haves.
> I made a conscious choice to stop customising my desktop (and then later, mobile) experience away from the defaults as much as possible, as I was fed up of having to document and then re-deploy all of my customisations every time I had to reinstall for whatever reason
I tried this for some time and came to the conclusion that for me most desktops' defaults don't fit me and it seems to get worse from release to release.
I love how my work is now about 99% OS agnostic. I've been working from home a lot lately. There are times when I want to do some deep research and I don't want to do it on the desktop. So I just get my MBA, plop on the recliner and Google away.
Save the pages with SessionBuddy on Chrome. Then when I have to actually work, I can go to my Windows desktop and jump right into work.
It's come to a point where I'm basically using two operating systems daily and it hasn't affected my workflow one bit
> Hotel-chic is very clean, very minimal, very sparse. Just enough to have the necessary conveniences that appeal to everyone, with absolutely nothing personalised for any individual.
It is also terrible if you stay there for more than a couple of days.
Apple is not an hotel, it is a fast food with overpriced menus because they use expensive ingredients, charge 2x the price because of their fancy plates, but what you get it's still an overpriced hamburger.
It's like ordering a 25$ cheeseburger from McDonald because it's made with a percentage of Kobe beef
Hotel-chic is very clean, very minimal, very sparse. Just enough to have the necessary conveniences that appeal to everyone, with absolutely nothing personalised for any individual.
As of about 10 years ago, I made a conscious choice to stop customising my desktop (and then later, mobile) experience away from the defaults as much as possible, as I was fed up of having to document and then re-deploy all of my customisations every time I had to reinstall for whatever reason, which was far too frequent for my liking.
At the same time, I'd been moving home roughly every year for the 7 years prior already, and had grown weary of all my physical effects. I started disposing of more and more of my things (inadvertently marie kondo-ing my life before it was a "thing" I was aware of) and decreasing the personalisation of my physical space down more and more.
I now essentially live a hotel-esque lifestyle, with most of my personal customisations fitting in a small corner of the room. Added bonus of this is with the frequent travel I need to do for work, I can take one or two items with me, and the hotel room instantly feels like home.
I guess this explains why I'm relatively happy as an Apple user. The lack of customisation doesn't bother me, as I don't customise anything outside of the bare minimums (wallpaper and privacy settings, thats about it).
It also explains how I'm able to use Windows 10 at work without killing anyone, while my colleagues are all using tiling window managers under Linux and looking at me like I'm crazy for not wanting to spend a week tweaking and customising my environment....