Linux is a Double Edged Sword

Talking with someone about Apple ecosystem, linux, and cross-device integrations in general

Made me realise how much of this is actually a pain

I usually joke “It’s hell, but one of my own creation so I at least know which torture devices there are.”

Tbf, Arch quite probably has more pains than other distros

• Although mine has been surprisingly stable for the past 5 years…

Configs are cool

But configs are also a pain to set up, keep in sync, backup, etc.

There are wikis for everything

• Side-note: if not, SOL

But everything I’ve written have been through a frustration+caffeine fuelled “flow”, which produces really good configs and scripts which Just Work.

• And should they ever break, going back through all those wiki pages and details will likely be a similar exercise in frustration
• If the project even still exists (this has happened! termite, ferdi, woff2ttf, etc)

Sure, writing these mini-tools, scripts, configs, etc. have taught me an incredible amount about both those concepts and configuring systems in general

But increasingly, I also just want a system that works and doesn’t require arcane wpa_supplicant runes, which I had to get from a lecturer who also ran Arch, to connect to my university’s network. Plug-n-play is really nice, y’know?…

Can make things very secure: LUKS, PAM, firewalls

But I 100% am not an expert on those, even though I dual-boot with Windows with FDE on.

• If that breaks, then by design, all my data is actually just gone.

“But Tom, make backups!” “Just backup using ”

See previous points: the choice and modularity is the beauty of linux, but also, I’d need to sort this out myself, it’d likely be a CLI which I then need to comb through man-pages to find the right incantations for (because everyone seemingly agrees there are no sane defaults), and if I miss any data because I happened to not know that obviously the Linux FSH stores X important thing in Y totally-definitely-obvious path, then I’m once again SOL

I do genuinely like this OS, and I do genuinely like my machine.

• Don’t think I couldn’t use a tiling VM for work at this point (although, maybe MacOS virtual desktops would be an alright substitute)

But I am also increasingly aware that, by intention/design/philosophy, it is all up to me should anything go wrong. And sometimes, you just don’t want that.