on tinkering

I remember when I first switched to linux I was trying out everything like a madman. Just kde, access to internet, my arch install, and I. And yes I started with arch linux if you're curious¹.

The sheer amount of customization was overwhelming but in a dopamine-driven way. I mean you had like 6~7 great terminal emulators all with different features and niceties. But above all, the desktop environment, KDE, was so customizable and had so many options and features and preconfigured themes you could apply it was hard to resist the urge to tinker.

But in the end I switched away from KDE in favor of...

enter i3wm

I initially didn't have the guts to switch to a tiling window manager. I mean you have to configure everything yourself and the whole experience feels like duct-tape solution. Right?

Turns out it merely takes an hour or two to configure it to your heart's content; after which, you don't have to touch it again. And while it takes a few hours if not days to get fully used to the keyboard driven workflow, it is 100% worth it.

Anyways I was on i3 for a year or so until I moved away to something even more minimal and simple.

dwm, the endgame

It was late into my second semester that I bit the bullet and switched to dwm(I was using st before it). I liked it because I knew it will never update and break on me, and every feature I want is available in the form of patches². It took me a few days to find out which patches I really like/need.

But my monkey brain couldn't sit still and wanted to configure and tinker with other programs like neovim, my editor. And I did. I did waste my time configuring and over-optimizing scripts to use dash shell which is lighter to save 10~15mb of memory for instance. But at last I stopped.

Why/how did I grow out of tinkering?

It was around a year ago(or maybe even more) that I decided I want to study like a maniac and change my major to computer science/engineering. Studying for ~8 hours a day(and now ~10) I could literally not afford to lose/waste any time due to tinkering and configuring.

So in short, I have hardly configured my os/setop since then. The biggest change being writing my own neovim config from scratch which I don't regret.

I don't regret tinkering however

Tinkering, while mostly useless and a waste of time, has some benefits. The obvious one being the initial productivity gains. Once you discover the world of tinkering with your os and see the sea of options available, you can definitely see how your entire workflow changes for the better³.

After some time of course you reach your endgame and just configure and tinker for the sake of it, and not to be more productive. It feels as though one is desperately trying to squeeze out every single bit of optimization they can.

But who are we fooling here, tinkering is fun. Tinkerers tinker not to make their workflow better and setup more productive. But to satisfy themselves, over and over again as a matter of fact. Productivity gains are mostly a side effect. It is important to acknowledge that and not fool ourselves.

To me, tinkering is no longer as fun and enjoyable as it once was, and so I have stopped. However I'm happy that I did it. I have this amazing desktop that I can reproduce easily with a post-install script, deploying all my configs.

So go ahead and tinker. Because once you get a life, it will fell worth it.