A story telling to save me from a therapist consultation.

No space square world. I realize that that this could be my theme philosophy. This is my general approach:

  • windows manager: tiling (bspwm)with no spaces, squared windows, no decorations, no visual effects
  • theme: transparency and grey background buttons/white text

Over two decades I went from a fancy looking machine to its complete opposite where minimalism is king. How did I make such a big jump?
To make it brief, recreating this comfort look that invaded my real environment felt reassuring at first in my virtual life. But as time went by I noticed that smooth rounded stuff that transiently showed up on my screen created:

  • more and more distraction and negatively impacted my productivity
  • some frustration when something didn’t run as expected because I felt that everything should be as smooth as the appearance of my screen

I would definitely say that I feel way better now and I’m more efficient but I also admit that I’ve reached an extreme where:

  • I don’t appreciate screens over 14" anymore because I feel like it’s taxing on my eyes movement and again a waste of space
  • I don’t like wasting a pixel of space if not justified. This is also maybe influenced by preference for small screens
  • I need extreme simplicity (which brings efficiency) to all aspects of my workflow. So I use a 36-key split keyboard, a trackball, vim-like keybindings everywhere possible, use terminal as much as I can, use fzf for all my file searches…

Hope you will never end up like me but nice to have friends in this group if it’s too late for you ^^

  • Oliver Lowe@hachyderm.io
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    10 months ago

    @wwwgem Totally agree! :) One of the coolest things about Linux for me is learning about all the different approaches to systems and applications.