Ask HN: How do I escape OS-switching-cost hell? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I escape OS-switching-cost hell?

2 pointssinglepaynews4 comments

I am currently stuck in a loop between my iPhone, and a series of new laptops. I'm sure the flowchart is familiar to others: you start with a macbook, it breaks, and now you're constantly reconfiguring your laptop to achieve some version of productivity and sync with your phone.

I thought I'd be able to solve this with a NixOS config, the thinking being that my machine config is a git repo, and if/when a laptop breaks I can simply duplicate it on the new machine.

What's actually happening is that I'm spending more time wrestling unsaved passwords across windows, iPhone, and new Linux installs than any other computer activity.

Like most consumer users, I never really understood how iCloud worked, much less OneDrive, and more often than not am wrestling them to not do things automatically that confuse me. My current state is trying to setup syncthing across two windows machines, only to have an automatic OneDrive action create a mess of my desktop, and I'm hoping someone here will have a 3rd person view and help me stop wasting time on configuration.

My last local maxima was "iPhone / MacBook, everything just works even if iCloud is weird I can do dev work and generally my phone and laptop are the same". I'd like to be able to say "x phone and x laptop, everything just works and when something gets broken/lost I can magically restore the software setup on a new device to replace it without losing data as in files or data as in installed and configured software"

Can this even be done? Am I tilting at windmills? It seems like every major company is trying to achieve this under the condition that you have vendor lock in at the hardware, but even assuming you do that you will only achieve data protection as in files, and every new machine will need another new vsCode install/config step, as will every other application.

I get that there is and always will be both a hardware lifecycle and vendor lock-in, what I feel should be left in the past is the idea that software configuration cannot be moved across the hardware lifecycle painlessly.

So if I get this right you’re looking for a cross-platform password manager?

My belief is that OneDrive is a complete waste of time and you’re best turning it off. If you need file syncing use Dropbox. My first experience with OneDrive was (1) Office saved there by default and (2) if it wasn’t working you couldn’t save documents and if you have that kind of experience once you’ll never use the product again.

That’s part of but not fully it, thanks for the validation that it’s not just me re: onedrive.

I think partially I’m wrestling with the almost philosophical question of whether Linux is viable for consumers, because ideally I’d be a consumer, but I’m so frustrated by switching costs between windows/mac that surely open source has to be the solution, and loop from this point.

There are, in my mind, 3 kinds of data loss when my laptop breaks: 1) passwords 2) files 3) applications

(1) and (2) are at least in theory solved by simply embracing vendor lock in. In practice you really can just keep buying Apple forever, or figure out OneDrive for real and it will work.

(3) is where I think I’m breaking with the current state of the industry, but it is not mandatory imo that I wouldn’t be able to get my vscode, pgadmin, cad application, office suite, etc. all downloaded with their config intact on a new machine.

One answer to some of those problems is to use remote desktop technology.

Last time I went to a hackathon I brought a 15 inch Alienware from 2017 which has bad connections in the USB system and is on the edge of death. I loaded up Visual Studio and the Unity Framework ahead of time so I'd be ready to use the same tools as my team.

Personally my favorite hackathon kit is a tablet plus a keyboard and a mouse. Remote desktop into a big computer and you have the sleekest kit anyone has and the most powerful computer. I have a powerful computer at home but I have ADSL, it is possible to remote into but latency is pretty bad.

My plan, the next time I go to something like that, is to set up a cloud instance ahead of time and just boot it up. Somewhere between $1-$2 an hour would buy a powerful machine which would really be a bargain if I only want to run it for 20 hours on an occasional weekend.

"set up a cloud instance ahead of time and just boot it up"

That sentence is the closest to what I'm imagining--the thin client to personal computer, your use case is interesting (hackathon peripherals); I'm thinking of this as a lifetime-durability play.

Basically what if my home's NAS could also serve all my applications, and at any given time I really just have a KVM into it. If we assume network is fast enough, that would achieve the UX I want, which is that the KVM is effectively disposable and the personal computer stuff all stays intact.

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