Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

I completely relate to that feeling. This has led me to use less of everything over time. One day I realized this, that I was in fact applying the KISS principle to my life. Fewer apps + fewer features + fewer gadgets = fewer bugs irritating my day-to-day life.

Examples:

My desktop environment on my laptop is Linux with, 99% of the time, just a bunch of xterms and a browser (without extensions... they tend to crash browsers).

I installed exactly 4 Android apps on my phone (after flashing it to cyanogenmod to get rid of the bloatware): gmaps, youtube, barecode scanner app, some app to write notes on the home screen (NotesWidget). Everything else sucks and is a waste of my time. But even the dead-simple NotesWidget app author managed to mess it up with enough bugs that I am considering writing my own(!) I have tried at least a dozen other notes-taking application and am not satisfied with any of them.

I don't maintain a music library. Sync'ing music across multiple PCs, phones, other devices, etc, suck. Personal libraries "in the cloud" don't work because I am not always online. I just listen to satellite radio in my car.

I own no TV, no game console, no tablet.

And yet, I am a tech enthusiast. I accept a little "complexity" where it makes me happy: I program GPUs/FPGAs, I have a home theater set-up at home, I maintain my own website/blog on colocated servers, etc.

Very much like-minded, here.

> Sync'ing music across multiple PCs, phones, other devices, etc, suck.

Was thinking the same but I had to do it, because I need a back-up and I need my music at work too. The only sane way: have proper files half-manually arranged in directories synced with a real solid linux tool (unison). Same for pictures.

What I want to emphasize here is that the current trend against files is a disturbing regression, and can only end in a complete mess or loss of the things you own. I have kids pic in my folders, and I owe to my kid to still have them in 20 years, if nothing else.

This discussion reminds me of something weird that occured to me when I was following lifehacker: it had so many advices and nice tricks and apps you should install to your system, and at the same time was very voical against the bloat and the clutter.

Spotify is so much easier. Once you decide to only manage stuff you create rather than stuff you happen to own, then backup and management get so much easier as there is so much less of it.

Problem is that Spotify doesn't have all the music you want necessarily unless you also add your own files to it.

My solution to this would just be a dropbox folder full of MP3 files and a vlc playlist file. I don't use any monolithic player/organiser of music like iTunes or WMP but too a lot of people it seems like it has to be iTunes.

The benefit of liberating yourself from trying to backup and distribute someone else's content is much greater than missing a few tracks. There is plenty of other stuff that you could listen to instead.

That's really quite a subjective thing. It might be true for people who just looking for anything to stick on in the background.

People who are "into" music and have favourite artists that they are very loyal too or who are looking to discovered unsigned or indie artists are not going to want to be restricted to whatever is in the Spotify catalogue.

Personally I'd say around 50% of the music I want to listen to is available on Spotify. There's also a fair number of "big name" artists who's music isn't licensed to them.

The solution for a lot of people seems to be to simply use YouTube as their music player since pretty much anything seems to be available there. On the other hand I'm not sure what the legality of this is.

I fill in the gaps with live music. And its not just anything, there is lots of great music thats not just anything. Its just not everything...

Pretty much all the music on youtube is illegal...

Ten years ago everybody enthusiastically installed every piece of shareware (windows) or open source (linux) software they could lay their hands on. There were a whole lot of portals devised to desktop software.

People's desktops had all kinds of weird hacks in it, tweaking every imaginable bit of appearance, user experience and features.

But I think we all came to conclusion that it does not pay off. Yes, your 3rd party file manager is much more powerful but does installing it on every of your PCs in life pay off? It does not.

The whole experience becomes much more generic and throwaway. Yes, I tune some programs, but I'm ready to leave the whole setup at any moment and start with a blank screen again - and I actually have to do that every 2-3 years.

No longer I use dozens of programs and have 5 DEs installed but just a few and exactly one.

Same boat. Only my essential developer tools and very few apps. Used to try everything. For Win if it's not on Ninite it's not on my PC. It's just to much hassle when reinstall and I wan't the same tools on my MacBook an PC

With package managers and text-based configuration, setting up my system from scratch takes 5 minutes of manual time (and some more unattended).

I just keep a git repository that contains my dotfiles, /etc and the output of 'dpkg --get-selections'.

In five years most of your config files will confuse then-recent programs. Then you will perhaps discard some.

Not really. Programs don't tend to read the configuration files of others, and they don't tend to change their own configuration files that much either. Since I started using Debian, six years ago, I probably had to modify three or four files and maybe delete a few more. Time that is more than paid off by the time savings of some of these configurations.

So basically, as he says, to the question "Doctor, it hurts when I do that" your answer is "Don't do that".

It's a perfectly legitimate position, but it's not really helping progress, is it?

My position is the ultimate market-deciding capitalist answer: I don't buy broken products.

How do you know the product is broken before you buy it?

You can eliminate some of the uncertainty by googling the product name and see if there are any complaints of the "Everyone has seen this issue" variety. Of course, even a product with 100% consumer satisfaction can have "No one has ever seen this before" issues.

Problem is that you're going to find people bitching about just about every product out there.

Some of these problem reports are just going to written by people who are all doing something wrong. Others might be legit bugs.

I can't think of any technology that I own that doesn't have some issue that drives me nuts.

Android FolderSync would help in your music syncing issues...it syncs folder pairs where the other end of the pair can be literally anything - ftp, http, nfs, samba, skydrive, gdrive, etc. If you aren't online - no biggie it can sync with your PC whenever you are in your home network or sync with your office workstation if you are at office or just about any combination you can think of.

I completely concur. Careful pruning of your toolset will allow you to move forward far faster.

I have basically standardized on Pidgin, Firefox (minimal extensions), emacs, org-mode, and a terminal program. At home, I use Mail.app and the OSX contacts. I'd like to move them out to emacs though. :-)

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