Bismillah
Minimalism #
I like it #
There are some people that decide to leave some of the perks of our modern life and take an alternative route. Some of them live off-grid in a cabin in the middle of Alaska or Canada. Some just dress simple clothes. Some retire to study sacred texts from a wooden tablet in the middle of the desert. Others code in a terminal using Vim, on a Debian system with Spectrwm as their tiling window manager.
I feel somewhat attracted to that. I imagine being them and can feel free from all the bloat this capitalist society tries to forces us into. And I say to myself that I want to be like them.
Then I go and install Vim, play with Qtile or Bspwm, try it some days, and then realize I spent hours trying configuration after configuration so that I can be somewhat productive. Then I get tired and go back to Linux Mint and VSCode.
It’s a trap #
Minimalism or Simple Life is doing more with less. Not doing less with more. Installing VSCode is just one click and gives me a good editor, with sane defaults, excellent LSP support, extensions for everything I need. Using Cinnamon or KDE Plasma (I heavily dislike Gnome) is so intuitive that nobody needs to show me how to do it, and I don’t need to configure anything at all if I don’t want to.
Using these two pieces of softwares turns my computer into a productivity machine in almost no time. I don’t need to learn weird shortcuts if I don’t want to, I don’t need to keep very long config files, I don’t need to learn Lua to configure them, I don’t need anything. And yet there are so many gurus out there trying to convince me I should try them because it’s better.
On the other hand we have people like Andreas Kling using things like Ubuntu Mate and CLion to write a freaking operating system from scratch and get crap done. Or George Hotz who’s a hacker and uses VS Code.
Who would you follow?
Balance #
I don’t like to be owned #
I try to be conscious of my own shortcomings and not fall into that trap. However, I don’t like Microsoft owning my life. I started to dislike Windows more and more since Windows 10 and it’s ads machine. I also dislike that GitHub uses the code we write to feed their AI systems. AI bothers me.
So I don’t want to use an IDE that consumes all my RAM and likes to sell me GitHub Copilot every two mintues. I don’t want to want an OS that pushes OneDrive on me, spies me, and injects AI everywhere. I don’t want to put my code into a repository that will feed their AI.
Also, I don’t want to buy a machine (MacBook) that will be “obsoleted” in 2 years just because they say so. That ALSO pushes AI everywhere. It pisses me off.
How to balance #
I think alternatives are good. I’ve been a Linux user for a long time now. I never liked to configured every bit of my system. I’m good with defaults. I like Cinnamon, but it’s getting more “Gnomized” lately, so at this moment I’m just using good old KDE Plasma and it’s working great.
To edit code I’m jugling with both Zed and Helix. I’m not used to modal editing, I think it’s a pain in the back, but I’m understanding that it’s useful in the terminal where keybindings could easily conflict. So I’m in between those two, but I disabled AI altogether in Zed.
For code storage, I’m mainly using GitLab. I’m just trying it out at this point to see how it goes. Might move to Codeberg, but not sure yet.
I’m using a Lenovo Thinkpad T490 with 16GB of RAM and it’s a great machine. I don’t plan on buying anything new unless I need to.
I want to be productive using the less amount of resources I need.
That’s minimalism for me.
