I remember many years ago a user on a forum talking about the Nokia N900 and its advantages. He mentioned that he could change everything with Maemo (Linux based), while the rest of us preferred Symbian and all the applications it had available. In fact, Symbian had WhatsApp in 2010 or 2011. Nowadays, the interface customization It's one of the attractions of Linux, but is being able to change everything really such a good thing?
It depends. Let's take an example. HyprlandIt's a composer that lets you do everything, and when I say "everything," I mean everything. Sure, you go to YouTube and make a search as "rice hyprland" o search for topics on GitHub and he's blown away. Now, achieving something like that isn't easy (in fact, Hyprland is hideous after installation). Yes, you can find a complete theme with its dotfiles and take less time, but switching from one to the other isn't as simple as making a couple of clicks.
When interface customization becomes an obsession
Let's summarize this opinion piece and say how I see it: the customization of the interface It's fine, as long as you don't go crazy over her.For example, Plasma allows you to change the bottom panel to turn it into a Dock, with an app drawer and open applications, and at the top you can place a bar with the clock in the center and the system tray on the right, just like in macOS. You can even see application menus in this panel, something Garuda also does.
En this link We explain how to make any KDE look like the Dr460nized version of Garuda. You don't need to read the whole thing, just scroll down to see that the article isn't short. A lot of changes need to be made. If they're done once and that's what we're aiming for, it's a huge plus for Linux, but if it's going to be changed every week, it ends up proving right those who say that Linux is for people who have no life and just want to waste time fixing things.
An example of what NOT to do: me and my obsession with emulation
Several years ago I turned my oldest laptop into an emulation center. I still have the files lying around. romsets From Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, NES, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, I don't remember if there's anything else, and all the arcade games. Including duplicates, I have over 20.000 ROMs, literally. To get them, you have to download them all, and to have IT IS With images and metadata you have to spend days doing scrapping.
Due to the limitations of data scraping, it would take me more than a week (doing other things in between, of course) to get everything as I expected. And in the end, how many hours have I spent with these games? Well, I think a lot because, through trial and error, I've at least finished God of War and God of War 2. But not counting those, I don't think I've played more than two hours, and a large part of that time was spent on Dragon's Trap for the Master System.
But I have it. And the time spent getting it was fun.
I also remember the case of a computer programmer. He said he had a laptop with a fully customized Arch Linux installation… but he didn't use it. It was just sitting there, sitting unused for support. He had the satisfaction of having it and owning it, and that was the extent of its usefulness. Why want something you're not going to use? And what's worse: why waste your time on it?
The moral is that The possibilities aren't bad if you use them, but they're not so great if you don't.Windows and macOS users have a point, in part: you install the system and use it. End of story. I prefer Apple's design, and you don't have to think for a second about what you're going to do with it. It's basically plug and play.
We rule Linux
Linux lets us change whatever we want. We're in charge. We're God. But we can also break some things and waste time on others we're not going to use. It depends on us whether we make good use of our freedoms. that it provides us.