Clickbait title: Why I use KDE.

If you have the pleasure of being around Computer Scientists, you will find that they have peculiar ways to go about things. Now some of these things actually make sense, in the logical abstract sense, and everyone agrees on them. This is a myth. Name one such thing and I will find a Computer Scientist that calls it the worst thing.

But there’s two other reasons why Computer Scientists insist on doing something. The easiest and worst one is “We always did it this way”. It is also the most dominant one, because inertia is the most powerful force in business. We call this “Windows”. Maybe even “Windows XP”.

And then there’s the reason. The one that creates hate campaigns on forums.

“It works for me”. [User was banned for this post]

The problem here is that some people are different and will have different sensibilities to you. But this is indistinguishable from them being WRONG.

So here’s the thing I’m WRONG about. I put myself on the side of people who do not change default configurations. This is notably different to being normal. I’m an annoying contrarian who uses Linux. But on a program-to-program basis, I tend to work with what the program gives me. I accept the premise.

I’ve begun thinking about this concept of defaults again when I was at someone else’s machine helping them with a problem and I tried to edit a config file with vi. First of all, this opened what I’d call vim (I figured out later this is default on many systems! Including my own!!). And then when pressing dd (for non-vim user, this stands for dance dance) hoping to delete a line, it refused to do so. I think I remember it moving around my cursor as well. Terrifying!

So clearly this person was fine with changing defaults to a strong degree. Meanwhile I have yet to find where my vim configuration file lives. And I think this can pull you some flak in circles of people I respect. “What do you mean you’re doing X without having Y”. There’s a really nice parallel between the inventiveness of someone’s programming ability and the environment they use. But many will also admit to you in confidence that a lot of this futsing around is not in the service of productivity, if in the service of beauty and understanding intricate systems (also beautiful!).

The other side of this is productivity tool spiralling. This is obvious toolbox fallacies together with an ecosystem of Youtubers who have forgot that some people have more than one hobby. Watch this guy, yes all three videos he ever made.

I think there are very practical reasons to just use defaults of commonly used programs. The obvious one being that you can easily switch machines, servers etc. But beyond that, it keeps you in the “majority” swarm. A lot of content online will be written for you, tutorials will not conflict with your special keybinds, your bash config wont footgun you due to a personal hack the original author of the command you copy-pasted could have never anticipated.

That isn’t to say that bad defaults should be needlessly defended. Really I’m saying the opposite! I think techie people tend to lose themselves in customisation, because in some ways it is inherent to the thing that fascinates us about tech. This can make us not appreciate the benefits of good standards, especially if we’re writing code for people who aren’t as much of a tech god as you are! Have some empathy for the non-techies. They are so many and they have a lot of money. Tantacrul has some wonderful videos on the importance of UX design and the new video on Audacity has its own section about defaults.

I don’t have a plea for anyone to do stuff like I do it. The diversity of tech is what I love about the ecosystem.