It's been a long time since my last sign of life (even though there has been a lot happening on GitHub). I want to give an update on how I want my setup and philosophical decisions regarding technology to be.
In previous texts, I always wrote about how I wanted things to be minimal and tailored to my specific use case. I don't think like that anymore. The idea of my past self was made possible by my very limited use case, which didn't change for over a month, and by having the time to not really do anything other than optimize my limited experience.
But that experience grew, and as soon as I got home, my timetable wasn't strict anymore and I wanted to try many different things all at the same time. It got harder and harder to keep things minimal. Right now, I see it as a recurring cleanup cycle, rather than something that just happens naturally. That's very different from what I wanted to have.
Right now, the ideal would be more that I can try everything without breaking anything or causing irreversible damage, while minimizing the effort required to try new things. If done right and with enough experience, I'm sure the most elegant solution is still suckless, but I don't have that level of expertise and would need to develop a lot of projects just for myself, which is probably a bit overkill.
That brings me to my current position. I want a system that I can just throw away, maybe even make it impossible to save that state (similar to Tails), while saving all the data on a NAS. I wouldn't need to worry about anything on my system and could just do crazy stuff with it. But there comes another problem: I want my setup to be the same every time. Or maybe not. In essence, I want to minimize administrative tasks, like changing references, script paths, etc. I just want to get going.
I'm not writing this text because I have the perfect solution or answer. Quite the opposite is the case: I don't have any of that. But writing down my thoughts has helped a lot in formalizing them.
To finish up, I want the possibility of having everything at my fingertips without a lot of administrative time being wasted and without the risk of breaking something serious. I just want to get going, and maybe I should just do that.
I then had a small discussion with ChatGPT, giving it all my previous posts as context for my current situation and then asking about trends and for a summary in a single paragraph:
The underlying problem here may not actually be about finding the right distribution or making the system more minimal. It may be about the cost of maintaining a system whose state is constantly changing. A perfectly minimal and carefully crafted system can be incredibly elegant, but every decision also creates something that has to be maintained later. Over time, the system becomes an accumulation of old decisions, exceptions, configurations, scripts, and things whose original purpose may no longer even be remembered. Keeping the system clean then becomes a recurring task rather than something that happens naturally. Instead of trying to find an even better way of maintaining this state, it may be more useful to make the state itself less important. The ideal system might therefore be one where experimentation is cheap: software can be installed, changed, broken, or completely removed without putting anything important at risk. The system itself could be disposable, while the data remains persistent somewhere else. In that model, reproducibility does not necessarily mean having exactly the same system every time, but having the same starting point every time. The goal would then not be maximum control, but maximum freedom without the administrative burden that usually comes with having complete control.
I'd say that this summary describes it really well. The goal has changed from the most tailored experience to the most free experience. To finish off:
I WANT TO FEEL FREE WHEN USING TECHNOLOGY
For transparency: I wrote this post myself and then used ChatGPT to correct grammatical mistakes and improve the overall reading experience, since English is not my first language.