Something has fundamentally changed in my computing experience in the last few years, and I don’t really like it.

Now, back in, say, 2002, people were amazed that a version of windows was available that could usually run for a few hours without crashing (XP).  OS X was at Jaguar, and it was pretty slick, but also limiting, in a strange way.  In the Linux world, GNOME’s window manager wasn’t doing a good job with Xinerama hints (so windows would pop up right in the middle of those two 17″ CRTs heating your computer area) and running KDE smoothly required a whopping 256MB of RAM.  Only OS X could do antialiased text without serious tweaking, and getting 3D acceleration on Linux required some pretty serious wizardry: recompiling kernels with DRI, adding poorly documented sections to /etc/X11/XF86Config, waving chickens over the monitor, and so on.

Roughly, it was the bloody dark ages.  Since then, those of us who escaped to a Mac have seen successive waves of improvement, to the point where almost no grievance has been left untouched; meanwhile, GNOME and KDE have become beautiful, tightly integrated and intensely productive environments.  It’s hard not to look back with astonishment that we ever actually got anything done¹.

But amidst that barbarism, there were some things that had an aura of magic to them.  If you could spend a couple of days tweaking your environment, reading documentation and adding the appropriate cantrips and sigils to configuration files, you could get to the point where your entire workflow—including goofing off—was effortless.  There was a lot of strangely fun stuff like writing a quick perl script to rip through a text file full of lab results, crunch them and spit out a LaTeX table to include in the report.

That doesn’t really seem to happen anymore.  The process of serious work seems to be: start web browser, start Outlook, start crappy custom software.  I’m getting pretty fluent at window juggling in XP, which is painful once there are twenty or so windows up, but there’s no magic here.  Even at home, with my lovely Mac, everything’s pretty inane.

The change is twofold, really.  One is in user interfaces and interoperability.  As usability issues are addressed, one way of doing things is becoming dominant.  This is actually a pretty good thing for the most part, but I have to admit that I occasionally miss rolling my own custom-fitted workflow.  The other part, and definitely the bigger of the two, is the nature of what I do on computers.  Back then, it was “here’s a problem, here are some tools, solve the problem.”  Now, it’s “here’s a problem, here’s the solution, now do it nine hundred times.”

Sigh.

1) I suppose people running windows don’t feel much different now than they did then.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Geekery, General Rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.