I did the usual distro hopping and tinkering as a Linux enthusiast. Debian > Ubuntu > SuSe > Arch (for a looong time) > Gentoo > Slackware (I sort of stuck here and there) and lots of dabbling in whatever is 'current', and it's only now I've started to get a bit reactionary.
My first experience of systemd was on Arch, I think when it was replacing trad init around fall 2012. I kept up with the technical gossip, if not the real low-level arguments (didn't know enough) but I liked the things it was sold on: It was neat, tidy, and seductively fast, and it was (in a desktop scenario) completely reliable.
I remember those heady days of running systemd-analyze and everyone bragging about their 2 second boots. What the fuck happened?
SSDs are now widespread, everything is faster at the storage level, and yet it all just seems so slow. It's all got so heavy.
I'm finding myself increasingly reactionary. Hating all the new stuff, because it's just all shit you don't need.
When you strip it all back to a 'lightweight' (and yes, the speechmarks are deliberate, even light things are heavy now) you need to solve some problems around ACPI stuff and comfort buttons, but you don't need a lot else to have a nice computer experience
Take an email client. You can use something neckbeardy like Mutt, and in a world or text it is king, but as soon as you get into workflow things like attachments and the fact everyone does HTML messages you need to do a little more to make it all copacetic.
I had a web dev colleague look at me using Mutt and he said "How do you deal with images?" and I said "By recognising I am better than the person sending them"
All joking aside, this is the world we live in, and your tools have to be able to cope with it.
It's nice to live in a technological cave, but at some point you have to come out.
@sullybiker You can set an external image viewer for Mutt. Same for any other file type. It’s pretty easy.
For images, I recommend feh. Very lightweight, no bloat.
It's really interesting when you do productivity stuff in terms of exactly what you miss when you go bare bones. It's all solvable with work, but the seductiveness of having a built-in solution is so tempting, but living with the baggage it brings is seldom worth it.