Just a little rant on tooling today. I've been returning to some UNIX learning stuff, which has me again studying the problem of "personal computing" generally. As modern people, what relationship do we have with computers?

The tools we have affect how we approach problems. Windows is very corporate (as in big tech, corporations) so the solutions that appear to someone who has bought into the Microsoft ecosystem are often very, well... Microsofty. Indeed, there are tried and true ways to do lots of things by handing over control to Microsoft. These may not be the most "elegant" solutions with computers, but they do Just Werk (TM).

If we move beyond the names of particular products and instead start to think about stuff in terms of simple actions we are doing, I think that we can often arrive at much better solutions than the "one-size fits all" enterprise solutions.

For instance, let's suppose you're trying to solve the problem of "backing up files". What you want to do is to make sure that certain data which is important to you is saved on multiple pieces of harddrive (e.g hard drives). Now, a typical solution to this problem is to use some cloud service like Microsoft's OneDrive. Automatically, files local to your machine are copied and saved across mutliple servers owned by Microsoft. For many customers, this is an acceptable arrangement. They trust that Microsoft will do a good job making sure they don't lose their files in the event of something like... spilling coffee on a laptop.

However, there are many disadvantages to just using the "default" option. Firstly, what if you want to own/control the hardware you're saving stuff on—you might not want to give Microsoft all your data. Or, maybe you're okay giving Microsoft some data, but you prefer to not have other data on foreign servers. "One-size fits all" solutions typically don't offer finer mechanisms of control to set up what you want.

On the other hand, if you build your own solution—this is one thing I'm working on—you solve the original problem of backing stuff up, but you don't need a third party (like Microsoft, Dropbox, etc) stepping in. You are more robust by being decentralized—problems affecting big corporations need not affect you. Similarly, you can be aware of just how you scale your own solution; this might mean buying up cheap used computer hardware to make a more robust system through redundancy/copies.

It is hard to start thinking about alternatives if the tools you have always suggest a particular way of doing things—

This is one of the reasons I kinda detest smartphones. Smartphones are all about doing stuff how an app tells you to; on the other hand, even some relativelys imple machine like a kitchen timer or a pencil can be used in infinite ways of your choosing.