Bonum Certa Men Certa

Focusing on Getting Stuff Done

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 29, 2024

Belle epoque vintage art victorian women antique illustration public domain vintage

MANY people get flooded by notifications all day long. Social control media contributes a lot to this. It's designed to "addict" and to maximise "engagement" (or "screen time"). More than 5 years ago I had already figured out how to cope with it (hiding notifications is made intentionally hard due to "addictive" interfaces).

In GNU/Linux, the desktop environments make it simple to occlude some parts of windows. Aside from spilling windows out of screen edges there are various options more advanced than stacking, e.g. always on top/bottom, shade etc. In KDE (Plasma), for instance, application- or windows-specific settings are extremely versatile.

Another thing to be said about GNU/Linux is that reboots are seldom required unless your laptop/desktop is world-facing (accessible directly by IP address) and runs some badly broken stuff. How many people run Apache with some remotely exploitable hole on the desktop at home? Almost none. I did this at university, but that was almost 2 decades ago. And speaking of which, how many people run a public-facing server that's connected to a physical printer and takes job (printing) requests from any random address?

There are people who reboot every day. Some reboot every week or so. I spoke to such people. They don't develop an evolved set of "activities" (kDE term) because they constantly start again from scratch. While it's true that some desktop environments can restore "sessions" upon reboot, there are severe limits to that. For instance, there's no trivial way to restore SSH sessions, even if the remote side has screen/tmux running. It's just not feasible to restore everything, it is infeasible to fully preserve a state.

Speaking for myself, I very seldom reboot, except the machine that faces the outside world, regularly gets updated, and runs no "weird" software.

My uptimes are as shown below.

Main laptop: top - 01:37:16 up 385 days, 8:22, 43 users, load average: 0.24, 0.69, 0.80

Second laptop: top - 01:37:26 up 319 days, 17:49, 2 users, load average: 9.64, 8.42, 7.82

That's a combined uptime of 700+ days. My wife's laptop is approaching 300 days too (last reboot was probably last year or start of this year). The machine gets patched, but it still runs an old kernel. Since she's the sole user of that machine and it's not accessible from the outside, this is quite reasonable.

GNU/Linux generally makes computer users more productive. It's a force multiplier.

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