So I learned something because I almost made a very bad decision and thought about why I wanted to make that bad decision.
I’m working on the upstairs this evening and F1 practice was on, so I decided I was going to turn on F1 practice. Because dorky reasons I decided to plug my steam deck into a dock / display / keyboard / mouse desk I have and put the F1TV on it.
For those who don’t know, the Steam Deck is a handheld gaming device with a Linux OS. It’s not really meant to be a computer, but when you plug it into real computer stuff, it has a desktop mode where it becomes a normal Linux computer, running KDE Plasma (which is usually my favorite desktop environment).
So I’m using a linux desktop and I realize / remember I really like using a linux desktop. The list of reasons are the typical reasons… I own the hardware and the config, I can reasonably assume I’m not being spied on, it all works as I expect it to and/or I can set it up to work how I want. It just feels right. It feels comfortable and productive.
And ~1.5 years ago I was feeling the same way and very nearly went all in on linux for all my home everything. And the very bad decision I was beginning to make was in the same direction. I like my Macs but my goodness I really like linux; and I was beginning to think maybe it’s time to consider exiting the Apple ecosystem. Which is a nightmarish thought.
So I started to dissect it in my brain.
Sure, I like Linux for a lot of reasons, some of which listed above. But why is it comfortable? Why do I really like it? What’s so different? After all, all I was really doing was opening a web browser like I would on any other device to watch a video stream. Why is it different here?
Eventually I came to a theory.
Both Windows and macOS have a nightmarish feel because there’s notifications and popups and roadblocks to everything. In Linux, I can just do whatever it is I wanted to do. On macOS, I can do what I want to do - but there will be a notification of a message, an email, an application update, or whatever else. Heck, macOS will even display all the notifications from your iPhone if you want that.
My Linux desktop installs never have any distracting notifications set up. I’ll get a notification if a long-running file copy is done, or some other thing I started, but I never get a notification from some task I didn’t start.
I didn’t move to Linux 1.5 years ago because I like iMessage and Photos and Mail. But the reason I like Linux is because I can’t get iMessage there. And I only check email manually. And software updates can happen silently and entirely automatically or only when I manually run an update.
I think notifications are destroying us all. They are so distracting, they break your train of thought before you can build the track for the train. I literally think notifications are breaking our ability to think.
I just opened Obsidian to write this down and I got greeted with a Release Notes page because of course I need to see that, not my content. Obviously I opened this app to read what the developers changed, not to write the stuff I came here to write.
Computers need to not be proactive. They are being pushy and breaking human brains. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with these realizations yet, but it feels likely I’m going to start with turning off all notifications everywhere.