Serious question, but is this an age thing? When I was young, I was all about building boxes, tweaking settings, pushing to get every last drop out of the gear. That's because I had a lot of free time living a much more carefree life while still living with parental units. Eventually, I was able to parlay those skills into gaining some advantage for small companies I worked. Now, I have a full life outside of work, and just cannot be bothered with all of that now. As long as the device does what I need it to do, that's all I care about. I don't even change the desktop or any other personalization for sake of if it doesn't actively make me any more efficient. Once I'm done, I push back from the keyboard and continue on with other aspects of life.
My problem is that things don't do what I need them to do any more. I've spent years learning how to run a computer like the devil just for it to constantly amount to nothing because some asshole decided that everything needs to take the backseat to "It Just Works". More and more of the problems I run into that should be fixable by a config change, sloppy workaround, or (in the worst case) a quick patch are now just immutable facts of life. At some point the ideology has you spending more time dicking around, not less.
I hear you. I'm 43 with 2 school age kids. And work for myself. And 3 of us. So it's uh, busy, always.
It's more of a resource question. I tend to keep my hardware around for a long while. I like to repurpose it for various little things. A have a netbook grabbing sdr data in an outbuilding and shuffling data to living room server to be processed (goes weather). Server is an old Dell workstation. Etc.
My worry is the 2 i5 iMacs I have upstairs. Old, yes. Upgraded to the extent they can be? Yes! Useful hardware? Honestly, yeah.
Except they can't get newer versions of osx, this the cricut machine will not work on them. This I have to use parallels z with windows , to make the 27" iMac use the cricut because... Osx can't be upgraded. (Brave browser has hit its point too).
With the old stuff it's fine because I figure I'll eventually put some sort of Linux on it and have a useful thing, still.
The new m* looks so nice. And quick. And sleek. And I just fear 5 years down the road, when it's still nice, and fast and sleek but you can't even open a webpage because safari will not upgrade, and the world slowly crumbles around the hardware, which becomes.
. Useless.
So it's not so much personalization but being able to just continue using that of which was purchased. I've been buying pixels because of the same reason. Maybe I won't keep it for forever, but I upgraded from a pixel 3 last year and that's only because I broke a BMS wire behind the battery and said "well, a new phone is cheaper than a new house when it burns down because I'm a cheap ass".
So, does one sacrifice some new shiney to have a device that you still can use if the apple gods (or whomever gods, it all seems to be forced obsolete).
Huge blabber rant, but it's such a weird market now it seems like. No problem going ARM on apple, just wish Linux efforts seemed to be heading in a more positive direction (hector, quit? Future? Unknown?).
ARM on 'wondows' seems like a not great idea, expecting weird sdr software to not work ,etc.
So that leaves paying decent $ for perhaps a lesser product..like a framework, but one that may last a longer time. Or at least work as long as the hardware works.
What do people do when faced with such (first world) things.
