Skip to content

The appeal of upstream: why my dotfiles commits are dwindling

Posted on:September 17, 2018
2 minute read

As I dive into my senior year at RIT, I have a lot less time to explore software configurations: new plugins, workflows, and the software that accompanies them, all take too much time to learn and incorporate with my current workflow.

As I’ve written before: Spacemacs does 90% of what I want to do, but despite that, I have and maintain my own Emacs config.

On the maintenance end… I rarely have time for that as well. My KDE+Xmonad config fell apart with KDE Plasma 5.13. Around 95% of the time, Plasma windows immediately disappear after popping up, making the setup unusable.

There’s value in a project that others are invested in. If something breaks, you aren’t on your own to try and fix it.

While these projects have opinions, a minor change to workflow may be worth the security the new workflow brings.

I’ve moved to Spacemacs for the time being. My new window manager + DE setup isn’t nearly as functionally pure, but it hasn’t broken with the newest KDE.

Knowing the tools I have aren’t going to explode on me with a new update has been worth the transition. Maybe I’ll get sick of the new bindings and paradigms, but for the time being, I have a much more reliable box.