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Minimalism embodied: a minimalist desk image.

Many people reach a point in their lives where they see clutter and excessive personal possessions for what they are: distractions and time-sinks that deeply – and negatively – impact one’s life.  Minimalism seeks to change this.

I am no different; I, too, have been conscious that for many years I have amassed a vast number of gadgets, had far more clothing than I could ever really wear (before it went seriously out of fashion), and bought books far quicker than I could read them.  Freely, I admit, I still do the latter – but I can “hide” them now on my ebook reader!

The Internet’s “Minimalism”

It is amusing to see, particularly on certain social networks, how minimalism is portrayed.  Let’s describe a typically “minimalist” image:

  • White.  It must be white.  White walls, white furniture, mostly-white accessories, all well lit (often artificially).
  • An Apple Mac computer, centre-stage on a desk.  Typically a 21-inch iMac, but sometimes a 27-incher too.  In front of the Mac must be the following:
    • A wireless keyboard & wireless trackpad – both precisely aligned;
    • A notepad
    • A pencil
    • An iPhone
    • Sometimes… a mug of coffee (although I am allowing myself a crossover into that other bastion of internet imagery here, the “Getting Organised!” image);
  • A desk lamp;
  • A single picture on the wall, bordered with a white frame, casting a soft shadow thanks to…
  • A window on the adjacent wall;
  • A crappy plastic chair (still white) that no-one in their right mind could ever sustain a day’s work in;
  • A wooden floor.  Or, if the floor is white, then the desk is wooden.  Or the chair back might be green.  You get the idea.
A silly picture of my wardrobe.
For completeness, here’s a terrible picture of my wardrobe, showing just how far my minimalism still needs to come (it’s not just white, grey or black)!

For an example, check out Jessica Comingore’s minimalist studio.

Flipboard is a great resource for these types of images.  Search for ‘minimalist’ and you’ll soon happen upon this template of what a minimalist lifestyle apparently involves.

What Is Minimalism?

If you Google this, no doubt you will see a definition along the lines of styles in art, music or design.  But these days, “minimalism” has come to mean something else: the removal of superfluous possessions leading to a perceived reduction of stress and distraction in a person’s life.  It’s this definition what I am most interested in, which is the one driving most internet imagery these days.

Minimalism is not, necessarily, about choosing to do without

Minimalism is an interesting side-effect of western capitalism.  The effect of acquiring wealth is curious; it more often than not seeks to be displayed through the adornment of expensive garments, and through “showcasing” the necessity of owning various accessories, plus the outward demonstration of their worth to a “successful” person.  But to many people, myself included, the effect of acquiring objects is that they increasingly demand more time from the owner in order to manage.

This is detrimental to their original purpose, because time will now be split between the owner using the objects, and the owner managing the objects.  Thus, the fewer objects there are – whether these are clothes, cars, bottles of liquor in the cabinet, or watches – the more utility such devices actually provide and therefore the more effective they become both at their original purpose, but also as a showpiece.

What Minimalism is not.

Minimalism doesn’t, in my mind, have any connection with frugality, virtue through sufferance, or eco-mentality.  To me, “being green” and “being minimalist” can be mutually exclusive, although they can also co-exist very well too.

Minimalism is not, necessarily, about choosing to do without.  It is choosing to do with what you need, in the numbers your need it/them, and do without what you don’t.

Minimalism is also not doing without, for the sake of doing without.  It’s a great exercise in making one reconsider what is important and what’s really important to you.  This is the key.  It’s justifiable to say that you need something because it makes you happy.  Most people listen to music because, for their happiness and wellbeing, it’s needed.  That’s fine.

Being minimalist does not mean sitting in a silent, white room, looking at perfectly pressed shirts hanging in a wardrobe.  And it’s also not about choosing £20 shirts instead of £100 shirts.  One can enjoy life’s luxuries, and one probably will enjoy them more, if their number is measured.

My Minimalism Experience

Macbook Pro 2015: forcing my minimalism.
A really expensive laptop considering the spec. A true minimalists machine!
Image of ThinkPad T420: my barrier to minimalist computing.
A great laptop, but sadly superfluous to my needs.

For example, just before Christmas I came to a difficult decision:  I decided I had to sell my ThinkPad laptop.  There were no two ways about it; I had too many computers adoring my house, due to accumulating older work laptops as time went on.

My thinking was, “well, it still works and it’s still powerful enough to do lots of stuff, so I can get more done by keeping it and splitting my activities between the MacBook Pro that I now use for work, and this.”  Except that doesn’t really translate into the bigger picture.  Sure, I could keep both machines and pretend I’m being more productive, but in reality I started spending more time wondering which machine to do what on, or moving data from one to another, or agonising that I was simply distracted by this entire thought process, or generally finding that the MacBook Pro was more portable and thus my preferred choice to take somewhere.

I historically associated my perceived productivity benefits to my ThinkPad, its wonderful keyboard, and loved how I had complete control over the GNU/Linux operating system I used on it.  But in reality, two machines became a burden.  Yet, this wasn’t the only laptop I had “laying around” (although occasionally used).  Actually, I had four other laptops.  This was akin to hoarding, and served no benefit whatsoever.  There was basically no chance I would ever use them all until they broke, one by one.

So before Christmas, each laptop – an HP Pavillion, a ThinkPad T420, another ThinkPad – a T420s, and a Samsung Chromebook, all found new homes.  They also found me richer – not only for the money I made on them, but also for the less clutter I had around the house.

Finally, the agonising dissipated and with that, the stress went.  I had more space to think, fewer options to consider (as far as my computing went) and happier productivity.

Moving forwards

Once you get the bug for selling or giving away old stuff, it is hard to ignore.  As soon as I can find the time I will work on selling more computing kit I have laying around.  And there are other things too – all sorts, in fact.  Like old pieces of furniture (bin/tip), old garden tools (tip/sell), old clothes (donate to charity), one or two old TVs (!) … it goes on and on.  In fact, the speed at which one can acquire goods is absurd.

Moving forwards, reducing this clutter alongside a renewed focus on personal development has already made a huge change in my self-perception.  I feel stronger, lighter and more focused.

If this post has helped you, or if you have had similar experiences, please comment or link below!

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    "Your Skype calls are about to get much better" is an underwhelming title for what is otherwise exceptionally gushing praise for Redmond.  Like, PR-aise.

Will Google respond … with another new messaging app release? 😉

http://flip.it/5M2cH

http://flip.it/5M2cH

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This is a confession of a new Mac user, seeking absolution.

I have a Mac.  It’s for work.  Unfortunately, I finally came to realise that I cannot reasonably develop web apps to work on iOS and macOS without having access to those platforms for testing.  I feel I’ve done exceptionally well to avoid this reality for many years and plough on with the Linux desktop, but building a VM Hackintosh without a proper software license is against my morals and, indeed, the law.

Would I have bought a Mac for personal use?  Of course not.  There’s no need; I have been a (more-or-less) happy GNU/Linux user for 15+ years.  The Linux desktop has provided me with everything I need from a computer, and I’ve enjoyed the reliability of open source software.  And I will continue to be a GNU/Linux user.

I <3 Linux

But … one thing about Linux that is, occasionally, frustrating is the complexity of software.  I don’t mean that its typical user software is difficult or overwhelming in Linux.  Instead, it’s that there is never the ‘best’ way to do things in Linux; there are multiple, ‘reasonable’ ways.  It’s this lack of ‘purity’ about the desktop experience which sometimes confounds newbies, and turns some people off.

Tux, the cartoon penguin.
Tux: the mascot of Linux. Does any other modern OS even have a mascot?

From my admittedly limited experience, it seems that people prefer to learn one way to do things and to stick to that way.  With all the desktop environment options in Linux, there is no ‘one way’.  This is why each platform has its advocates and evangelists, whether it’s Windows, macOS or GNU/Linux.

I feel like I have been spoilt with GNU/Linux, and especially with GNOME 3.  To me, there is no better desktop environment than GNOME 3, despite having moments of hair-pulling frustration at it, from time to time.  But GNOME 3 is a beautiful desktop: it’s clean and minimalist, its default file system application, Nautilus is more functional than the Mac’s Finder, its handling of multiple workspaces (where Linux is constantly superior) and navigation across those workspaces is much more fluid and natural, and so on.

There are political, social and technical issues with GNOME development and the whole GNU/Linux system at large (let’s not mention systemd here), but if you were to ignore those factors and introduce somebody to ‘the Linux desktop’, I would argue that GNOME 3 (and Cinnamon too, for that matter) present a beautiful interface to enjoy and work in.  It’s not perfect, and can be problematic too at times, but it’s flexible and open.

The Problems with a Mac

That was a very long-winded introduction, but I felt it necessary to establish my position, before I talk about the Mac.

Macbook Pro 2015
Ladies and Gentlemen: The 2015 Macbook Pro. A really expensive laptop, considering the spec.

The problem I have is this: I want to love the Mac, but I don’t.  Sometimes, especially in business, you feel you need a commercial product simply because it helps you fit into the world around you. And, when a computer costs you a significant amount of hard-earned cash, it’s got to be something you want.  Sadly, I didn’t want this.  It was simply a necessity for me to continue doing what I do to earn a living.  Therefore, it felt ‘forced’ rather than chosen, or desired.

When you identify with a philosophy, such as I have with the guiding principles of free/libre open source software, you develop a mindset.  You become attached to the tools and methodology deriving from that philosophy.  It becomes incredibly frustrating when things that were easy on Linux become hard on anything else.  You wonder why people put up with all these obstructions to productivity…

Obstructions to productivity

Let’s look at a few of these.  As a software developer, sysadmin, business person and general user (who is used to the layout of a standard UK PC keyboard), I ran into several problems switching over to a Mac:

'3' key on Mac keyboard.
Having a less-accessible hash key on a keyboard is challenging, especially for coding.
  • The hash (pound) key.  The hash symbol is used extensively in a UNIX environment to comment out sections of software code for reference purposes.  On a UK PC keyboard, this symbol is located on its own key to the right of the keyboard; on a Mac, this is located on the ‘3’ key; you have to use a modified key (the option / alt key) to access it.  This is a barrier to productivity, although perhaps due to muscle memory and old habits.  The position of the @ symbol (on the ‘2’ key) is also annoying.
  • Finder: no SFTP support!  As someone who needs to upload files to web servers quite often, it’s stunned me that a well-established UNIX-based OS like macOS doesn’t support this transfer method ‘out of the box’.  One has to resort to a third-party program.
  • Finder: no Cut?!  Apple have a strange approach to doing some things, especially considering their claimed print-based heritage (recall Steve Jobs telling a university that Apple focused so much on typography…?).  Take Cut and Paste.  Cut (not Copy) and Paste is a relic from the printing press age, where articles in layouts would literally be cut and pasted into position.Unlike all other decent file managers, Cut has no place in Finder on a Mac.  Only Copy does.  Except… Copy works like Cut when the source and destination locations of a file are on the same filesystem. In this situation, Copy moves the file (Cut-Paste).  But, if the source location is on one filesystem, and the destination on another, the file is Copied (Copy-Paste).  This is totally inconsistent and confusing, resulting in two copies of the same file – sometimes…
  • Finder (again): no option to show hidden files.  Yup.  As a GNU/Linux user, you take this stuff for granted.  This preferences option (or hitting CTRL-H) in GNOME is a lesson to Apple:

    GNOME's Files application preferences
    How to hide or show hidden (dot-)files, e.g. .config.
  • Disk formatting: not enough filesystem support.  A typical vendor lock-in situation, where the OS vendor totally fails to provide sufficient flexibility with regard to mounting ‘foreign’ file systems.  It’s a complete joke that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, would refer to Chromebooks as ‘test machines’, when in fact they are more flexible for mounting external devices than a Macbook ‘Pro’.
  • Disks – no S.M.A.R.T. support on external USB drives.  This is inexcusable.  Not being able to see an external drive’s S.M.A.R.T. status, especially when that drive might be used for your time machine backups, is akin to gross incompetence.  Other operating systems do this; Apple not doing this is a bad joke.
  • Time machine: scheduling not flexible enough.  I want daily backups, not hourly.  Where’s the option to change this?
  • Text editing and stupid modifier key behaviour.  On a PC, to select a word at a time you would hold down CTRL+Shift and then arrow left (or right) to select a word.  Press the arrow key again to select the second word.  Then, to Cut or Copy on the PC, you would keep CTRL held down, release Shift and press X or C, respectively.  Not on a Mac.  The process of keyboard-based word selection on a Mac is to hold down ‘Option / Alt’+Shift, arrow left or right to select a word at a time, then release all modifier keys, then press and hold Command and then press X or C respectively.
  • Workspace / Desktop management is less efficient than GNOME 3.  Linux desktops pioneered virtual desktops / workspaces, with Windows and Mac OS (X) following suit.  In GNOME 3, workspaces are created and destroyed dynamically, and can be navigated to efficiently using the keyboard (not like on the Mac, where you have to use a three-finger swipe on a trackpad, or the Mission Control key and a mouse).  macOS doesn’t destroy unused desktops automatically, leaving visual clutter.
    macOS mission control
    Why not just get rid of that unused desktop/workspace?!  Compare GNOME 3, below.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRHAio98n-g

  • A pure split-window session is unnecessarily modal.  In macOS, you cannot easily create a left-right split of windows that take up all available screen real-estate, without forcing those windows into full-screen modality.  Forcing anything is bad, mmm’kay?  Again, compare GNOME 3.

Migrating for good?

So, the question remains, is there enough goodness left in macOS to entice me to migrate over for good?

Are you kidding?!

Less productivity, less freedom, some bizarre defaults, some frustrating impediments to productivity and all backed by a ‘can do no wrong’ philosophy mean that Apple’s products will stay strictly off my shopping list commercially and personally for the foreseeable future.

I won’t be selling my ThinkPad T420.  No way, José!  But at least I can now do iOS and macOS testing for web apps and site layouts.  In that vein, Apple makes great test machines!

And I think I have absolved myself 🙂