Intentional Computing

I’ve been using Arch Linux (btw) since the beginning of this year. It is a barebones distro, meaning you have to install every package you are going to use yourself. While not the most fun exercise in the world, it made me think about what software I need to make my computer usable. Beyond the necessary stuff like wi-fi drivers, I was forced to choose what I wanted my computing experience to be like. Rather than being given a default desktop environment and a suite of software I could opt-out of if I cared to, I instead had to deliberately opt-in to the desktop experience, text editor, and web browser.

It is certainly less convenient to do things this way. However, I’m coming to believe in the importance of ritual and inconvenience in life🔗. While I truly do understand the desire to follow the path of least resistance to get to a result (I am a programmer, after all), following that path for everything robs you of the experience of the journey. Doing things the hard way opens up your mind to different perspectives, takes you down paths that would otherwise go unexplored, and presents new opportunities for discovery. Setting up a usable Arch installation from scratch lets me take a moment to appreciate the immense amount of software that has built up the computing features I take for granted. Manually managing my music library and copying a selection of files to an mp3 player lets me think about what I love about certain songs, albums, and artists and how my tastes have changed over the years.

Tech is becoming increasingly focused on pushing us to passively consume content, whether on social media or one of a million streaming service, and making it harder to do anything else. We have incredibly powerful computers in our pockets, but the path of least resistance is to use them to check Twitter/Bluesky/Mastodon, because every other path is made to be difficult. Using your phone to write totally sucks🔗, using it to draw requires a stylus and a lot of patience. Programming on it is totally impractical, and even if you do get around the barriers, good luck running any code on the device itself. It is more difficult to use your phone to write notes and doodle than a simple notepad, despite outclassing it by several orders of magnitude in both cost and compute power. The duopoly of phone operating systems means this is unlikely to change, unless mobile Linux somehow becomes usable during my lifetime.

All this is to say that computers are powerful tools that empower us to learn and be creative and build skills, and I aim to be more intentional in using my computer in this way. Sometimes my intention is entertainment, of course, but I want to choose that to be the case, instead of it being pushed on me by the software my computer runs.