In Praise of Tinkering

According to Byung-Chul Han, one of the marks of our current version of capitalism is that we have moved from an outside entity demanding that we work under exploitative conditions to internalizing that very demand, to the point that we demand exploitation from ourselves. It used to be the case that we fantasized about the days when we could be free, when we could control exactly how we allocated our time or how we chose to live our lives. If we could only be free, then we would work less and feel less empty.

Just as AI was sold to us as a way to work less by having agents do the work for us, we ended up finding ourselves working more and more and prompting for longer hours. Our system today tells us we are free, but that freedom can itself become the mechanism through which we exploit ourselves. We no longer need the outside entity to keep us on a leash; we deliberately choose to keep ourselves on one and make most of our lives a submission to market rules.

I've always been interested in Linux and computers in general. I've also been an Apple user for quite a while, and own both a MacBook Pro and an iPhone. An argument I've read on the internet countless times, and one that I've been tempted to adopt myself at some points in my life, is that a defaults-driven, more rigid system like macOS is preferable as an adult who needs to actually get work done, because who else has time to fix their audio after a kernel update?

I think this has been partially true for some years, but Linux has come a long way since then. Some bugs and quirks still have to be worked around, but I've surprisingly been finding an almost equal number of bugs and quirks within macOS and macOS software.

A slightly different but still similar line of argument tells you that the customizability of Linux works to its own detriment: do you really have the time to try so many window managers, theming systems, and desktop environments?

While this looks like a sensible posture to take if you're a busy person (and I am), I don't think we should take this attitude at face value without first examining its implications. More interesting to me than the Linux question itself, though, is the assumption underneath this argument: that time spent exploring or personalizing a tool has to justify itself through productivity.

First off, not everything has to follow market logic. We work partly so that some portion of existence doesn't have to be work, even if work is interesting to us. You don't need a business case for your own curiosity. That's a depressing life.

Second, exploration is how we actually learn beyond our existing capabilities. An obsession with efficiency can be the enemy of exploration. Exploration is necessarily inefficient because if you already knew the result would be useful, it wouldn't really be exploration. So if you're serious about your work, you owe it to yourself, your company, your clients, and your users to spend time tinkering and exploring technology beyond its current shape. Even if it's not directly related to work, one of the great hallmarks of taste is the ability to blend knowledge and creative ideas from multiple disciplines into what you do.

Third, autonomy and control have value beyond productivity. Being able to understand, alter, repair, reproduce, and replace the system you depend upon is valuable even if you never cash that capability out into fifteen saved minutes.

There's a resilience argument. There's an intellectual argument. There's an ownership argument. And there's simply the pleasure of competence.

This is why I love Linux. And it's also why I have to be honest about what the Mac does to me every time I come back to it.

I love this machine for earned reasons, not out of brand loyalty. I haven't seen a trackpad come close to maching my Mac's. I can close the lid knowing, not hoping, that the laptop will sleep without eating all my battery, and it will wake up afterwards. A battery that survives a full flight or a long day out even if I forgot my charger. That's what an OS built around its own hardware buys you.

But then on my Lenovo P14 running Linux I can swap the entire window manager, remap the keyboard at the system level, and theme every pixel of the desktop. On the Mac, a tiling window manager asks me to partially disable System Integrity Protection just to manage my own windows, and Hammerspoon is the ceiling of what Apple will tolerate. I'm not asking to recompile the kernel. I'm asking to arrange my own windows without the OS treating me like an idiot who doesn't know what he is doing.

The classic reply is that the lockdown is the price you pay for this level of polish. As if somehow the same control which makes the trackpad magical is what keeps my hands off the window manager. I call BS on that, and I could even take that argument more seriously if Apple hadn't already shipped both. The Mac that won over a whole generation of programmers was OS X: Unix underneath, a terminal one click away, polish on top. It was the machine that just worked AND the machine you could take apart, at the same time. The trade-off is policy, not some absolute law of physics.

So now I find myself begging Apple to meet me halfway. Bring some of the innovation happening in the Linux world into macOS. Open the ecosystem up to open source more. Win back the power users, the way the old Apple used to. Why does it have to be one or the other? I want to tinker, and I'd love to do it on a Mac too.

I don't want to choose between a reliable system and one I can play with. When I'm working, everything else really is backstage and I want my machine to just work. But tinkering is the part of computing that's still mine: the hour that produces nothing, optimizes nothing, and doesn't have to! I refuse to live my whole life on stage. I want that hour, and I want it on the best hardware I could possibly get.

I love Linux for these values. Apple, I'd like to love you too.