The Benefits of a System Crash
My main computer decided that it had had enough the other day. I don't know what pushed it over the edge, but it could have been any number of things. It's been a developer machine for four years now, and I'm more exploratory than usual. I try to keep my systems lean and mean, but cruft gathers over time and systems get tired.
A few restores from backups didn't help, the system kept getting to the point where it wouldn't boot properly. So I did the next thing: I wiped the hard drive entirely and reinstalled the OS, no backups, it's time to rebuild.
This is no great loss as a good 95% of what I do is stored in various cloud services anyway. If it's not backed up I probably don't need it. But it gives me a chance to re-evaluate.
So I'm learning to use the fish shell instead of zsh, not because there's anything wrong with zsh, but because I've always meant to play around with fish more and if I have to reconfigure everything anyway I might as well do it in a new shell.
Also, the system starts up so much faster now than it used to. I don't know what I did to it over the past four years, but it feels almost brand new again.
I guess we've all had a hard four years, really. Maybe allowing a system crash to happen so we can start over fresh isn't a bad idea after all. We work so hard to avoid it, maybe it's better to just get through it.
Or maybe I shouldn't make hardware into a metaphor.
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