by amano-kenji | 2025-11-25 15:09:21+00:00
That makes sense from a SaaS business owner because security and privacy are a part of software business.

However, I didn't specifically talk about software business. A medical doctor may be interested in mullvad VPN and run it in his own computer, but it doesn't make sense for him to spend a year on learning gentoo linux, setting up linux network namespaces with firejail application profiles for multiple VPNs for different applications, setting up a backdoor-free router out of a computer with Intel ME disabled, setting up a home VPN with the backdoor-free router, setting up a DNS server on that router, and so on. "High level" privacy is a huge full-time rabbit hole I could die in. There is an infinite rabbit hole in one field. At this level, system configuration becomes complex, and you want to learn how to automate reproducible system configuration with nixos or guix. Learning guile scheme and guix system can easily take 3 ~ 6 months of full-time effort on top of all these shit I mentioned. His doctor career would be over before he learns all that just to craft a private computer for himself.

An e-commerce store CEO would lose his shopify e-commerce store if he tried to do all these things I did for my computers. His job is to run an e-commerce store. It is not to spend the next few years full-time on learning linux commands, how to compile linux kernel on gentoo linux, how to set up guix user services, and so on. Before he gets all that, he will lose his e-commerce store.

I had to spend a month on writing a utility because my customized sway environment required it for audio GUI. How the hell did I end up writing a utility for "pipewire" audio GUI? Because KDE, GNOME, cinammon, XFCE, and other desktop environments were buggy as hell and I ended up with a customized sway environment. On top of that, I had to learn how to configure ALSA and pipewire with dot files. I hated learning how to configure pipewire with dot files. Linux desktop environment is still not ready for most people who just want things to work. Why the hell did I need to learn how to make xdg-desktop-portal backends work nicely with firejail? xdg-desktop-portal was another huge time sink. I hated learning about xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and xdg-desktop-portal-wlr and making them play nicely with web browsers in firejail. I had to learn all that because ALSA alone couldn't do basic things I wanted it to do. I also had to learn audio amplifiers and USB DACs because I couldn't stand shitty audio from my motherboard's internal headphone jack. It took months to tame linux audio according to my preferences. The cost of using a customized sway environment is basically your life.

It took months to "fully" tame all the quirks of my sway environment.

I just wanted some privacy, and I ended up doing a lot of things. When you do one thing, you don't just do one thing. You end up doing a lot of ancillary stuff. I ended up becoming very poor because I spent too much time on doing all these shit. It is death by thousand cuts. Security and privacy are just the tip of an iceberg which goes far beyond simple system crafting.

My "unintended" core specialty is crafting a private and robust personal computing environment.

One specialty can basically eat up nearly all of your time if you are not careful.

You don't know how long it takes to learn computer stuff basically from scratch. If they have a very good full-time tutor, they may learn the basic stuff quickly, but it genuinely takes more than a year to learn all the autistic OCD-level privacy shit along with all the ancillary stuff required for a "fully" robust computer system that's basically without a glitch at an OCD level.

The lesson is if you obsess with things outside your core specialty at autistic OCD levels, you will lose your core business whether it is a medical clinic, an e-commerce store, a restaurant, and so on.

In retrospect, if I was supposed to learn from scratch again, I would just install linux mint or buy a macbook, set up one VPN instance on my computer, implement browser isolation with multiple web browers, set up emacs org agenda, and call it a day. This way, your config is minimal, and you don't even want reproducible configuration management systems like nixos and guix.

I used to be an autistic geek. Now, I want a way out of the maze in my mind.

If I focused all that autistic obsession on becoming the best version of myself, I would be a multi-millionaire already.