I confess: I hate rebooting!

At this very moment, I know there’s a kernel update, and I should be rebooting the machine, but I just hate it. Rebooting because of some security update feels offensive, intrusive, and simply put: it violates the core idea of personal computing; that is, total control over my personal computer. In my view the choice between not rebooting and risk of handing my computer over to some online criminal is not healthy way to exercise freedom. I try to explain why.

The root cause for this disagreement between me and my security updates is basically some sort of laziness. Now I’m not a lazy guy in general (on the contrary, I work too much all the time), but when it comes to my personal computer and the way I arrange things on my desktop, what could describe it better than laziness?

Situation is this: I have 10-20 applications open at all times. You know the normal; e-mail, browser, music player and things like that. But not only I want these applications to be open all the time, I also want to them to appear on the exactly same spot all the time, so that I could just press couple of keyboard shortcuts and get them visible to some Window Manager frame. Exactly the same way, exactly on the same spot on screen, always, to the end of times. I don’t want to spend a single millisecond of my life in dealing with things like finding out where are my applications, what hand gestures I should do to make them visible. Same applies also to documents. I want them open all the time. And I want all this to be instant.

Maybe now you can understand my frustration when the time of reboot is at hand. Regardless of all sort of state saving I do in Emacs and Stumpwm, it is always a bit of a hassle. I suppose most of the remaining hassle could be solved technically, but it’s just too complicated to my taste. I’d love to have just a single Lisp Machine -style System Image, that would persist perfectly over of the reboots, forever.

One step towards that goal may be EXWM, the Emacs X Window Manager I’ve been experimenting with lately. Maybe more on that on some later post.