The Floater Manifesto

When I’ve talked about my use of tech over the years, I’ve called myself a “floater.” What I’ve meant by that is that I’ve never stuck to a single operating-system ecosystem, and I think that this has secretly been a bit of a strength of mine.

In the past five years, I’ve played around with iOS. And Android. And MacOS. And Linux. And, at times, even Windows. Rather than shoehorning myself into one type of technology experience, I instead choose the ones that I think best meet my needs.

You can’t get a better tablet experience than an iPad right now, though some have been trying. Android’s overarching flexibility and support for sideloading does more to put the user into control. MacOS has a comfort level and attention to detail that keep it in the conversation decades after OS X first changed the game. Windows wins when you just need it to work. And Linux is laying out the groundwork for the new frontier.

The day the “spell” broke for me, I remember well. I had already been Hackintoshing my laptop for a couple of years, pointing out the party trick that my Mac had a touchscreen, but I fully intended on making my way back to the Apple ecosystem at some point. I went into the T-Mobile store to look at the latest iPhones, when I saw a lonely kiosk on the other side of the retail floor. Hiding within it was something interesting: A phone with basically all the features I wanted, at half the price.

That phone, the OnePlus 6t, was my introduction to the Android ecosystem. But it was also my introduction to the idea that I didn’t need to do everything in the world of Apple. I thought that I was going to go back to iOS when Apple inevitably gave in and released a USB-C phone. But it’s been more than a year, and I’m still rocking a OnePlus device.

But to be clear, I am not the Brandon Straka of Apple enthusiasts over here. (If you don’t know, don’t look it up.) I am not trying to convince you that my PC is better than your Mac or that you should use Android. (And I am not a shill for the Linux ecosystem.)

Rather, I would like to make another case: The distinction matters less than ever, and that opens you up to working with whatever you find most comfortable. It might even be best to be comfortable with three or four ecosystems. (And also, the tribalism means that we’re often ignoring some pretty fascinating trends.)

Floating around sounds like a fun way to spend some time. (Toni Cuenca/Unsplash)

I think the reason this is possible now, when maybe it was difficult or annoying 20 years ago, comes down to a few key changes in technology:

1. Cloud-based (and web-based) applications. Over the past decade, the browser has come to matter more than ever, and that means it is possible to get more-or-less the same experience for many applications we run daily. Figma, for example, works great whether you’re on an 11-inch Chromebook or a 18-inch Razer laptop (yes, they make them that large).
2. High-quality cross-platform frameworks. If the developer is willing to put in the work, it is possible to create applications that work amazingly no matter the setting. Two that come to mind on this front, although coming at it from diametrically opposed directions, are Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code and the drawing-focused image-editing tool Krita.
3. The flexibility of self-hosting. Being able to host software that you might have had to pay a monthly fee for in the past on a box in your closet opens up a lot of opportunities that you may not have had otherwise. (Though, as some will note, the business model still matters.)
4. Improved experiences in the FOSS space. Recently, I’ve been playing with Fedora-based OS Bazzite, which is primarily a gaming OS, but also works well for workstation-style work. I’m of the opinion that, if you pick the right distro, you will find Linux a pretty comfortable experience these days.
5. High-quality virtualization & remote access offerings. Tools like Jump Desktop, RustDesk, Parsec, and NoMachine make it easy to pull up another computer from the comfort of whatever interface you’re using. And usually, it’s pretty fast. I often log into Macs from Linux, though the key commands always get me.

If I had to point to some inspirations here, I think one of the key ones that comes to mind is the YouTube channel DistroTube, run by its similarly named creator Derek Taylor, who loads up a VM with a different operating system and runs it through its paces.

He goes much further afield with his Linux experiences than I ever have, but he has helped expose some interesting approaches to software that are out of the mainstream but should inspire the mainstream. One of the key ones, which he is kicking the tires on now, is Hyprland, a tiling compositor that leans hard into visual pop, but also presumes that you know how to use a command line and modify complex config files.

(To be clear, on this journey, I am going to tell you that there are a lot of good ideas in the Linux ecosystem that the Mac and Windows side need to be taking. And vice versa, honestly.)

Also inspiring is the work of This Week In Self-Hosted, a newsletter that highlights the large number of free and open-source applications that can be run on a tiny little Linux box, generally with a Docker container). The tiny little Linux box is the secret, to me, to making this all work.

I think there are a lot of topics to cover on this front, and I kind of want to play in this sandbox for a bit with some of the weekday pieces just to see where it takes me. I think that sometimes when I have ideas like this I often just leap into them without a net. Instead, I’m just going to float through this idea and see where it takes me. Maybe I’ll formalize it at some point, but for now, it’s just a loose idea I’ll be touching upon periodically.

Beats always having to talk about whatever’s making me mad this week.