I have felt the same way for a while now and upon reflection I realized that one purchase in my past had pushed me over the top in my addiction: a laptop in 2006.
I was liberated from my desk to do creative things. Think of all the beautiful places I could take may new laptop and feel the juices flowing. The world was my oyster!
Instead, I just looked at crap on the Internet from all those places. I could sit on the couch and have the Internet. I could sit outside and have the Internet. The laptop led to an iPhone. The iPhone led to the Internet while standing in line. The Internet in the car...
I still flirt with the constant idea of selling that laptop, selling that iPhone and seeing what happens. But alas all I do is flirt; I just bought a new laptop last month.
I wouldn't be, because dealing with a console all day drives me up the wall. For me, it's an utterly miserable way to work--this is the future, we have these things called "mice" and "overlapping Windows" and "text editors that don't expect you to have a modal brain or memorize three-modifier shortcuts."
I just unplug from the Internet, and have my reference materials in hardcopy or sitting on my hard drive (the complete Java and .NET references are in local storage, for example). It's not hard to do, it just takes a bit of self-discipline.
Tiling windows do not cause more mental overhead--for me. I've used awesome on my Linux machines and decided to tube it because it gave me nothing. A laptop, for example, does not have sufficient screen space to allow me to effectively tile most applications.
This faux-authoritative bullshit that infests any comments about Unix really should stop. Again: for me, tiling window managers are not pleasant or comfortable and they don't work in two of the three environments in which I work anyway. Maybe not for you, but for me. I said for me in my original post, and you come along and tell me that I'm wrong about my own experiences? Believe me, you're free to show yourself out instead of trying to correct me about personal preferences--don't let the door hit you on the way out.
I was liberated from my desk to do creative things. Think of all the beautiful places I could take may new laptop and feel the juices flowing. The world was my oyster!
Instead, I just looked at crap on the Internet from all those places. I could sit on the couch and have the Internet. I could sit outside and have the Internet. The laptop led to an iPhone. The iPhone led to the Internet while standing in line. The Internet in the car...
I still flirt with the constant idea of selling that laptop, selling that iPhone and seeing what happens. But alas all I do is flirt; I just bought a new laptop last month.