> Technically Gentoo is also in the running, but can you imagine trying to compile all your packages from scratch on a system that benchmarks worse than a raspberry pi 3?
Uh, I actually did this, it wasn't so bad honestly it just took about a day to rebuild everything.
Honestly the Sony VAIO that I had was _awesome_ in some regards, the hi resolution display was extremely crisp! It fit comfortably in my inside jacket pocket, the battery didn't suck.
The only issue I had honestly was the proprietary connector to get ethernet (though this was more annoying in 2012 when I was doing this, these days laptops don't seem to have ethernet); the only other issue was that the GPU was extremely slow with Linux.
it was probably extremely slow in Windows too, but vista (which was installed on the thing) was far-far too heavy to understand why it was slow at all.
The nearest best laptop I've found that is in all areas superior than the Sony VAIO P-Series (aside from being a bit taller) is the GPD P2 Max which is basically perfect.... if only it had a passively cooled ARM CPU.
Compiling your own software is a really humbling experience. When it takes way more time to compile a browser than a full fledged OS or you find out that seemingly simple programs need to pull a mind boggling amount of dependencies you really start to question the state of the software world
I think the main reason browsers are so extremely slow to compile is the heavy templating.
But, I agree, I can compile my entire OS including user-space software and desktop environments in about the same time it takes to compile chrome.
Which is scary.
But then again, people want it to do everything (WebUSB, WebGL etc; etc; etc;). So it stands to reason that it's inherently complicated and difficult to compile.
I wonder if the high iteration time hampers development...
Gentoo was fun, too bad I don’t have time for it anymore. I used to go for nice walks when Firefox was compiling. Great opportunity to go outside and take a break.
USE flags in Gentoo also allows for a much more configurable system.
I use a GPD Micro PC throttled to 6 watts TDP, which means the fan can stay off permanently. It fits in a jeans back pocket, and has an ethernet port. And a serial port. And a full size HDMI port. And three full size USB ports, and a USB-C port.
I also did this (around ~2008), a friend of mine and I built near identical Atom boxes with first gen (Diamondville) 64bit atoms on Intel motherboards running 865 chipsets IIRC. The GPU/Chipset was louder than the CPU because the CPU was completely passive. I did emerge Xorg on that... it took I think a day and a half(ish) even optimizing the heck out of compile options to use everything march=native... it was slow as heck. But it lasted me for years as a little project box until I replaced it with an 4th gen i5.
You really do start to ask yourself if you need a package if compiling it will take a day or two. Hence OpenOffice never got installed.
Save for the processor being better than any VAIO's, I disagree. I find all of these to be absurdly unreliable (crappy firmware) and very cheap hardware for the price, not comparable at all to the typing experience on the P-Series. And the "trackpoint substitute" is a disaster, resembling a "tiny touchpad" more than a trackpoint.
Hrm, interesting.. I disagree with your opinion about the hardware quality, it feels sturdy and keys travel quite nicely. The screen is fantastic in color reproduction (for my needs), has high resolution and gets bright enough.
There’s no trackpoint/nipple and I hadn’t considered that a problem as I’m weird and spent a lot of time getting used to only using the keyboard some years ago- so an oversight on my end and you’re completely right, the touchpad sucks.
The firmware is extremely bare bones, but I wouldn’t say it sucks since I don’t have any reason to believe it’s bad. (Nor good, it just works for me.)
I think you are mistaking the GPD Pocket 2 Max with the non Max version. The Max version has a real touchpad while the GPD Pocket 2 has that tiny thing on the upper right.
I have the GPD Pocket 2 and while the trackpoint thing is not the most precise you get used to it and I have no complaint to do regarding the hardware. It just works.
At one point in college, I was using an old Thinkpad x41 tablet and wanted to mess around with gnuradio. I wanted it on my tablet laptop since I had that on me most hours of the day. Compiling gnuradio took several hours. I was running arch so I want unfamiliar with compile times for things I grabbed from the AUR but it was atrocious. I started it in my first class of the day and would just throw my laptop in my bag while it was still compiling and walk quickly to my next class so I could grab a power outlet before Pentium M sucked up all the battery.
Glad you enjoy your life at 800 MHz! I appreciated your article although the plural form to address a single person (not the editorial "we") makes me uneasy for political considerations.
So many more things could be easily enjoyable on such hardware if the software ecosystem allowed it. I'm also curious what hardware modularity like Framework is doing could have achieved two decades ago: if you could easily plug in a chip to decode/encode video quickly, this computer could probably play any kind of video.
> We have no idea what crates.io thinks it makes sense to require javascript to look up packages but here we are.
Apparently, without a specific Accept header, crates.io thinks i want a JSON response for a crate lookup, not the homepage. Now i don't even remember why i was requesting this URL to start with (not in a script) but i don't understand the logic of that and the maintainers in the chatrooms seemed to consider it's not a bug.
I'm also very curious about antiX "proudly anti-fascist" distro but that they're two debian releases late (still on stretch) does not exactly attract me.
I don't want to speculate about Artemis specifically, but first-person plural pronouns to refer to oneself typically isn't a "royal we" or anything like that, it's just what helps some folks feel comfortable, especially those who have DiD or who label themselves as plural. See https://www.reddit.com/r/plural/wiki/index (keywords: "plurality," "multiplicity," ...)
I'm dating someone who refers to themself in the first person plural; it becomes perfectly natural pretty quick :)
I never knew this was a thing. I'm not on board with promoting the use of "we" as a replacement for first person singular as being an acceptable societal norm, unless you're the Queen.
Sorry, but it is too close to contributing to mental health, or personality, disorders for me.
After finishing the article, my main take-away was how impressive it is that such a quirky tech setup could work for both of them. I was comparing it to my relationship and how difficult it is to share any item/space which is also customized to either of our preferences. It gave me hope.
It seems ambiguous to me, I was honestly trying to figure out if there was more than one person using the author's laptop, or if it was a multi-author article or something.
Not that English isn't chocked full of ambiguity - I just haven't managed to identify a benefit over using the more commonly accepted "I" here.
I interpreted this as the "editorial we" or perhaps the "author's we":
> The editorial we is a similar phenomenon, in which an editorial columnist in a newspaper or a similar commentator in another medium refers to themselves as we when giving their opinion. Here, the writer casts themselves in the role of spokesperson: either for the media institution who employs them, or on behalf of the party or body of citizens who agree with the commentary. The reference is not explicit, but is generally consistent with first-person plural.
I have heard it from a "sovereign citizen". They seem to use it when wanting to talk about themselves (flesh) inclusive of their various personhoods and corporate entities. I imagine that traffic cops find it unsettling for a lone driver to say "we" are going somewhere, as if there are other people somewhere unseen in the vehicle.
I have a laptop from 2009 or 2010 running at 800 mhz with a 32 bit CPU. It has to run an older version of Ubuntu (18.04) because nothing supports it nowadays. Even 32 bit packages are hard to get. I see no reason to use antiX or other esoteric distros since ubuntu runs fine on it and supports the hardware. I doubt antiX supports more hardware.
Someone else recommended it here, but I don't see the advantages over a robust package repository like ubuntu 18 or a minimal ram only distro like puppylinux. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/antix.html
Funny enough I got puppylinux running from a dos (windows) partition and running out of RAM on just 2gb on a Toshiba Portage m200. I've even got Windows XP Tablet edition running on SSD, but it can't really connect to much online due to the TLS limitations. And newer versions of the linux kernel don't support the wireless chipset. It is also difficult putting an old non-PAE kernel into a newer distro.
TLS really killed the utility of a lot of older computers with regards to using the "modern internet".
I have an old Dell with a 32-bit 2.33 Ghz T2700. Linux fully supports the GPU, and no issues with missing 32-bit packages on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's a spare browsing / retro gaming machine hooked up to the TV in the guest room. For gaming, it runs everything from arcade MAME to Mario Kart 64 like a champ. For browsing, it's not speedy but not bad on heavy HTML sites like gmail/youtube.
I agree antiX was a poor choice. No issue with PAE kernel on Tumbleweed i686. If OpenSUSE ever drops x86 support, there's always Debian or Arch 32 (if I want to stick with a rolling distro).
I still have a tablet PC from 2005 in rotation, and the lack of 32-bit apps is definitely a killer, but not terrible.
My original reason for reviving it was for use as a whiteboard in Zoom calls, but there's no 32-bit Zoom app - and I'm sure screen sharing while decoding 15 people's video would've been out of the question anyway. So I run a VNC server on it, and share out a VNC session from my work laptop instead.
I've also hit the issue where I've had to compile software for x86 using modern build toolchains. It takes forever, and more often than not, I run out of RAM (only 1GB). To get myself out of a pinch, I've mounted a 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive as swap space. Sure, it makes compiling even the most basic software a multi-hour process, but where this machine isn't my daily driver, it's still easier (to me, at least) than cross-compiling.
> I'm also very curious about antiX "proudly anti-fascist" distro
"Anti-fascist" doesn't actually mean that - it's a political dog-whistle.
> they're two debian releases late
That's in line with their use of Palemoon, which lags behind normal Firefox feature (and security) releases due to their decision to support older features (mostly XUL) (not that this is very avoidable, because maintaining an XUL fork is very hard work, and not for the faint of heart).
> > We have no idea what crates.io thinks it makes sense to require javascript to look up packages but here we are.
>I've had a similar experience with crates.io:
They do have an API (ps: I built crates.live on top of it). I think they have a very good reasons to block the crawling of their main website. Otherwise, people might abuse it. Actually, they recommend you identify yourself when crawling their API to not limit you. I didn't do it, and found no problem constantly calling their APIs.
> Glad you enjoy your life at 800 MHz! I appreciated your article although the plural form to address a single person (not the editorial "we") makes me uneasy for political considerations.
You assume Artemis identifies as a single person. In all likelihood, they are a plural system. Statements like yours are microaggressive at best.
A plural system? You say that as though it requires no explanation.
I don't get the "political considerations" part, but this is the first time I've encountered anyone referring to themselves as "we" online, and I also found it jarring.
She got the Dragon Speech software, and I was surprised at how
good it was.
You can of course dictate all your notes, documents emails.
It also provides means to navigate your OS, start programs, close them,
and a lot more.
It is expensive but she could do most of her work with two hands that didnt work.
A while back I saw a video about a guy who wrote code using such software
(not sure what he used in particular).
This can be tedious "Open bracket", "new line" etc.
He had spent a long time tuning it so it was fast and efficient.
He used a set of custom grunts and noises as "macros" for all the bracket
brace, and other symbols that are in heavy use in programming languages.
If you were just listening to him and didn't know what he was doing
it sounded a bit distressing.
You'd use a custom vocabulary as well. So rather than "curly open" you'd use "heck", and instead of "enter" it would be "bark". I'm just making the actual words up here, but the point is to use a different/more simplified vocabulary that's also easier to understand by the computer.
I worked with a guy who wrote code like this. He was, indeed, pretty productive, but it was hell sitting next to him without good headphones. Was this guy you're referring to a long haired, kinda scruffy guy who had worked at Amazon at one point?
Did your GF or friend ever consider using foot pedals at all? I knew a programmer once who used various foot pedal combinations for different punctuation marks and tabs.
I have been looking into pedals before this ever started,
and we looked at some different options, but
could not find something that seemed worth it.
I really want a set of foot controls to act as my mouse
since growing a third arm is currently not practical.
I keep looking around and I know there are some solutions
out there, but not in my price range that seems solid.
A cozy laptop sounds nice. I bet IRC is more than fast enough, surprised it didn't get a mention. Also, if you just want to read some text on the web as fast as possible, w3m might be worth a shot. I use it in TTY2 all the time to look stuff up. Browser CDN caches like Decentraleyes or LocalCDN might also be worth trying especially with the mnestic set up: you would only have to load certain JS bundles once per session.
>a dishonorable mention to twitter for being slower than Discord, we wish we were making that up
If you're just browsing Twitter, then the Nitter frontend (https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances) is way, way faster. Does not have algo-recs either, which could be positive. If you need to post, I assume you've tried spoofing user agent to mobile? This might help with bloated sites in general.
The 1000x480 resolution seems interesting. Maybe this machine would make a good single-purpose device for writing.
Also, somewhat related: Former Debian maintainer Joey Hess famously used a Dell Mini 9 for all his coding [1, 2]. I wonder if the Sony has a better, less cramped keyboard compared to the Mini 9.
Another interesting guy doing valuable work on low-end, underclocked hardware is Nils M. Holm [3].
Myself, I can get most of my stuff done on a Thinkpad T42 (underclocked to 600 Mhz to reincarnate its dying GPU). With the ram-booted Tiny Core Linux, this thing still flies. I'm having a hard time ditching it because of the 4:3 IPS screen and excellent keyboard. I've even used it to produce lengthy radio programs for my country's public broadcasting.
Aside web browsing, there seems to be more than enough software solutions, hacks, workarounds and programming languages for doing valuable work on rather old hardware these days. Really interesting times we're living in.
Then again, might be true that with yesterday's hardware, you're limited to solving yesterday's problems. I guess I'm fine with yesterday's problems in many aspects of life.
Some people doesn't know that, aside of media creation and consumption, we don't need so much power to do other things.
Most of my university assignments were done on a Acer Aspire One netbook (1.3/1.6 GHz Dual Core Atom, 2 GB DDR2 RAM) and I had no problem. To program in C, C++, and Python in Debian is simple great, and to simulate circuits with SPICE related software on Windows 7 is also good.
I started using it because it was more light and more comfortable than the newer laptop I had (15" 4th gen Intel i5 laptop), and as a small device for reading PDF is great, so i ended up using it more and more, and for more tasks, leaving it for exclusive academic usage and letting the other for games and media.
I still have my Samsung NC10, had it running an IRC bot until recently in power save mode with no fans. Opening a modern version of a browser is pretty revealing about how heavier the web has become though.
As for media creation, SaaS is where its at for weak endpoints. My ancient chromebook battery is going and it could never run CAD, office, or video editing natively, but it runs onshape which is SaaS 3-d CAD, and Google Workspace/suite/apps whatever its called this week, and Wevideo SaaS video editing perfectly fast no slowdowns or problems pretty much ever. The onshape viewer works great on my phone and tablet so if I'm building something far away from my desk, I've got the prints with me. Unlike my desktop keyboard, my tablet touch screen is sawdust-proof.
Another discovery I made a long time ago was network connections are usually fast enough and small battery friendly CPUs are slow enough that its faster to send a video file to AWS (or have it there to begin with), spawn a linux box on AWS, run handbrake in CLI mode to convert the video to some obscure format on a very CPU beefy machine, and download the converted file, and delete the huge (and expensive) AWS instance, than it is to transcode video locally. Some CPU based transcoding is very slow if you don't have a lot of cores and its brutal thermally and to the battery.
If you only have one SaaS app in your life, the old meme was what do you do when the internet is down? Well, the internet is almost never down for me, I'd pick up my laptop and go to a cafe or library if it was, and everything I do is online or SaaS or VPN'd in so I wouldn't crabby about one app being down I'd be crabby about being completely and totally shut down.
That anti-SaaS argument in 2020's is like arguing that people have to drink bottled water because what would they do if tap water stopped working one day? If we're in a situation where the tap water stops working then we got bigger problems than which bottled water company to enrichen.
The linked article seemed surprised that a 2009 device could play video, but I had been using Mythtv for 7 years by that point including occasional HD video on a relatively weak settop box class of computer and doing youtube for awhile so his specs for playback seem very low compared to what I was doing in '09 on small devices, but whatever.
What is the allure and purpose of going back to 800 Mhz? I mean I did it myself this week, but was frustrated enough to think it's a really dumb idea, waste of time. I can't even articulate why I did it in the first place.
I used a Raspberry Pi 4 (1500 Mhz) as a daily driver for 4 days. Struggled with hidpi scaling, no Signal Messenger, overheating CPU, Youtube at 360p, HTML Gmail.
I went so far to upgrade Pi to SSD, plus heat sink. Considering adding active cooling... but the said nope, back to Macbook Pro. Why do we even try?
Change your workflow. You cannot expect a less powerful system to perform the same as a more powerful system.
Rather than watching YouTube directly, use youtube-dl with VLC. Rather than using HTML Gmail, use IMAP and a native email client. Rather than using Eclipse, use vim.
We all fall into patterns. We grow to find comfort in those. But, we can't expect to maintain those patterns when circumstances change.
I also found it confusing. I was wondering if it was this person's preferred pronoun but their Twitter [0] lists "she" as of "January 2022" and all the testimonials use "she" too [1].
"They" is almost exclusively singular in those circumstances, regardless of its etymology. Similar to how "you" derives from the old English second person plural pronoun, but is in virtually all variants of modern English acceptable for the second person singular.
Readit News
Uh, I actually did this, it wasn't so bad honestly it just took about a day to rebuild everything.
Honestly the Sony VAIO that I had was _awesome_ in some regards, the hi resolution display was extremely crisp! It fit comfortably in my inside jacket pocket, the battery didn't suck.
The only issue I had honestly was the proprietary connector to get ethernet (though this was more annoying in 2012 when I was doing this, these days laptops don't seem to have ethernet); the only other issue was that the GPU was extremely slow with Linux.
it was probably extremely slow in Windows too, but vista (which was installed on the thing) was far-far too heavy to understand why it was slow at all.
The nearest best laptop I've found that is in all areas superior than the Sony VAIO P-Series (aside from being a bit taller) is the GPD P2 Max which is basically perfect.... if only it had a passively cooled ARM CPU.
https://gpd.hk/gpdp2max2022
But, I agree, I can compile my entire OS including user-space software and desktop environments in about the same time it takes to compile chrome.
Which is scary.
But then again, people want it to do everything (WebUSB, WebGL etc; etc; etc;). So it stands to reason that it's inherently complicated and difficult to compile.
I wonder if the high iteration time hampers development...
Recent jawdrop: 'apt-get install asciidoc' on a pi needs to pull 189 packages, will use 889Mb of additional disk space.
USE flags in Gentoo also allows for a much more configurable system.
I wouldn't trade it for much...
used to be the norm back in the unix days. finding exact pre-compiled binaries for your exact arch/OS combo was like finding a pot 'o gold ;)
am also amazed at how well gba emulators run on older devices!
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/packages/solaris/sparc/
I’m sure it’s been 15 years since I’ve even thought about it.
You really do start to ask yourself if you need a package if compiling it will take a day or two. Hence OpenOffice never got installed.
Save for the processor being better than any VAIO's, I disagree. I find all of these to be absurdly unreliable (crappy firmware) and very cheap hardware for the price, not comparable at all to the typing experience on the P-Series. And the "trackpoint substitute" is a disaster, resembling a "tiny touchpad" more than a trackpoint.
There’s no trackpoint/nipple and I hadn’t considered that a problem as I’m weird and spent a lot of time getting used to only using the keyboard some years ago- so an oversight on my end and you’re completely right, the touchpad sucks.
The firmware is extremely bare bones, but I wouldn’t say it sucks since I don’t have any reason to believe it’s bad. (Nor good, it just works for me.)
I have the GPD Pocket 2 and while the trackpoint thing is not the most precise you get used to it and I have no complaint to do regarding the hardware. It just works.
So many more things could be easily enjoyable on such hardware if the software ecosystem allowed it. I'm also curious what hardware modularity like Framework is doing could have achieved two decades ago: if you could easily plug in a chip to decode/encode video quickly, this computer could probably play any kind of video.
> We have no idea what crates.io thinks it makes sense to require javascript to look up packages but here we are.
I've had a similar experience with crates.io:
Apparently, without a specific Accept header, crates.io thinks i want a JSON response for a crate lookup, not the homepage. Now i don't even remember why i was requesting this URL to start with (not in a script) but i don't understand the logic of that and the maintainers in the chatrooms seemed to consider it's not a bug.I'm also very curious about antiX "proudly anti-fascist" distro but that they're two debian releases late (still on stretch) does not exactly attract me.
I'm dating someone who refers to themself in the first person plural; it becomes perfectly natural pretty quick :)
Sorry, but it is too close to contributing to mental health, or personality, disorders for me.
Then I read these comments.
It seems ambiguous to me, I was honestly trying to figure out if there was more than one person using the author's laptop, or if it was a multi-author article or something.
Not that English isn't chocked full of ambiguity - I just haven't managed to identify a benefit over using the more commonly accepted "I" here.
> The editorial we is a similar phenomenon, in which an editorial columnist in a newspaper or a similar commentator in another medium refers to themselves as we when giving their opinion. Here, the writer casts themselves in the role of spokesperson: either for the media institution who employs them, or on behalf of the party or body of citizens who agree with the commentary. The reference is not explicit, but is generally consistent with first-person plural.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We
It's quite standard usage.
Definitely contributed to me not finishing the article.
No
Someone else recommended it here, but I don't see the advantages over a robust package repository like ubuntu 18 or a minimal ram only distro like puppylinux. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/antix.html
Funny enough I got puppylinux running from a dos (windows) partition and running out of RAM on just 2gb on a Toshiba Portage m200. I've even got Windows XP Tablet edition running on SSD, but it can't really connect to much online due to the TLS limitations. And newer versions of the linux kernel don't support the wireless chipset. It is also difficult putting an old non-PAE kernel into a newer distro.
TLS really killed the utility of a lot of older computers with regards to using the "modern internet".
I agree antiX was a poor choice. No issue with PAE kernel on Tumbleweed i686. If OpenSUSE ever drops x86 support, there's always Debian or Arch 32 (if I want to stick with a rolling distro).
My original reason for reviving it was for use as a whiteboard in Zoom calls, but there's no 32-bit Zoom app - and I'm sure screen sharing while decoding 15 people's video would've been out of the question anyway. So I run a VNC server on it, and share out a VNC session from my work laptop instead.
I've also hit the issue where I've had to compile software for x86 using modern build toolchains. It takes forever, and more often than not, I run out of RAM (only 1GB). To get myself out of a pinch, I've mounted a 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive as swap space. Sure, it makes compiling even the most basic software a multi-hour process, but where this machine isn't my daily driver, it's still easier (to me, at least) than cross-compiling.
"Anti-fascist" doesn't actually mean that - it's a political dog-whistle.
> they're two debian releases late
That's in line with their use of Palemoon, which lags behind normal Firefox feature (and security) releases due to their decision to support older features (mostly XUL) (not that this is very avoidable, because maintaining an XUL fork is very hard work, and not for the faint of heart).
>I've had a similar experience with crates.io:
They do have an API (ps: I built crates.live on top of it). I think they have a very good reasons to block the crawling of their main website. Otherwise, people might abuse it. Actually, they recommend you identify yourself when crawling their API to not limit you. I didn't do it, and found no problem constantly calling their APIs.
https://antixlinux.com/antix-sid-iso-files-available/
If you feel too irked/offended by antiX there is also https://mxlinux.org/
You assume Artemis identifies as a single person. In all likelihood, they are a plural system. Statements like yours are microaggressive at best.
I don't get the "political considerations" part, but this is the first time I've encountered anyone referring to themselves as "we" online, and I also found it jarring.
She got the Dragon Speech software, and I was surprised at how good it was.
You can of course dictate all your notes, documents emails. It also provides means to navigate your OS, start programs, close them, and a lot more.
It is expensive but she could do most of her work with two hands that didnt work.
A while back I saw a video about a guy who wrote code using such software (not sure what he used in particular). This can be tedious "Open bracket", "new line" etc.
He had spent a long time tuning it so it was fast and efficient. He used a set of custom grunts and noises as "macros" for all the bracket brace, and other symbols that are in heavy use in programming languages.
If you were just listening to him and didn't know what he was doing it sounded a bit distressing.
https://www.nuance.com/dragon/businesbs-solutions/dragon-pro...
Anything that's can be templated is. There's natural language integration with LSP. I use Vim mode "naturally" etc...
It's not like reading what's on your screen word by word. It's less input than typing.
You'd use a custom vocabulary as well. So rather than "curly open" you'd use "heck", and instead of "enter" it would be "bark". I'm just making the actual words up here, but the point is to use a different/more simplified vocabulary that's also easier to understand by the computer.
https://talonvoice.com/ is also worth keeping an eye on.
I have been looking into pedals before this ever started, and we looked at some different options, but could not find something that seemed worth it.
I really want a set of foot controls to act as my mouse since growing a third arm is currently not practical. I keep looking around and I know there are some solutions out there, but not in my price range that seems solid.
I wonder if the parent comment typed that URL by hand.
>a dishonorable mention to twitter for being slower than Discord, we wish we were making that up
If you're just browsing Twitter, then the Nitter frontend (https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances) is way, way faster. Does not have algo-recs either, which could be positive. If you need to post, I assume you've tried spoofing user agent to mobile? This might help with bloated sites in general.
For music, mocp, and links+/dillo make a good combo.
Youtube-dl+ytfzf+mpv with a config setting up the youtube-dl format for 420p = heaven.
In ~/.config/mpv/config:
For the rest, Fluxbox+rox+lxappeanrance+nm-applet+xpdf. Ted and Gnumeric as a micro office-suite. Or Siag, if you don't need Unicode.On Chromium, it has a --light switch.
Also, somewhat related: Former Debian maintainer Joey Hess famously used a Dell Mini 9 for all his coding [1, 2]. I wonder if the Sony has a better, less cramped keyboard compared to the Mini 9.
Another interesting guy doing valuable work on low-end, underclocked hardware is Nils M. Holm [3].
Myself, I can get most of my stuff done on a Thinkpad T42 (underclocked to 600 Mhz to reincarnate its dying GPU). With the ram-booted Tiny Core Linux, this thing still flies. I'm having a hard time ditching it because of the 4:3 IPS screen and excellent keyboard. I've even used it to produce lengthy radio programs for my country's public broadcasting.
Aside web browsing, there seems to be more than enough software solutions, hacks, workarounds and programming languages for doing valuable work on rather old hardware these days. Really interesting times we're living in.
Then again, might be true that with yesterday's hardware, you're limited to solving yesterday's problems. I guess I'm fine with yesterday's problems in many aspects of life.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721645
2: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/
3: https://usesthis.com/interviews/nils.m.holm/
Most of my university assignments were done on a Acer Aspire One netbook (1.3/1.6 GHz Dual Core Atom, 2 GB DDR2 RAM) and I had no problem. To program in C, C++, and Python in Debian is simple great, and to simulate circuits with SPICE related software on Windows 7 is also good.
I started using it because it was more light and more comfortable than the newer laptop I had (15" 4th gen Intel i5 laptop), and as a small device for reading PDF is great, so i ended up using it more and more, and for more tasks, leaving it for exclusive academic usage and letting the other for games and media.
It was supposed to be a disposable laptop, it outlasted and persisted through everything else.
Another discovery I made a long time ago was network connections are usually fast enough and small battery friendly CPUs are slow enough that its faster to send a video file to AWS (or have it there to begin with), spawn a linux box on AWS, run handbrake in CLI mode to convert the video to some obscure format on a very CPU beefy machine, and download the converted file, and delete the huge (and expensive) AWS instance, than it is to transcode video locally. Some CPU based transcoding is very slow if you don't have a lot of cores and its brutal thermally and to the battery.
If you only have one SaaS app in your life, the old meme was what do you do when the internet is down? Well, the internet is almost never down for me, I'd pick up my laptop and go to a cafe or library if it was, and everything I do is online or SaaS or VPN'd in so I wouldn't crabby about one app being down I'd be crabby about being completely and totally shut down.
That anti-SaaS argument in 2020's is like arguing that people have to drink bottled water because what would they do if tap water stopped working one day? If we're in a situation where the tap water stops working then we got bigger problems than which bottled water company to enrichen.
The linked article seemed surprised that a 2009 device could play video, but I had been using Mythtv for 7 years by that point including occasional HD video on a relatively weak settop box class of computer and doing youtube for awhile so his specs for playback seem very low compared to what I was doing in '09 on small devices, but whatever.
I used a Raspberry Pi 4 (1500 Mhz) as a daily driver for 4 days. Struggled with hidpi scaling, no Signal Messenger, overheating CPU, Youtube at 360p, HTML Gmail.
I went so far to upgrade Pi to SSD, plus heat sink. Considering adding active cooling... but the said nope, back to Macbook Pro. Why do we even try?
Rather than watching YouTube directly, use youtube-dl with VLC. Rather than using HTML Gmail, use IMAP and a native email client. Rather than using Eclipse, use vim.
We all fall into patterns. We grow to find comfort in those. But, we can't expect to maintain those patterns when circumstances change.
Depends on how hard you want to try or compromise on.
[0]: https://twitter.com/EverfreeArtemis
[1}: https://artemis.sh/
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