💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~aprilnightk › gemlog › 2022 › 08 › 20-how-many-computers.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 16:37:30. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

2022-08-20 - RE: How many computers do you have?

ew0k has started a pretty interesting discussion thread, so I might as well chime in (perhaps a bit late to the party :D )

Original post

I'll loosely describe what I have.

Computers proper

A Lenovo laptop with Arch. It's my daily driver. If my memory serves we well, it's 13 years old. Its battery is dead, its keyboard is dead, but otherwise it works flawlessly and I almost never feel restrained by its computing power. I attach a second screen to it via a VGA cable.

An even older stationary PC, of which I don't remember any specs. It's just there, used for experementation. List of systems that were ever installed on its' hardware: Windows XP, Xubuntu, HaikuOS, Kolibri, Kali Linux, 9Front, and currently - FreeBSD. It's headless, but whenever I need to run it I just physically reattach the second screen from my laptop to it's VGA port.

Communicators

A Philips feature phone. I use it to make calls and receive SMS.

A smartphone, used for reading, surfing, and SSH-ing to virtual servers. I didn't want to have a smartphone, and I abstained for a prolonged amount of time - but I was eventually forced to.

Others

An Android tablet. My grandma got a new tablet so I took her older one. It's still somewhere in my drawer.

Some little netbook which came with Windows 10 preinstalled. I went to great pains to purge the system and force a Xubuntu install onto it. It works, and I can't remember how I did it. It required a lot of weird configuration.

A E-ink book reader. An old but a good one. But I must admit that I mostlyread from my smart phone screen now, because it's smaller and more handy when on commute.

Conclusion

I never realized how ancient most of my gear is. I'm fine with it, though. It shows that depending on how you use your computers, you probably don't need the bleeding edge. The idea of switching to a new laptop gives me a headache. I will need to reconfigure everything. Will it work fine with Linux? Will there be some weird restrictions, which weren't present in the times of older hardware?

...Think I should go see whether my grandma's old Android tablet is still alive.

- - - - - - -

Keith Aprilnight (aprilnightk@tilde.team)