2022-09-23
My recent stint in the UK was a palate cleanser, the mountain between two valleys where I got to look back on an old way of life and the new landscape before me. Right now, the road ahead glitters with opportunities to learn new things, such as permacomputing.
A couple weeks ago, I found a link to Low Tech Magazine from ~cmccabe in the Rawtext.club archives, and haven't been able to stop thinking about using Linux to keep "old" hardware performant for everyday practical purposes.
How and why I stopped buying new laptops (Low Tech Magazine)
Personally, I feel that modern laptop hardware should last 10-15 years, but modern laptop makers obviously disagree. The "planned obsolesence" approach to product strategy has led to a "throwaway culture", which leads to yucky things like environmental pollution through improperly disposed devices and an increase in carbon emissions through new hardware manufacturing.
It all seems like such a depressing waste, and if tactical adoption of low-tech alongside clever use of software can mitigate the negative impacts, why shouldn't we have a go?
I've realised that being only semi-technical and somewhat competent means I'm limited in what I can actually do. But where this once might have discouraged me, it now makes me very curious as to what impact a person can have at lower skill levels.
To that end, here are some of the constraints and criteria for my exploration of permacomputing:
1. I'm not here to fuck spiders. A little fucking around and customising is fine, but nothing that is overly time-consuming, requires expert knowledge, or involves any mysterious obstacles or a "that's just how it works" flavour of shitness.
2. The end result must past the parents test. As in, my parents. They are needs-driven in that if they need to do something, they won't balk at exploring new habits and software to accomplish this. But they won't tolerate any unnecessary fussing about. Benefit must outweigh cost in effort and money.
Yeah, it's a bit wishy-washy, but the crux of it comes down to needing a not-fucked setup experience and a not-shit end-user experience.
For my first project, my dearly beloved has volunteered a 2015 MacBook Pro, which is on its last legs on macOS 10.4 (Mojave). I'm hoping to get it snappy again with some kind of lightweight Linux operating system.
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