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Joey Hess' minimal approach

joey.hess.usesthis.com

11–20 of 122 posts

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#14
post #3

I love this setup. After the new ARM chromebook came out I got all excited and looked about for a way to dual boot a full OS on my old series 5. It turns out it's easy now ( http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/chrubuntu-1204-n... ) There is a lot of pleasure in using such a small machine. I am definitely looking forward to an e-ink laptop. As I get older my eyes grow more weary, but the e-ink display on my ki…

My main gripe with chromebooks is that they don't have a windows key (KEY_LEFTMETA). As a xmonad user, I have quite a lot of functionality bound to that key and I'm not too sure about moving it over to KEY_LEFTALT (mostly because of conflicts with my Emacs key bindings).

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#15
big respect to this guy and he seems to make awesome software. But using a 5 year old netbook with very low resolution and 2gigs of ram, no external Screen and dialup modems for internet doesnt seem like a very productive working enviroment...but if it works for him, why not, but this is clearly is too minimal for my taste ;)

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#16
It sounds like the new Chromebook is a pretty good solution for him. Or maybe wait a year more for the next-gen one, which hopefully will have a 4 cell battery.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#17

"If it doesn't have a keyboard, I feel that my thoughts are being forced out through a straw." Beautiful.

Yeah. Says the guy doing all his work on a 1024 x 600 display. I mean the guy no harm, but so much of what he says strikes me as incredibly back-worldly. Like using dial-up and limiting yourself to fan-less laptops. I mean I get the "thin terminal" philosophy where you have a shit laptop that connects to something much more potent. But where's the point if the connection sucks as well.

I guess in the end we have vastly different use cases, which is perfectly fine. I found it a quite interesting, if a little obscure, article to read.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#18
post #15

big respect to this guy and he seems to make awesome software. But using a 5 year old netbook with very low resolution and 2gigs of ram, no external Screen and dialup modems for internet doesnt seem like a very productive working enviroment...but if it works for him, why not, but this is clearly is too minimal for my taste ;)

It is just random thoughts, but may be this very limited setup helps to think through software he develop more which probably results in better software overall.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#19

"If it doesn't have a keyboard, I feel that my thoughts are being forced out through a straw." Beautiful.

Yeah. Says the guy doing all his work on a 1024 x 600 display. I mean the guy no harm, but so much of what he says strikes me as incredibly back-worldly. Like using dial-up and limiting yourself to fan-less laptops. I mean I get the "thin terminal" philosophy where you have a shit laptop that connects to something much more potent. But where's the point if the connection sucks as well. I guess in the end we have vast…

For writing or coding, a decent keyboard seems much more important than a high resolution screen. For consuming stuff the converse is true. (Even though I also prefer a high res display, and he mentions that it took him some time to set up Xmonad in a way that allowed him to effectively work with such a low-res display).

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#20
post #16

It sounds like the new Chromebook is a pretty good solution for him. Or maybe wait a year more for the next-gen one, which hopefully will have a 4 cell battery.

I've been looking for a replacement for my Mini 9 and this seems to be about the only thing out there. Microsoft sure has strong armed everyone to make things with regular HDDs because they needed to run Windows... I actually went into Microcenter last year looking for a SSD netbook, and they practically chased me out of the store, and added $50 to everything that wasn't Windows (which they didn't have the prices on anyway). Does anyone know of a company that has Netbooks without Windows on them at a $250 price point? Dell's Linux pages are non-existent. I can't believe that something I bought in 2008 is now double the price.
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