Permacomputing • Hacker News Board

Re: Permacomputing

#11

Post by CursedSilicon » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #6

The best way in to permacomputing, imo, continues to be: Get an old used Thinkpad. Put Linux or one of the BSDs on it. Use low-resource options: LDXE, i3wm. Go about your business driving this thing however you want to. Learn to live within its limits. This is truly the computer as bicycle for the mind.

[flagged]

Re: Permacomputing

#12

Post by jdmoreira » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 10:23 AM UTC

CursedSilicon wrote: post #11

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #6

The best way in to permacomputing, imo, continues to be: Get an old used Thinkpad. Put Linux or one of the BSDs on it. Use low-resource options: LDXE, i3wm. Go about your business driving this thing however you want to. Learn to live within its limits. This is truly the computer as bicycle for the mind.

[flagged]

Can you please say more. Curious to learn more about this

Re: Permacomputing

#13

Post by nehal3m » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 10:27 AM UTC

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #6

The best way in to permacomputing, imo, continues to be: Get an old used Thinkpad. Put Linux or one of the BSDs on it. Use low-resource options: LDXE, i3wm. Go about your business driving this thing however you want to. Learn to live within its limits. This is truly the computer as bicycle for the mind.

I agree. I flip between Apple's ecosystem and FOSS a few times a year. My wife recently dropped her cracked iPhone SE in the tub so it died. I gave her my 13 mini and decided to challenge myself to switch back to my Thinkpad and Fairphone for at least a year. Since I wouldn't really be needing sync features either I disabled iCloud and moved back offline.

Much simpler, much more in my control. At the end of the day most computers built in the last 10 years don't break a sweat doing the things I need one for. Same for phones. It makes you much more resilient against hardware failure, and if you go through the pain of converting your stuff to open formats you're basically free as a bird.

Re: Permacomputing

#14

Post by EndShell » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 10:31 AM UTC

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #6

The best way in to permacomputing, imo, continues to be: Get an old used Thinkpad. Put Linux or one of the BSDs on it. Use low-resource options: LDXE, i3wm. Go about your business driving this thing however you want to. Learn to live within its limits. This is truly the computer as bicycle for the mind.

Any older business class laptop really. I have an two older Laptops. One is a Dell 6410.

The former has Debian on it with Gnome and I've stuck 8Gb of ram on the machine, slapped in an SSD.

The machine is 14 years old and it can reasonably handle browsing, mail, Youtube, Discord and VSCode. Gnome actually performs better than XFCE or any of the light-weight DE as long as I am using Wayland.

Re: Permacomputing

#15

Post by Philpax » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 10:31 AM UTC

jdmoreira wrote: post #12

CursedSilicon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can you please say more. Curious to learn more about this

https://tilde.team/~ben/suckmore/

Re: Permacomputing

#16

Post by moconnor » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

The landing page doesn't actually describe what it is. Is it using old chips and writing low level code? Is it open source? You kind of have to define a movement somehow, right?

An example of what a permacomputing solution to a problem vs a traditional one would look like would do a lot of work here. Perhaps where "ପໄଓ -:*´" is...

Re: Permacomputing

#17

Post by markus_zhang » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #6

The best way in to permacomputing, imo, continues to be: Get an old used Thinkpad. Put Linux or one of the BSDs on it. Use low-resource options: LDXE, i3wm. Go about your business driving this thing however you want to. Learn to live within its limits. This is truly the computer as bicycle for the mind.

Nowadays I only purchase used mobile workstations. I can get a 32GB Dell under 700 CAD including tax and delivery. It was really a deal.

New laptops are so expensive and unreliable that they might actually break down sonner than my used ones...

Re: Permacomputing

#18

Post by project2501a » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

Lovely. More neo-liberalism in neo-hippy format. The next Burning Man: Save the planet, compute in older hardware.

Detractors: You can't be anti-capitalist without being on the other side. Also, you can't put individual issues above societal issues.

Re: Permacomputing

#19

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

CursedSilicon wrote: post #11

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #6

The best way in to permacomputing, imo, continues to be: Get an old used Thinkpad. Put Linux or one of the BSDs on it. Use low-resource options: LDXE, i3wm. Go about your business driving this thing however you want to. Learn to live within its limits. This is truly the computer as bicycle for the mind.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Permacomputing

#20

Post by maeln » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 10:38 AM UTC

jdmoreira wrote: post #12

CursedSilicon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can you please say more. Curious to learn more about this

As far as I know: https://tilde.team/~ben/suckmore/

But, as someone who also didn't know about the drama before last week or something, I never really liked suckless anyway. It always felt like the same pretensions minimalist movement you see in other field. Yeah it is very easy to make something with barely any feature work well and be tiny. Now try to do the same with something I actually want to use.