Title: Old Computer Challenge v3: postmortem

	Title: Old Computer Challenge v3: postmortem
	Author: Solène
	Date: 17 July 2023
	Tags: occ occ23 oldcomputerchallenge
	Description:

	# Challenge report

	Hi! I've not been very communicative about my week during the Old
	Computer Challenge v3, the reason is that I failed it. Time for a
	postmortem (analysis of what happened) to understand the failure!

	For the context, the last time I was using a restricted hardware was
	for the first edition of the challenge two years ago. Last year
	challenge was about reducing Internet connectivity.

	# Wasn't prepared

	I have to admit, I didn't prepare anything. I thought I could simply
	limit the requirements on my laptop, either on OpenBSD or openSUSE and
	enjoy the challenge. It turned out it was more complicated than that.

	* OpenBSD memory limitation code wasn't working on my system for some
	reason (I should report this issue)
	* openSUSE refused to boot with 512 MB of memory under 30 minutes, even
	by adding swap, and I couldn't log in through GDM once there

	I had to figure a backup plan, which turned to be using Alpine Linux
	installed on a USB memory stick, memory and core number restriction
	worked out of the box, figuring how to effectively reduce the frequency
	was hard, but I did it finally.

	From this point, I had a non-encrypted Alpine Linux on a poor storage
	medium. What would I do with this? Nothing much.

	# Memory limitation

	It turns out that in 2 years, my requirements evolved a bit. 512 MB
	wasn't enough to use a web browser with JavaScript, and while I thought
	it wouldn't be such a big deal, it WAS.

	I regularly need to go on some websites, doing it on my non-trusted
	smartphone is a no-go, so I need a computer, and Firefox on 512 MB just
	doesn't work. Chromium almost work, but it depends on the page, and
	WebKit browser often didn't work well enough.

	Here is a sample of websites I needed to visit:

	* OVH web console
	* Patreon web page
	* Bank service
	* Some online store
	* Mastodon (I have such a huge flow that CLI tools doesn't work well
	for me)
	* Kanban tool
	* Deepl for translation
	* Replying to people on some open source project Discourse forums
	* Managing stuff in GitHub (gh tool isn't always on-par with the web
	interface)

	For this reason, I often had to use my "work" computer to do the tasks,
	and ended up inadvertently continuing on this computer :(

	In addition to web browsing, some programs like LanguageTool (a java
	GUI spellcheck program) required too much memory to be started, so I
	couldn't even spell check my blog posts (Aspell is not as complete as
	LanguageTool).

	# CPU limitation

	At first when I thought about the rules for the 3rd edition, the CPU
	frequency seemed to be the worst part. In practice, the system was
	almost swapping continuously but wasn't CPU bound. Hardware
	acceleration was fast enough to play videos smoothly.

	If you can make good use of the 512 MB of memory, you certainly won't
	have CPU problems.

	# Security issues

	This is not related to the challenge itself, but I felt a bit stuck
	with my untrusted Alpine Linux, I have some ssh / GPG keys that are
	secured on two systems and my passwords, I almost can't do anything
	without them, and I didn't want to take the risk of compromising my
	security chain for the challenge.

	In fact, since I started using Qubes OS, I started being reluctant to
	mix all my data on a single system, even the other one I'm used to
	being working with (which has all the credentials too), but Qubes OS is
	the anti-oldcomputerchallenge as you need to throw the more hardware
	you can to make it useful.

	# Not a complete failure

	However, the challenge wasn't such a complete failure for me. While I
	can't say I played by the rules, it definitely helped me to realize the
	changes in my computer use over the last years. This was the point
	when I started the "offline laptop" project three years ago, which
	transformed into the old computer challenge the year after.

	I tried to use less the computer as I wasn't able to fulfill the
	challenge requirements, and did some stuff IRL at home and outside, the
	week went SUPER FAST, I was astonished to realize it's already over.
	This also forced me to look for solutions, so I spent a LOT of time
	trying to make Firefox fit in 512 MB, TLDR it didn't work.

	The LEAST memory I'd need nowadays is 1 GB of memory, it's still not
	much compared to what we have nowadays (my main system has 32 GB), but
	it's twice the first requirements I've set.

	# Conclusion

	It seems everyone had a nice week with the challenge, I'm very happy to
	see the community enjoying this every year. I may not be the challenge
	paragon for this year, but it was useful to me, and since then I
	couldn't stop thinking about how to improve my computer usage.

	Next challenge should be two weeks long :)