(2025-10-27) Make computing personal again: return to the roots
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Digging out old (or otherwise weak) hardware is extremely useful sometimes.
It helps you rememeber what's really important and what's just bells and
whistles. For instance, after successful tryouts of Alpine and MX Linux, the
next candidate for my old MacBook Air A1370 became Bodhi Linux. Yes, it's
based upon (an older version of) Ubuntu LTS, but the system itself is
revamped enough to consider it quite an independent distro. I'd say, despite
some idiosyncrasies, it's just as capable as MX for "reviving" such old
laptops with 2GB RAM and a weak dual-core CPU. But that's not my primary
topic of today. It's just a case when I, after installing this distro,
started thinking about which software I really need in my day-to-day life.
The first thing is, of course, a good terminal emulator. As I probably
already mentioned, ligature support is a must for me (Fira Code font in
particular), so I use patched st for X and Contour for Wayland. Inside the
terminal, my workflow revolves around three things: a nice shell (usually, a
recent bash or oksh), a nice text editor (modern Vim) and a nice session
manager (tmux). All these things require additional configs and plugins that
I have used to move from system to system. This is complemented with a few
other third-party CLI utilities such as grep, curl, aria2, rlwrap, jq, fq,
fzf, mpg123, ffmpeg, sox and the imagemagick package. That comprises like
90% of what I use from the generic perspective, besides the browser, the mpv
player, LLM-related stuff, VPN-related stuff (like ZeroTier CLI), Android
platform tools and some proprietary messenger apps.
What about the rest, you may ask? Well, the rest is pretty much DIY: my own
scripts written in POSIX shell, POSIX AWK, Tcl and sometimes Python. And
this is the essence of how I want it to stay. In fact, once the tooling
fundamentals are stabilized with the aforementioned things, one doesn't need
a lot besides shell, AWK and Tcl/Tk to do pretty much anything else on a
local desktop. These three runtimes are 1) much simpler and more enjoyable
to learn, 2) require much less system resources, and 3) train your brain
much better than any of those modern software stacks, let alone any
genAI-related "vibe coding" nonsense. Alas, most distros (esp. ones based on
the oldstable Debian/Ubuntu versions) still ship with Tcl/Tk 8.6 instead of
9.0 (and 8.6 still has much better "ecosystem" support), but that doesn't
matter much anyway, it still is a solid choice and I can't emphasize enough
how easy it is to pick up by a total newcomer to programming. It's a true
gem of indie software development, and I feel like this gem is yet to be
rediscovered by those who want to make computing personal again.
That being said, I also need to dig up another laptop of mine, an even older
one. Because, with the right software stack, there's no such thing as
obsolete hardware. And I think I already have every piece required to prove
this point.
