After this challenge, I feel like I immediately need another challenge:
don't use a computer at all for a month. The combination of so much
computer usage along with thinking about my relationship with them is
giving me a desire to take a break :)
Yesterday I was thinking about this 'supplemental machine to the old
machine' and ended up refreshing the Eee PC I have laying around with
Alpine Linux. Now the iBook feels less cluttered, not trying to do a
bunch of stuff all at once. Feel like I can focus in on some of the
programs I've been wanting to dive into deeper.
Notes on Alpine Linux
---------------------
Most of my previous experience with Alpine is from within a VM or
booting from USB as a temporary system all in RAM. One of its claims to
fame is being very popular inside of Docker, and primarily used as a
server. It's absolutely capable of running as a desktop, but the
selection of WM and DE is not as 'ready to go' as desktop-focused
distros. It's great if you're into getting X/Wayland going yourself and
configuring things precisely. But if you expect to just install a WM and
have it preconfigured in your login manager, you may be in for a
surprise.
DWM is one of the few options which can be easily installed and in my
experience works perfectly. I tried installing a few others (bspwm,
wmaker, jwm) with less immediate luck. Some of the pages in their
handbook about this are old, so check the wiki instead. It's been a long
time since I attempted to use DWM but it seems pretty good. Close enough
to Xmonad for me to feel comfortable.
RAM usage in Alpine without X on this system is around 40mb. In DWM with
a few terminals it's around 65mb. Adding Firefox with a few tabs and I'm
around 400mb.
The Eternally Shrinking Computer
--------------------------------
Months back, I built a family computer with the kids, an AMD mini-itx
system with a decent GPU. For a while, I was using this a lot, nice and
beefy. My old Xeon Lenovo D30 had an issue so it got decommissioned for
now. Then a few other things changed, through work I got a decent
Macbook Pro, and stopped using my custom PC for work. Suddenly it was
only used by the kids for gaming!
For my personal machine elsewhere in the house I went through some
hardware I had laying around, but when I came across a Lenovo
ThinkCentre m810z at a pawn shop for $60, I ended up just using it. My
custom PC was WAY more expensive, but I was happier on random junk.
During this challenge, after using an iBook G3 only for a few days,
suddenly an Eee PC feels like a workstation with endless power. The only
thing which is not comfortable is popping open tons and tons of browser
tabs, which is fine by me, because the web sucks.
