This basically was the first day that I wasn't mostly using my work
computer during the day. And the heat here in Munich often wasn't
as oppressive, so I actually found myself in front of my Cinema
Display for a few hours and could see how much of my "spare time
computing" I could do with this hobble machine.
So here are the boring results:
ALPINE EXPERIENCES
So after Slackware failed me due to size constraints, I've been
"living" in Alpine for the first time ever. I'm no stranger to
minimalistic Linux distributions (Arch, Void), and my first
experiences with the OS required a lot more manual involvement,
including finding out "modelines" for the X11 server.
So this wasn't entirely too difficult. If there was something
missing, I had a good idea what package to look for. A few short
notes about my trials & tribulations
- Boy, they really need to add an 'install' alias to their package
manager. It's "apk add", but I just enter "apk install" all the
time.
- My video card uses the intel driver, and due to some combination
of hardware, kernel and actual driver, it got glitchy a few times.
Total freeze for a few seconds, garbage output at the top of the
screen. If the Wyse Terminal isn't totally botched, I might be
able to figure some solution for this by fiddling aroudn with
the configuration.
- The package selection is quite good, although not as extensive
as Slackware would've been. This is mostly noticeable with older
software, as the trendy stuff gets added by the current users.
I had to install my favorite low-tech window manager myself (lwm),
and the netsurf browser is only available in the bleeding edge
version.
- Speaking of browsers, I've had very bad luck with most of the
graphical ones. Basically every webkit version I tried (midori,
badwolf, qutebrowser) had the rendering engine crash. I guess
they all require something that isn't present in my installation,
maybe a compositor, dbus, etc.?
Firefox worked, but phew, basically any page that has more than
a few images fills my precious 512 megabytes of RAM all by itself.
So I'm back to lynx for most of my browsing.
GUI VS TERMINAL APPLICATIONS
My intention for this challenge was using mostly GUI applications.
Doing most of the things possible in the terminal seemed a bit of
an easy way out. Using a Unix system as some kind of terminal
multiplexer has been quite popular for decades now, and applications
that just do their graphics via a fixed-width character screen
save a lot regarding dependencies and RAM.
Not that this is always the case. If your application is written
in an interpreted language like Python, you might end up taking
up a lot of memory just with the basic functionality of your
program, and the RAM saved with a simpler GUI isn't noticeable.
And sometimes, things are just weird. I recentlyl tried installing
the new "zellij" program, and it took up a multiple of what those
programs did. Who knew, rewriting everything in Rust isn't an
automatic success...
But let me say it clearly: I like GUI applications. Or even more
clearly: I like GUI applications as they once were.
You can have well-rendered text using a proportional font, aren't
constrained by a fixed character grid or they characters themselves
when it comes to creating interactive elements.
Early Mac applications, some Amiga, Atari and RiscOS programs, and
arguably a few of the better OS X apps from the 00s are my prime
example of what can be done with the medium. I'd like to have more
of those, but in recent years the main design paradigm has been
the world wide web, which in turn has been graphically "designed"
by people coming more from an advertisement background, not from
desktop applications (leading to the horrible "UX"/"UI" split that
shouldn't be there in the first place). And after a while of this
being everyhwere, you expect your desktop applications to look
more like what you're interacting most of the time in your browser.
I don't really see a way back from this...
But this is the "old computer challenge", so some old-fashioned
GUI apps would seem well-suited for this.
I just have a hard time finding them for my installation. That's
one of the detriments of open source systems, you usually get the
most recent apps. Apps that have been modernized or that have
replaced the sleeker older programs.
Not that there weren't that many paragons on the Linux desktop
anyways, compared to the systems I've mentioned above.
I've got an mp3 player that tries to look like winamp. All great,
but it does that in 50 megs of RAM and with many unused features,
including a totally different UI entirely.
I've got no luck with a smaller web browser, but given that most
of their bulk comes from the basic web engine, there's little
hope here. I wouldn't even focus that much on the graphical
fidelity itself. Give me something like lynx, but with better
text rendering and good concurrent data handling (no freezes or
long pauses when downloading etc.).
The LaGrange app for Gemini/Gopher would be quite okay, preferably
using a more standardized GUI not a DIY solution in SDL.
Maybe we should bring back Motif and have a try at a new CDE.
Apart from a bit of nostalgia, I've got no good opinion about
the first version, but maybe it's a handhold to get some marketing
excitement.
I don't even want to get started about the misplaced assumption
that terminal UI apps are closer to the "Unix nature". I've got
some general ideas about what that's worth, but aside from that,
let's note that the "true" inheritors of Unix went in a different
direction with Plan 9 or Inferno.
