Solène Rapenne

3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that time, but the upgrade was completely smooth.

My idea when I installed Haiku was to make my own version of the "old computer challenge"[1], with an emphasis on using GUI apps.

Similarly to @probono (a FOSS dev), I also found Haiku "shockingly good"[2] at being a lightweight, responsive, easy-to-use desktop OS.

After some patching, I was even able to compile Tectonic[3], a modern LaTeX engine written in Rust, and Quaternion a Matrix client supporting E2EE[4]. All that running on a single core Athlon 64 and 1.5GB of RAM.

I posted some screenshots in a Mastodon threads if you are curious[5] (but my posts are in french sorry :/). And of course this comment is posted from Haiku!

[1]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-challenge.html

[2]: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-first-day-with-haiku-shockingly-good-8930cad4bbb0

[3]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/

[4]: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion

[5]: https://mastodon.tedomum.net/@tgoldoin/109554115997967651

K.Mandla and Inconsolation were my inspiration sources. I still use a minimalist setup since mid-late 2000's, and it's amazing. No distractions, pure music from Jamendo/Magnatune, no notifications, no nothing. Mails, RSS' and news are fetched automatically via Cron, and read in text mode.

And OFC as I played text adventures thru retroemulation since ~2002, I play IF and Roguelikes as my main gaming sources. For the rest, libre gaming.

My setup it's an Atom n270 netbook with 1GB of RAM + 1GB of ZRAM acting like 2GB, but currently I'm following Solene's challenge on low resources, so I have 512MB of physical RAM limited by a Syslinux boot flag and a single core:
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-06-04-old-computer-challenge-v3.html

Once you use Groff+MuPDF, sc-im, mutt, AWK, and a few of C (Unix low-level knowledge) and Scheme (global CS terms), your skills skyrocket with very few resources and lower electricity bills. I could even chat with some nice people from Mastodon at https://brutaldon.org and using Lynx and by calling sxiv/mpv externally for image and media links.

I really enjoyed participating in Solene%'s Old Computer Challenge 2022: <https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-07-01-oldcomputerchallenge-v2-rtc.html>

I adjusted my rules a bit to make them fit into my setup (WFH, Homekit lights, etc), the main challenge being that rather than accounting for time spent online and trying to limit it to 1h, I just wouldn't go online at all (unless for work). It was a wonderful week, and even one week can start to make a long-term impact!

Another thing worth trying is to leave your phone at home, and attend to your "digital needs" from a smartwatch. The screen is too small and the input too quirky to be efficient at wasting attention, but you can still get directions, pay for stuff, reply to a message, etc. (I actually don't have mobile data on my watch so I need the phone to keep the watch online, but I'm mindful of when I'm in "no phone mode". You can also seize the opportunity and just go offline, without giving up on things such as checking the time or playing music.)

Random question regarding OpenBSD:

I'm curious why you suggested OpenBSD vs Linux? I read through your linked "OpenBSD : why and how" [1] article - as well as the secondary linked article from that page [2] - and couldn't help but notice how many of the reasons listed were reasons why not to use OpenBSD. More than that, the limitations (while I do understand the value of doing simple things well) of the system seem highly constraining.

Do you use OpenBSD for all your devices, all the time? Or is it more of a thing where OpenBSD serves your needs perfectly for some smaller subset of what a "computer" is, and for everything else you have a separate device to fill those needs? (An ipad/macbook for media consumption, a home server for handling media related tasks, etc.)

Love the general sentiment behind the article, btw. The OpenBSD thing just really stood out to me as I read through it.

[1] - https://sive.rs/openbsd
[2] - https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-06-22-openbsd-selling-arguments.html

> they consider ZFS "non–free" on par with the GPL

Why isn't it? The CDDL is basically the MPL, which in-turn is basically the LGPL.

The jihad against the GPL by FreeBSD and conveniently ignoring the CDDL being weak-copyleft was always ironic to me.

> and the devs probably haven't had one either

solene@ left and stated the filesystem as a supporting reason:

> I have grievances against OpenBSD file system. Every time OpenBSD crash, and it happens very often for me when using it as a desktop, it ends with file corrupted or lost files. This is just not something I can accept.

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-11-15-why-i-stopped-using-openbsd.html

Ansible makes mutable changes to the OS, task by task.

Nix is immutable. A new change is made entirely new, and only after the build is successful, all packages are "symlinked" to the current system.

Fedora Silverblue is based on ostree [1]. It works similarly like git, but on your root tree. But it requires you to reboot the whole system for the changes to take effect. Since Nix is just symlinked packages, you don't need to reboot the system.

More detailed explanation here [2].

[1]: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree

[2]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-07-12-intro-to-immutable-os.html