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 :)