ffog OCC3 Day 4
===============

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.


July 13, 2023