Wrap up after Solene's Challenge ================================ Last edited: $Date: 2021/07/16 09:51:30 $ Wrap up after one week using FreeBSD 13 on an old Acer Aspire One ZG5. The world wide web ------------------ Solene's Challenge helped me to realize what has become of our web browser. My experience as a user of the world wide web goes a long way. I remember people complaining massively when the first "commercial" websites were erected. These were company websites. The mailing lists where full of it. People had realized that the web was a very democratic way to share both information as opinions. Websites where mostly setup by knowledge institutions like universities, and personal homepages of the common people. And now these companies started to have an appearance on "our" internet ... I started with Mosaic, than moved the Netscape. After this came Mozilla and Firefox. Also, I haved used lynx, elinks and w3m a lot. Lynx used to be part of the standard installation of Linux. And I still do use these text mode browsers a lot, mainly because of speed, readability, less distractions and less annoying ads. Resource hungry graphical browsers ---------------------------------- Browsers like Firefox, Chromium, and Chrome have become immense. From this list, on my Acer Aspire One ZG5 I only installed Firefox. It turned out to be absolutely not usable. The 512 Mb RAM on this laptop is not enough. These browsers are slowly evolving into a platform to deliver virtual machines on our laptops beyond our control. Digital restriction management will become more and more part of our lives, and the web browser will be one way to enforce that to us. There is not much we can do to stop this. The parties that govern the w3c standards are there to make the ultra-rich even richer, and don't act in the interest of the common people. So, we have to look at what we is under our control. And that is only our behavior, I already only follow RSS-feeds of websites that I can open in w3m or eww. I still use lynx. And now, that as a result of Solene's Challenge, I have come aware, I will start making less use of Firefox, Chromium, and so on. From the challenge I learned that `links -g` still can do a great job. Fediverse --------- I have a Mastodon account and have started playing with a personal Pleroma server. Through the challenge I came to realize that these environments rely on modern web technologies and cannot be used with a text browser without JavaScript support. From the Libera.chat channel #old-computer-challenge I learned about `toot`, a text mode Python Mastodon- and Pleroma-client. This is a great way to go through your timeline. It is fast. Of course, this doesn't show any images, but with the can also be done with `links -g` (through the V (view) option). Disk-less laptop ---------------- After the initial install of FreeBSD 13 on the old 8 GB SSD, the SSD completely crashed and the laptop couldn't even boot from USB anymore, so I had to disconnect that from the motherboard. So I did the challenge week with a disk-less laptop, booting FreeBSD 13 from an USB stick. This was not a problem at all, it runs all the needed applications. Ratpoison window manager ------------------------ Because of the small 8.9 inch screen I choose for the Ratpoison window manager. At the time this Aces was my daily driver I also used Ratpoison on it. In fact, I have used Ratpoison for more than a decade and only switched to i3 about two years ago. It turned out my muscle memory was still there. Emacs ----- I only started using Emacs seriously a few months ago. One of the ways to get more acquainted to it, I moved from Newsboat to Elfeed for reading RSS feeds. It turned out that Elfeed on Emacs works really fine on this machine. When updating the feed, htop shows full use of memory and quite some use of CPU power. After the feeds are updated, and going through the feeds, reading them in Elfeed and opening links in eww, I don't see much performance difference compared to my 'normal' $HOME laptop. Maybe this is because I have configured eww to use the standard font and not to show images, both on my `'normal' $HOME laptop as on this Acer. Not much else -------------- I hardly watch movies, or go to YouTube and so on, only occasionally to watch some episode from Reiner Koenig or so. I also don't use Netflix. So these things I didn't miss. The normal stuff I do is ssh to my central shell-server (a FreeBSD jail running tmux with irssi, mcabber and mutt), so this is no difference for any other laptop (which is the reason I choose for such a setup many years ago). 8.9 inch laptop --------------- This laptop has been on the attic, out of my site, for some time. But now it is back, I still enjoy the form factor. It is small, light weight, and has a decent keyboard (which is a bit small, but you get used to that pretty quick). Too bad, small 'netbooks' like this are not sold any more. Enjoyed the Challenge --------------------- The initial part, with the SSD going crazy, and having to open up the laptop to disconnect it, was quite adventurous. The challenge also attracted some nice people to the Libera.chat channel. All in all I enjoyed the challenge, and don't want to end this wrap up without a very big "thank you" to Solene!