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 :)