Up until a few years ago, I was exclusively using old, slow second hand computers and trying to make the most of of them. Mostly out of necessity, as I had basically no money.My main computer was a Thinkpad X40 up until around 2015, running NetBSD. Then I used an HP T620 thin-client.On them I was mostly running small C and Scheme software from suckless or that i wrote myself, and Ma (ACME clone) as my environment for email, programming, IRC, etc…Luakit was the browser because it was the only one not painfully slow. Javascript was almost always disabled and that was fine.I don’t exactly remember when it changed, I think it was gradual, as I got more powerful computers to play games and stuff, during the covid lockdowns.Now I run a completely standard software stack, KDE on Linux, my chat software runs on electron, emails in thunderbird…And… I feel miserable, i find everything so complex and sluggish and irritating. I don’t feel like I can change anything or contribute in any meaningful way.I think it’s slowly sapping my love for computers (and current trajectories are not helping)…I want to get that old joy back, I want my computer to be my creative tool again. I don’t want to depend on modern hardware and software.I would like to talk to like-minded people about it.#permacomputing (i suppose)
