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by usrbinbash 467 days ago
> Get an old used Thinkpad. Put Linux or one of the BSDs on it. Use low-resource options: LDXE, i3wm.

And then people use this upcycled, environmentally friendly option to connect to social media, their music provider, 2-3 streaming services, their workplace account, and various AI systems, all of which require datacenters eating up so much energy, that by now we consider building nuclear power plants just for them.

1 comments

Great point. Aside from the energy requirements that also makes you dependent on infrastructure availability. You seem kind of cynical about the tendency to simplify but we have to start somewhere and taking care of your own setup first seems like a good first step. We ought to be mindful of the complexity we're making ourselves dependent on and solving for that in the use cases you mentioned. Most streaming platforms will let you save a local copy, for a start. You can also rip your physical media, or forego using a computer for media consumption altogether (or in permacomputing terms, self-obviate).

But your point stands and from the perspective of permacomputing is indeed a problem.