This is truly the computer as bicycle for the mind.
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.
But your point stands and from the perspective of permacomputing is indeed a problem.
Much simpler, much more in my control. At the end of the day most computers built in the last 10 years don't break a sweat doing the things I need one for. Same for phones. It makes you much more resilient against hardware failure, and if you go through the pain of converting your stuff to open formats you're basically free as a bird.
The former has Debian on it with Gnome and I've stuck 8Gb of ram on the machine, slapped in an SSD.
The machine is 14 years old and it can reasonably handle browsing, mail, Youtube, Discord and VSCode. Gnome actually performs better than XFCE or any of the light-weight DE as long as I am using Wayland.
I rather like something comfortable these days, so I'll stick with my M1 MacBook Pro. The creature comforts genuinely make my life better so I'm willing to pay for them.
https://plan9-4th-edition-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/...
- 90 MHz or greater Intel/ARM 32-bit processor
- 32 MiB of RAM (system memory for physical and viritualized installs)
- SVGA capable of 800x600 screen resolution or greater
- Network connection
- 300 MiB of storage (SD, IDE, SATA, SAS)
- Either a CD/DVD drive or a USB port for booting the installer media
New laptops are so expensive and unreliable that they might actually break down sonner than my used ones...
An example of what a permacomputing solution to a problem vs a traditional one would look like would do a lot of work here. Perhaps where "ପໄଓ -:*´" is...
> In this paper, we argue for the potential of permacomputing as a rich framework for exploring creative design constraints building on a long history of applying constraints in art, design and cultural practices.
[0]: https://monoskop.org/images/6/6a/Mansoux_Aymeric_et_al_2023_...
I don't think I have anything to learn about computing from a website that takes multiple seconds to load plain unstyled text.
Permaculture is in the first place an ethical or even utopian project, and I'd characterize it as a counter-culture. You can see this reflected in how permacomputing defines itself in opposition to silicon valley: there's a whole page on what they think is wrong with 'Californian ideology'. See https://permacomputing.net/issues/ and https://permacomputing.net/Californian_ideology/.
Permaculture is a design system grounded in ethics, that concerns itself with rethinking a sustainable society inspired by nature. A common trope is the 7 generations rule: how does a design decision today, impact the future of 7 generation down the line? The domain where permaculture is mostly associated with is agricultural systems, but it also has some influence in the built environment. It was never intended to be limited to agriculture. Permacomputing seems to want to extend or apply it to the domain of computing.
Honestly I don't find the idea of extending hardware lifespans the most innovative. I think it is interesting to rethink the whole of computing from the pov of 200, 500 or 1000 years into the future: if we still want to be there and have a good life for all (and do computation), how could that impact decisions on hardware today?
I think a model where we see all current hardware as a 'repository of components and materials' that can be re-composed (not just recycled) is far more interesting than merely extending lifespans. In that model, there is virtually no waste anymore. Everything can be recombined as we discover more valuable ways of putting things together, rather than thrown away, even after a longer time. I'd argue that also mimics the way nature works. Ecosystems are always growing in complexity as life evolves and diversifies, given the right conditions and lack of bottlenecks. There are no static cycles.
There is literally a) no way to answer that, and b) it probably doesn't even matter. For instance, in 1850 (which is roughly 7 generations ago), the Austrian Empire abolished the customs and tariffs between its Hungarian and Ausrtian pieces. How does it impact us today?
Detractors: You can't be anti-capitalist without being on the other side. Also, you can't put individual issues above societal issues.
