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Why-I-use-old-hardware.md (3433B)

    

  1. ---
  2. date: 2019-01-23
  3. layout: post
  4. title: Why I use old hardware
  5. tags: ["philosophy"]
  6. ---
  8. Recently I was making sure my main laptop is ready for travel[^1], which mostly
  9. just entails syncing up the latest version of my music collection. This laptop
  10. is a Thinkpad X200, which turns 11 years old in July and is my main workstation
  11. away from home (though I bring a second monitor and an external keyboard for
  12. long trips). This laptop is a great piece of hardware. 100% of the hardware is
  13. supported by the upstream Linux kernel, including the usual offenders like WiFi
  14. and Bluetooth. Niche operating systems like 9front and Minix work great, too.
  15. Even coreboot works! It's durable, user-serviceable, light, and still looks
  16. brand new after all of these years. I love all of these things, but there's no
  17. denying that it's 11 years behind on performance innovations.
  19. [^1]: To [FOSDEM](https://fosdem.org/2019/) - see you there!
  21. Last year [KDE](https://kde.org) generously [invited me][kde-recap] to and
  22. sponsored my travel to their development sprint in Berlin. One of my friends
  23. there teased me - in a friendly way - about my laptop, asking why I used such an
  24. old system. There was a pensive moment when I answered: "it forces me to
  25. empathise with users who can't use high-end hardware". I showed him how it could
  26. cold boot to a productive [sway](https://swaywm.org) desktop in <30 seconds,
  27. then I installed KDE to compare. It doubled the amount of disk space in use,
  28. took almost 10x as long to reach a usable desktop, and had severe rendering
  29. issues with my old Intel GPU.
  31. [kde-recap]: https://drewdevault.com/2018/04/28/KDE-Sprint-retrospective.html
  33. To be clear, KDE is a wonderful piece of software and my first recommendation to
  34. most non-technical computer users who ask me for advice on using Linux. But
  35. software often grows to use the hardware you give it. Software developers tend
  36. to be computer enthusiasts, and use enthusiast-grade hardware. In reality, this
  37. high-end hardware isn't really *necessary* for most applications outside of
  38. video encoding, machine learning, and a few other domains.
  40. I do have a more powerful workstation at home, but it's not really anything
  41. special. I upgrade it very infrequently. I bought a new mid-range GPU which is
  42. able to drive my four displays[^2] last year, I've added the occasional hard
  43. drive as it gets full, and I replaced the case with something lighter weight 3
  44. years ago. Outside of those minor upgrades, I've been using the same desktop
  45. workstation for 7 years, and intend to use it for much longer. My servers are
  46. similarly running on older hardware which is spec'd to their needs (actually, I
  47. left a lot of room to grow and *still* was able to buy old hardware).
  49. My 11-year-old laptop can compile the Linux kernel from scratch in 20 minutes,
  50. and it can play 1080p video in real-time. That's all I need! Many users cannot
  51. afford high-end computer hardware, and most have better things to spend their
  52. money on. And you know, I work hard for my money, too - if I can get a computer
  53. which can do nearly 5 *billion* operations per second for $60, that should be
  54. sufficient to solve nearly any problem. No doubt, there are faster laptops out
  55. there, many of them with similarly impressive levels of compatibility with my
  56. ideals. But why bother?
  58. [^2]: I have a variety of displays and display configurations for the purpose of continuously testing sway/wlroots in those situations