One year without a PC

2023-09-11

I swapped my Windows 10 desktop machine for a Raspberry Pi 4 around a year ago. Time for a resume and asking “would I do it again”?

Let's start with the big question: Would I do it again, knowing what I know today?

Well, yes and no. I'm much more happy with the streamlined, terminal UI based workflow that I have now. I feel more focussed and way less distracted. I spend less time procrastinating and I'm not really missing much. So that way it was totally worth it.

What I wouldn't do exactly in the same way is migrate to an arm64 platform, on Manjaro Linux. Some apps are simply not available. If I was able to go back in time and tell young me a thing, it'd be that ThinClients exist. They have a slightly higher Wattage but provide a bit more CPU power in return. But most importantly, they're x64, so they'll run anything.

biggest issue: the internet

It's ridiculous how fat the internet has become. Firefox is by far the slowest application I use. LibreOffice is orders of magnitude faster. So is Inkscape or Gimp. Maybe Chromium would be a slight improvement but I refuse to use it.

Sadly, there is no universal workaround to a “proper” browser. I keep trying w3m but most of todays internet simply doesn't work or isn't readable in a CLI browser. This includes Wikipedia, which is a shame.

Aside from w3m there are two tricks I have up my sleeve:

First: Download as markdown. I'm using pandoc to download a website and store it locally as markdown. This works well for content-rich pages like coding documentation, wikipedia, long-form articles. I guess I could download the pages as html with wget but that wouldn't solve the slowness of the browser.

Second: RSS feeds. My most common usecase is to subscribe to the RSS feed of YouTube channels and download the videos as .mp4 through yt-dlp, then watch via mpv. A few simple shell-wrappers help a lot with that. I've also subscribed to various news pages through RSS, which saves me the trouble to open their website.

other issues

Other than the aforementioned internet, there's not much that really hurts.

Like I said in the intro, some things are simply not available on arm64. One of them is zeal, an offline documentation reader. It sounds great to be able to read all coding documentation offline (see above for internet woes ;) ). But it's x64 only. Oh well, I'll make do. And here wget really helps in downloading documentation. It's not impractical but if I could to the whole thing without connecting to the internet at all, that'd be great.

Games. Yes I admit it. Sometimes I want to play a game that isn't TUI. There is “Endless Sky” but it hasn't gripped me. There's “OpenTTD” which is nice. But sometimes I really want an indie game that is on steam.

One year without a PC

biggest issue: the internet

other issues

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