One Computer: A Counterargument

· 322 words · 2 minute read

In the last post, I presented ideas for replacing Silverblue on my laptop with something more agreeable to my personal tastes. My proposals in that post are predicated upon the existence of my desktop, which I use primarily for ten-plus year old games like Fallout 4; and for web browsing, as opposed to browsing geminispace or gopherspace using Offpunk. A simple change to philosophy collapses this dichotomy:

Rather than relegate the web to my desktop, and all other browsing to my laptop, I simply implement a tiered preference - Offpunk first, then Epiphany/GNOME Web, then Firefox. If what I’m doing really needs Firefox, as a handful of things do, and I fail to muster the willpower to make it that far? Must not be important. As for the other matter, my laptop runs New Vegas well enough on its own.

No, if I’m honest about things, it’s silly to delegate tasks to my desktop in the first place. I’ve currently got it on an isolated VLAN, in the pretense that I’m just not going to touch the web on my laptop. And from there, I sync passwords and the like with my desktop via encrypted flash drives. What is the point?

Why not simply shut my desktop down? Save myself the hassle and the electricity. I can boot it back up if I really want to play Fallout 4 for some reason. Otherwise, I do everything I need to do on this Latitude 9420. I’ve even got half a mind to never connect it to an external display. It could be nice to elevate its screen, but 14" was a perfectly reasonable screen size when I was younger, and it’s not overly obvious to me why it isn’t now - unless I’m to take the purpose of my computer to be hollow “content” consumption.

I said in the last post that I admired FreeBSD’s simplicity; why not implement some of my own?