Limited Computing
People are always shocked to discover my main computer is from 2017 and is an i3-powered fanless desktop. Limits force me to focus on what's important. Just the software and compute power I need to get the job done. Would it be nice to have a faster computer at times? Sure. Do I want to waste the time to find, build, and re-install everything for those few times? No.
My main desktop is my old repurposed firewall. The full details are available online.
I use FreeBSD because it's clean, neat, and just works. Run BSD. Previously, and previously.
My prior desktop was a Raspberry Pi 4B+ and a Pine64 RockPro64 SBC. Here's how the CPU performance compares from the RPI 4B+ to the current desktop.
From my perspective, my desktop is now 3x faster (well, 2.76x), but overall it feels lightning fast. I use a hardware encrypting external drive to store all my data. And with ZFS filesystem, it's a fantastically fast, reliable, and portable setup. I can saturate the 1 Gbe interface, and with the embedded GPU, enlightenment runs flawlessly. Overall, it's really nice hardware. Having it fanless is a bonus. If I need real compute horsepower, I can rent it from altcloud providers like 1984, linode, digitalocean, vultr, etc. It costs about $5 to rent a 96-core system at linode for the few minutes I need it. I can also use Sourcehut's build servers, too.
I consider doing upgrades, but will take my time and figure out something that should last another 7 years or so. For now, this works and will continue to work for me. Your experience may be different.
Colophon
I'm experimenting with two new features here,
- AVIF files for images and comments via email. Now that AVIF is a standard and supported by 93% of browsers, the increase in performance by the reduction in page size is worth it. Plus it reduces page size and load speeds, dramatically.
- The comments via email is an experiment to see what happens.