I love my cheap little Linux box
Disclaimer: This is a stub of a blog post.
- For the last few months, I’ve been using a little second hand computer as my desktop computer for software development.
- It’s a little Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q Tiny PC. I got it for AU$180. It’s got 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.
- I installed Arch Linux (btw) on it - it’s my first time using Arch and it’s been a good learning experience. I’m using the XFCE desktop environment and have two apps - my web browser and my terminal.
- 16GB feels like a lot of RAM when you’re just working in a terminal and using a web browser. Because Arch doesn’t come with any extra software, the computer is not doing much at any one time. Which is good!
- At the same time, I’ve been learning how to use tmux and Neovim. It was pretty uncomfortable getting started with Vim motions as everything felt sluggish, but I’m getting better. For a long time I couldn’t get the muscle memory of J for down and K for up!
- For me there’s something nostalgic about Linux and keeping things really simple on your computer. While computers are getting more and more powerful, and our smartphones are becoming our main computers, having a simple desktop that feels like it’s from the early 2000s feels good to me. I still like my M1 MacBook Air, but it’s a different feeling.