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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 31st, 2025

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  • I think people should rediscover the beauty of doing things offline on a computer.

    I had a recent experience traveling on a train. A mother used YouTube to entertain her young kid with some children video. Every time there was an internet hiccup and the video stopped, the kid started crying…

    You don’t need a NAS and a streaming media server or anything in cloud to watch your favorite media, or to listen to your favorite music. You can simply put them on a pen drive and whenever you need the media, plug it in and watch/listen offline. Using an OTG adapter you can even plug it into your phone (at least for the duration of the the time while copy the needed files off it). Most people don’t need much more than this. And if that mother put the videos on the phone before the journey the kid would never cry.

    If you need a file server, you can use a basic Linux installation and enable SSH. Then you can transfer files over SSH using Filezilla or other SFTP client. For versioning you can use Git (it’s not just for programming), and the remote is just a directory on that Linux server where you have previously created a bare git repo.



  • I think the main requirement for general purpose computing is the decoupling of software from hardware and allowing modularity.

    The problem is that with Apple, Samsung, etc fully integrate the hardware and software in house, this means all the drivers and blobs can be kept in house secret.

    On the other hand a PC can be built by anyone from hardware components they choose. In order to make this work all the drivers and blobs for all the hardware components need to be public, and therefore can be integrated into the Linux kernel, allowing anyone to use an open source OS on their system.