Let's talk about computers and such. I think they are important considering the amount of time we spend on them.

I've come to realize how I'm deeply entrenched in the Apple ecosystem. I have a macbook air, an iPhone 5s, and an iPad mini. When I am home i have an external setup that i connect my laptop to but other than that gone are the days of my full desktop use. I don't game, I don't program and I don't require intensive processing power so this suits me fine. Even so, I'm also slowly using my tablet more and it's replacing my air for leisure usage. I'm used to tethering at work(which is really my car as i go from place to place) but it was getting expensive as I always broke the 10gb usage limit. $500 phone bills suck:(

I've switched to 4gb limit a month for both my phone and table so the bill is now ~110. I did it partly for the bill but also because I just don't use the internet too much anymore as a pastime. 5 minutes on 4chan, 5 minutes here and my needs are more or less satisfied for the day. Sad but also I feel good that I am finally moving on.

What are your setups and how do computers play a role in your life? Have they been waning as you get older like me or is your usage growing?

If you think there can be improvements to be made in someones setup don't be shy to say so.

I only have a desktop. No laptop, smart phone, tablet, or any of that stuff. I do have 4 monitors with my desktop right now but once I find good homes for them I will probably go down to 2 or 1.

I have done a lot of downgrading and downsizing lately. I want to be less reliant on technology for anything other than work or college.

To me, the immobility of a desktop is a good thing. It means I won't be tempted to browse the web when I'm out and about.

I've been spending less time online and more time exploring nature. I am much calmer and happier now.

one desktop for playing games/leisure programming (windows), and one laptop (debian) for any linux work i do, however i program less and less at home these days as i am a programmer by trade.

a nexus 7 for reading books via the kindle app the majority of the time, and a smart phone for listening to music while commuting and calling people - it lacks the horse power to do much else.

as a side note, i haven't felt the need to upgrade by desktop in some time as no games have come out that seem to challenge its specs (gtx 570 and an i5 2550k).

I like the feeling of a single desktop computer. Nothing can replace it. That's all I use.

I surrendered my entire being to it for a few years. Every time it stopped working, it felt like my life ended for those few moments. A lucid feeling of dying.

These days I am spending much less time beside it. I don't feel like there is anything interesting to do on it anymore. I wouldn't feel anything if it got destroyed or taken away.

>>4
I only have the one laptop as my main computer. I do use the tablet and phone occasionally but mostly as supplements but the bulk of my tasks such as paying bills, shopping, work is done through the single laptop.

I'm trying to reduce internet usage as it consumes what little time I have left at the end of the day. I've closed around most misc accounts and a couple of gaming accounts. Most notably, EVE.

For almost a decade I've been on the internet participating across dozens of communities anywhere from the trolling, experiencing little private jokes to having full fledged second lives like EVE. It's been a wild ride but, quite frankly, I'm tired.

I'm still an internet addict. I'd like to get better, but I haven't tried yet.

I do almost everything on my desktop (Windows 7). I have a laptop (Parabola GNU/Linux) that I usually fire up just to update every once in a while.

In terms of changing habits, I stopped playing video games for a few years, but now I've started to play a few of them again because I want things to talk about with my internet friends. Games don't interest me that much in and of themselves, but you can't enjoy someone's company in silence over the internet (can you in real life? I don't know.).

>>6
Open world games like Skyrim are the worst. I've sunk so many hours into it and the STALKER series. I don't think I could go back to playing games so soon as they suck you in if you don't have self control like me.

>>4
We're just jaded I guess. That or too many years of internet have gotten to us.

>>6
Open world games like Skyrim are the worst. I've sunk so many hours into it and the STALKER series. I don't think I could go back to playing games so soon as they suck you in if you don't have self control like me.

>>4
We're just jaded I guess. That or too many years of internet have gotten to us.

My main computer is a Thinkpad X60 running 100% software and an encrypted home folder to keep me safe. I keep my UI smooth and visually appealing for a nice work environment. I don't store a lot of stuff permanently on it, I have an external for that. I use Tox, TOR, and Email with GPG, and IRC, for communication.

My desktop is a Raspberry Pi. It'd basically my backup and always-on permanent computer. It's hooked into my external drive and acts as an interface for it. My whole life is stored chronologically on it. And as I take new photos, videos, write things, they eventually end up in the external. I use cron and espeak to have it wake my up at 7:00AM each day and speak to me what I typed into it last night. Which is normally a list of all the things I have to get done that day.

I have an old Apple iBook G4 which I use as a seedbox for things having to do with information activism. Things like TAILS Linux, Trisquel Linux, Byzantium Linux, and some Wikileaks files and documentaries. I also IRC from it and look up the weather from it since it's always there and turned on.

I have an old smart phone with a LED flashlight on the front that is hooked into my Wifi. It's running as a TOR relay 24/7 and a the light is always on because I have it hung above my spider plant. So it helps grow my plant and grow the TOR network.

>>9
Talk about going in the opposite direction. I do admire your DIY nature though. Linux is cool and all but I never got too into it. I just didn't spare the time.

I'm currently using a Thinkpad W520. It used to be just a workstation for multimedia production, but it slowly became my main computer.
It's running Windows 8.1, which is okay.
I'd love to just install some GNU/Linux distribution, but I need Adobe CS5 in my workflow and dualbooting/virtual machines feel awkward.
I also have a desktop PC, primarily used to play games and render video. Right now it's catching dust, since it keeps crashing and I didn't find time yet to determine the cause.
I don't own a smartphone and I only use my tablet to play rhythm games.

>>11
Time? Just FYI it's not all code and terminals. There are distros that are more easy to use than closed source stuff. This is the X60 I use. The distro is Elementary OS Linux.
→/751/calm.png

I use my computer primarily for listening to/downloading music, occasionally doing some graphic work, browsing the internet and watching some shows (but I have my htpc connected to my personal computer since mine has a larger HDD). I used to play a lot of games, and I still get the urge to play every now and then. I have a pile of games that I "want" to play that I download over and over again and never play.
My computer is still an integral part of my life; I definitely don't think I'll be getting rid of it anytime soon. It's indispensable with regard to record and bookkeeping, storing photos, music, books, and video, editing text/making important things like CVs, but I'm having a hard time seeing its use outside of the very basic needs I feel every person has now.
In other words, my PC is really more than I need. I feel like I could do more with it, but I'm trying to get out of the house more, and I think it's hindering my growth as a person in that respect.

Two laptops. The other one is ridiculously small, and since there's no real need for me to use two computers at a time I use it only rarely. I don't carry either of them around, my main sits on my desk and the smaller one is in my bookshelf. I own a smartphone but only use it like you'd use an old one. It's for phone calls and alarms.
My main laptop has Win7 and Arch Linux in dual boot. Since doing things with Windows is so hard I use it to waste time, and Linux when I intend not to waste time. Recently I've started shifting from point-and-click interfaces to keyboard-driven ones. Mostly, when I'm on my computer I just waste my time. What I really need is some "internet front end", a device on which to watch videos and listen music, and something to store files and create simple text files myself. Which means I could make do with a lot worse pc (in terms of GHz, cores, and memory).

>>14
I like the feeling that simple pc's give you, especially laptops.

Yeah, they don't have power up the wazoo but for simple things such as email, internet, and such what more do you need?

>>15

What I really need is some "internet front end", a device on which to watch videos and listen music, and something to store files and create simple text files myself. Which means I could make do with a lot worse pc (in terms of GHz, cores, and memory).

Tablets. Seriously. For the longest time I avoided them like the plague but when I bought my iPhone I was given an iPad for free and since then it's bridged the gap that I had between my phone and my laptop. This in the sense that there are times when you don't want or need to pull out your laptop to do something that your phone isn't good enough for(usually screen wise) and that's where tablets come in.

I used to think of them as devices meant for nothing but consumption but honestly that's not always bad and in some respects it is ideal. Say you want to read a book but don't want to spend money, it's a pain to read on your laptop and your phone is too small. Boom, tablets fill the gap.

I'm pretty sure I could use any Linux distro to do what my PC (running Win7) does now, but I need to keep Win7 on the machine to interface with my htpc. I am sad because so many Linux distros are so much more elegant...

>>17
Have you considered making a dual-boot?

>>17
Listen to >>18
Dual booting, is easy. But to make things even more easy you can install Linux directly to a thumbdrive, and boot from that.

>>19
Dual booting is redundant. Splitting your attention like that is a poor decision.

>>17
If you want elegant, consider a mac. I mean this in all honesty. You will have the best of both worlds. Price wise it is really not expensive(considering you forego 15 inch form factors).

The build quality is excellent and mac os itself is a good operation system.

>>20
Best of both? I'm not aware that anything in OSX is FOSS, except the default browsers rendering engine.

Best of both?

Yup. He gets an elegant and smooth operating system that's actually functional!

>>20

Splitting your attention like that is a poor decision

How does a dual boot split your attention? You only ever boot into one at a time.

Price wise it is really not expensive

You can't be serious.

Also, personally, I can't stand Apple's keyboards.

>>21
Darwin is free software.

>>23
Macbook Air is rather cheap.

>>22

an elegant and smooth operating system that's actually functional

I'm not sure that's what >>21 was getting at when he mentioned best of both worlds.

Regardless, every OS is completely functional and `smooth' if treated properly.

And >>24, they really aren't. An 11-inch runs for $1100 here, with the power of a system of about half the price. I don't know how much it is over where you live, but it's just plain out of the question here.

>>24
I just checked the store, the cheapest "Macbook Air" is a thousand bucks. Looking around Newegg I could get a system with double the specs for half the price.

>>23
Oh riiiight! I forgot about Darwin! Though as a whole OSX is not free. And now knowing that Apple participates with the NSA in spying on the world -and they never had a good privacy track record before that- I just simply cannot use it. Though I will say that OSX looks very pretty. The UI gets in the way of me using it sometimes, but it is very very pretty.

Man, living in 2014 is weird. It used to be that people on the net would argue over what OS is best between Windows, Linux, and OSX, and eventually it would just come down to what you used a computer for and dogma. Now post-Snowden it's either you HAVE to use 100% free and open source software on your machines or you're helping the leaders of the *free world* to break and violate your humans rights. And if you're American, your Fourth Amendment rights. I was all for people using Windows or OSX if it helped them get their work done, they should have the right to choose what software they ran on their machines. But not if it *literally* comes at the price of their human rights. Fucking hell.

>>25
>>26
And I can get a better HTPC or Desktop for the price of an Acer or Thinkpad Laptop. My point was, that the MBA is one of the cheapest Ultrabooks. It's okay, though, to not need an Ultrabook. Also, if I'd factor in the time I spent to solve problems and apply voodoo-like workarounds to my Windows machine (which runs on fully supported business hardware, which *should* work all the time), I could have bought a MBP instead of my Thinkpad.
That being said, I greatly prefer Linux over OSX anyway.

It's okay, though, to not need an Ultrabook.

What does "ultrabook" even mean, besides "overpriced, lightweight laptop marketed to facebook users"?

>>28
Since you are asking like this, I will answer like this: Ultrabook basically means "Macbook Air and more expensive Macbook Air Clones".

That said: It's only being marketed to social media users because there are a lot of them. The Macbook is a very nice machine if you don't care for gaming.

Also, whenever I'm on my bike, carrying my Thinkpad + Battery + Powerblock with me, I wish for something lighter, and I'm what you'd call a poweruser. An Ultrabook would be so nice and I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I had the money.

Dear thread people:
What are your favorite lightweight/elegant Linux distros?

>>30
Lightweight? Crunchbang. It is using about 90 megs of ram at boot up.

>>30
Debian testing minimal netinstall with i3 as the wm.

>>30
For for visual elegance, Elemantary OS Linux. Which uses about 350 megs of RAM at startup. For lightweight it'd say what >>30
says.

I looked it up and OSX and Windows 8 both need 2 gigs or more to run. Jesus.

>>33

2 gigs or more to run

Welcome to the year 2014. We hope you're able to integrate well with modern society!!

This thread is very excitable. I wonder what it is about computers that would cause that?

>>35
I think there are a few /g/entoomen amongst us.

>>36
What makes you think that?

>>36
>>36
Why hello.

I use two computers, a Linux workstation/server/desktop and a Windows ultrabook for gaming and going out. Most of the time, I use an SSH tunnel to my Linux computer for security and doing Linuxy work.

OS: Slackware-current, Windows-current

Text editor: emacs, Geany

Web browser: none, Seamonkey

IRC client: irssi, Hexchat

Mail: emacs + gpg

IM: IRC, Skype, Line

Blogging: custom

>>33
I downloaded and made a bootable USB of Elementary, all excited because it seemed to be exactly what I wanted. I live-booted it. It ran fine. Of course, I installed it to my secondary HDD, it was beautiful.

Of course, now, when it boots up, it shows me some gobbeldyguk that I have inferred means my graphics driver is not compatible (which is stupid, since it works fine from the bootable USB) and booting sends me from that screen to a terminal. No GUI. So much for "working right out of the box." Such has been my experience with Linux in general.
"Look at all this cool stuff it does, and it just works! Right out of the box!" FUCK YOU. IT DOESN'T WORK. IT NEVER WORKS. IT TAKES THREE DAYS TO BOOT ENOUGH TO USE THE INTERNET YOU LYING SACK OF GARBAGE.

>>40
Damn.

>>41
OK you know what, I'm sorry I got mad earlier. I finally found a fix and am writing this from Elementary OS. I'm sorry, everyone.

>>42
Really? I felt bad for you and I asked others how to fix your problem.
http://www.reddit.com/r/elementaryos/comments/22ti1d/what_could_cause_elementary_to_work_fine_in_live/

Oddly enough, that is where I found my fix! Thank you!

I've seen other distros do this - work fine in Live mode and then fail to handle the graphics card on first boot. It is, as you so rightly say, absurd.
What model is your graphics card? Have a look on the Ubuntu forums for the commands required to get the right driver installed. ElementaryOS is worth making the effort to get working.

I'm trying out browsing with keyboard browsers. Luakit looks best. dwb is more easy to set up and get at your settings and bookmarks with, but does not look as good as Luakit.

>>46
You should also try uzbl or firefox with Vimperator/Pentadactyl.

>>47
I actually installed dwb, Luakit, Surf, and uzbl. The first two are the only ones I could could get to run after install. Which do you think is better of those two FX addons you speak of?

>>48
You couldn't get uzbl to run? Weird. Did you try uzbl-tabbed?

I prefer Vimperator, but many people claim it's bloated. Try both!

>>36
Indeed.

At home I've got a Asus laptop that I bought in 2014 for $1000 leaf bucks, a new MSI gaming laptop plus monitor I took home from work, and a Nokia Lumina 635 with Windows Phone 8.1.

I got the Asus laptop for school to replace an old XP laptop since I needed to use SolidWorks. Maybe 80% of my free time is spent on this laptop. Mostly browsing chans, reading manga and lns, and watching anime. The gaming I do is very light. Mostly Kancolle and FKG, and sometimes Freespace 2 and RotMG. I've been thinking about about replacing it with maybe a new desktop or laptop but not quite sure if it's worth it given my current needs. There are occasions that I feel the laptops age but it doesn't bother me. While I'm still deciding, I will be getting a large SSD to replace the 500GB hard drive I currently use.

Not much to say about the MSI laptop for work. It's new and pretty fast. Use it for CAD work. Actually faster than the old desktop I used at the office.

I think I also got my Nokia phone in 2014. Right now for just $45 canadian pesos I get 500min talk and 2GB. In past years I rarely use over half that data. Now working at home, it's even less. The number of call or texts I need a to make a month is in the single digits. Mainly just use it to check emails and read lns while sitting outside or on the bus. A lot of apps have stopped working or are partially broken. Like the 4chan app I use still lets me browse but posting has been broken for years. A good percentage of modern websites will not load properly or just crash the browser. The phone is really showing it's age but for the talk, text, and bit of reading I use it for, it's good enough. 2 things that make me want to get a new phone are a better camera and being able to play Kancolle. When it still worked, I was using Teamviewer to play on my laptop and send out expiditions. I think I'll continue to use this phone until the battery can no longer last a day or the screen cracks.

I currently "compute" with 3 different devices:

First my main PC which I just got this year. I'm not really hardware-savvy so I went to one of those sites where you can pick your parts and they assemble the thing for you. I was lucky enough to get an RTX 3070 for a reasonable price in that package becaues the big dealers get way better prices on GPUs compared to private buyers. Also this year I got my Valve Index VR headset which I still use quite a lot. This thing was the main reason for the better rig because it brought my gaming Laptop to its limits.
The latter is being sold right now. The PC is where I do most of my gaming and since I got it with a big curved screen I also happen to watch shows and movies on here instead of going over to my living room. Welp.

Then I have my 2011 Asus Laptop which would barely operate with its old Windows 7 OS installed anymore so I wiped it in 2018 and installed Ubuntu as I made my first steps into the Linux sphere. It's holding up well and it became my little tinker machine and also anything light like lurking, watching youtube or writing e-mails.

Then, also this year, I bought a Fairphone to replace my Samsung Galaxy. I was sick of the battery wearing out and with a fairphone you can replace lots of the parts yourself. Since I don't need a super high quality camera anyway, I don't mind. It's a little slower of course but not that noticably.

Looking back, I spent about 3.5k eurobucks on tech this year... Welp, that's what happens when you can't travel abroad due to lockdown restrictions. You buy a VR headset and escape into virtual worlds.

I have four devices, and I'm not happy with it. I have a laptop, a Thinkpad x200, which I love. I'd stop with just that if I could. Unfortunately I also need a phone, I have two: one is a little Nokia brick, and the other is a Oneplus. I also have a Chromebook I had to use for video calls during the lockdown.

I run Elementary and Emacs on the x200. I've moved through a lot of operating systems, but at this point I'm just at a sad stage of acceptance and some kind of pragmatism. Emacs is comfy, Elementary is okay but it does alright.

>>53
What are your problems with elementary?

>>53
Why do you enjoy emacs? I've never seen it referred to as comfy.

>>54
Elementary has been slowly getting heavier resource-usage wise, which is fine but means it doesn't work as well as it used to on the old computer. I don't like some of the things it makes difficult (changing window managers eg). I do like a lot of things though, including how integrated the default programs are.

>>55
I'm not entirely sure, maybe it's stockholm syndrome. The keybindings feel better to me than cua or vi binds. I like having different text-oriented tasks in the same interface. I like how well it works with lisp development, and I like being able to manipulate and poke around in functions as I work. As with Elementary, it has good and bad parts, but I really like the good parts, enough to put up with the bad parts.

>>56

Elementary is nice, especially because it's well-designed. I agree that the window manager is annoying and it's much more resource-heavy than it used to be, but the design and usability is good.

Of course, now I use a Mac, so lol

>>57

Yes, I really like the design of Elementary, and their human interface guidelines are some of the most thoughtful I've seen in a long time. System coherence is up there with Haiku, as long as you don't try to do anything different.

But the resource usage thing is what comfiness rests on pretty much for me. I can't get by without that being low.

I try to use systems as free as I can.

My main OS is Trisquel running on a laptop with libreboot for the BIOS. On a system that requires any evil non-free stuff, I'll use LXLE for my OS and coreboot for my BIOS.

If I want to boot something on some other PC I carry SliTaz on a thumbdrive. https://www.slitaz.org/en/

>>58
I agree, low resource usage = much more comfy. I used to not really pay attention to resource usage, but now that so many programs are just Electron wrappers around HTML5 nonsense, I much prefer a native application.

>>53
I feel the same, I've grown tired of technology in recent years, I just want to use it as little as possible and live life without too much technological interference.
I'm not sure why I feel like this, I used to be pretty enthusiastic about tech, tinkering and keeping an eye on the latest developments.

Now, I'm just tired of it.

>>61
For me, tech and the internet in general used to have a whole hell of a lot more magic to it. Now a lot of that has been sucked out and not really replaced with anything at all. I've felt more sitting outside in the morning dew with a cup of coffee in some random backyard than I've ever felt staring at the void of what passes for internet content these days.

Don’t have a “home setup” anymore. Ironically, the closest thing I have to it is my at-home work setup: a single Surface 2 laptop, with dock, hooked up to a 50” TV in the garage.

My most productive default mode at the day job is “rage,” so never have the energy to work on/in yet another system when I leave the garage.

I have a Mac mini, a Dell rack, a custom-built machine and two specialized HTPCs. I never turn any of them on - all for ghost projects that I should get back into - but that I never do.