In response to a shared link about building custom computers.

I find much of this lovely, despite misgivings (why build a laptop, with all its ergonomic problems, while eliminating its portability?) . . . . I enjoy the warm colors, and the absence of a GUI, and the wood grain; I’ve seen some split keyboards that use wood, like the Keyboardio Model 100, and some desktop towers, like this series from System76. (My daily driver right now is a Lemur Pro from them, running their in-house Linux distro Pop!_OS. Once Windows 10 stops free security updates, I’m thinking of installing NixOS on my ThinkPad.) (Come to think of it, when I went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art last year, they had on display, in a special exhibit on design in furniture and furnishings, an old IBM ThinkPad, a big amicable chonker, the black with red accents connoting stability with a bit of sanguinity, as opposed to the cold grey and silver of Macbooks and Chromebooks.) And aesthetics proper aside, there are encouraging signs that one can build a business from creating laptops that last; Framework shows one way forward, as does System76 in their own way.

I do think that we will have to take some more hits to convenience and ease-of-use as we get older and as we are forced to choose between either getting to know these weird tools or continuing to ride the magic box carousel that Apple and their competitors sell tickets for. Apple in particular hurts to watch as it creates wonderful hardware for personal computing and then effectively nerfs it all via its software. But the strategy tracks with their overall product design and philosophy, insulating the user from the tool’s internals, a choice to which programmers are sensitive. Open-source isn’t the panacea for this situation, given the difficulty of “coordinating” hardware and software (there’s a reason why I paid System76 for a tested Linux laptop). But it is a way forward.

December 30, 2023.