Posted by indigodaddy 9/2/2025
Of course in practice, unless you're running a seed box or something, they're unlikely to find out/object. I've never heard of anyone getting dropped just for having a server on their home network, but I have heard of people being dropped for excessive upload.
Pros of using an old device?
- near no modern distractions
- VI keys (hjkl and friends) everywhere. Nchat, telescope, mupdf...
- No mice related RSI.
- batch read emails, news, newsgroups and forums. Connect once, download and upload every email and comment.
- offpunk cachés everything too, from gopher to the web. Offpunk --sync and read everything offline.
- gopher://magical.fish and gemini://gemi.dev, enough for tons of cases, even translating English into Spanish for some odd words here and there
- telescope if I want something faster over gopher/gemini/web with stargate.gemi.dev:1994 as the proxy. No ads, no trackers, no cookies, no nothing. Just the text and nsxiv to view the images as they are linked too.
- florb for Open Street Maps. Enough for GPX track editing and lurking out places and some trip.
- megafast speed. Oh, you have an i7 with Plasma/Windows 11, or worse, Gnome3? Try it against cwm as the window manager, xterm, and CLI tools. No GUI will match the speed of a TUI interface, ever.
Cons:
-no modern gaming, but who cares. Mednafen, slashem, text adventures, csokoban... there are tons of old but charming games out there.
- no JS web. But florb does it fine for Open Street Map. Maybe if I wrote some Street View client with curl/libcurl and some basic equirectangular (360 degree panorama) viewer, I would be more than fullfilled. People used to see these images on Pentium II's computers and up, you know, from 'multimedia CDs' which were from thematic/educational (as a book/magazine, but with interactive content) to software which were the literal depiction of Street View with Apple's QuickTime VR.
-SBCL for Common Lisp works so-so, under i686 just GNU/Linux, under OpenBSD it's a bit restricted unlessyou recompile it, and it will last for long. No bordeaux-threads for SBCL, and ECL drives me mad sometimes.
- GNU/Linux it's sending 32 bit support to /dev/null, but Hyperbola GNU and Parabola (among GNUinos/Devuan and others are still making your old computers usable).
If my netbook can do that... older ARM devices being far more powerful than an n270 can do crazy stuff with very low power. That's why PostMarketOS needs to suceed. I wish I would resurrect a Tokyo Techbook (ARM wm8850) with it too...