Young People Are Falling in Love with Old Technology

Like I have been thinking more and more about having a dumb phone or a embedded open source device which can run linux or bsd

Now it has to be small because it is constrained by space and due to it being small, personally I think that increasing the performance on such small chips would make them really expensive when I just need to run lets say a very small video or just have basic terminal things I suppose

So I really wanted a system (gui) preferably that could run on very resource constrained devices and this is EXACTLY where old technology shines.

Now although I have been a linux users for 2-3 years now due to privacy concerns when I had valorant which had kernel level access and I came to learn that the only true safe way would be to reinstall my system but at that point I was already getting familiar with linux so I jumped into linux with nobara

But personally on my linux, I always preferred rolling, high cut edge/hype distros like arch (now cachy with hyprland)

I always thought that there is no point of soo many distros and the only important ones are debian,arch,fedora,nix and alpine.

I had seen things like tiny core linux and damn small linux and etc. softwares but I never thought that they have any use but more and more I appreciate the fact that to a somewhat degree they just boot into a gui and I can then have almost complete control of the system of sorts.

Its so fascinating and puts so much things into perspective when you see the 20 mb distro...

I am more and more fascinated by the idea of small linux/bsd os's. Kolibri os peaks my interest too

I recommend https://copy.sh/v86/ for someone wanting to tinker with old os or some unique ones. I actually booted up windows 1.1 or the first release as it was on their website and well it was actually really good looking to me. Like I appreciate the retro style more and more and E-waste can definitely be prevented if the hardware was made in a more modular manner like I was discussing it on a different thread about my lg tv. Like Imagine an open source tv of sorts...

Well with things like raspberry pi and other hobby-ist chips which can be really cheap, you can definitely craft an open source hardware and have some things be 3d printed as well and that's something that I deeply like nowadays.

For me its privacy and price and now I love the style too. I love how much can be packed in so much less. How??? In the world of 100 mb electron hello world or node modules, booting up is so magical and the whole system of tiny core linux was running on my pc and I ran top and literally the whole system's most resource using was the gui (xvesa) was taking 2% memory on a 8 gb pc

I love it. I loved playing with it. xDialog with curl and some basic shell scripting or heck lua scripting can be so so good and I want to learn more about building my own os and other stuff from tiny core linux. I LOVE IT.

I also love things like alpine for things like containers and I can understand how systemd standardises things but its definitely interesting to see these resource constrained os too, seriously give it a go. Its dead simple to play around with tiny core linux.

Edit: I LOVE DUMB PHONES, especially flip phones. It doesn't help that my phone is literally a 1 gig android phone which literally is shit. My dumb phone with very small less than 50 mbs for sure, I am not sure lol was so so fast, it was scary good for its price and performance...

It was literally so tiny that I could balance it over my one finger and it had a really cool slick design and the numbers/things would only be visible when you interact otherwise it would've turned black to sort of have a really good looking device.

It was the kaechoda k100 for 11-13 bucks. The only pain in the ass was me setting up my sd card for hard for it somehow and my non tech cousin actually helped me do it when I was trying to convert my sd card into fat disk and looking up their manuals and gave up but then he just did it. I am not sure what was the issue but in the end it worked great and before that I was feeling very restricted but once I got my sd card and added my music in it by bluetooth, it kinda became really nice and so I can suggest buying it just for funsies if you have a spare sd card and if sd card works out of the box or you also got a cousin who can help you lol :)

Older tech does one or a small number of things, and it usually does those things well and stays out of the user's way.