Building the Perfect* PC for a Pittance

(*Perfect is pretty subjective here)

There’s a symbiosis between hardware and software. One where hardware has a built-in planned obsolescence. Your shiny new M4 macbook will look positively stale in a couple of years because it will be put out to pasture and receive no more software updates (around the time that Tim Apple wants you to want the device’s successor).

While all this is going on, the Linux community is beavering away to get relatively old tech to run an operating system in a distinctly usable way. This short video we made looks like it is talking about a new hard drive, but it is really about how you can build a desktop computer that has everything exactly as you like it.

The standard response to the low cost, high configurability argument is ‘Linux is only free if you have the time to spend configuring it’. It can definitely feel like that is true, but that annoying configuration is similar to the misery of meal prep: It feels like wasted time, but it is time you’ll quickly reclaim once you start cooking. Anyway, I was talking about the video, here it is:

The most important part is over in a flash so here’s a screenshot of it.

The screenshot is of a Linux desktop running the i3 Window Manager with Compton (for transparency) and it shows a:

• Web browser - Firefox using the Kagi search engine, which does a much better job at finding what we’re looking for than google does.

• Filemanager - Ranger,

• Resource manager - btop,

• Music player - ncmpcpp,

• Multitasker - tmux,

• Editor - Neovim.

Those are just a few of the tools that we’ve settled on because we aspire to the kind of desktop look that the computer geek in a film has. You know, loads of windows and scrolling text before typing quickly and whispering “We’re in”.

There are lots of other FOSS tools that we use on a daily basis, but we won’t bore you with the full list.

TL;DR

We love open-source software. You should give it a try too.