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DIR <- Back Switching to a lower power consumption setup ============================================ Over the past months I found joy in the process of minimizing the power consumption of my setup. I really started to hate the idea to burn a lot of electrical power, just to have some moving pixels amuse me. I looked for alternatives. Alternative hardware, software and workflows. The question was: Can a different game entertain me aswell while consuming much less power? I found joy in this frugality. I replaced my former computer (including a big graphics card) by a humble Intel N97 Processor. This was my main PC now and I loved it. (I know some readers wouldn't even consider an N97 humble.) HTML https://www.gmktec.com/products/intel-alder-lake-n97-mini-pc-nucbox-g5 In order to still be able to play games with friends, I had to lower some graphics settings. There was one game that was only playable after I closed my browser and closed discord. Discord being the communication- application that my friends prefered to use. In my opinion discord is a harmful, sucky software anyway. In order to stay connected I used an alternative lightweight client called ripcord. HTML https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ You might think this is not a desirable state and I agree! Nevertheless it is very tough to break contact with long distance friends with whom you stay connected via these games. Anyway wanted to get rid of this bad software. The joy to use a sane, humble setup is much stronger in me right now. My lesson learned was: "Joy doesn't scale with compute power. But achieving equal joy with less compute power feels awesome!" Once the stone was rolling I switched more and more back to terminal based applications in order to deal with daily tasks. At the same time I felt so much more productive. I had a fun journey with a minimal setup running on: Alpine Linux (musl) - busybox - git - dwm (+dmenu,slstatus) - st - tmux - vim - mpv - chromium no ricing A good friend of mine is continiously encouraging me to switch to linux. In the next weeks I will have to decide if I wanna stay on linux (Alpine, Void,Gentoo or even linux from scratch?) or switch to a OpenBSD desktop. Wish me luck.