Does It Take Unplugging?

I really don’t know who Wayne Porter is, but some network security people I read do. Apparently he took a sabbatical from the Net for about 6 months, and learned a bit from it.

I’m puzzled. Did it really require such a complete withdrawal to become more human? “Technology should serve people, not people serving technology.” I seem to recall saying such words years ago when I first got my own used computer (DX2-66), and was debating something with folks on a RedHat forum. I don’t count myself among the profound thinkers of the world, so I’m wondering how Mr. Porter missed out.

Is it really that bad in the geek world? I read jokes about poor social lives, but is it real?

Could be. Even I got too wrapped up in Computer Land. I could spend hours each day doing nothing important on my computers. Then I began helping people learn how to use theirs, and realized just how unimportant they were. It gave rise to a series of articles here about eschewing the “rolling release” mindset of Open Source, always chasing the next new feature, never finished, never settled, never anything really accomplished.

As I tried to get away from that, I did my best to get hold of a laptop. The logic of that was simply my own mental frame of reference. It’s easier to hibernate a laptop and walk away from it for several hours each day. It was the reason for accepting such a low-powered laptop (1Ghz P3), so I was forced to pare down the toys and stick to what was really needed to do actual work (I pretend I’m a writer). At one point I actually tried to get a decent system not too useful for anything but DOS, rather like my first computer, but those machines scarcely run any more.

It’s why I also played with going back to Windows, so I wouldn’t be tempted to play with it too much. It was just too hard, since all my habits are built on Linux/BSD. When I realized XP was no better for the hardware (Win2K wouldn’t run on this thing), I decided to try one more time some various automated install Linux distros. Puppy runs fine, but too much function is missing. DSL was even faster, but misses more function, since it still uses the 2.4 kernel. FreesBIE did run okay, but FreeBSD is still limited to APM for things like laptop suspend. I may still end up using that some day, since this laptop includes APM in the BIOS.

But for now, I’m running OpenSUSE 10.3. Yes, I know it’s “obsolete” and won’t be supported past October this year. I don’t care. Anything more recent is unforgivably bloated on this machine, not to mention broken in too many ways. Should it continue working the way I like, I may just ignore the end of support and deal with whatever consequences come with it. More likely I’ll have time to research until I find something else just as light, but the point was to get an install which would work out most of the details of configuration without my intervention. Debian Lenny did almost none of that, and actually ran slower. None of the Ubuntu stuff worked properly, and was harder to fix. The point was, I was tired of having to tweak for weeks. SUSE did more things right out of the box.

I don’t want to play with it any more, I just want to get my work done. It helps to know Linux is so much more secure, and matches my work habits. On XP I was stuck using Kmeleon and Sylpheed, not because I liked them, but because everything else was too heavy, too slow. With SUSE 10.3 I at least get to use Firefox and Kmail is just dandy. They work, and all the other tools are usable without slowing the machine to a crawl.

Newer is not always better in Computer Land. When chasing the next upgrade means serving the computer instead of vice-versa, it’s time we did something else.