Honestly? It is.

Getting a understanding of what you do is something that is moving towards “lost arts” territory regarding everything computer related. Yeah, you will not get the solution to your problem THAT FAST, but if you find out why the thing you want to do did not work and understand how to make it work you will benefit in the long run.

If you only use software that is created by people you like… well… i guess your only choice will be an abacus…

In reality, what Chromebooks provide is a reinvention of the good old mainframe and terminal principle. In theory (like my recent - half joking - 9front comment) this is something that would be really easy to set up with nearly all Linux systems and especially immutable ones.

My take would be:

Put an sign up / sign in form as a “first boot” message in a distribution of your choice where you can specify (or have pre-filled by an organisation) a central server (could be something fancy like Nextcloud or something simple rsync based) where your whole profile folder gets synced to. After that: If anything goes kaputt just roll back the sync. Or “powerwasch” (to keep the ChromeOS terminology) the system to a clean state and re-sync your home folder.

In theory something that could all be implemented with a little scripting in an afternoon.

9front (with enough volunteers and a modern browser) could be exactly that.

I use Devuan and TDE because the setup is so incredible boring and dusty that i do not have to get acquainted with anything new (SystemD, Wayland… whatever hipster WM is currently cool) and keep working with the tools i like.

Well, look at it the other way around:

Those niche places act like a filter, pretty much alike as the whole internet was about ~20 years ago. Yeah, there may be fewer people around, but those people tend to be quiet a bit more interesting.

Nah, “the rest of us” is ruining the internet by following the people in the top of the trash pit.

You know… nobody is stopping you from self hosting, building a website or digging a gopherhole?

Devuan + Trinity Desktop

Moved over there since Debian switched to Sytemd. It is boring, dusty… but it works and stays out of my way.

I still doesn’t like it…

Flatpaks together with “immutable” distributions, Wayland and systemd are a heresy, a crime against the UNIX principles, a disgrace in the eyes of of SED and AWK. REPENT! Save your immortal core dumps and return to the one true /home !

Absolutely! I observe this behaviour on myself: I am nowadays even sometimes coding on my phone (though, the experience is still… “suboptimal”), but for everything else? Its mostly fine.

I don’t get it… Arch install is pretty straight forward?!?

Well, that was a sentence often heard at a former employer… we employees often followed up with “… yeah, but the family name is Corleone”

Nah, '95 was best. BBS systems were in their final bloom, Usenet was better than everything that came afterwards (OK, the fediverse maaaay be a good successor) and there were still the COOL systems (Atari, Commodore…) around even after their respective companies had abandoned them.

You also could make some decent money if you had some rudimentary coding skills… I financed my first motorcycle (for which I hadn’t a driving license, mind you) by writing a (QBASIC? Visual Basic? I don’t remember) software for managing car parts for some local used car dealers.

Just to mention it:

gopher://sdf.org

There is no better place for plain and real content

They didn’t get most references in the 80s/90s either… this is the reason why nerds seemed weird…

Well regarding plan9port, it is really, really easy to acquire… just clone the Github repo (https://github.com/9fans/plan9port), run ./INSTALL and everything else sorts itself out ;-)

Why ed? Well, it keeps my brain from rotting 😀 just half joking… i have noticed that whenever i use a somewhat more “user friendly” software my mind starts to wander off more easily and instead of being more focussed on the programming task i shortly after find myself doing… $THING instead of being productive. So, being the only jack-of-all-trades-computer-guy in a small-ish company i tend to chose the tools that work for me, even if they are a bit… anachronistic.

I think the best maintained version of Sam would be the one included in 9front (if you want some truely special experience) or if you want to stay (somewhat) in the realm of the sane you can use plan9port which also brings in many nice tools out of the Plan9 ecosystem.

Well, for me personally this would be EmuTOS

Honestly: Yeah, i was trolling (kind of), but:

I DO like to code via ED because the design and workflow of ED (or even better: Sam) makes folding unnecessary because you only put on the screen what is needed right at that moment. Want to see two functions 1000 lines apart? No problem, just print them right below each other on the screen.