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You also gained a comfort level poking around in moderately complex system that could break if you did something wrong, and then force you to step through problem solving to fix it. This is a very important skill. (Though it's also important to understand when potentially breaking something, even temporarily, is low stakes vs. something to be avoided at all costs)

It's a skill I like to call a "video game mentality" that I think was probably influential in the rise of technology: video games gave players the ability to push buttons and experiment in all kinds of ways with a technological system but in a very low stakes environment.

I don't think I would have been nearly as comfortable poking around and tweaking system variables in my first computers running Windows 3.X and 95 if I didn't have years of experience poking around in other pixel-based environments in the form of videogames. I would break things, panic, realize that whatever it was, it was fixable, go through trial and error, learn to find other people and resources to help, fix the problem, and do it all over again at some point.

I had the exact same experience, but a fairly clear flow into my career. My own tinkering led to a job at a local computer store fixing computers when I was about 15, and then a job as a build engineer at 18. This was in the 90s so there weren’t a ton of college students with computer experience to compete with, and I think there was more openness to non-traditional candidates.

My last job was product director for a major CI/CD platform, so there’s a pretty clear breadcrumb trail all the way back to tinkering with Linux on old hardware to now.

The Linux command line and scripting was part of it, but the real deeper lesson was that computers are understandable and if you are persistent you can fix or improve nearly anything, or assemble something new and useful by building on what’s available to you.

>Years ago, as a kid, when the only computers I had access to were cobbled together hand-me-downs and machines people would throw away I used to do this kind of thing. Like the author, I settled on IceWM after trying Fluxbox/JWM/FVWM/"Window Maker" and all the various forks with minor variations.

I had one of those original EeePC's years ago, 900 mhz celeron in like 2008, 800x480 screen, just woefully out of date. Ended up running Fluxbox just because of ram usage. With an actual WM it couldn't stream The Daily Show smoothly. I really do love playing with low spec systems.

Indeed. I too find optimizing and making things work on low spec systems far more rewarding than brute forcing using the latest hardware.

> it's questionable if I learnt anything useful other then how to get hobby DEs working on ancient hardware

I did similar things, and on one hand I feel it’s ok that it’s not all “useful” - it was a hobby after all, but on the other hand I do feel it had benefits - you learned patience, creative thinking, problem solving, and working on those projects for a long stretch of time almost has a meditative effect I felt. I’m sorry that a lot of modern kids probably don’t get to experience this as much as everything is pre-packaged, system-on-a-chip, non-fixable etc. (And people are more careful of how they dispose of computers due to privacy).

Wow, Damn Small Linux, what a throwback! That was how I was first ever able to run and interact with a Linux system back as a teen. I had no computer with Administrator access, but I found a zip file with DSL, a QUEMU.exe, and a .bat file which would run QUEMU and boot DSL, cause I couldn't figure out how. I never even got it to save to a persistent disk, I had to boot and re-do all the changes I'd figured out the prior time. What an amazingly educational little thing that was!

Wow, this took me down memory lane. Puppy Linux and its crazed Windows 95-esque dialogue boxes (remember Puppy Unleashed?) will forever hold a soft spot in my heart.

Not sure how it is anymore, but Puppy Linux circa 2008 was like the GeoCities of operating systems, glorious in its own unpolished way. Vector Linux, too, which I believe was Puppy's ancestor.

> Years ago, as a kid, when the only computers I had access to were cobbled together hand-me-downs and machines people would throw away I used to do this kind of thing.

That was me well into my 20s :) Win2k broke, and I was broke, so the only option was to install linux.

It paved the way for me to get into programming, not so much shell scripts, but just the powerful idea that computer systems were malleable things you could change - something not really obvious for those of us who cut our teeth on MS Windows.

Same! Ubuntu 6.04 with Gnome worked surprisingly well on a 450mhz PIII.

> it's nice to have computers that "just work" with modern software

Yeah I never understood people who work with computers all day economizing on their computers. Even from scalpers you’ll pay ~$6500 for top of the line parts and peripherals, which is about the cost of a high school student’s violin.

Wow that’s pricy. I played 1st section violin through college and only have a $2k one. My friend played first chair 1st violin section through college and had a $4k violin and it sounded amazing. Maybe we got lucky and found a really good instrument shop? Another friend had a cello that costed well over $15k though so there’s that.

The $2k violin is a $3k+ violin in 5 or 10 years, unless you drop it. The computer is generally not (especially if you drop it).

At least you're engaging with the premise. You could also get a $980 with tax M1 MacBook Air. A Dell prebuilt - even the Alienware, which does not have to pay scalper prices and comes with a 3070 - is $2,611. These are all comparable options. In the instrument world, a $6,500 computer is more like a $30,000-150,000 violin and bow. Like the stuff professionals use.

I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily driver. I like it because the hardware is cheap and easy to replace. It sips electricity, which matters to me. It doesn't support Intel or AMD. And as a developer, I can more acutely feel differences in performance based on the algorithms I choose. If I can make it run acceptably on a Pi, it should work okay on a non-flagship phone or a 4+ year old office PC.

Kudos to you!

Yes, but it's also thanks to this mentality that a simple text editor occupies 1 gig of ram and two cpu cores nowadays. If the dev's machine is infinitely fast and has storage as fast as other people's ram, they stop caring about performance issues, because they never encounter them in the first place. And I'm not talking about working on hand written assembly for a week to get the last bit of performance. I've repeatedly found silly things like O(n) code calculating something that could be expressed as O(1), hilariously complicated xpath expressions that in the end just retrieved an immediate child and whatnot.

At one of my first jobs, when my boss got annoyed by some software being slow, je always said that developers should get the fastest hardware available, but as soon as they start testing or using their own software, the machine needs to magically turn into a 386 with your home directory on an NFS share. Granted, that was 20 years ago so 386 didn't sound as hilarious as it does now, but it was still a little extreme. But that idea stuck with me, and to this day I do test software on slow machines every now and then, looking for obvious performance left on the table.

Easy, not everyone lives in countries where giving ~$6500 is a possibility, and if they have access to such money they wouldn't be spending it on computer parts most likely.

Even in the US $6500 is a lot of money for most people. I've personally never spent even a third of that on a PC.

Yeah, indeed.

I'll give you two reasons.

1. In many countries $6500 is enough to start a business. I'd rather do that than pay for an overpriced piece of aluminum with a piece of fruit etched on one of the sides. What if I'm not the business type? That's fine. It's still probably better to save that money.

2. Modern computing is turning into a dumpster fire. It will be pretty soon that the Intel platform will work in the same way as the above-mentioned fruitty platform and you won't be able to run whatever software you want on it. While I agree OP is probably making his life extra miserable [1], I admire people like him, since their efforts will give us the next free/fun computing platform.

[1] I too run a Raspberry Pi at home, but I've long given up on turning it into a desktop machine. There is an easier way to run modern software on cheap hardware with a fraction of the hassle.

6500 is a bunch of money, reason why you also don't see many high school violin students