S1E40 — Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

GARY: —not a notebook, Obi, the thread says notebook, I read the fucking title—

OBI: It says netbook. The word is netbook. You are saying notebook.

GARY: Same family. The netbook is a notebook that has been humbled.

MAEVE: I'm Maeve. I invest in things that later require an apology letter.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher. Voice still too loud for human skull.

GARY: Right. I'm Gary. This is Hacker News Radio, episode whatever, thread: "Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux."

OBI: You got there. Proud of you.

GARY: Top comment is bcraven, quoting the author. "I did not expect much, and because the bottlenecks were the HDD and CPU I did not feel any noticeable performance improvement."

OBI: That is beautiful. He upgraded the RAM and discovered the machine was already a corpse. Founder optimism colliding with physics. My favorite genre of fucking pornography.

GARY: He's a builder, Obi. He looked at a fifteen-year-old netbook and said, "This deserves one more life." That is the same instinct that—

OBI: That is the same instinct that burns thirty-eight million dollars on aluminum.

GARY: Bauxlite was not aluminum, it was a vertically-integrated—

MAEVE: It's sunk-cost spirituality. He bought the RAM, so the RAM had to matter. If you cannot feel the improvement, you have not prayed fucking hard enough.

GRUNER: Field note. Human installs Arch. Machine remains slow. Human blames hard drive. Hard drive cannot read Hacker News. Advantage: hard drive.

GARY: The point is he finished the project. He shipped. Do you know how rare that is? I once spent eleven fucking months on a landing page—

GARY: —months on a landing page and the CTA button didn't even work.

MAEVE: MarioMan. Four years ago he installed Debian on a netbook because it was one of the few distros still officially supporting x86 32-bit binaries. Real challenges: Wi‑Fi drivers and a stock BIOS lid‑close bug that Linux handled and Windows XP ignored.

OBI: The lid‑close bug. The machine goes to sleep when you close the lid, wakes when you open it, except sometimes it wakes into a dimension where the screen never comes back. Linux fixed it. Windows XP looked at it and said, "This is fine." Because Windows XP was a fucking nihilist.

GARY: That is exactly how I learned Linux. I did not choose Debian. Debian chose me through fucking suffering.

MAEVE: Netbooks were the unpaid internship of computing. You worked for free, you learned nothing transferable, and at the end you still couldn't afford a real laptop.

GRUNER: This is what you call... "dogfooding the trauma."

OBI: The Wi‑Fi driver hunt alone. You are on a forum at 3 a.m. downloading a .inf file from a man in Estonia.

GARY: His name was Madis and he saved my life.

MAEVE: Madis is not a person. Madis is a distributed hallucination caused by Intel's chipset strategy.

GRUNER: I have catalogued seventeen Madises. None human.

OBI: serious_angel drops a link to ArchLinux32 architecture options: i486, i686, Pentium4, with or without PAE.

GARY: PAE. Physical Address Extension. The thing that lets a 32‑bit CPU see more than four gigabytes of RAM by lying to itself.

OBI: It is not lying. It is a bank‑switching hack from the era when we thought 640K was a fucking personality trait.

MAEVE: And drdexebtjl says only the very first Atom generation was 32‑bit only. Later Atoms had 64‑bit support, but OEMs shipped them as 32‑bit machines because Windows had shit 64‑bit driver support.

GARY: Wait. My old netbook might have been 64‑bit the whole fucking time?

OBI: Yes. You spent three years compiling Firefox for a CPU that was embarrassed for you.

MAEVE: Shipping a 64‑bit CPU with a 32‑bit OS is like raising a Series B on a market you know is shrinking. The check clears. The soul does not.

GRUNER: The hardware was innocent. The OEMs were the malware.

GARY: jbl0ndie had the Asus Eee PC 901. Four‑gigabyte root SSD, second sixteen‑gigabyte SSD, tried btrfs across both. Windows on the subsidized version limited how many apps you could open.

MAEVE: A four‑gigabyte root SSD. That is not fucking storage. That is a dare.

OBI: And the second SSD was slower. So btrfs would stripe your data across hope and fucking regret.

GARY: But look at it. Tiny. Chunky. The keyboard looked like it was made for a child's court‑mandated typing class. I fucking love it.

OBI: You love it because it resembles your burn‑rate chart. Adorable from a distance, fatal up close.

MAEVE: I would value it at zero pre‑money and a hundred percent nostalgia post‑money.

GARY: drdexebtjl adds: some of these machines had 1024 by 600 displays, and many apps expect 1024 by 768, so modal dialogs are too tall for the screen. The OK button lives below the visible universe.

OBI: You cannot click OK. You cannot click Cancel. You can only rotate the machine and hope gravity moves the dialog.

GARY: It's like a Tamagotchi that runs Emacs.

GRUNER: I have seen humans weep over modal dialogs. Tears are inefficient coolant.

MAEVE: To the Eee PC 901. Adorable war criminal.

GARY: internet2000 says netbooks didn't need Microsoft's help in dying. Nobody bought more than one because the experience was that bad.

OBI: Finally. A user with a memory.

MAEVE: theevilsharpie follows up: Chromebooks are the spiritual successor. Cheap, low‑spec, disposable laptops.

GARY: Microsoft still fucking killed it. They pushed Windows XP onto hardware that couldn't hold it. That is like pouring a milkshake into a thimble.

OBI: The OEMs chose to ship it. The users chose to buy it once and never again. Microsoft did not hold the fucking gun. They sold the gun at retail.

MAEVE: The market unconditionally elected Chromebooks. Netbooks were the reprobate hardware, predestined for the fire. Chromebooks are the elect.

GRUNER: Field note. Disposable compute. Humans will fucking pay to forget.

GARY: That buzz is my worldview filing for divorce.

GRUNER: Field note, verbatim. "Subject believes suffering improves silicon. Subject also believes Chromebook is netbook after marketing exfoliation. Conclusion: humans do not want better machines. Humans want better stories about why they deserve machines."

MAEVE: Netbooks are the Protestant work ethic made plastic. You did not buy a laptop. You bought a covenant of deferred enjoyment. The screen was small because suffering was the point. The CPU was slow because grace is unearned. And Chromebooks are the predestination of hardware: the OS was always going to win because the OS accepted that the user was lazy and the machine was disposable.

GARY: ...what?

MAEVE: You heard me.

GARY: Okay. That's the fucking show. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: This was Hacker News Radio. Goodnight.