My personal laptop broke. It was during the end of last semester of uni, and I had many assignments yet to finish. I tried to boot into it after I have gotten to the dorm, but only the fans would spin and the keyboard backlight would light up. I wanted to investigate the issue. From what I've gathered online, it could be many things from a faulty real-time-clock battery to a dead motherboard. Well, you don't even have to guess, it was the motherboard, or, more precisely, the gaping hole in the graphics card. I never repasted the computer, so the frankly terrible job the manufacturer did could have been the problem. Or maybe just a manufacturing defect, I saw it was quite common for the motherboard to die ~1/2 a year after warranty. I did not bother repairing the laptop, as I would have to replace the motherboard as a whole, which comprises a significant part of the original price.
Now I had to assess available options. I had (still have) an assigned work laptop, your basic office model, i5, no dedicated graphics. But sufficient for civil engineering CAD and occasional 3D models of the terrain and infrastructure. I'm lucky to be a part of a great work collective, my boss was understanding when I came to him with a request to allow me to use the work computer for school. Well, that would be covered for now, I can finish my assignments. But what will I use for my free time? I don't feel comfortable with my activity being tracked on the provided laptop.
At home, we have a couple spare notebooks. I picked my grandma's old one, replaced the hybrid HDD with a solid state drive, and upgraded the RAM from 4 to 8 GB using a spare DDR3 stick. Then I installed elementary OS (Linux) on it. It's a 10 year old Pentium PC, but it works like a breeze. I'm especially surprised about the boot up time and screen turn on time after opening the lid. It also goes to sleep instantly after closing the lid right back. And who, in 2025, still has an integrated DVD drive and a VGA port? Yeah baby! (Though I miss my USB-C...)
The device is not without issue, naturally. It'S vEry HeAVy /ref. The battery is either faulty, or just old, and percents decrease at the same rate as minutes on the clock grow. It's also not incredibly powerful, sporting a low end nVidia card. Coming from a gaming laptop, I almost never actually needed the performance. I bought the last notebook with the intention of editing videos and doing 3D graphics, but I have never gotten to it. And all the videos I've previously made were done on sluggish hardware. As if the limitations allowed me to be more intentional with my use of technology.
To get to the main point I wrote this post: this is it. The limits helped me be more focused, and I learned a ton alongside. First, I would not be daily-driving Linux had I had my old computer. I tried some commands for simple file manipulation and moving between folders in the terminal, which I'm a newbie to. I started learning the uxntal programming language (which reminds me -- I have to return to the tutorials!), and learned how to clone a repository, build an uxn emulator and add uxn roms to the app menu.
As an old Minecrafter, I now play Luanti Minetest Game on a small Czech allowlisted server. I first thought that it would be unplayable, as I was initially getting only 1-10 FPS. But lowering the rendering distance worked wonders, and now I'm on stable and more than acceptable 30 FPS. I could go higher, but it's enough for building.
I love to contribute to OpenStreetMap, the open map database. However, using the web-based iD map editor was incredibly slow. It would be better with more RAM, which I instinctively went to order. But then it hit me: I don't need to upgrade if I can find a less resource-intensive alternative. So I went and installed JOSM, a desktop editor with offline support. It works differently, as you only download a small portion of the area and work your way from there, saving precious memory. Also, editing relations, i. e. bus routes is so much simpler than in iD. I can duplicate them! They automatically order the road pieces and stops! And show gaps! I'm glad that I learned to work with this tool.
Next thingie-thing, I learned how to make electronic music! I wanted to try this when I first listened to ZeWei and Lamplight -- Caftaphata and gotten into some kind of an euphoric state. But only now did I install LMMS and went through all the tutorials from TJFree within a single day. The interface looks ominous at first sight, but the usage is easy. During the following 5 days, I created my own 2 min track titled "petabyte" by magnetdysk. Silly author's name, but I like it. I sent the beta version to my family, and they think it's cool. I have an idea for my next song in my head, and some melody snippets in my voice recorder.
I also used this opportunity for a bit more digital sovereignty. I had for a long time been a Onedrive user, which is a really bad option when it comes to backing up your data privately. So I started downloading my backup to a new external drive, from Onedrive, as I could not get to the files on the broken computer's SSD. It was painfully slow, with frequent errors and incomplete downloads. This only solidified my decision to move away from Big Tech, and I am moving from MS 365 Copilot (previously MS 356 (previously MS Office)) to LibreOffice for personal use.
Along these big changes, I stopped using social media, news sites and various forums I was present on and did not consider them valuable enough. I put on a limit both on my smartphone and PC with the LeechBlock Firefox extension. An empowering thought I was influenced by was "I am in full control of my life, and what happens to me", giving me motivation to make difficult decisions. I did not see the value in most of these services anymore, or not enough of it to justify using them. I even left the Fediverse entirely, shifting from a major proponent of it to a skeptic. The ideas behind it are worth rooting for, having no ads or limited outside influence due to its federated and decentralized nature. I can see its potential for organizing, small closed groups and finding new people, but not in daily usage. It gets overwhelming quickly, like regular social media, as it (even if unknowingly) copies the behaviour of its commercial relatives. Nowadays, I fill a lot of time with music that I buy on Bandcamp and listen to offline, but I'll also try to be more intentional, probably with a time limit. I kept some Discord servers, as there are 2 communities I greatly value. And most importantly, they are not overwhelmingly busy.
I unsubscribed from a lot of YouTube creators, especially technology channels, as the consumer oriented field has become too stagnant, with changes just for the sake of changes, or has unfavorable priorities to me, like generative LLMs everywhere, increased surveillance and data collection, unrepairability, and planned obsolescence. Then I moved my subscriptions to FreeTube -- a more private desktop client. It does not always just work, as YouTube regularly introduces obstructions, but that makes me more intentional with my use, and I go pursue some other activity instead.
For once, I am thankful this has happened to me. I no longer think I need a powerful graphics card on my PC. Or a new phone. When you get to the device's limit, you can go two ways: upgrade or lower your consumption. I'd recommend to utilize what you already have before spending more money, and maximally adapt to the restrictions that come with this way of thinking. At least for me, the results are worth the hassle.
August 3, 2025