4 ms·

As much as I love the hacker spirit of cracking open hardware and software and bending it to your will (whether or not it was designed towards that end), I enjo

by ryandv 3y ago

As much as I love the hacker spirit of cracking open hardware and software and bending it to your will (whether or not it was designed towards that end), I enjoy my reMarkable precisely because I can get away from the ubiquity of computing and needing to constantly tinker with and repair software. I've fucked with Gentoo and Arch for so long that sometimes I just want a break from it all. No dependency hell, no bugs, esoteric stack traces, nor popups, advertisements, notifications, nor distractions. Just some pen and paper, except without the eraser shavings or ink blots. Not having to scan your notes to digitize them is a nice bonus as well. Especially since the pandemic and in the WFH era it's nice to get away from the omnipresent touchscreen or mouse and keyboard interfaces and deal with something a little more tactile; something reminiscent of a less perpetually online era. I'm tired of being hyperconnected to everything. Not to mention all the problems from staring at LED monitors all day long. Sometimes I don't want to troubleshoot software; I've done enough of that already.

blowski 3y ago
I'm with you. I want to buy things that don't need constant fiddling to keep them working. I want them to silently do their thing, supporting me in the background while I focus on mine. But it's great knowing that I _could_ drop down a layer at any time. It makes me feel a lot more comfortable about relying on an ecosystem to know that it has redundancy in the support layer. For example, if Remarkable themselves go out of business, will I still have access to my documents? Will they still receive updates? Will I still be able to buy replacement parts?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ryandv 3y ago
  Yes, yes. It just works, but if I need to I can pop open the hood and shell in, and then I'm back at home with Linux.
locusofself 3y ago
Precisely why I have not used Linux on my laptop/desktop since like 15 years ago. I love to tinker and troubleshoot but I prefer to to be getting paid for it.
- freedomben 3y ago
  A lot has changed in the last 15 years. Unless you're doing something crazy (like trying to play sound, haha jk that's a throwback joke to the old days), there's nothing you need to tinker with these days (though of course it's there if you change your mind). Fedora, Ubuntu, and some others are very stable and "just works".
  - slimsag 3y ago
    That wasn't my experience ~11 months ago [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32891879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32891879
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    A year or two ago, I remember HiDPI still being a hassle.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Yeah fair HiDPI is still a bit of a hassle. Not hard, but not out of the box either. Excepting 4k, which is fine out of the box. the pain comes in if you need fractional scaling.
  - RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
    I've done 3 new computer builds in the previous 6 months. Both Linux installs were an 'it just works experience'. The windows box has been a total pain in the ass and I've had to reinstall multiple times. Linux is a better out of the box experience than Windows.
Teknoman117 3y ago
I feel you on this. I started using Gentoo on my personal machines (Desktop, Laptop, NAS) after I needed to understand it for work. Eventually I fell in love with the developer workflow that it allows. That was seven years ago. These days I feel like I've spent so much time tinkering for little to no benefit. I've been through LFS a few times so I don't feel that being a Gentoo user made me understand Linux any more than I already did. So much "emerge --sync && emerge -1 sys-apps/portage && emerge -auUDN @world" and then fix USE flags problems and mask problems and keep rerunning the last command until it actually works. I somewhat self host everything right now - VPN into my home network to access my NAS. But the user experience of documents and media just feels so poor compared to existing cloud services that I'm tempted to just give up on homelab stuff. The upfront price of 10+ TB hard drives is hundreds of dollars a drive, you need to replace them every 5 years or so to "trust" them, you need redundant disks because you can never trust them, you need a backup solution, time investment to make backups, and the price of power in the Bay Area means you are spending several hundred a year on power to run the gear. Whereas I could just get 10 TB for $50/month from a cloud provider. It's not like I actually watch or listen to any of the blurays or music rips I've made, which represent most of my data... I bought a PineNote in early 2022 hoping to replace my reMarkable. I've worn out the battery but I don't want to give money to a company that intentionally makes swapping the battery nearly impossible. Along with the fact they're useless at work because you can't directly use a cloud service, you have to proxy through reMarkable's own service. I thought it'd be fun to tinker on but then I actually developed a healthy social life and exercise routine again and have found little motivation to stay inside when I'm not working.
swores 3y ago
> As much as I love the hacker spirit of cracking open hardware and software and bending it to your will (whether or not it was designed towards that end), I enjoy my reMarkable precisely because I can get away from the ubiquity of computing and needing to constantly tinker with and repair software. Personally I completely agree with you, and could have written almost exactly that paragraph - I too have a ReMarkable (the 2nd / current version), and love using it as it ships for both note taking and especially for reading ebooks/PDFs ("especially" just because it's what I use it for more, not because that's what it's better at - in fact, its UI for reading documents is among its weaker points and I hope they improve it in future software updates). However it is worth pointing out that you can SSH into it, and there are a fair few 3rd party tools and hacks for it - so far I've avoided trying any of them as there's nothing that I want strongly enough to have even a 1% risk of bricking it to worry about. But I'm tempted to start playing around with it someday. This is the best list of stuff for the ReMarkable that I'm aware of, though I don't know how complete it is / how many released tools or guides there might be that aren't included here: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
- Eeems 3y ago
  https://remarkable.guide https://remarkable.guide is a good place to start
  - swores 3y ago
    Thanks, bookmarked!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
teknico 3y ago
> Not to mention all the problems from staring at LED monitors all day long. Not sure what problems you mean. Any reference?
- ryandv 3y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6020759/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6020759/
doublerabbit 3y ago
> Sometimes I don't want to troubleshoot software; I've done enough of that already. That's why I switched to FreeBSD. Every OS kernel update, every package upgrade just works. Rock Solid.
pmarreck 3y ago
> I've fucked with Gentoo and Arch for so long that sometimes I just want a break from it all. No dependency hell, no bugs, esoteric stack traces, nor popups, advertisements, notifications, nor distractions. OT, but FYI... I have all that on NixOS. Things install and run reliably and configurations stick reliably, all declaratively. It feels like "the final distro hop" for me. 1) Getting back to known-good from any fucking-with that breaks something is 1 rollback away. 2) It's still Nix wizardry to do something as relatively simple as set up a systemd background process that gongs on the hour (I actually made this work, but it broke recently and I don't know why yet because 2-year-old-son). This actually discourages "distracted hacking" while making you work for the changes you definitely want, which ends up being a nice compromise. FWIW, I've been the most productive on this Linux distro of all the ones I've tried (Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, Pop_OS, Manjaro, Arch).

by ryandv 3y ago

blowski 3y ago

I'm with you. I want to buy things that don't need constant fiddling to keep them working. I want them to silently do their thing, supporting me in the background while I focus on mine. But it's great knowing that I _could_ drop down a layer at any time. It makes me feel a lot more comfortable about relying on an ecosystem to know that it has redundancy in the support layer. For example, if Remarkable themselves go out of business, will I still have access to my documents? Will they still receive updates? Will I still be able to buy replacement parts?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ryandv 3y ago
Yes, yes. It just works, but if I need to I can pop open the hood and shell in, and then I'm back at home with Linux.

locusofself 3y ago

Precisely why I have not used Linux on my laptop/desktop since like 15 years ago. I love to tinker and troubleshoot but I prefer to to be getting paid for it.

freedomben 3y ago
A lot has changed in the last 15 years. Unless you're doing something crazy (like trying to play sound, haha jk that's a throwback joke to the old days), there's nothing you need to tinker with these days (though of course it's there if you change your mind). Fedora, Ubuntu, and some others are very stable and "just works".
- slimsag 3y ago
  That wasn't my experience ~11 months ago [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32891879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32891879
- dehrmann 3y ago
  A year or two ago, I remember HiDPI still being a hassle.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Yeah fair HiDPI is still a bit of a hassle. Not hard, but not out of the box either. Excepting 4k, which is fine out of the box. the pain comes in if you need fractional scaling.
- RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
  I've done 3 new computer builds in the previous 6 months. Both Linux installs were an 'it just works experience'. The windows box has been a total pain in the ass and I've had to reinstall multiple times. Linux is a better out of the box experience than Windows.

Teknoman117 3y ago

I feel you on this. I started using Gentoo on my personal machines (Desktop, Laptop, NAS) after I needed to understand it for work. Eventually I fell in love with the developer workflow that it allows. That was seven years ago. These days I feel like I've spent so much time tinkering for little to no benefit. I've been through LFS a few times so I don't feel that being a Gentoo user made me understand Linux any more than I already did. So much "emerge --sync && emerge -1 sys-apps/portage && emerge -auUDN @world" and then fix USE flags problems and mask problems and keep rerunning the last command until it actually works. I somewhat self host everything right now - VPN into my home network to access my NAS. But the user experience of documents and media just feels so poor compared to existing cloud services that I'm tempted to just give up on homelab stuff. The upfront price of 10+ TB hard drives is hundreds of dollars a drive, you need to replace them every 5 years or so to "trust" them, you need redundant disks because you can never trust them, you need a backup solution, time investment to make backups, and the price of power in the Bay Area means you are spending several hundred a year on power to run the gear. Whereas I could just get 10 TB for $50/month from a cloud provider. It's not like I actually watch or listen to any of the blurays or music rips I've made, which represent most of my data... I bought a PineNote in early 2022 hoping to replace my reMarkable. I've worn out the battery but I don't want to give money to a company that intentionally makes swapping the battery nearly impossible. Along with the fact they're useless at work because you can't directly use a cloud service, you have to proxy through reMarkable's own service. I thought it'd be fun to tinker on but then I actually developed a healthy social life and exercise routine again and have found little motivation to stay inside when I'm not working.

swores 3y ago

> As much as I love the hacker spirit of cracking open hardware and software and bending it to your will (whether or not it was designed towards that end), I enjoy my reMarkable precisely because I can get away from the ubiquity of computing and needing to constantly tinker with and repair software. Personally I completely agree with you, and could have written almost exactly that paragraph - I too have a ReMarkable (the 2nd / current version), and love using it as it ships for both note taking and especially for reading ebooks/PDFs ("especially" just because it's what I use it for more, not because that's what it's better at - in fact, its UI for reading documents is among its weaker points and I hope they improve it in future software updates). However it is worth pointing out that you can SSH into it, and there are a fair few 3rd party tools and hacks for it - so far I've avoided trying any of them as there's nothing that I want strongly enough to have even a 1% risk of bricking it to worry about. But I'm tempted to start playing around with it someday. This is the best list of stuff for the ReMarkable that I'm aware of, though I don't know how complete it is / how many released tools or guides there might be that aren't included here: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

Eeems 3y ago
https://remarkable.guide https://remarkable.guide is a good place to start
- swores 3y ago
  Thanks, bookmarked!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

teknico 3y ago

> Not to mention all the problems from staring at LED monitors all day long. Not sure what problems you mean. Any reference?

ryandv 3y ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6020759/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6020759/

doublerabbit 3y ago

> Sometimes I don't want to troubleshoot software; I've done enough of that already. That's why I switched to FreeBSD. Every OS kernel update, every package upgrade just works. Rock Solid.

pmarreck 3y ago

> I've fucked with Gentoo and Arch for so long that sometimes I just want a break from it all. No dependency hell, no bugs, esoteric stack traces, nor popups, advertisements, notifications, nor distractions. OT, but FYI... I have all that on NixOS. Things install and run reliably and configurations stick reliably, all declaratively. It feels like "the final distro hop" for me. 1) Getting back to known-good from any fucking-with that breaks something is 1 rollback away. 2) It's still Nix wizardry to do something as relatively simple as set up a systemd background process that gongs on the hour (I actually made this work, but it broke recently and I don't know why yet because 2-year-old-son). This actually discourages "distracted hacking" while making you work for the changes you definitely want, which ends up being a nice compromise. FWIW, I've been the most productive on this Linux distro of all the ones I've tried (Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, Pop_OS, Manjaro, Arch).