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.

Do “the stuff” on the server, only serve HTML. In my first job we build a whole webshop with very complex product configurators that would today even run perfectly fine in dillo.

JavaScript is needed to actually build anything useful

Tell this to the people who build things you would call today a “Webapp” with CGI written in C.

Well, if you want some really interesting experience i would recommend trying out Edbrowse, but for a really good day to day experience i personally really like Lynx: Most (for me) relevant pages work very well with it, it has a seamless gopher Integration and the UI hasn’t changed (much) since i first used it in the mid 90s.

Why use Lynx? Well, it keeps away all the crap that makes the web unbearable since people started plastering their pages with blinking ad-banners, and today it is an absolutely great way to get around paywalls and read pages and articles undisturbed.

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.

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 !

Baaack in my day we got a driver for our mouse on a single DD floppy…

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

Thank you for this new rabbit hole that thanks to my pathological curiosity for software on the far side of normalcy i now HAVE to explore and waste time i should spend working on a project 😜

As a weirdo (maybe not a fascist tech bro, but who am I to judge) my personal grudge against systemd and Wayland is that I personally simply DON’T LIKE CHANGE.

Nazis AND Devs should fuck of?

X11 AND Wayland are for degenerates, a distraction at best but mostly just something that wastes CPU cycles and RAM.

THE FUTURE IS TERMINAL!

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.