What kind of pre-enshittification tech do you all use? Stuff where ppl look at you like you’re an alien b/c nobody does it that any more.
Me ->
Oldschool offline mp3 player rather than Spottify or other streaming or phone app, to use when running.
Paper books rather than e-books.
DRM free games I buy on GOG to avoid rootkitting my own comp.
Wired speakers rather than smart speakers.
Old ass pre-connected car.
Prob more but I can’t think of it all rn.
Admittedly a lot of my audio stuff is either wireless or built-in now. Either laptop speakers, or bone conduction headphones since I want to hear what’s happening around me when I’m walking on the roadside. Not clear on what you mean by pre-enshittification tech, but here’s the stuff people either need explained, or look at me weird for:
We’ll be moving into an owned home soon, and I have some plans for tech, and non-tech stuff. Can’t wait to see how many comments we get about having awnings in 2026.
I wish I had time to use Gentoo, but I barely have time to upgrade my Suse TW and Artix systems (to be fair, suse’s packaging system is shit compared to arch/artix, but it is more stable if upgraded after a long time).
How do you manage to upgrade it regularly? Do you have an extremely powerful PC or just the T430?
Gentoo is on the Latitude; it’s slightly more powerful, but it’s still an eight year old laptop. The big thing that’s cut down on compile time is using binary packages by default, only compiling when I either need to because my USE flags are different, or because there’s no binary package available. I don’t have that many packages installed that take hours/days (and I do mean days, I gave up on the source package for qtwebengine after 3 days of compiling) anymore. Average update takes maybe 30 minutes now, updating weekly.
For a more direct comparison: Same PC, installed Gentoo twice (I managed to bork my install), the source install took 3 days to actually get a GUI, binary install took 3 hours, and there is essentially no difference
I will also say: You can absolutely use your computer while the upgrades are going. Gaming won’t be great, but doing office/coding stuff, and watching videos is usually fine
Eh, on my Latitude(5290) - 2018, i7-8350u and my shitty home network (still better than my grandma’s ADSL but not by much), zypper dup (with some unnecesarry shit) takes an hour. I assume emerging the upgrade would be at least 10 times longer.
I assume I’d be forced to use Gentoo if I eventually switch to a snapdragon laptop, so fuck me then.
If you do, adding the line ‘FEATURES=“getbinpkg”’ to your make.conf will automatically make it search for binary packages that match your USE flags, and they do pick ones that are pretty sensible for the binaries, so it’s very likely. I think I have maybe 3-4 packages that have binaries that I can’t use because of my flags, and they’re all pretty quick to install.
Not sure how much the internet will affect it, I’ve only tested it on my current network, which is pretty fast