I’m becoming comfortable with the idea that there’s a joy in allowing hardware to serve specific purposes. At first it felt excessive or wrong to to have more than one computer. Buying a gaming PC felt strange. But after running my Arch Linux experiment, and also thinking about “Internet as a Place,” I’m happier going to my desktop and turning on my $100 Arch machine to write code or browse the internet. Or keep a tiny Linux computer in my bag to connect to HDMI in study rooms to run meetings without bringing my heavy (and expensive) Macbook. I keep looking at CyberDeck projects thinking it may only be a matter of time, or at the very least, jvscholz tiny computer[^1]. Plus, having several inexpensive computers allows for more experimentation. Have one you’re not using much? Why not try running an SMB share. Or a media library. Or an audiobook server. Or an ad blocker. If you like it enough, it doesn’t cost much more to get a whole new dedicated machine for it that can do it even better.

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[^]: Linux is so lightweight; it completely rules because it opens up so many possibilities