@teratology
Yeah, it's exactly like that. I don't think that it's completely sustainable — they still rely on civilization being there a lot. But it's still light years more autonomous than the lifestyle most live. I don't consider them some sort of leeches for society though — just because they use donated hardware. Well, it's a nice experiment, if it works for them — so be it.
But this experiment demonstrates very well how delusional people who say something like "let's get rid of these huge evil companies and just use old hardware" are. We can't remake civilization that way yet — we have no one else, but these evil companies to make our hardware. And this comes from a person who uses computers that are at least a decade old, sometimes much more than that. I'm typing this now on a 2008 Mac Pro, still a capable machine with dual quad core Xeons and 28 gigs of RAM TBH, and I still have a ThinkPad from 2003 (!) — and I sometimes use even that little guy, I've been browsing Fedi from it yesterday. But I know that this hardware was made by evil corpos, they weren't even remotely that evil as they are today, but I still kinda rely on them.
Well, there are computers like MNT Reform — I really like it, but such hardware isn't even remotely close to being mainstream. I think some people are being hypocrites — screaming out loud for their right to repair and to modify their hardware, but still buying hardware from the likes of Lenovo or HP instead of supporting smaller hardware makers — we have plenty of them today. A lot of people are being very vocal, but fail to put their money where their mouth is.
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