AlmanackPage

Retirement frees a person's time to delve deeply into qwertyness. Lately, the question for the Almanack has been: What is the minimal computer that is good enough for general use?

First up, a Surface Pro 3. This is a 4-year-old machine with a gorgeous screen and decent specs, so why is it selling for $270? A nephew inherited one with no

useful end-user software, so we undertook a Linux installation to see if it has merit. The cosmetics are stunning: ultra-HD eye-grabber, 700 grams, a faux-suede cover/keyboard that magne-magically adheres to the tablet, good

sound, all the ports, SSD, bluetooth, etc, etc. So you really want to like this thing.

No distro offered a seamless experience, but Jake Day has a patch kit on his web site to handle the quirks. Strike one: end users don't want to rebuild the OS kernel to make their machines work. But being geeks, we'll play along for now.

Install git, log into github anonymously, download the kernel source, run a build.

The patch kit wants to work with Fedora. Which is fine, except that Fedora releases a kernel update every week, so get to work on a sophisticated build script, and brace yourself for a 4-hour maintenance window. Strike two; there

are maybe 10 geeks in the universe with the patience, and they're both working for the NSA.

The patch kit adds a battery monitor, since Surface doesn't play nicely with any distro's power management, and wifi support, since Surface has its own idea of how to drive a Marvell chip. But the Surface camera follows no standards at

all, so even Jake has given up on driving that little brick. The battery monitor takes a very rough guess at how much juice you have left, so you might ust crash with 40%. And wifi might stay up if you keep it busy, but even the

latest patched version might just take a nap while you're running a download. In other words, it works, but not very well. Strike three.

Next in line is a Raspberry Pi. The choices at present are Pi 3b+ and Pi 4. Latest version would seem a no-brainer, but 4 is only 4 months old, and most of the kits and add-ons haven't caught up. And there is some obscure usb-c issue

that the wizards warn may frotz your hardware, so maybe you want to wait til they fix it. So 3b+ it is.

Considering that the Pi is sold as ikea-for-nerds, RPI (we're insiders now) is a pleasant experience. The official and 'official' bits work exactly as they should, right out of the box, with a little help from YouTube. (Nobody reads

the damned manuals anyway, right?) Third-party kits seem universally dodgy, and they come with sub-literate instructions to enhance their unintelligible YouTube videos, but they could fill a niche if you're patient.

Pi is cheap: $40 for the cpu, $60 for a screen, $15 for a case, $40 for usb and sd chips, $15 for speakers, $20 for a charger kit, $15 for a camera, $30 for a

battery... It does add up. You have to download the 'raspbian' OS and put it in a 32Gb partition on a micro-sd chip, then assemble the whole mess. Which is all part of the fun, knowing that you can take it apart, put it on a tv with

hdmi, embed it in a robot, put it in a surveillance blind, the project list goes on and on. Because it's very low wattage, you can drive it with a couple of phone-chargers, or phone batteries. Zendure batteries do pass-through charging,

for an instant UPS. My favorite feature is the add-on scaffold: Legos, built into the case and peripherals for easy and firm attachment.

But if it's a 'real' computer you want, well. Linux is very frugal with memory, but the Web is not. Adobe and Chrome and Skype and streaming eat gigabytes for a snack, and Pi 3b+ has a don't-even-think-about-it 1Gb hardwired memory limit.

For normal geeks this is adequate. My modest investment of time and treasure produced 120G of available storage on a usb 'disk' and 96G available in the

Linux partition of the boot sd card. So, with 1G of memory and 200G of disk, this can be a very capable machine. The 7" screen is 800x640, which is fine for editing, even to my aging eyes. Just don't try to exchange large pdf's

with your accountant, or start a Hangout with your remote relations. This is the Unix/KISS philosophy alive and well in the 21st Century.

My wife looked at the exposed ribbon cables and battery wires and Lego hinges and asked if I thought TSA would let me take that bomb on a plane.

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