Good Shout

As I spend too much of my life in co-working spaces, I am very accustomed to seeing my fellow professionals using £800 Macbooks for working in google docs, taking Teams calls or some other browser based activity that could be comfortably managed by my 5 year old Moto G30 Android phone.

Even if you routinely do activities that cannot be limited to browser based solutions, I still think there is alot of room to utilise older, cheaper tech – and if you’re running a small charity, anything to free up budget is going to be a blessing.

This is also more than a little inspired by the incredible story that the French governement are aggressively moving away from Windows and towards Linux.

So I have been experimenting with options to see where we can keep costs down, as well as keep decent tech out of landfill.

For this I decided to pair a laptop and a tablet. In my own freelance work I pair a laptop for travel with a desktop for design – this allows me a portable option and a powerful option, but at a much cheaper price than a portable and powerful option combined. I find this works well, is cost effective and gives me more options. So here the laptop fills the role of the ‘powerful option’ – which at first made me nervous…

The Laptop
for my laptop I have a Lenovo Thinkpad X270. Released in 2017, it is not quite a decade old. But it has a hard plastic shell, a compact body and an incredibly satisfying keyboard. The internals are old, but the build is solid as is common to most Thinkpads. If you aren’t a computer enthusiast Thinkpads are an excellent choice. They are enterprise laptops built to last, and ex-office units can be often found on the second hand market for bargain prices – as with this one.

The Tablet
I have a second generation Amazon Fire Tablet 10. This is a pick based on two key factors. Firstly it has a keyboard case that is great for typing – just feels pretty nice for the size, that’s it. Secondly, these tablets are super, super problematic in practice. They are locked to a weird Amazon fork of Android that tightly controls what apps you can use, they are really under powered and because of this there’s tons of them that are going to be sold very cheaply, or they are going to end up in a landfill somewhere.

In theory, if it can handle some sort of word processing or some sort of light browsing/emails etc, this should be of some use, and that’s a very cheap option if you just need something to cover the very, very basic of basics – and because of their cheap initial price, there’s tons of them on the secondary market so they can be reliably and cheaply sourced.

Straight out of the gate, I am as excited for the laptop as I am worried about the utility of the tablet.

With our hardware sorted, now we move onto software.

Our Thinkpad came with Windows 10, which honestly would have worked fine – but the spirit of this excercise is open source software, and operating systems are one area where we have some amazing choices.

For operating systems for professional work, a Linux fork seemed to be the most obvious choice. There are android ports for X86 processors if you wanted something more usable/accessible and may be an option for you.

Linux distributions represent a universe of possibilities, and wading through them all is an endless and intimidating proposition. My go to (primarily for tinkering with old hardware) is Linux Mint as it is not too dissimilar from Windows and has different varieties for less capable hardware. Pop OS is similar, and even aesthetically more interesting to use than Mint(and in fact there was a dual boot option for Pop OS already installed on the laptop) but Mint has such broad driver support, everything generally works straight away, which it did in this case thankfully.

For our tablet we are sadly locked to the weird Amazon-ified version of Android. You can add the Play store easily with the this software (https://xdaforums.com/t/windows-linux-tool-fire-toolbox-v45-0.3889604/) which opens up the possibilities for applications, but we will still be limited by the power and memory limitations of the tablet.

Another great benefit of Linux Mint is it features effectively an app store called Software Manager – that feels better curated than the Play Store by a country mile. If Terminal has always scared you away from Linux, Mint would be a great way to dip your toes in as Software Manager is a very friendly way to explore the Linux universe.

Skipping over browsers and the standard utilities, I opted for Libre Office for documents. Libre Office is a very capable equivalent of the Microsoft Office suite. As is the nature of my work and this challenge, I was mainly interested in word processing, and Libre Office works great – but it was quickly replaced by Obsidian – a note taking app. As most of my writing is uploaded to a web page where it will be formatted, having a feature rich word processing app doesn’t make as much sense, and Obsidians plain text and easy navigation made for a more appropriate programme. Next the suite of design and production apps for graphics and video. I opted for GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, Inkscape as an illustrator alternative, Kazam to screen record, Audacity for sound editing and Kdenlive for video editing.

It should be noted that all these programs can be installed by a single command line via terminal ‘Sudo apt install ‘ then just list your desired apps, and they will be queued for download and installation.

I also used Chromium’s ‘save as app’ feature to get the desktop versions of a few social platforms to have standalone icons that act closer to a mobile app. Mainly so I don’t forget to engage with various platforms, as they are more intrusive on my desktop than in my favourites folder.

Asides from Kdenlive and Kazam, I have a pretty rich understanding of these programmes, and if you want to edit videos but aren’t married to an open source editor, Davinci Resolve offers a very generous free version, and is genuinely an incredible application. GIMP I still use despite an active Photoshop subscription. GIMP can handle 95% of the tasks I use PS for but with a tenth of the resources. Inkscape to Illustrator is a less seamless switch, as I find Illustrator far more friendly to use, but it is still an easy switch if you are saving on budget.

I’m sure further exploration of the Linux Mint Software Manager would yield more exciting FOSS programmes, but my basic needs were met, and I would need to move onto what limited utility I could squeeze out of the paired tablet.

Whilst the plans for the tablet were minimal, so were my options. I had installed the Play store for Obsidian and Syncthing – an app that would keep folders synched between devices through a local connection, rather than an online platform like Google Drive. I use this with Obsidian so my notes travel between devices somewhat seemlessly – this is espescially impressive as it is operating system agnosticly and my Linux laptop syncs with my Android tablet painlessly.

I also installed F-Droid, a FOSS focused Play Store equivalent. And from here installed Orgzly revived for organisation and task management, and K9 Mail to handle email.

The android version of Obsidian is optimised for mobiles, and doesn’t enjoy the sleek navigation of the desktop version. It also takes close to 8 seconds to load, as this tablet truly chugs. But I am able to write and do basic website updates, if slowly. It’s also really compact, and the low price means I don’t have to worry about throwing it around. It can live in the bottom of the pram and maybe I get ten minutes on a park bench to make notes or sketch out ideas.

I did miss the simplicity of Google Docs when working between devices, and questioned how close I was sticking to the FOSS spirit with a locked down Android operating system anyway, but ultimately the appeal of old e-waste tech like this getting a second lease of life is too appealing ot ignore.