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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of people recycling this particular idea and typically they will end up sticking a Raspberry Pi (assuming they can get it) into an enclosure that serves the intended purpose. You can then use the base OS to hack around on it until it looks and feels like the device you would like to have. Some of these are very impressive.

One example: (there are 100's)

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/scripto-distraction-free-wr...

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Devising custom word processor for custom device seems... overkill compared to cheap laptop with word processor installed (and nothing else) and in autostart...

Absolutely. I recognize some of this though: I wanted to learn how to play the piano. Other people might go and find a teacher, I dug around to find some software, used it for a while, found all kinds of shortcomings, designed my own software. Probably not the most efficient way of learning to play the piano, to put it mildly. But very satisfying once it works.

Maybe the goal isn’t to be able to use a word processor, but rather to have an aesthetic experience. In that sense, this is more akin to art than engineering.

I think it's an important aspect of computing, we can often forget the human experience element.

Seasoned creatives I talk to find their environment and the feel of it very important to their productivity, and I think it's the same for computing.

When coding in Windows the feel is that of fluorescent lit room in 2005, sitting next to a filing cabinet with a Cisco phone on my desk that rings every 15 minutes.

Coding in my personalized linux setup makes me feel like a netrunner in cyberpunk and I love that. I know I can achieve the same work in Windows, but the vibes are different.

> Coding in my personalized linux setup makes me feel like a netrunner in cyberpunk and I love that.

Absolutely my aesthetic, too. Sometimes, I'll spin up KDE just to get away from the terminals for a few hours, then back into i3/Sway.

This is really nice, though. I would love to see more variety in computing than what we have now, since a lot of it is the same old same.

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