This is an awesome setup. I like it, good job.

That said, I do think there's a bit of irony to solving your "paying attention to writing" problem by setting up your OS from scratch, choosing to swap out the default networking stack, installing a novel flavor of your preferred text editor because you're "trying to get to know it a bit more," customizing your battery readouts, tweaking the login sequence, and then, after all that effort to make sure you'd have the perfect environment for uninterrupted writing sessions, installing tmux so that you'll be able to do multiple things at a time.

There's a pattern that I notice a lot on HN.

"To solve this problem, I engineered an entire system from scratch."

Response: "That's a cool solution. But, isn't it a lot more work than this straightforward solution?" (the user is right - the complicated solution is massively more work than the straightforward one)

Response: "Yes, but it's a cool project - it's OK to not be the most efficient all the time." (also right - there's nothing wrong with doing projects with zero utility just for the fun of it, and this one actually does have some use)

It seems like there's a bifurcation of expectations.

Some people want to do a project, and they take a thin justification as an excuse to do so.

Other people really do want to solve a problem, but they get mired in perfectionism and overengineering, or aren't even aware of the simpler solution.

Conflation between these two categories keeps many HN threads gainfully employed.

(worth noting that for people in the latter category, pointing out "there's this simpler solution" can be incredibly helpful, because they simply might not know that it exists, or maybe they need a little bit of pushing to realize that they're overengineering things and that they got stuck in a place that they don't actually want to be in. this has been me, many many times)

This reads like someone with ADHD took Adderall and accidentally focused hard for a day on the wrong thing. It has happened to me.

I guess if this writerdeck works persistently for many projects then fine. But if every 2 projects the writerdeck gets revamped then it seems like a way to get a dopamine hit or distract ones self. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't seem like it's a net benefit in terms of focus.

The way people are coping with the current hellscape that is 2026 is interesting to me. Somehow, it always seems to be internalization. Like, if only I can lock in using this distraction free method, if only I start buying more physical media, if only I use a dumb phone and an mp3 player for my music, etc. etc., somehow that will resolve the intractable shitstorm happening right now. And none of that is even going to be a drop in the ocean in terms of making your life better. Only collective action has the potential to do that at this stage.

If anyone wants to try this without the intricate setup, if you have a linux system, you most probably can just press Ctrl+Alt+F3 and drop into a tty console directly. To return, you have to press Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+F2. You also have multiple consoles, up until F12 probably.

I used to use this a lot when trying for a less distracting desktop, just like in the original post.

I'm desperately awaiting the perfect eink device for this.

I've got a great writing setup on Obsidian that really works for me, a royal kludge mechanical keyboard...just waiting on the next gen of eink

The Boox One Note Max was sooo close, but they almost immediately discontinued the product and probably won't be supporting it long.

Suggestions are welcome

This article reminded me of something I've been thinking a lot these past few months, that is having my computer split in 2 modes:

1. work, having everything available in a desktop OS

2. personal, a console-only mode with a few basic functionalities I consider not time wasting: ebook reader, weather forecast, next sport events, 1 TV show episode per day, calculator, calendar, timer, etc

Since I use the extremely configurable awesomewm window manager, this switch would not be hard to implement and have me locked (somehow) based on day of the week or time on work days.

LE: actually, the console-only mode would be more of a menu-only one with something like rofi desktop [1]. Something very minimal and easy to use.

[1] https://github.com/giomatfois62/rofi-desktop

Consider wordgrinder, a console word processor, as distinct from a text editor. https://github.com/davidgiven/wordgrinder

I find fhe discourse here hilarious. Haven't most of us built our skillsets and careers out of side quests?

There is so much I wouldn't know or understand if I didn't go down the odd rabit hole.

I recently installed Alpine Linux as part of a side quest and was blown away by just how fast it was without running a GUI or loading up a bunch of background programs. It was so fast a little voice has been telling me my daily driver laptop should run a minimal Linux distribution like Alpine.

> I'm trying to be more intentional with my tech choices. I want devices that do one thing really well, and that when I'm done with that one thing, I can put them away, and do something else. I don't want everything to follow me around everywhere.

Sign me up.

I would like an audio device which can play mp3, podcasts, internet radio. Bonus points if it supports some kind of cartridge system, size between credit card and audio cassette. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

I had a similar setup in 2023, but the computer was reformatted after I moved. I wrote a HN comment about the setup before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37792204

I liked it and intend to use a similar setup in the future. There were quite a few "rough edges", unfortunately. In retrospect, a tiling window manager would have been a better choice.

I found Midnight Command to be great for this, with its integrated file manager, file viewer (mcview), editor (mcedit), and diff (mcdiff).

I didn't realize how much I relied on a unified clipboard until I didn't have one any longer. mcedit's clipboard was a file (or one of them was?), so I had to adjust some workflows.

The biggest problem came from my need to view a lot of PDF files. I had a framebuffer PDF viewer that was pretty clunky. It did not work with tmux and PDF files could not be opened directly from Midnight Commander as I recall. This specifically is why I'm thinking about a tiling window manager as I won't have to pick a clunky PDF viewer and the remainder will just work.

> I had to set my syncthing web GUI to be listening on all addresses instead of just 127.0.0.1. I don't love this approach, but again, this thing has nothing private on it.

OP mentions SOCKS proxy but you can also just port-forward the one web ui port instead:

    ssh -nNT writerdeck -L 8484:localhost:8384

and visit http://localhost:8484 on your normal machine.

HN deletes certain words at the beginnings of submitted titles: could we add "It's time to talk about" and potentially also "my"?

I don't think I could go this far, because I'd have too many devices to switch between.

But I like the overall idea.

It also fits in well with something I used to think about a lot: Computers and the internet have caused a major shift toward hiding a lot of things that used to be much more apparent.

E.g. your important papers would be in a physical file. Your books would be on the shelves. Your art on the walls. Visitors and family members could see them. Quite a few things I have in common with my late dad were a result of finding his books on the shelves as physical objects.

Now most of the books I've bought (and a couple I've written) over the last couple of decades are on my phone or my computer, and not visible to anyone who doesn't know where to look.

I've tried to be deliberate about showing my son the books I think he'll like, but those of my dads books, and manuscripts he wrote, that I ended up picking up and reading were only partially those he showed me - many more were books he had no inkling I'd like, or didn't think were age appropriate, that I stumbled on over the years.

Moving all of those things into files on general purpose devices, away from physical objects, feels like it is unmooring us from parts of our immediate surroundings.

Doogie Howser M.D. vibes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX0_Tuzr4wE

Why not just use DOS? e.g.:

https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos

At least the laptops that can still run DOS natively tend to have fairly good keyboards...

Great to see Veronica at the top of HN. She's a great creator, highly recommend her content.

Before dunking on this lady for rolling her own writerdeck Linux distro, consider that I see advertisements for rather weaksauce devices, often with tiny LCD or, if they're posh, e-paper screens and very limited functionality compared to something like vim, for between $500 and $1200 USD. For an electric typewriter whose entire value proposition could have been achieved with a DOS PC.

Veronica put a used laptop to work achieving much the same thing for next to nothing, except her time of course. It's not reverse-engineering an obscure Space Shuttle computer, but it's the kind of effort I think we want to reward on a site called Hacker News.

The stress relief of a plain old Linux terminal should not be underestimated.

Not only for writing, but for shell sessions too.

I love my Raspberry Pi for that.

I've wanted to do this for a while. Thanks for detailing your setup! I hope one day I find the time to try it.

I've also always yearned for more usability from just the command line.

There's no tui spotify client, is there? Maybe I should break out my mp3 collection again... I'm trying to think of what else I'd really need to not need a GUI machine for my day to day. Maybe email?

Lynx and other tui browsers are not usable on today's web. Maybe there's a subculture to find somewhere that also appreciates reader-mode / lack of javascript?

If so anyone please lead me to the promise land!

This is a really interesting system. I find that I end up using an iPad with all my PDFs as reference materials when I'm writing, it would be nice to attach an external monitor in 'portrait' mode which exclusively hosted a single application that could let me select PDFs from my collection and display them on the screen. Then with one unit I'd have what I needed in one place.

Can I tangent to some love for the Debian TUI installer? Just seeing it evokes such pleasing thoughts. I don't think it's changed a whole lot in at least 10 years, maybe more. I think it's pretty well designed in terms of UX.

I have never seen it crash or bug out.

Even the graphical version is excellent. They've resisted using a web view, thank god (giving you the side eye, Fedora)

A lot of respect and love for Debian!

It's interesting to me how few people seem willing to just turn off notifications.

I'm all on board with setting up a retro machine for fun, but if one wants to focus on writing, there are ways to achieve this that don't require the sacrifice of good font rendering, comfortable colours, etc.

The fact that the Music app notifies you of the new song is not some immovable law of nature...

Look, it does look like overkill but I totally understand you and where you are coming from...

I managed to publish my first book, second getting final review and third one is in editing... fully connected. AI came up with all the names for the characters, did a research on places and such. Huge help. I did check it all. For example a name AI claimed was French, totally was German and had to be replaced, but otherwise it is of huge help in writing if used correctly.

But here is a thing that made the most difference. Dictation. And not into dumb mac or phone transcriber. I use Typeless and used Superwhispt before, Typeless has amazing keyboard replacement and understand Serbian and transcribe it to English with minimal issues.

I dictate in my own Obsidian vault, to Inbox, which is then processed and sorted out by SidianSidekicks service (I am the founder). I look weird because I am talking to myself everywhere I go, but it is amazingly productive.

You didn't describe, but rather demonstrated, another aspect of the pattern which is that someone inevitably "goes meta" and remarks on the pattern - and usually someone points out that it's "not black and white" and the sub-thread decays into muttering obscurity with no real conclusion or insight. Personally I've come to see this as a niche form of "exuberance of the young" which is itself wasteful in the strictest sense, but is more generously characterized as a side-effect of other, hopefully more important personal maturation effects.

It's the natural flow of tech conversations. Like a splash, it follows with ripples, the sine wave of for-comments and against-comments, and eventually comes to an equilibrium.

> it's OK to not be the most efficient all the time

is it ? it's a non-negligible reason for the absolutely unsufferable technological world we are currently living in

Forums are made up of many individual people who all have their own perspectives. It is not all black and white, zero sum, good or bad.

> focused hard for a day on the wrong thing

Entirely depends on what the author wanted to focus on. Who are we to say what is the right or wrong thing to focus on?

What a strangely hostile thing to say to somebody's earnest post about their setup.

Same. However, for a while, I did not need to work much, and indulging in such things was an absolute delight. It was entertainment, but it also benefited me when I actually worked.

Nothing opposes a setup like this to collective action. Given that most of modern technology or at least most of the internet is built to actively distract you as much as possible to extract profit, it's just a sane choice to disconnect from this every now and again if you want to work on things that actually matter. And this can totally include things that are for the collective good, and in collective efforts.

Me, seeing someone eating ice cream: “Here is one of several copies of The Permanent Revolution that I keep on my person for this exact situation”

> Only collective action has the potential to do that at this stage.

Yes in terms of surviving the full shit storm, and yes in terms of deriving security and comfort from community, but the things you mentioned are all valid steps on a path to joining the community of people working together on the issue you're trying to solo cope with.

Example: lately those paying attention here in Taiwan are getting the sense that our internet is fragile, and start looking into solutions for that. Many end up at reticulum and meshtastic. They might fiddle a bit, maybe get a Lora radio or whatever, but regardless, this weekend is g0v summit, where there's a lot of talks and a booth about this exact thing, and yesterday a lot of the people I met attending the talks or visiting the booth are brand new to this. But now they're in the scene, plugged in with people that have been spending years tying solar Lora radios to the top of trees throughout the city.

Getting into offline music, you get to the stage where you start trying to find good quality music, and stumble into the soulseek community, or you start wondering more about modding your dumb secondhand hardware, stumble into the mod community. From either of those into the FOSS/open hardware scene, anti-IP scenes, "four thieves vinegar collective" types.

Basically, there's many paths.

Some people merely have the urge to create -- For those people, it has little to do with coping. They would like a distraction free environment regardless.

I'm certainly one of those people :)

It's very meditative to solely focus on the one thing in front of you.

> And none of that is even going to be a drop in the ocean in terms of making your life better.

I disagree 100%. Collective action isn't ever going to persuade Apple or Google to correct course. Collective action has already failed to compel Microsoft for 30+ years. These companies picked their side and your bargaining has zero leverage if you continue to purchase their products and suffer their indignation.

You can only improve your life by getting rid of disrespectful advertising and low-quality slopware. The victim mindset is a lazy lie, one that you tell yourself to justify a net negative lifestyle.

I agree. Collective action can come in two shapes.

One is that enough individuals take action, and the things you list are that, an individual taking action. If enough individuals do it then goal accomplished.

The other is making our politicians force other individuals to do it.

IMO both are necessary. There's some things where decades have proven that individuals are too "weak" to resist the pull of their urges (and nevermind those urges have trillions of dollars of R&D to make them as strong as possible so it's an unfair battle).

> Only collective action has the potential to do that at this stage.

Nothing resolves the shit storm, but it is absolutely possible to not be in it. Don't need collective action for that.

You don't need to solve whats going on around you, just whatever works for you. The fact your chose the word "coping" says more about your mindset than those you're generalizing about.

No one is trying to solve the shitstorm for everyone, they’re trying to escape it for themselves. No one can do anything about the uninformed masses addicted to the tech world that was previously propped up as great because so much money was moving around the space.

A lot of the complaining in the comments that “this doesnt solve anything for the masses” or “its too complex for the problem space” are totally missing the point. It’s not about you or the greater society. Greater society has chosen the slippery slope race to the bottom and can’t be saved because they can’t be bothered with taking on a little extra complexity or doing things to help themselves.

Non-hotswappable life improvements/tech that don’t make life faster/more efficient?! Oh the humanity!

A collective action will only improve things for the least common denominator of the collective…which isn’t that helpful to the individual who is already unable to change things for the collective. It was the collective that helped create the shitstorm why work with them?

And your copium is posting to HN explaining to everyone how they are Doing It Wrong.

I consider it a good first step.

Of course people reach for individualized solutions first: We (Americans at least) live in a very individualized society.

But these individualized solutions still represent a shift in mindset, of people believing they have agency around how they use technological tools, and of people believing they should make those choices and not a company or the government. This seems very basic and self-evident to anyone who spends time on HN, but it is genuine progress for a lot of people.

My wife bought one of these: https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler

Reviews are wildly polarised. * Some folks find it to be the best thing ever [long battery life, the new patch makes the eink surprisingly fastly responsive, decent keyboard, no distractions] * While others find it terrible [it's still eink, that's a lot of money for a device that doesn't actually do much]

You can find a selection of alternatives, and homebrewed options, here: https://www.writerdeck.org/

I use the Onyx Boox Palma for a portable eink drafting setup. It's worked pretty well. I wrote about it here: https://liza.io/portable-writing-setup-with-onyx-boox-palma/

My dream device is the "Solar A5 e-ink computer" - It's A5-sized laptop, so it fits in a leather zipped case for journals. If you're familiar with HP Journadas / Sony Vaios from early 2000s, that's roughly the form factor. There's a solar panel on the back of the screen / outside of the enclosure. The screen is e-ink, and the operating system is Linux Mint Debian Edition. For console mode, a good "writing station" applications are "mc" (Midnight Commander) and "ranger" - simple GUI for editing text in folders, like a blog/knowledge base.

Some challenges I've experienced: (1) Can't find A5-sized e-ink screens that accept HDMI as an input, (2) It would be cool to use a common Android phone, since there are many around. RaspberryPI is an option. Honestly, would love the simplest portable device that runs Debian Stable on a battery, (3) I have NOT been able to find small, A5-sized keyboards. Most small keyboards are cheap plastic bluetooth junk.

If anyone would like to seriously rally around this, let's talk'bout it. My vision for this laptop has always been "10:00 AM Austin Texas, sitting at a patio bar in direct sun, journalling/coding/writing". I have not been able to find any computer device that satisfies that situation, so there is obviously a market niche.

The Pomera line of devices from the Japanese company "King Jim" (yeah, I don't know) are really nice from a features point of view: limited enough to stay out of your way when you're writing, functional enough to enable the basic workflows you'd expect e.g. basic file management, SD card/USB transfers (something that many/most/all Western boutique writing devices like the Freewrite somehow didn't support well or at all last time I checked). Somewhere I have a funky e-ink Pomera thing with a folding keyboard that I did a lot of writing on, and later I bought a DM250, which is not e-ink but works pretty much the same, and now has a US version. I recommend it.

Onyx iterates on its BOOX tablets fairly rapidly, but tends to continuously offer something in various size classifications. You'll find 13.3" tablets typically named as "Max" something or other.

I do see the Note Max as presently available, FWIW: <https://shop.boox.com/products/notemax>

I've had a previous iteration of their 13.3" tablet, the Max Lumi. Slightly lower resolution, and has a frontlight. It is a very nice display, though with an Android OS which I see as a net negative.

I'd really like an e-ink display option for the Framework 12" or 13" laptop.

If your up for waiting and the usual crowd funding risks there's https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zerowriter/zerowriter-f...

I backed it myself.

Ideally, somebody like Modos would create a replacement e-ink display for the Framework.

If you want something you can use today with a Kindle or other e-reader I made an app for this https://solarwriter.msol.io