Taking a Semi-Truck to Buy Salad: My Manifesto for Simple Computing
I was born in the very last days of the '70s, so I lived through the entire '80s (though, for obvious reasons, I only have memories of the second half). In those days, maximalism was all the rage. I remember TV remotes packed with buttons - and the more buttons there were, the more high-end the TV was! Energy consumption was merely an economic concern, not an ecological one. I remember cars, full of trim and, once again, buttons of every kind. They were probably distracting and not very ergonomic (though arguably better than the tablets mounted on today's dashboards), but they projected an idea of "progress." The same went for houses and apartments: they were spacious, with well-defined rooms, often filled with knick-knacks.
Gradually, things changed. Over time, minimalism took hold. "Less is more" became the mantra in many sectors. We saw it in electronics (a philosophy Apple rode to great success), in interior design, in construction, and in architecture. We got low-impact homes and devices that were ever more powerful yet consumed less and less energy. And yet, in the one field that should embody efficiency and logic more than any other - computing - the exact opposite seems to have happened. We've progressively made things more complicated. Simple tasks, like hosting a website, have become, in the eyes of many, jobs that require complex and heavy stacks - stacks that consume resources and electricity just to get the base system running.
Operating systems are becoming increasingly complex, bloated, and packed with features that are useless to most people. Even the Linux world, which was often born under the banner of modularity and lightness, has in many cases followed the same trend. Just think of modern web stacks that, even on Linux, require containers, orchestrators, and complex build systems merely to serve a static page.
And that's why I've decided that my blogs, at least for now, will be hosted entirely on a VM that costs 1 Euro per month. By using efficient operating systems (like NetBSD, in this case), it's possible to run the whole setup with excellent performance on very few resources.
This isn't a matter of necessity - I have powerful, underutilized servers at my disposal - but a matter of choice. It's a small act of computational minimalism. I want to demonstrate, just as I have done and am still doing with FediMeteo, that you don't need to invest in extreme resources, powerful (and expensive) hardware, and complicated stacks to perform simple tasks. Tasks that today, for whatever reason (that's a rhetorical question, and the answers range from commercial interests pushing new solutions for already-solved problems to curriculum-driven development), are instead handled on oversized infrastructures.
As I like to say, it's like needing to buy some salad from the shop down the street, but instead of walking, cycling, or, at most, taking your car, you take a semi-truck.
Sure, it works.
But it makes no sense.