Why Do This?

More and more, minimalism is becoming the way of life for a lot of people. Minimalism doesn’t mean poverty; it means efficiently doing more with less. Less clutter, less junk, less debt, less stress, and generally less on our minds. Who wouldn’t want that? There are even very successful shows on TV about decluttering your life and making your household simpler by eliminating the things that don’t make you happy. We can all benefit by making a lower ecological footprint, incurring less debt, and not by chasing “the Joneses.”

This book isn’t about cleaning up your house. It’s about cleaning up your technology, or at least in learning how to do all the same stuff you already do in as minimal a way as possible. If you’re used to working from a $2500 MacBook Pro, or if you have three iPads in your living room, and you’re just waiting for the next new phone upgrade, then I may be talking to you. We all love expensive new high-tech toys, but it’s a lot of fun going the other direction as well. What’s the least equipment you need to get by?

The first thing that comes to mind is by using older equipment. You can buy used computers on dozens of web sites, and that’s always an option. Still, they’re old equipment, they’re used, and who knows how reliable they are after the previous owner did…whatever with them? I always prefer new equipment, but I just don’t want to spend a lot of money. I like configuring that equipment to my specifications and making it all work my way.

What kind of computer can we get that’s new, but really inexpensive? Well, junk computers usually. You can buy a cheap, new Windows laptop for $200, but it will come preloaded with a ton of bloatware, run slowly, and make the user experience worse than nothing. Chromebooks are an awesome concept, and they’re very powerful in themselves with little cost, but there’s almost no customization possible, and they are also closely intertwined with cloud computing, which has its own drawbacks. These obvious solutions aren’t really solutions at all, they just create new problems. We’re going to have to look off the mainstream path for what we want.

I suggest the Raspberry Pi (RPi). This little computer has a quad-core processor, more USB ports than any MacBook made today, and it runs many different varieties of Linux, the most stable free operating system in use today. And best of all, it’s really, really inexpensive for new hardware.

Why the Raspberry Pi over one of the many newer all-in-one single-board computers that have sprung up since the Raspberry first hit the market? Why not an Arduino, BeagleBone, Odroid, Tinker Board, RockPro, or even Le Potato? Yes, that last one is a real product. Those are all powerful little computers that have their purpose. The Arduino is great for electronics applications that need a microcontroller. The Tinker Board is good for, well, tinkering. The Raspberry Pi, however, can do all these things in a very general-purpose way; what we are looking for in this book is a small device that can serve as a general-purpose computer, and in my opinion, the Pi is the best all-around device for this. There’s a reason so many of these competitors look just like a souped-up Raspberry Pi: because they are. They took the best and bumped it up a little. By sticking with the established Pi architecture, you get the benefit of the most tested and evolved selection of software. Many of those other devices require you to compile the operating system and jump through hoops just to get a working system; the millions of Pi hobbyists have done all that for us already. Many of the apps we will look at here, especially on the desktop side, are simply not available for many of these other devices.

Although all the advertising for Raspberry Pi points out that "It’s only $35," that’s not strictly true, as this cost is just for the main motherboard. You’ll also need a power supply, memory card, a case of some kind, and a few cables. You can pick up the parts individually quite easily, or there are kits that have everything you need for around the same price. Assuming you can scrounge up your own keyboard, mouse, and monitor, you’ll still only be out of pocket fifty to sixty dollars USD for the other parts.

Most books on the Raspberry Pi focus on programming, hardware tinkering, and electronics interfacing. Not this book. We won’t deal with the GPIO port at all, nor will we do any coding of any kind here. In this book, we’ll look at setting up a Raspberry Pi with the intention of using it as a real computer. We’ll install real desktop software and do real work on it. Then we’ll look under the hood and learn all the command-line tools that will really make things speed along and do things you wouldn’t dream you could do with such a small device. Are there limits to what we can do with this little computer? Yes, and that’s where the challenge comes in. It’ll be fun, it’ll be inexpensive, and it’ll be minimalist computing in the extreme!

Let’s get started! In the first chapter, we’ll look at the hardware aspect of this project. What will you need to buy? What have you already got? And how do we make it all work?