> I supposed he could attach an external monitor.

I'm not sure it's powerful enough to handle one 1080p external screen. It's certainly not powerful enough to handle two. (My desktop can't handle three with its current graphics card and driver.)

I also think that you need X for multi-monitor setups. When I Ctrl+Alt+F2 (C-M-F2 if you are used to emacs) for a console, it just mirrors the screens. Even if you could get it to not mirror, I'm not sure what meaningful advantage you would get over just tiling lots of terminals in a very basic window manager.

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> RMS seems to have stopped hacking software, so his computing requirements seem to be limited to what's necessary to produce his writing. He also seems to be getting support and service from other people's computers/servers and other people. I'm not sure that any average person would want or be able to do things exactly like him.

Yes. Maybe I'm subconsciously being overly critical because he chose to stop hacking and start writing philosophy. Different people obviously have different needs, and those needs are best served by different devices.

That being said, he seems to use his netbook because he has no other choice, not because he wants to. Perhaps the Free Software Foundation (FSF) should spin off a Free Hardware Foundation (FHF) if he wants devices that can run GNU/Linux (as he puts it) without needing any sort of proprietary firmware at all. It seems unhackerish (if that's a word) to just accept circumstances rather than to try to build your way out of them. I'd gladly use a FHF motherboard/CPU for the next box I build if they were decent -- and if they existed!

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> However, I've known too many Russian/Finnish hackers who grew up with computers like clones of the sinclair zx80 who would surely not have been as awesome had they started off on supercomputers. Something about the easy availability of resources and lack of simplicity seems to spoil some of the fun.

Yes. I hate it when classes "teach" programming with IDEs that think (and code) for you. I took a class that required the use of Eclipse, so I went ahead and coded in emacs anyway. It's very vital to build up things like muscle memory (from basic editors that don't get in your way) and resourcefulness (from poor hardware) if you want to get good at programming. It's easier to learn a good concept out of necessity than just because you've been told that it's good.

That being said, once you've learned how to do something hard, if you don't want to do it again you shouldn't have to. The best environments for learning might not be the same as the best environments for use once you know what you're doing. (Although I would, in my biased opinion, think that something like emacs comes close. It doesn't get in your way or try to think for you like a "modern" IDE, and yet it has lots of depth if you know the right commands or download the right extensions. It seems to encourage learning to obtain more functionality, rather than just having menus upon menus. I'm not opposed in principle to IDEs, but none of them seem to have sane, minimalist defaults. It's a sad state of modern software where an example of bloat in the 1980s is now an example of minimalism today.)

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> This is why I think so many hackers are drawn to simpler devices like ardunio or embedded microcontrollers.

It's also just fun to build things. I'm looking forward to the Raspberry Pi. I don't know what I'm going to do with it when I get it, but I'm sure I'll find some use for hardware that inexpensive.

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P.S. I hope I'm not giving the impression that I hate rms. I wouldn't be so picky here if I thought that his end goal wasn't worth achieving.