There was one idea that started circling my head once I thought about it, and it wouldn't leave! So I had to implement it and try it for a few days. Overall, I would say the experiment went well, but the time is not right to keep it going.
Remove the wireless driver from my computer. Use the computer offline, plug it just once to do an automated one-time data transfer in the morning.
I installed OpenBSD because it lacks the driver for my wireless chip, because it comes as a single integrated system, because it installs X11 painlessly (in my old netbook this tends to be a problem), and because of it's superb documentation.
On top of it I ran Emacs, trying to live inside Emacs the way some people do.
I learned a few things in the process.
The first thing I learned is: I don't like the email ecosystem in Emacs. I had been using mutt for a while already, and I couldn't find anything at all that was simple like that. Each had to introduce it's own quirks, gimmicks, it's own complexity. On the other hand, I think I was expecting too much, or rather, too little. Gnus and notmuch, in the end, do their work as intended. Perhaps it's just that I haven't really figured out email yet. Well, I learned a bit more about email in the process.
When I go back to this kind of life, because I will, I hope I'll come with more experience, so that I can get it working without stressing so much about it.
I learned that there are things I like doing outside of Emacs.
I've always been interested in the Emacs life. This was as much an experiment in living fully in emacs as it was about offline life. I could manage to do everything in emacs, of course. But I also missed the command line life and some of its appliances. I figure it is mostly about getting used to it, if I decide to do that. But why force myself? I use emacs for three things, which account for most of my computer usage, but not all of it:
For system tasks such as scripting, configuring, moving files around, I tend to prefer the command line. And although there is a shell in emacs for most of it, some of these things live strictly outside of the emacs logic, and some require an actual virtual terminal, rather than an emacs buffer.
So instead of living in emacs, I'll treat it as my writer's deck, and my nonweb browser.
By nonweb I mean gopher and gemini, plus the web sometimes. Emacs has elpher and eww, which means that in a single environment I can check them all.
I learned GUI emacs beans no-x11 emacs for some reason.
This is weird, but it feel a lot nicer using it on X11 than on a virtual terminal, even if it's exactly the same thing! It may be psychological, idk. In a virtual terminal my brain gets in "hacking mode", and an emacs session running in X11 goes into "writer mode". Some of it has to do with the themes. I like a nice light theme during the day and a mild dark theme (dark gray background) in the night.
I learned I like perl more than elisp.
And I also find it A LOT easier to write a simple shell script than figure out how to make elisp do something I need.
I had already realized a while back that I can use both vim and emacs, and they shine for different things: vim is better for programming in syntax-heavy langauges, like perl, while emacs shines for writing prose.
I learned that I like to surf the nonweb.
I like to be online and explore gemini capsules, gopher space, and oldweb sites that people make, their blogs, etc. I need to be online to do this in real time.
I learned that I have more fun in linux.
Linux is fun. I mostly enjoy tinkering with the system, experiment with building systems, figuring out low-level details about the system, files, protocols, etc. I like the "hacker mode" that my brain adopts while on the terminal.
I learned the environment goes a long way in shaping our actions.
Being offline had one positive effect: It made me focus, it freed me from distractions. This is the first reason that I moved outside the web browser in the first place. But being completely offline means there isn't the lure to go fool around on irc, a MUD, or a pubnix server. I managed to start writing a lot of what I'd been sitting on for the past few months, as well as read a lot more documentation and do a lot more experimenting than I usually do on the computer.
I am going back to a linux system that's connected, and I'm carrying my learned lessons with me. In the future, perhaps the far future, I expect to dive fully into the offline experience, but now is not the time. I actually have a plan, or rather, a daydream of what I want my future to be, and an Emacs deck for offline writing + automated data transfer is part of that ideal. In the mean time, I need not sweat it, and make use of the current setup to learn more about the linux, and have fun with it!ofl