usesthis.com

I've recently had lots of success wasting time using the website usesthis.com. It's a collection of brief interviews with all kinds of people on what kind of hardware and software they use to get stuff done. There are quite a few big names on there, including Linux luminaries like RMS and EMS, major distro or language creators like Daniel Robbins and James Gosling, and other cool people like Zed Shaw. I don't know why, but I find learning what stuff these people use really interesting. A few observations:

• Almost everybody uses a Macbook of some description. Of those who don't, almost everybody uses a Thinkpad of some description.
• Ubuntu is overwhelmingly the most popular Linux distro. I'm a little surprised by this. I mean, sure, Ubuntu is mad popular, but I didn't think it would be as popular with really experienced and talented people, since so much of its appeal is in everything being already set up for you and it "just working". (note ESR is thinking of switching to Arch!)
• Lots of people hate 16:9 ratio screens and wish 4:3 would come back, which I can sympathise with. I wonder if it would be worth stockpiling good used 4:3 laptops now while they are still not too rare?
• Lots of people are really concerned with their keyboard's effect on their wrists many years down the road. This is not something I've really ever paid attention to, although maybe I should.

I'd never heard of him before, but Jason Rohrer gets my respect for being the only person I've found so far is happily rocking some nice old hardware (sub-gigaHerz CPU and sub-gigabyte RAM) using minimalist software that works for him.