The year to be offline.

The internet has completely gone to shit; I don’t think I even need to explain why at this point. It got me thinking of setting up a separate PC with no internet connection, just for drawing, animating, and other such creative tasks.

I’ve had this $40 Optiplex with a 4th-gen i3 collecting dust for a little while, so I decided to throw in a spare SSD and load Windows 7 on it. Despite the goal of all this, I used a temporary Wi-Fi adapter to grab all the drivers (shout out to Legacy Update) and download my programs. Can’t believe the newest version of Krita (5.2.14) still runs on Windows 7.

Laying down lines is acceptably smooth, but zooming and especially rotating the canvas is really choppy here. I looked in the settings and can’t change the renderer either, I’m stuck on OpenGL. I decided to try Linux Mint XFCE on another spare SSD and that ran Krita perfectly fine, so I may end up using that going forward. Running Linux also gives me the advantage of getting rid of the web browser and all other distractions entirely, and connecting to my network to access my Syncthing server. Yeah, it kinda defeats the purpose of an “offline PC”, but not having Syncthing was immediately a huge pain in my ass with the Windows 7 setup.

I ordered a compatible i7 processor to upgrade this thing with, so maybe that’ll fix whatever sluggishness is left. I’ll make an updated post or perhaps a video once I get that and a bigger desk to permanently set this up on. Right now I don’t have enough desk space between my modern PC and this one.