Permacomputing is also learning to deal with existing technologies, often trying to find the least evil among bad alternatives. In hardware we can't afford being too picky because we'll want to lengthen the lifespans of already existing pieces of hardware (even bad ones), but in software we usually have more choice.

When assessing software and hardware, we'll want to focus on technicalities such as resource use (especially ?energy use), dependencies and documentation – mostly because many pieces of today's technology fail miserably in these areas.

See also: