Why! That is probably the post important question when it comes down to my latest venture back into Linux-Desktop-Land. That wonderful labyrinth of a thousand distributions, millions of packages, billions of bug requests and about 5 decent pages of documentation. Who on earth would wonder of the beaten path of tried and trusted (though somewhat boring) desktop interfaces like those on a Mac or (if pressed) a Windows Machine.
Well, ME!.
And my ventures are not for the faint of heart, because I did not only go forth and install Linux, I actually bought a half decent laptop to do the trick. No more hand-me-downs from friends and family, no more digital orphans rescued from oblivion by a bit of fast dumpster-diving. God no! I already have plenty of those. And for the most part their digital ‘second life’ could mostly be motivated by one single reason. I could install linux on them. After which I would leave them just as discarded as before, but now only sporting an OS you could actually use. Yes, you read that right: YOU … not me.
Because using those old clunkers in a day to day scenario is a little bit beyond my expectations of technology. When I work on a computer I do like it to be nice, sleek, somewhat portable and if possible: pleasant to work with. I’m spoiled by working on my lightning fast Apple devices you see. A nice little iPad here, an insanely fast M4 Mac mini there and for mobile firepower: A 16 inch Macbook pro that weighs about as much as an obese hauwitzer artillery piece from the first world war.
And here lie the fruits of my latest venture.
Although I purchased my iPad to become my ‘mobile companion’ I do find myself in situations where it’s not completely covering all bases. Sure, with some tweaking and some remote desktop shenanigans it works but.. I do catch myself departing the homestead with the iPad, only to have the Macbook Pro (and its massive 5 pound presence) tagging along in my backpack as some sort of digital insurance.
On the other hand I also wanted a “non production” machine. A decent laptop for me to geek out on without polluting (or “crufting”) my production machines with experimental software and features. And I wanted that machine to be just as slick and smooth as my other macs (only MUCH lighter). To bring some variety to my menu, that machine could run Linux and I would have a decent “playground” for my creativity.
From the start, all my old clunkers were OUT of the picture (failing batteries, poor screens, heavier then 2 Hauwitzers) so I thought: Lets one of the recent macbook pro’s (or air’s) with the nice displays and the non-shitty keyboards and put Linux on them!. Having desecrated Cupertinian virgings with open source USB stick before, I thought: how hard could it be. My window of opportunity was small. I wanted a recent machine, with an intel architecture and without the absolute disaster called “the butterfly keyboard”. This one little “invention” frustrated me so much back when I owned one of those wretched laptops, I was caught trying to stomp on real butterflies for years to come.
## But I found my effort thwarted by a new nemesis.
Apple’s TMP chip makes installing Linux on these machine feel like you are back in the early 90’s. Thanks to some close source drivers, secret firmware and pesky hardware/software shenanigans disguised as “user security” putting Linux on a machine like this is just … no fun.
So I went on a quest for an alternative through the dark and dreadful land of second-hand laptops on the internet. With a limited budget to spend (350 euros) I passed by some horrible contraptions. Plastic designs, terrible keyboards, horrible ‘standard resolution’ displays, Hauwitzer-class weight restrictions … and some of them were so icky you did not even need to look at the browser history to know that the previous owner had a lifetime pornhub account and a lot of time on (at least one) hand.
My revelation came when I found out about the existence of a laptop call the “Matebook Pro” by Chinese trade nemesis Huawei. Having already traded punches with the US government in the first rounds of “digital tradewards” Huawei has a bad reputation. But they make awesome little laptops since 2018. The Matebook Pro models offer slick light laptops with smooth aluminum bodies. Excellent keyboards and ab-so-lutely gorgeous 3000 by 2000 displays powered by Nvidia Graphics.
To be honest I was in love: These things looked and felt like macbook airs but came with a display that was just (of not more) pretty to look at. The quirky 5/4 screen ratio also means that this 14 inch laptop is a perfect fit for any messenger bag while still being big enough to let my iPad pro hide behind in a fight.
After wasting hours of my life clicking around on Facebook marketplace and other second hand sites my Ferengi haggling skills landed me a 2018 Matebook pro with 8 gigs of ram , an i7 processor and a 3000 by 2000 13.9 inch touchscreen in my lap within budget and driving distance. Yawning as its owner touted that this machine “Ran Windows like a champ” I pondered what distro to install on this machine. So much to choose from .. what would I pick.
Ubuntu ?
As the canonical development team raised their glass celebrating 20 years of “Ubuntu” , I too looked back at 2 decades of decent Linux use. After discovering Linux in 2001, many of my attempts to straddle the penguin had been thwarted by missing codecs, the inability to install from source and beard-wearing-shotgun-wielding-virgins shouting ‘get out Noob’ on Usenet. Ubuntu changed all that and ever since, its OS, derivatives or other Debian based distros have been my home. Hating Gnome 3 (or just being old) I preferred a more classic interface with and up to date look. (Sorry Puppy linux) so I went for predictable Linux Mint. Well polished, well supported and stable. Just like a human phallus: An os is not about what it looks like, its what you do with it.
That being said, an OS is only an OS. Without any applications and vague notion of what to do with them, this computer, just like my entire existence is fairly useless. So before we go on an installing spree, it might prudent to consider the fact: What do I want to do with this computer? Well, boost my creativity for one, and that means, getting back into writing. So the first quest consisted of finding a decent application to slam down some markdown and store it somewhere a failing harddrive or stolen laptop has no agency. God knows there are plenty to choose from. Cornered by zealots on both sides (The cult of eMacs and the Tribes of Obsidian) I decided to take the middle ground and go back to an old love: Joplin. Syncing up to a free onedrive account is my only trespass into non-sandalsprouting country so far. Joplin works fine offline so I might just keep distractions at bay by not giving myself and IP Address.
But, I do love me some tunes though: The app Audiotube comes to the rescue, tapping into the massive collection of Youtube and turning video’s and playlists into non-stop audio. I know some of you nerds love “Mission Control” on Soma FM, but there is only so much southern tanged Nasa jargo i can groc, Copy that? Rog.
Hit the net
Next up IS connectivity. Although this machine might be a veritable island in the storm, it’s power lies in it’s ability to interact with the other machines in the family. For the longest time Tailscale has been my goto solution to just that. This veritable peer to peer vpn solution lets you interconnect over a 100 systems together all over the internet. I picture my virtual network cables crossing the coffee shop trans-dimentionally tripping up the barista while pumping my well protected bits over the internet. This lets me quickly pull in the screens of one of my other machines via VNC, RDP or the commandline. For the latter Termius has been my goto app. It remembers all my SSH connections and lets me give each and every host its own fancy colored interface.
When said connection WOULD drop, I do like to keep files and folders handy and for that Syncthing is my poison of choice. I’m still traumatized by my latest splurge into Owncloud and how cumbersome I found it to use on my mobile IOS devices. Syncthing was a breeze to setup on both my NAS and my other devices and fawwlesly syncs and stores files wherever I need them for offline use. In this case it’s a bunch of Youtube video’s I backed up using a fancy script. That way I can watch them for as long as I need, from wherever I want without those pesky adds. The combination of Syncthing and Joplin let me create and consume wherever I want.
Talking about media consumption, I have to disappoint you. I’ve never gotten into all of those fancy mediaplayer apps. One of the reasons is that i’m lazy and have never bothered with things like metadata, on the other hand i’m old and prefer the ancient form of data organisation called files and folders. As a result I use MC to open up whatever tune I want to listen to (or want to watch) and that’s good enough for me. Shoving in a pair of bluetooth headphones appeared trivial and before you know it i’m trying not to fall into a coma watching a video on LLM’s that i downloaded to “watch later”.
When it comes to surfing the web, Internet Explorer is no longer an option. Sad really, I loved crawling about the Internets a a snails pace, half-rendering websites while simultaneously licking every malware infected street-turd with great relish. However, Firefox is not the open source alternative that immediately comes to mind. Cowering from loud noises on the street, I seek bravoure elsewhere and choose to be “brave” only in the choice of my browser. Though infested with crypto-crap and other overloaded with redundant features that make it feel like ICQ in the 90’s.
Slimmed town to its minimal configuration with a small bookmarks toolbar at the top and a vertical tab bar on the left, all that remains of the interface is a full-width address bar and the icon for my Bitwarden password manager. My “new tab” screen is slate gray with a zenlike clock and that is that.
But of course, all new marriages are happy marriages.
I have been down this road before: The honeymoon weeks with a new laptop where everything is fresh and new and good. Where small quirks don’t bother you (yet) and everything seems to “just work”. Knowing Linux, that is not how it is going to remain. The jaded nerd in me has long since stopped blowing the open source trumpet as “the ultimate desktop operating system”. Whoever thinks Windows is somehow ‘less stable and reliable’ should try walking into just the first circle of dependency hell. Bearded nerds are biased and my chin is clean. I know that at some point, shit will hit the fan and something that might look painfully simple will turn into a 3 week crusade across the internet that runs aground at the soggy beaches of an abandoned software project or horribly poor documentation.
But, that being said: Have I reached my goal? have I been able to build a computer that is “on par” with the rest of the market and that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the other digital workhorses in my house? ….. Maybe just. Everything (aside from the fingerprint scanner) is working. The battery life is not bad, but i’m afraid that an 8 hour minecraft marathon might not be in the cards if not combined with a nearby powerplug. That being said, the charger that came with the machine is ridiculously small and can be easily hidden between 2 shagging hamsters. With a display like this cranked up to 80 percent brightness, I can live with a 5 hour batterytime. And, this is NOT a new machine, so I think i can count my blessings.
And what is next? Well, taking my little new toy out for a spin. Fun-sized its not prone to occupy the whole coffee table (and a part of Poland) while you snap it open. It doesn”t require 2 people to carry it away when it’s drunk. It fits smoothly into my 12 inch TomToc ‘vertical messenger bag’ (more popularly referred to as ‘purse’) and my regular bag. It might not be as flexible as my 13 inch iPad pro that takes up a little more space on the table with the kickstand case, but then again that machine is about cama-sutra/Origamy hibrid when it comes to versatility of use. This little laptop is more of a carry-me-everywhere you need a laptop. Something below the price of a kidney that doesn’t break the band should somebody swipe or break it.
I’m Off
So I am off to explore the world with a little linux laptop under my arm, to convince myself and a 1000 strangers on the internet that all you need to make the “year of the linux desktop” come true, is a usb stick with enough space, a laptop that doesn’t have any principles and the drive to make technology, work for you.