zerosleeps

I suppose I’d better say something about that ThinkPad I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. This won’t take long, because I didn’t try switching away from macOS very hard.

As a reminder it’s a 4-year old ThinkPad T490s with oodles of RAM. It feels rugged, and I love having status lights - there’s one on the power button so you know if the thing is powered on or sleeping, which is replicated on the outside of the lid so you know what’s going on even when the laptop is closed, plus a dedicated LED for charging status. It has a fan that seems to switch between speeds a bit too aggressively for my liking. It’ll be silent for the longest time, and then suddenly start whining when load increases - there’s nothing between silent and kinda-loud, which annoys me.

The keyboard feels decent to use, and it has dedicated page up/page down/home/end keys which I enjoy. The trackpad is very mediocre, but I like the physical buttons. I tried the TrackPoint but it’s not for me. And the speakers are terrible.

To my surprise having a touch screen is really nice, despite me never installing anything on the machine that was designed to be used by fat human fingers. It’s just cool to be able to reach up and quickly dismiss a dialogue box or drag something out of the way.

Operating systems. Well I tried the default desktop variants of Debian 12, Fedora 42, and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Debian felt a bit outdated for running on a desktop, while Ubuntu felt too corporate. Fedora seems to have it together though, and it had the nicest install and first-run experience in my opinion. I will say that PC architecture needs to get to where it’s going faster than it is. BIOS? UEFI? Secure Boot? Sort it out. Then there’s all the built in “management” stuff that I’m sure corporations insist they need but just adds to the confusion.

My thoughts on using these Linux distributions is kind of the same: everything works, and works well, but there are too many way of doing the same thing. Fedora and Ubuntu in particular seem to be stuck in an in-between land, where they can’t decide whether to go all in on Flatpak/Snap or stick to using traditional repositories. And that really hurts the user experience, as all the distributions have a confusing array of software management stuff installed by default.

And yikes when it comes to stuff that doesn’t appear in an official repo. Take 1Password as an example: they have repositories for all the big distributions which is impressive, but the installation steps are not for “normal” users. Why is adding a custom repository still so difficult to do without using a shell? It was fairly easy to find the GUI for adding a repo, but I couldn’t work out how to add keys outside a console in any of the distributions I tried.

Oh and apparently Gnome removed status bar icons, but a few tools I tried (like clipboard managers) seem to rely on there being a status bar. Messy.

Anyway, those are my thoughts and opinions. It was a fun and informative, if brief adventure. It’s fantastic that all of these operating systems exist and are maintained and are available for free. Linux on the server is incredible, but Linux on the desktop still isn’t for me.