Laptops on passthejoe

I love a quiet laptop

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 13:02:19 -0700

I love a quiet computer. That’s one of the great appeals of the Raspberry Pi. No fans, no spinning drives. If only they had enough power to really do desktop things.

I’ve never experienced a Pi “bigger” than a Zero W version 1.1, so I don’t have enough information.

And like most people who still use “real” computers that aren’t smartphones, I do most of my computing on a laptop. And that laptop has an x86_64 (in my case Intel) processor.

The 2021 Linux laptop rebuild

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 14:59:33 -0700

CentOS Stream 8 — a controversial yet boring Linux — would be my new operating system

After holding up due to indecision, I went ahead with the Linux laptop rebuild.

I decided to give CentOS Stream 8 a try. It’s a “hot” Linux distro. But for all the wrong reasons. I can say now that it’s technically excellent, with the extremely notable exception of an error in the Boot ISO (yes, I filed a bug) that makes it impossible to proceed before figuring out and manually entering a URL for a working mirror and then a regression in Mutter that killed Files/Nautilus for a day or so until I figured out a workaround. (Developers sent a new package soon thereafter.)

Reinstalling a Linux computer system: Step by step

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 09:39:10 -0700

I’m about to put a new hard drive and battery in my main laptop, a 2017 HP Envy 15.

Whenever I make a change like this, I like to be ready with backups, Linux install images on USB drives and whatever tools and parts I might need.

I’m not as worried about running into problems because I now have a very decent second computer — the 2011 27-inch iMac running Debian Buster — if the laptop isn’t ready right away, I’ll still be able to work.